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Further boosting this ethos of accessibility is the fact that Hestia will be compatible with both iOS and Android phones. Dupuy pointed out that even a smartphone that is around five years old will work with Hestia for taking images of the sun and the moon, but to see more deep field objects like nebulas, a more recent and more sensitive smartphone such as an iPhone 12 or 13 may be required.

Vaonis, launched in 2016, is no stranger to introducing astronomy equipment via a Kickstarter campaign. In 2020 they successfully launched the Vespera smart telescope after a fund-raising program. The difference between Hestia and previous projects is this smartphone telescope project is much more affordable.

“It was possible to better in terms of price,” Dupuy said. “We wanted to use all the image processing experience we have gained to develop an app and to create a very affordable new product.”

TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 14 it is due for a $3.7 billion windfall late this year after becoming the latest satellite operator to clear C-band spectrum ahead of schedule for terrestrial 5G telcos in the United States.

Weeks after launching its seventh and final C-band clearing satellite, the company said it had achieved certification for work to move broadcast customers into a narrower swath of the spectrum.

The Federal Communications Commission set a deadline for satellite operators to clear the spectrum by December 2025, but offered them nearly $10 billion in incentive payments if they could make the frequencies available for telcos before Dec. 5, 2023.

Last year, NASA undertook its first planetary defense mission with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The goal was to divert the moonlet Dimorphos from its orbit, demonstrating that an asteroid could be redirected in the case of a catastrophic course toward Earth.

The spacecraft’s impact, while altering the moonlet’s orbit, also resulted in the dispersal of 37 boulders from its surface. Some of these space rocks are as wide as 22 feet off its surface.

The DART mission was watched intently across the globe on September 26, 2022. The spacecraft successfully shifted Dimorphos’s orbit from an original 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes post-impact.

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The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
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Stephen Wolfram starts by discussing the second law of thermodynamics — the idea that entropy, or disorder, tends to increase over time. He talks about how this law seems intuitively true, but has been difficult to prove. Wolfram outlines his decades-long quest to fully understand the second law, including failed early attempts to simulate particles mixing as a 12-year-old. He explains how irreversibility arises from the computational irreducibility of underlying physical processes coupled with our limited ability as observers to do the computations needed to “decrypt” the microscopic details.

The conversation then shifts to discussing language and how concepts allow us to communicate shared ideas between minds positioned in different parts of “rule space.” Wolfram talks about the successes and limitations of using large language models to generate Wolfram Language code from natural language prompts. He sees it as a useful tool for getting started programming, but one still needs human refinement.