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Category: space – Page 22

UNSW engineers have developed and built a special maser system that boosts microwave signals—such as those from deep space—but does not need to be super-cooled.

They say that diamonds are a girl’s best friend—but that might also soon be true for astronomers and astrophysicists following the new research. The team of quantum experts have developed a device known as a which uses a specially created purple diamond to amplify weak microwave signals, such as those which can come from .

Most importantly, their maser works at room temperature, whereas previous such devices needed to be super-cooled, at great expense, down to about minus 269°C.

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A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing spacecraft. The research gives engineers and scientists a slide-rule to help them design NASA’s upcoming Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission.

When NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it captured grainy photographs of large ice-covered moons. Now nearly 40 years later, NASA plans to send another spacecraft to Uranus, this time equipped to see if those icy moons are hiding liquid water oceans.

The mission is still in an early planning stage. But researchers at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) are preparing for it by building a new computer model that could be used to detect oceans beneath the ice using just the spacecraft’s cameras.

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After its formation, the moon may have been the scene of such immense volcanic activity that its entire crust melted several times and was completely churned through. At that time, the moon orbited significantly closer to Earth than today. The resulting tidal forces heated up its interior and thus powered the violent volcanism. Only Jupiter’s moon Io, by far the most volcanically active body in the solar system, offers comparable conditions.

These new considerations published today in the journal Nature by an international team of researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz, the Max Planck Institute for solar system Research (MPS) and the Collège de France resolve previous contradictions and inconsistencies regarding the age of the moon. According to the researchers, the moon was formed between 4.43 and 4.51 billion years ago. Its crust, however, appears around 80 to 160 million years younger.

The moon is apparently quite reluctant to reveal its age. Attempts to uncover its secret have yielded estimates that lie several hundred million years apart: While some researchers suggest that our cosmic companion was formed 4.35 billion years ago, others date its birth to 4.51 billion years ago.

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At night, charged particles from the sun caught by Earth’s magnetosphere rain down into the atmosphere. The impacting particles rip electrons from atoms in the atmosphere, creating both beauty and chaos. These high-energy interactions cause the northern and southern lights, but they also scatter radio signals, wreaking havoc on ground-based and satellite communications.

Scientists would like to track electrical activity in the ionosphere by measuring the distribution of plasma, the form matter takes when positive ions are separated from their electrons, to help better predict how communications will be affected by electromagnetic energy.

But analyzing plasma in the ionosphere is a challenge because its distribution changes quickly and its movements are often unpredictable. In addition, collisional physics makes detecting true motion in the lower ionosphere exceedingly difficult.

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We often imagine that our planet might be a sentient entity — Gaia — but could something like this evolve under known science? And might a conscious world be something we might create in the future?

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Credits:
Sentient Planets \& World Consciousnesses.
Science \& Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 312a, October 17, 2021
Written, Produced \& Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:

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A new visual recognition approach improved a machine learning technique’s ability to both identify an object and how it is oriented in space, according to a study presented in October at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Milan, Italy.

Self-supervised learning is a machine learning approach that trains on unlabeled data, extending generalizability to real-world data. While it excels at identifying objects, a task called semantic classification, it may struggle to recognize objects in new poses.

This weakness quickly becomes a problem in situations like autonomous vehicle navigation, where an algorithm must assess whether an approaching car is a head-on collision threat or side-oriented and just passing by.

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Human minibrains in little vials surprised scientists by surviving a stint in low-Earth orbit.

US researchers sent lab-grown blobs of human neural tissue known as organoids for a short holiday on the International Space Station back in 2019. What they got back a month later amazed them.

Not only were the cells healthy and thriving after weeks of weightlessness – they had matured faster than the same cells here on Earth.

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Researchers at NASAs Armstrong Center are advancing an atmospheric probe for potential space missions.

Utilizing innovative designs based on past aircraft research, the team has successfully tested the probe, planning further improvements to increase its functionality and data-gathering capabilities.

NASA’s Innovative Atmospheric Probe

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Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our Solar System, with around 400 volcanoes and extensive lava flows spread across its surface – but contrary to what scientists thought, a new study suggests this geological chaos is not powered by a global, moonwide ocean of magma below the surface.

Using images snapped by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, gravitational measurements, and historical data about Io’s tidal deformations, an international team of researchers has determined that the moon’s volcanoes are powered by a scattering of magma chambers in an otherwise solid mantle.

The findings counter previous theories about how Io’s volcanoes are powered, and point to a mostly solid mantle for the moon. With magma oceans believed to be present on many worlds, especially early in their formation – including our own Moon – we may need to rethink how planets form and evolve.

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