Pop the hood of the new Roman Space Telescope with NASA engineers who designed, built, and tested it.
Category: space – Page 19
From Militarized Patriarchy to FemaleCentric Societies in Space
Expanding humanity into outer space would represent one of the greatest transitions in human history. If millions of people eventually live and work in space, the social structures familiar to us today are likely to evolve into very different forms. Predicting those structures is difficult. Few, if any, could have predicted the profound societal transformation that occurred in Europe following the Industrial Revolution. The transition from extended families living within largely rural and feudal systems to nuclear families living in densely populated industrial cities and democratic states is now well studied, yet it would have been difficult to foresee before it occurred.
Similarly, when hunter-gatherer communities began settling permanently and developing agricultural villages, their social structures changed dramatically. We understand many aspects of this transformation today, but those living before the transition could hardly have predicted its consequences.
This article attempts to connect the consequences of large human populations living in space with the possible evolution of societies both on Earth and beyond it. One major consequence considered here is the possible abolition—or fundamental transformation—of the military institution, along with other highly hierarchical institutions.
Roman telescope aims to directly image exoplanets 1,000 times fainter than current limits
The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
Narrow ultrasonic beam enables stable 3D levitation six times farther than before
Scientists have developed a new acoustic levitation technique using an ultrasonic beam capable of levitating and moving small objects in midair over distances of up to 40 cm (16 inches), six times farther than previously achieved using conventional methods. The study, carried out by a research team from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and the University of Bristol, was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Acoustic levitation is a technique that uses sound waves to suspend objects in midair without physical contact—meaning it has the potential to be beneficial for handling fragile materials, contamination-sensitive samples and hazardous substances.
Conventional acoustic levitation systems rely on sound waves generated within an enclosed space, but the new technique is the first time a single-sided design has demonstrated stable acoustic levitation in three dimensions.
EXCLUSIVE: The AI founders who walked away from Bezosbacked Prometheus to model the universe
A research duo, once pitched to lead the Jeff Bezos-backed Project Prometheus, unveiled what they’ve built on their own: an AI model that can take in and produce information so vast that a lone computer might not handle it.
A 4-star system caught eclipsing itself in a way never seen before
Astronomers have found a four-star system doing something that has never been confirmed before. The system, TIC 433545934, has two close pairs of stars orbiting each other. While each pair eclipses its own two stars, as usual, only one pair eclipses the other. A paper outlining the properties of this unique system was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 13. It has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Meteorite dust holds records of magnetism that may have helped form the sun
4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a giant ball of gas and dust. Over the next few million years, this “solar nebula” underwent a huge transformation, flattening into a disk of matter that then condensed to form the central sun and orbiting planets.
Scientists have assumed that the early solar system was shaped mainly through gravity. But a new study finds that magnetism also likely played a role.
MIT scientists have discovered records of ancient magnetism in the oldest samples of meteorites known today. The team analyzed microscopic grains embedded in a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica in 2008. These grains, called calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs, originally formed during the solar system’s first 200,000 years, making the samples the oldest known solar system material.
A single neutrino caught beneath the Antarctic ice sent astronomers searching across 11 billion lightyears them to a young galaxy nicknamed the Shadow Blaster, its light bent and magnified by another galaxy standing between it and Earth
750-TeV IceCube alert led astronomers to a rare, lensed dusty starburst at redshift 2.988. The galaxy is the best candidate in the field, not a confirmed neutrino source.
Mars lacks Earth’s protective global magnetic field
Joint MAVEN and Tianwen-1 observations identify Kelvin-Helmholtz wave packets as a bursty route by which oxygen-bearing ions escape the Martian atmosphere.
The asteroid that may be three worlds
What shape is an asteroid? For (44) Nysa, the honest answer until now has been that nobody knew. It is one of the brightest and largest E-type asteroids in the main belt, a class with a surface rich in enstatite, and its oddness has made it a favorite target for well over a hundred years. Successive observations hinted that it was elongated, perhaps even two lumps stuck together, but the picture stayed frustratingly blurred.
An international team led by Kate Minker at Lowell Observatory has now brought two of the world’s heaviest instruments to bear on it: SHARK-VIS on the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, and SPHERE/ZIMPOL on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. With adaptive optics correcting for the churn of our atmosphere and purpose-built processing to sharpen what came back, they have produced the finest images of Nysa ever obtained. Minker describes them as close to spacecraft-quality, achieved without ever leaving the ground.
What those images show is two prominent valleys wrapping around the asteroid’s circumference. The team read them as necks, the pinched joints where separate bodies have come to rest against one another: Three lobes, gently welded into one.