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Category: space – Page 424

‘May the forest be with you.’The GEDI system aboard the ISS shoots laser beams down at Earth to fight deforestation.

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is building new digital tools to help fight deforestation and climate change. One of these is the FAO’s Framework for Ecosystem Monitoring (FERM) website, which uses satellite images to highlight the negative impact on forests worldwide.

The technology certainly lives up to its sci-fi namesake. The GEDI system is perched aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and it shoots laser beams at trees from the orbital laboratory.

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The countdown now begins for China’s next uncontrolled rocket reentry in October.

China’s Long March 5B rocket crashed into the Indian Ocean in an uncontrolled reentry over the weekend. * NASA’s Bill Nelson criticized China’s space practices, citing a “risk of loss of life and property”. * China will launch another Long March 5B to orbit in October.

China’s Long March 5B rocket core stage reentered Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, July 24.

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The U.S. Space Command’s proposed move to Huntsville passed a big test July 13 when the Pentagon released a draft environmental assessment finding “no significant impacts on the human or natural environment” if the headquarters is built on the Redstone Arsenal site.

Although there remain four steps ahead of the move, Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said the environmental assessment should be the last major hurdle for the plan to move the command from startup headquarters in Colorado to a permanent site. The move would bring 1,800 headquarters staff and their families to north Alabama.

“The Redstone Arsenal site is the (Department of the Air Force’s) Preferred Alternative for implementation of the Proposed Action,” the environmental assessment said. The proposed action is a permanent headquarters.

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Nowadays, the development of renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and nuclear energy sources, has become imperative, due to the limited resource constraints of the traditional fossil fuels [1 ]. However, these renewable sources could not deliver a regular power supply as the sources are variable in time and diffuse in space. Thus, the focus has been shifted to the electrical energy storage to smooth the intermittency of the energy sources. Rechargeable battery has the ability to store chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy with high efficiency [ 2]. Lithium-ion battery (LIB), as one typical rechargeable electrochemical battery, has dominated the markets of portable electronic devices, electric vehicles, and hybrid electric vehicles in the past decades, due to its high output voltages, high energy densities, and long cycle life; even though the high cost and the shortage of lithium resources are inhibiting the application of LIB in large-scale energy storage [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]].

Sodium-ion battery (SIB) is one promising alternative to LIB, with comparable performance to that of LIB, abundant sodium resources and low price of starting materials [[10], [11], [12], [13]]. As Na atom is heavier and larger than those of Li atom, the gravimetric and volumetric energy density of Na-ion battery are expected to not exceed those of the Li analogues [14]. However, energy density would not be considered as the critical issue in the field of large-scale grid support, for which the operating cost and the battery durability are the most important aspects [15,16].

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Billions of years in the future, The Time Traveler stands before a black ocean, under a bloated sun. The shore is scaled with lichen and flecked with snow. The crab things and giant insects that menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone. Apart from the lapping of dark waves, everything is utterly still.

He thinks he sees something shifting in the waves nearby but dismisses it as an illusion; assuming it to be a rock. Still a churning weakness and fear deters him from leaving the saddle of the time machine. Perhaps this anxiety is just prompted by the ultimate desolation of this world.

Studying the unknown constellations, he feels a chill wind. The old sun is being eclipsed by the moon, or some other massive body – for it is possible that the Earth has shifted into a new orbit around its star.

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Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies composed of a few billion stars. They are challenging to detect due to their low luminosity, low mass, and small size. However, it remains elusive how these dwarf and giant galaxies assemble their stars and evolve into modern-day galaxies.

India’s first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory, AstroSat, cracked this mystery. A team of scientists using AstroSat shows how the star-forming complexes in the outskirts of a dwarf galaxy migrate towards the central region and contribute to its growth in mass and luminosity.

The team includes astronomers from India, the USA, and France. Professor Kanak Saha at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, conceived this study. Mr. Anshuman Borgohain is the lead author of the paper.

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