Lifeboat Foundation

The weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), is splitting into two and getting wider, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Enceladus’ subsurface ocean composition hints at habitable conditions. A Southwest Research Institute team developed a new geochemical model that reveals that carbon dioxide (CO₂) from within Enceladus, an ocean-harboring moon of Saturn, may be controlled by chemical reactions at its seafloor. Studying the plume of gases and frozen sea spray released through cracks in the moon’s icy surface suggests an interior more complex than previously thought.

“By understanding the composition of the plume, we can learn about what the ocean is like, how it got to be this way and whether it provides environments where life as we know it could survive,” said SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein, lead author of a paper in Geophysical Research Letters outlining the research. “We came up with a new technique for analyzing the plume composition to estimate the concentration of dissolved CO₂ in the ocean. This enabled modeling to probe deeper interior processes.”

Analysis of mass spectrometry data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicates that the abundance of CO₂ is best explained by geochemical reactions between the moon’s rocky core and liquid water from its subsurface ocean. Integrating this information with previous discoveries of silica and molecular hydrogen (H2) points to a more complex, geochemically diverse core.

Virtual assistants and robots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, interactive and human-like. To fully replicate human communication, however, artificial intelligence (AI) agents should not only be able to determine what users are saying and produce adequate responses, they should also mimic humans in the way they speak.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have recently carried out a study aimed at improving how virtual assistants and robots communicate with humans by generating natural gestures to accompany their speech. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020, introduces Mix-StAGE, a new model that can produce different styles of co-speech gestures that best match the voice of a speaker and what he/she is saying.

“Imagine a situation where you are communicating with a friend in a virtual space through a virtual reality headset,” Chaitanya Ahuja, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The headset is only able to hear your voice, but not able to see your hand gestures. The goal of our model is to predict the hand gestures accompanying the speech.”

Take a sneak peek at our agenda: https://go.nasa.gov/31JrSyi?fbclid=IwAR1QTlNK9Q2QjgbHR5GYaCw…4ECrtpbCDM

Hubble observed sunlight filtering through Earth’s atmosphere during a lunar eclipse to see what a habitable exoplanet’s atmosphere might look like.

While we were all busy watching the Perseverance rover head off on its journey to Mars, NASA’s asteroid sample mission has been gearing up for its big moment. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx for short) has completed its final test approach of the surface. The next time it descends, OSIRIS-REx will scoop up pieces of the asteroid Bennu for return to Earth.

NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in 2016, sending it off to intercept 101955 Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid about 1,610 feet (490 meters) in diameter. Bennu does get very close to Earth at points in its orbit — there’s even a small chance that it could impact the Earth in the next few centuries. Currently, it’s safely out of the way about 2 AU distant (an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun).

Continue reading “NASA’s Asteroid Mission Completes Final Test Before Sampling Run” »

Sources & further reading:
https://sites.google.com/view/sources-asteroidmining/
Getting rare materials from the ground into your phone is ugly. The mining industry is responsible for air and water pollution and the destruction of entire landscapes. But what if we could replace the mining industry on Earth with a clean process that can’t harm anyone? Well, we can. All we need to do is look up.

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Continue reading “Unlimited Resources From Space – Asteroid Mining” »

Fun music video.

#HubbleClassic On January 19, 2015, Hubble captured a global map of Jupiter. This video was made from the observations.

Today, Jupiter is at opposition, meaning it shines in our sky all night long and is the closest to Earth that it’ll be all year.

#NASA #Hubble #classic #jupiter #planet #video #solarsystem #astronomy #space #science