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Category: space – Page 498

Over the coming weeks

we will be bringing you extracts from 9 trailblazer profiles from our new Neurotech report – dynamic and innovative companies we feel are driving this exciting space. Each profile includes a flagship product deep dive which offers a forensic consideration of product development, efficacy, target market, channels to market, success factors, IP and funding.

AE was born of the vision to increase human agency for end users through the technology the group develops for their partners and their wholly-owned and operated skunkworks companies. Running a highly collaborative agile process, these efforts are extended by investing heavily in the brain computer interface (BCI) space. BCI represents, to AE, the pinnacle of agency increasing tech with massive implications for users and the whole of humanity.

New NASA spacecraft could survive a hellish descent on Venus

NASA will launch a mission that will both fly by Venus and descend through its harsh atmosphere in 2029. Called DAVINCI, the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging mission will be the first to study Venus through both flybys and descent.

The spacecraft is expected to explore the layered Venusian atmosphere and reach its surface by June 2031. The DAVINCI mission will be able to capture data about Venus that scientists have been eager to measure since the early 1980s.

Only two NASA missions have previously visited the second planet from our sun – Pioneer in 1978 and Magellan in the early ’90s.

NASA to study the Moon’s mysterious Gruithuisen Domes for the first time

NASA’s Artemis mission has the chief goals of sending astronauts to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon and learning what is necessary to send the first astronauts to Mars. But it’s also planning to do so much more than that.

One of its many scientific mission will see the agency send the Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer (Lunar-VISE) and the Lunar Explorer Instrument for space biology Applications (LEIA) to the Moon in order to explore the mysterious Gruithuisen Domes, geological features that have puzzled scientists for years.

“Door” on Mars? A planetary scientist explains what you really see

For all the fuss it caused, it is only about a foot high.

The “door” was imaged by NASA’s Curiosity rover on May 7 on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the central massif within Gale crater, where it landed in 2012. Described on one website as a “pharaonic tomb door” because of its resemblance to some ancient Egyptian remains, it is, in fact, only about one foot high.

It is hard to spot on the panoramic image mosaic of the hillside above, but it leaps out at the eye if you see the individual frame where it occurs, as seen below. It does look like a doorway until you realize how small it is. And if you boost the contrast in the dark parts of the image, the picture just about reveals a solid rock face at the back of the shadowed interior. So as a gateway into the hollow hills of Mars, it doesn’t lead very far.

Nobody with even a little geological experience is likely to mistake the feature as a “door.” A geologist would note the thin and slightly sloping repeated layers of sandstone making up the whole of the rock face and would immediately expect that they were looking at the eroded remains of hardened sand dunes. These once covered the stream and lake sediments that Curiosity examined earlier in its gradual climb up through the layers of sedimentary rock making up Mount Sharp.

A new cosmic dawn: The Webb Telescope’s first color images are arriving soon

“We’re just human, and we cannot predict what the universe is going to tell us.”

It’s the moment we have all been waiting for: The James Webb Space Telescope will make its first scientific observations of the universe in the coming weeks. The first full-color images will drop on July 12, 2022, along with spectroscopic data.

This is the crescendo moment in a scientific symphony that has been tuning up for the last two decades.

What the images will show is somewhat a mystery —so Inverse spoke to Klaus Pontoppidan, Project Scientist with the Webb Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Technical PI for Webb’s Early Release Observations, to try and glean some clues to what they will reveal.

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