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Category: space – Page 453

NASA plan for an instrument to withstand conditions of Venus

Within the next decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission plans to send a descent sphere whistling through the atmosphere of Venus, collecting not only samples of its atmosphere but also high-resolution images of the planet’s surface. But Venus is a deeply inhospitable place, with surface temperatures hotter than an oven and pressure so great it is like being 900 meters underwater. Now, NASA has shared more details about one of the DAVINCI mission’s instruments and how it will collect vital data in this most challenging of environments.

DAVINCI’s VASI instrument (Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation) will be responsible for taking readings of the atmosphere as the descent sphere drops through the atmosphere on its 63-minute-long fall to the surface, including collecting data on temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction. This should help answer some long-open questions about the planet’s atmosphere, particularly its lower atmosphere, which remains a mystery in many ways.

“There are actually some big puzzles about the deep atmosphere of Venus,” said the science lead for the VASI instrument, Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. “We don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle and DAVINCI will give us those pieces by measuring the composition at the same time as the pressure and temperature as we get near the surface.”

Emotet Botnet Distributing Self-Unlocking Password-Protected RAR Files to Drop Malware

The notorious Emotet botnet has been linked to a new wave of malspam campaigns that take advantage of password-protected archive files to drop CoinMiner and Quasar RAT on compromised systems.

In an attack chain detected by Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers, an invoice-themed ZIP file lure was found to contain a nested self-extracting (SFX) archive, the first archive acting as a conduit to launch the second.

While phishing attacks like these traditionally require persuading the target into opening the attachment, the cybersecurity company said the campaign sidesteps this hurdle by making use of a batch file to automatically supply the password to unlock the payload.

Astronomers around the world weigh in on one of the most intense gamma-ray bursts ever

It came from the constellation Sagitta more than 2 billion years ago.

Earlier this month, on October 9th, one of the most intense gamma ray bursts hit the Earth.

NASA

Astronomers named the event GRB 221009A and they report that it was at least 10 times brighter than previous gamma-ray bursts. The scientists speculate that it also released the same amount of energy that would take thousands of suns their entire lifetimes to generate.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity reaches intriguing salty site after treacherous journey

After a treacherous journey, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reached an area that is thought to have formed billions of years ago when the Red Planet’s water disappeared.

This region of Mount Sharp, the Curiosity rover’s Martian stomping ground, is rich in salty minerals that scientists think were left behind when streams and ponds dried up. As such, this region could hold tantalizing clues about how the Martian climate changed from being similar to Earth’s to the frozen, barren desert that Curiosity explores today.

Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Space Policy — Office of Science & Technology Policy, White House

Advancing Space For Humanity — Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The White House.

Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. is Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the White House (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/) where she focuses on determining civil and commercial space priorities for the President’s science advisor, and her portfolio includes a wide range of disciplines including Orbital Debris, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Earth Observations, Space Weather, and Planetary Protection.

Previously, Dr. Uzo-Okoro built and managed over 60 spacecraft missions and programs in 17 years at NASA, in roles as an engineer, technical expert, manager and executive, in earth observations, planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, human exploration, and space communications, which represented $9.2B in total program value. Her last role was as a NASA Heliophysics program executive.

Dr. Uzo-Okoro has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and three masters degrees in Space Systems, Space Robotics, and Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University (APL), MIT (the Media Lab), and Harvard University, and a PhD in Space Systems from MIT, on the robotic assembly of satellites.

During her career, Dr. Uzo-Okoro also founded Terraformers.com to help grow affordable food through productive and networked backyard gardens, as a precursor to growing food in space. Her immigration story is profiled in President George W. Bush’s book, ‘Out of Many, One’.

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NASA Just Unveiled an Epic 12-Year Timelapse of The Entire Sky

NASA continues to outdo itself with the majestic images of space that it keeps releasing – but even by the agency’s high standards, a 12-year timelapse of the entirety of the night sky is an impressive achievement.

The imagery has been captured over those years by the NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, which was originally launched in 2009 under the previous name ‘WISE’ to study the Universe outside of our Solar System.

It has since been repurposed, and renamed, to track near-Earth objects including asteroids and comets.

SpaceX’s new Starlink Aviation service brings 350 Mbps WiFi to private jets

The new service will provide 350 Mbps internet, even while taking off and landing.

SpaceX just announced its new Starlink Aviation service, which will allow high-speed in-flight internet that will allow users to make voice calls and stream videogames, according to the company.

The new service promises speeds of up to 350 Mbps for airliners and is aimed mainly at private jet contractors. Earlier this year, SpaceX also announced a partnership with Hawaiian Airlines to bring free WiFi to its flights starting early next year.

Source: SpaceX / Twitter.

SpaceX recently announced Starlink RV and Starlink Maritime. It’s now taken the logical next step, expanding its Starlink service into the skies.

Energy jet traveling 7 times the speed of light appears to break the laws of physics

Gravitational waves are invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected with instruments such as the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Pasadena, California. So, after LIGO detected the first blast of waves from the colliding stars in 2017, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the merger to learn whatever they could about it. Before long, astronomers saw visible evidence of a high-speed jet of particles, blazing out of the collision site and lighting up globs of matter that had been ejected by the stars.

In their new paper, astronomers analyzed that jet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory and several additional radio telescopes on Earth. With these observations, the team calculated both the actual speed of the jet, and the perceived physics-defying speed.

The beyond-light-speed illusion arises from the difference in speed between the particles in the jet, and the light particles (or photons) that they emit. Because the jet’s particles move nearly as fast as the light they emit, it can appear as though particles in the early part of the jet are arriving at Earth at nearly the same time as photons in the later stages of the jet — making it appear as though the jet is actually moving faster than the speed of light.

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