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A team of researchers at Kyoto University has been hard at work on a satellite made of wood — and they say it’s now scheduled to launch into space next summer in a joint mission between Japan’s JAXS space agency and NASA.

While it may sound like an odd choice of materials, they say wood is a surprisingly suitable material for space.

“When you use wood on Earth, you have the problems of burning, rotting, and deformation, but in space, you don’t have those problems: there is no oxygen in space, so it doesn’t burn, and no living creatures live in them, so they don’t rot,” Koji Murata, a Kyoto University researcher who’s been working on the project, told CNN.

Dinkinesh, previously thought to be a single asteroid, is revealed by NASA’s Lucy probe to in fact be a binary pair.

“Moonrise” of the new satellite as it emerges from behind Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab.

Dinkinesh, a main-belt asteroid with an orbital period of 3.2 years, was discovered on 4th November 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey at Socorro, New Mexico. Less than two weeks after being observed, astronomers lost track of the object and it went unrecognised for several years. Additional sightings occurred in the mid-2000s, helping to re-establish its position and greatly reduce the uncertainties of its orbit.

“We are interested in studying shear deformation on icy moons because that type of faulting can facilitate the exchange of surface and subsurface materials through shear heating processes, potentially creating environments conducive for the emergence of life,” said Dr. Liliane Burkhard.


Two recent studies published in Icarus examine tectonic processes known as shear stresses which are also referred to as strike-slip faults on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and Saturn’s largest moon, Ganymede. While such processes are common on Earth, specifically with the San Andreas Fault in northern California, and have been observed on several icy moons throughout the solar system, these two studies hope to shed new light on the inner workings that cause these processes to occur on Titan and Ganymede, the latter of which is the largest moon in the solar system.

True color image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, passing in front of the ringed planet taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Image of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and the largest moon in the entire solar system, taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS, Kalleheikki Kannisto)

The Titan study focuses on how strike-slip faulting could be occurring at Selk crater, which is the proposed landing site for NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission, while the Ganymede study uses high-resolution data from NASA’s Galileo mission in the 1990s and 2000s to analyze a region known as Nippur/Philus Sulci, which scientists hope could help them better understand Ganymede’s geologic history.

“We’ve assembled the most accurate list of Kepler planet candidates and their properties to date,” said Dr. Jack Lissauer. “NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, and this new catalog will enable astronomers to learn more about their characteristics.”


Though NASA’s Kepler space telescope officially “retired” in October 2018, scientists are still pouring over data from the iconic exoplanet hunter that operated for more than nine years. Most recently, scientists came upon data that added four more exoplanets to the Kepler-385 system, which is located approximately 4,700 light-years from Earth and had previously been known to contain three exoplanets, all of which were discovered in 2014.

Artist’s illustration displaying two of the seven planets within the Kepler-385 system. (Credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

The data shows the sizes of all seven planets are between Earth and Neptune, also known as Super-Earths, with the two inner planets hypothesized to be rocky while the remaining five are hypothesized to be gaseous. All the planets are hypothesized to be exposed to greater amounts of radiation per area than all the planets in our solar system. This is due to its parent star being approximately 10 percent larger and 5 percent hotter than our own Sun. This finding comes as NASA is about to release an updated Kepler catalog, which contains almost 4,400 exoplanet candidates.

When summarizing facts, ChatGPT technology makes things up about 3 percent of the time, according to research from a new start-up. A Google system’s rate was 27 percent.

When the San Francisco start-up OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT online chatbot late last year.

When Google introduced a similar chatbot several weeks later, it spewed nonsense about the James Webb telescope. The next day, Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot offered up all sorts of bogus information about the Gap, Mexican nightlife and the… More.

A large space mirror heats up an asteroid, slowly melting it. Water, which was injected into the center of the body expands, blows up the melted material, creating the shape of a balloon. After cooling down, rotation is induced into the hollow body creating artificial gravity. An artificial fusion Sun brings daylight to the dark interior. A team of bio-life-support system experts, urban planners, and ecologists starts to create an artificial world inside the balloon, preparing it for the first settlers. The small world is then provided with a propulsion system and launched to one of the next stars or used as a space colony.

Tesla is going to integrate Elon Musk’s newly launched Grok AI assistant in its electric vehicles, according to the CEO.

Earlier this year, Musk launched a new AI startup, xAI, and said that it will work closely with Tesla.

The company’s mission is “to understand the true nature of the universe”, but in practice, its first project is to build a chatbot or AI assistant à la ChatGPT.

They’re called vibrotactors and they vibrate to provide orientation cues.

A number of factors, such as the lack of gravity, changed sensory inputs, and the unique conditions of space travel, can cause disorientation in astronauts. This phenomenon is so severe that it can even be deadly to the space dwellers.


A new path for safer space travel

Usually, astronauts must undergo extensive training to guard against it. However, researchers have now released a new study that shows that wearable gadgets called vibrotactors that vibrate to provide orientation cues may greatly increase the effectiveness of this training providing a new path to making space travel safer and more comfortable for astronauts.

“Long duration spaceflight will cause many physiological and psychological stressors which will make astronauts very susceptible to spatial disorientation,” said Dr Vivekanand P. Vimal of Brandeis University in the United States, lead author of the research. “When disoriented, an astronaut will no longer be able to rely on their own internal sensors which they have depended on for their whole lives.”