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Category: space – Page 383

NASA engineer teaches AI to be ‘GPS-like’ to guide astronauts over the lunar surface

An AI system is being developed to lead explorers around the lunar surface.

Without instruments like the GPS we have on Earth, scientists have been attempting for years to figure out how to travel over the lunar surface.

Landmarks like trees or buildings on Earth can serve as fuzzy but useful distance measures-features that are non-existent on the Moon.

NASA/Reese Patillo.

Since the Moon’s atmosphere is significantly thinner than Earth’s, it is challenging to determine the size and distance of distant landmarks when looking at the horizon.

Continue reading “NASA engineer teaches AI to be ‘GPS-like’ to guide astronauts over the lunar surface” | >

Scientists detect a rare circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts

Till now, only one repeating fast radio burst — FRB20201124A, has been reported with circular polarization.

The latest research by scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has identified circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs). The results were based on precise observations of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).

FRBs hold the distinction of emitting the most luminous radio flashes in the universe, with the energy released in one such incident rivaling the Sun’s output “over a whole day or even a month to a year,” according to phy.org.

Naeblys/iStock.

The study findings, led by Prof. Li Di, were published in Science Bulletin.

US startup wants to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to cool down the Earth

In theory, it could mitigate the effects of global warming; but experts are wary.

Make Sunsets, a California-based startup, released weather balloons that carried sulfur particles into the stratosphere which possibly burst there, releasing the chemical, MIT Technology Review.

Da-kuk/iStock.

Founded by Luke Iseman, previous director of hardware at Y Combinator, the attempts by the startup fall into the controversial area of solar geoengineering where particles are released into the atmosphere with an aim to reflect sunlight back into space to ease global warming. The field has largely been a thought experiment with no real consensus if the technology can help us fight climate change.

Top 10 NFTs that You Should Look out for in 2023

In this article, we review the top 10 NFTs and why they make for great investments this year.

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short, have been the buzzword for the year 2022. And, rightly so because even though it might seem like it is a new tech on the block, you will be shocked to know that there are more than 11 million NFTs out there. Each represents a unique (and, not to forget, valuable) piece of art which could be an image, video content, music, or anything else. And, yet, the industry is still in its infancy stage. We bring to you the only guide you will ever need to understand the uprising of the NFT market and what is all the attraction about. We have also shared some of our favorite NFTs to check out if you want to get active in space. This article features the top 10 NFTs that you should look out for in 2023.

Silks.

China reveals ambitious plans for Asia’s largest optical telescope

The nation wants to compete with NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope.

Peking University has ambitious plans to build the largest optical telescope in Asia, according to an article by Space.com

The Expanding Aperture Segmented Telescope

The new telescope will have an aperture of 19.7 feet (6 meters) by 2024 while its mirror will be expanded to 26.2 feet (8 m) by 2030. The project in English is called the Expanding Aperture Segmented Telescope (EAST) and according to a statement “will greatly improve China’s observation capabilities in optical astronomy.”

Monkey Experiment Reveals a Brain Switch That Could Be Useful For Space Travel

For humans to ever venture out among the stars, we will have to solve some hefty logistical problems.

Not the least of these is the travel time involved. Space is so large, and human technology so limited, that the time it would take to travel to another star presents a significant barrier.

The Voyager 1 probe, for instance, would take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, at its current speed.

Action of two protostars appears to be making conditions right for planet formation

A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their observations and outline what might be learned from future study of the star system.

The work by the team on this new effort came on the heels of work done by another team that discovered a pair of protostars still in the very early stages of their development—in their first 500,000 years of existence. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a closer look at the two protostars and also the environment in which they exist.

Astronomers find a star pulling its giant exoplanet into a death spiral

Kepler-1658b’s orbit is getting a little shorter — and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star — every year.

Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation — first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018 — to notice the slow shrinking of Kepler-1658b’s orbit. Recognizing the signs of deadly orbital decay in other exoplanets is going to take a similar amount of time and a similar volume of data, but Vissapragada and his colleagues say they’re getting there.

“We should begin to see hints of orbital decay for these planets within the next decade,” he and his colleagues write in their recent paper.

As for Kepler-1658b, it’s got about 2.5 million years left. When the time comes, whoever is watching (from whatever alien world harbors astronomers in the distant future) won’t see the planet simply fall into the star’s outer layers and burn up, like a meteor falling into Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, the same tidal forces that sealed its fate will probably rip the planet apart shortly before it takes the final plunge. Something similar probably happened to long-dead moons of planets like Saturn, which now make up parts of the planet’s famous ring system.