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Category: space – Page 4

Hybrid energy system: One roof for electricity, heating and cooling

Photovoltaic panels generate electricity, solar thermal collectors provide heat, while cooling is usually supplied by air conditioning systems that themselves consume electricity. As a result, buildings require different technologies competing for the limited space available on roofs and facades.

A solution developed by a team led by Dr. Gan Huang at KIT’s Institute of Microstructure Technology, by contrast, simultaneously provides cooling, electricity and heating from a single surface. This hybrid PDRC-solar system combines photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies with passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC). The researchers see applications wherever cooling and energy are required simultaneously.

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Entirely Surprising” — Scientists Have Found a Martian Meteorite Unlike Any Known Before

A meteorite found in Algeria has opened a rare window into nearly 2 billion years of Mars’ history that had largely been missing from the geological record.

Researchers at Boston College have determined that Northwest Africa (NWA) 13,441, a rock blasted from Mars before eventually reaching Earth, crystallized about 1.273 billion years ago. Its age places it squarely within a huge gap in the known record of shergottites, the most common type of Martian igneous meteorite. Even more unexpectedly, its chemistry points to a deep Martian source unlike any previously identified in this group.

“The characteristics of this meteorite were entirely surprising,” said Ethan Baxter, a Boston College professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and founder of the university’s Center for Isotope Geochemistry. “No other Martian meteorite like this has an age of 1.27 billion years.”

Curiosity Mars rover discovers field of honeycomb textures

As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each about 1.5–3 inches (4–8 centimeters) across. The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.

In a 360-degree panorama that the rover captured on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days, or sols, of the mission, the polygonal shapes spread in all directions for as far as the rover can see. They even wrap around the sides of a nearby butte nicknamed “Miraflores,” which stands 20 feet (6 meters) tall and is topped with a thick cap of sand.

“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” said the mission’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”

TESS discovers a rare brown dwarf orbiting a massive, aging star

For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone—too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars.

Through a new analysis of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers led by Nino Ephremidze at Harvard University have made the clearest observation to date of a brown dwarf in orbit around a massive, aging star, potentially offering important new clues about how these planet-like bodies form. Their results have been posted to the arXiv preprint server.

Humanity May Soon Have the Technology To Reach Other Star Systems

Tiny spacecraft riding beams of light could put humanity within reach of another star system in a single lifetime.

The recent confirmation of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet called LHS 1140b has created a wave of interest within the astronomy community. The planet orbits within the habitable zone around its parent star—a red dwarf located some 48 light-years from Earth.

The habitable zone is the region around the star where temperatures are just right for water to remain liquid at a planet’s surface. Astronomers detected helium being lost from the upper atmosphere of LHS 1140b. But heavier chemical compounds, such as water, which is a key ingredient for life, could exist lower in its atmosphere.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Webb is finding galaxies that look like they’ve been quietly forming stars for billions of years inside a cosmos that was, at the time of observation, only a few hundred million years old

Webb’s stunning early galaxies are forcing astronomers to rethink cosmic history—but not quite in the way the headlines suggest.

Scientists Discover a Hidden Problem in Decades of Spacecraft Data

Different processes can produce similar spacecraft observations, making it difficult to determine how particles move through Earth’s radiation belt.

A spacecraft passing through Earth’s radiation belts can record particle behavior that looks random even when the underlying motion is highly organized. New research suggests that the limited resolution of spacecraft measurements can hide fine structures in high-energy particle populations, making predictable movement resemble diffusion.

The International Space Science Institute (ISSI) research team, led by the University of Birmingham and the Czech Academy of Science, reports in Physical Review Research that distinctly structured particle motion can produce observations nearly indistinguishable from patterns usually attributed to random scattering.

Station Crew Gears Up for Next Spacewalk, Keeps Up Microgravity Research

The next spacewalk outside the International Space Station is set to take place on Tuesday, Aug. 18. Two Expedition 75 astronauts will work in the vacuum of space to replace a space-to-ground antenna to maintain high-speed data and communication transmissions between the orbital outpost and mission controllers.

Flight engineers Anil Menon of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) are gearing up for next week’s spacewalk that will see the duo spend about six-and-a-half hours swapping an antenna on the orbital outpost’s Z1 truss segment. Menon and Adenot worked together on Monday inside the Quest airlock and organized the tools they will carry outside of the space station for the replacement job. Station commander Jessica Meir and flight engineer Jack Hathaway, both from NASA. studied the Canadarm2 robotic arm maneuvers they will use to assist next week’s spacewalkers. Hathaway and Adenot also took turns cleaning the cooling systems in a pair of spacesuits. The quartet wrapped up Monday’s shift reviewing procedures for the upcoming spacewalk.

The most recent spacewalk took place on Aug. 6 to augment the space station’s power system. Meir and Menon spent six hours and 27 minutes building a modification kit on the station’s Starboard 6 truss segment where a roll out solar array is slated to be installed later this year.

For roughly a billion years of Earth’s deep past, the Moon’s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sundriven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch

Calling this a tug-of-war makes the mechanism vivid, but there was no rope, no conscious contest and perhaps no clean moment when one side “won”. There were two transfers of angular momentum whose strengths depended on a planet that was itself continually changing.

That is the version I find most persuasive to hold lightly. Earth’s day may have remained near 19 hours for an interval longer than complex animals have existed, because sunlight organised the air in just the right rhythm to counter the Moon’s pull on the sea. The evidence is suggestive, the mechanism is physically plausible, and neither is final.

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