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Category: space – Page 247

Two new sleep studies on the International Space Station are helping astronauts and folks here on earth get a better night’s rest.

“Have you ever been told not to look at your phone before bed? This is because the blue light affects your Circadian rhythm — your natural response to changes of daylight,” reads a European Space Agency (ESA) X post from Friday.

Two studies: Circadian light and sleep in orbit

ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen is currently conducting sleep research on the International Space Station. His mission is called Huginn and it consists of two studies that seek to understand more about Circadian light and sleep in orbit.

“Astronauts on the Space Station do a full circle of Earth every 90 minutes and experience 16 sunsets and sunrises every day. With this unearthly routine, astronauts can struggle to find a natural daily rhythm in space. The Space Station follows Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which helps keep a consistent schedule, along with regular wake-up and bedtime routines,” said the ESA press release published on Thursday.

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The lander and the rover, which landed on the Moon on August 23, were designed to operate for only one lunar day.

As the lunar day draws to a close, ISRO has decided to put its Chandrayaan-3 rover Pragyan in sleep mode to conserve its battery and protect it from the extreme cold of the lunar night. The rover, which has completed its assigned tasks, is now parked safely and has transmitted the data collected by its payloads to the lander, which in turn relays it to Earth.

Credits: ISRO/twitter.

Lunar Night

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Could you mine all the resources needed for space exploration from space itself? China reveals plans to achieve this goal by 2100.

Chinese space scientists have unveiled a preliminary roadmap that aims to establish a comprehensive space resources system spanning the solar system by the year 2100.

The ambitious initiative, named after the Ming dynasty scientist Song Yingxing’s work, “Tiangong Kaiwu” or “The Exploitation of the Works of Nature,” has the potential to transform the global space economy and elevate China’s standing in the world of space exploration, reported South China Morning Post.

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NASA has released images of the site from the Moon where Russia’s Luna-25 crashed last month. It revealed that the crash site lies 400 KMS away from the intended landing site of Russia’s lunar probe. It added that the impact of the crash was such that it created a 10 meter crater on the moon. Watch for more details.

#moon #luna25 #russia #nasa #crashsite #lunarsurface #russiamoonmission #images #orbit #roscosmos.

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The mysterious phenomenon that Einstein once described as “spooky action at a distance” was seen as a wavefunction between two entangled photons.

Quantum physics, the realm of science that describes the Universe at the smallest scales, is known for its counter-intuitive phenomena that seem to defy every law of physics on an everyday scale.

Arguably none of the aspects of quantum physics are as surprising or as troubling as entanglement, the idea that two particles can be connected in such a way that a change to one is instantly reflected in the other, even if the two particles are at opposite sides of the Universe. It’s the word “instantly” that troubled Albert Einstein enough to describe entanglement as “spooky action at a distance”.

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In what can only bode poorly for our species’ survival during the inevitable robot uprisings, an AI system has once again outperformed the people who trained it. This time, researchers at the University of Zurich in partnership with Intel, pitted their “Swift” AI piloting system against a trio of world champion drone racers — none of whom could best its top time.

Swift is the culmination of years of AI and machine learning research by the University of Zurich. In 2021, the team set an earlier iteration of the flight control algorithm that used a series of external cameras to validate its position in space in real-time, against amateur human pilots, all of whom were easily overmatched in every lap of every race during the test. That result was a milestone in its own right as, previously, self-guided drones relied on simplified physics models to continually calculate their optimum trajectory, which severely lowered their top speed.

This week’s result is another milestone, not just because the AI bested people whose job is to fly drones fast, but because it did so without the cumbersome external camera arrays= of its predecessor. The Swift system “reacts in real time to the data collected by an onboard camera, like the one used by human racers,” an UZH Zurich release reads. It uses an integrated inertial measurement unit to track acceleration and speed while an onboard neural network localizes its position in space using data from the front-facing cameras. All of that data is fed into a central control unit — itself a deep neural network — which crunches through the numbers and devises a shortest/fastest path around the track.

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