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Category: space – Page 165
NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) represents a cutting-edge initiative in space research, focused on studying atmospheric gravity waves. These waves play a crucial role in the dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere, particularly in the upper layers like the mesosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere. AWE operates from its unique vantage point aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
One of the primary objectives of AWE is to observe and analyze atmospheric gravity waves (AGWs) in the mesopause region, which is about 54 miles (87 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface. By studying these waves, AWE aims to deepen our understanding of how weather events on Earth’s surface can generate these waves and how they propagate through and affect the atmosphere’s higher regions. This research is vital for comprehending the broader impacts of AGWs on the ionosphere-thermosphere-mesosphere system, particularly in terms of space weather effects, which have implications for satellite operations and communication systems.
AWE is led by Ludger Scherliess at Utah State University in Logan, and it is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory built the AWE instrument and provides the mission operations center.
Philosophy of science.
We call it perception. We call it measurement. We call it analysis. But in the end it’s about how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impression of it that we have in our minds.
We might have thought that we could do science “purely objectively” without any reference to observers or their nature. But what we’ve discovered particularly dramatically in our Physics Project is that the nature of us as observers is critical even in determining the most fundamental laws we attribute to the universe.
But what ultimately does an observer—say like us—do? And how can we make a theoretical framework for it? Much as we have a general model for the process of computation —instantiated by something like a Turing machine —we’d like to have a general model for the process of observation: a general “observer theory”
Each Monday, I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead.
The office is no longer just a cubicle— but it’s also not a children’s playground.
Corporate giants often hold pride in their headquarters, its design, and its acclaim among contemporaries. Chinese tech giant Tencent is set to redefine this corporate landscape with plans for its new headquarters, Tencent Helix.
Envisioned by renowned German architect Ole Scheeren of the Büro Ole Scheeren Group, the ambitious project was unveiled on Thursday and promises to be a headquarters of the future, accommodating over 23,000 employees across an expansive 500,000 square meters – almost double the size of Apple’s California headquarters.
Move over uranium, the Milky Way’s oldest stars have bigger and better elements to make.
A group of researchers from across the United States, Canada and Sweden have discovered ancient neutron stars might have created elements with atomic mass greater than 260.
With an atomic mass of 238, uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element known on Earth, though others like plutonium have been found in trace amounts due to reactions in uranium deposits.
Composition of Asteroid Phaethon
Posted in space
The asteroid that causes the Geminid shooting star swarm has also puzzled researchers with its comet-like tail. The infrared spectrum of rare meteorites helped to determine the composition of the asteroid.
Asteroid Phaethon, which is five kilometers in diameter, has been puzzling researchers for a long time. A comet-like tail is visible for a few days when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun during its orbit.
However, the tails of comets are usually formed by vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide, which cannot explain this tail. The tail should be visible already at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun.
Most space heaters run electricity through high resistance wires to toast your toes. The Heatbit mini, however, trains large language models, builds AI for large corporations, or mines crypto while it warms up your home. In so doing, it pays its owners up to $28/month while in use.
“What we really do is zero-energy computing,” says CEO Alex Busarov, who I met at Web Summit in Lisbon recently.
Bitcoin mining and AI training—which has increased one million times over the last seven years—together consume more energy than the entire United Kingdom, Busarov says. All of that goes to waste as heat, which then itself often needs to be cooled in a data or compute center, costing yet more energy.
Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. When they try to determine how habitable these planets might be, detecting water in their atmospheres plays a huge role. But what if there was another way of measuring the water content in these worlds?
Researchers are developing a way of modeling these worlds to determine how much water they have.
Habitability likely requires surface water, as far as we can tell. But detecting surface water is next to impossible. The next best thing is to use the tools we have—like the James Webb Space Telescope—to detect and characterize exoplanet atmospheres. But despite the JWST’s power, it can’t examine every exoplanet atmosphere. Some are beyond its reach. But one team of researchers is using what we do know about exoplanets, tidal heating, and radiogenic heating to try to determine which exoplanets might have oceans, either on the surface or under the surface.
NASA has been laser-beamed data from millions of miles away — and it was a message the agency sent itself.
In a press release, the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech said that it has achieved “first light” laser communication via its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which was launched last month on the Psyche spacecraft that’s currently making its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The experiment’s main focus is seeing how viable optical communications, or data transmitted via freakin laser beams, can be as we as a species properly enter our spacefaring age. And by all accounts, it was a resounding success.