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Category: space – Page 317

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the weirdest and most intriguing worlds in our solar system. It is the only place we know of in the universe for sure beyond Earth that has rivers, lakes and larger bodies of liquid, but on Titan these features are filled with flammable hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

Studying Titan in depth has been difficult due to a thick atmosphere of clouds and haze, but NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of those clouds, and by extension, the weather patterns at work on this unique world.

“We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere,” said JWST Principal Investigator Conor Nixon. “Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun.”

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have together captured Saturn’s largest moon Titan in near-infrared.

The new images reveal clouds in the northern hemisphere near Kraken Mare, the largest known methane sea on the giant moon’s surface. Titan is the only other body in the solar system that has rivers, lakes and seas, though instead of water they flow with liquid methane and ethane. These hydrocarbons—as well as water and ammonia—also produce clouds and rain on the giant moon.

JWST’s image—from November 4, 2022 and published for the first time this week—revealed two clouds in the atmosphere, so scientists then pointed the largest optical telescope on Earth, the Keck Telescope, at Titan just 30 hours later to confirm their presence.

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China has completed the construction of what is now the world’s largest array of telescopes dedicated to studying the sun and how its behavior affects the Earth.

The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT), located on a plateau in Sichuan province in southwest China, consists of 313 dishes, each with a diameter of 19.7 feet (6 meters), forming a circle with a circumference of 1.95 miles (3.14 kilometers).

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In May 2022, the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload onboard a small CubeSat satellite was launched into orbit 300 miles above Earth’s surface. Since then, TBIRD has delivered terabytes of data at record-breaking rates of up to 100 gigabits per second—100 times faster than the fastest internet speeds in most cities—via an optical communication link to a ground-based receiver in California.

This data rate is more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links traditionally used for and the highest ever achieved by a laser link from space to ground. And these record-setting speeds were all made possible by a communications payload roughly the size of a tissue box.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory conceptualized the TBIRD mission in 2014 as a means of providing unprecedented capability to science missions at low cost. Science instruments in space today routinely generate more data than can be returned to Earth over typical space-to-ground communications links. With small, low-cost space and ground terminals, TBIRD can enable scientists from around the world to fully take advantage of laser communications to downlink all the data they could ever dream of.

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Bohr’s model of the atom is kind of crazy. His collage of ideas mixing old and new concepts was the fruit of Bohr’s amazing intuition. Looking only at hydrogen, the simplest of all atoms, Bohr formed the image of a miniature solar system, with a proton in the center and the electron circling around it.

Following the physicist’s way of doing things, he wanted to explain some of his observed data with the simplest possible model. But there was a problem. The electron, being negatively charged, is attracted to the proton, which is positive. According to classical electromagnetism, the theory that describes how charged particles attract and repel one another, an electron would spiral down to the nucleus. As it circled the proton, it would radiate away its energy and fall in. No orbit would be stable, and atoms could not exist. Clearly, something new and revolutionary was needed. The solar system could only go so far as an analogy.

To salvage the atom, Bohr had to invent new rules that clashed with classical physics. He bravely suggested the implausible: What if the electron could only circle the nucleus in certain orbits, separated from each other in space like the steps of a ladder or the layers of an onion? Just like you can’t stand between steps, the electron can’t stay anywhere between two orbits. It can only jump from one orbit to another, the same way we can jump between steps. Bohr had just described quantum jumps.

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You can’t discuss fulfillment robots without mentioning Amazon. Over the past decade, the retail juggernaut has become the 800-pound gorilla in the category, courtesy of several key acquisitions and seemingly endless resources. And while warehouse robotics and automation have been accelerated amid the pandemic and resulting employment crunch, Amazon Robotics has been driving these categories for years now.

This week at its annual Re: Mars conference in Las Vegas, the company celebrated a decade of its robotics division, which was effectively born with its acquisition of Kiva Systems. Over the course of its life, Amazon Robotics has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drive units, across its fulfillment and sort centers. From the outside, it’s been a tremendous success in the company’s push toward same-and next-day package delivery, and its driven the competition to look for their own third-party robotics solutions, bolstering startups like Locus, Fetch and Berkshire Grey.

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