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Category: space – Page 601

Fascinating new episode with NASA planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for the Mars InSight lander which is changing the way scientists now view Mars’ interior dynamics and inner workings. Please have a listen.

I welcome Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for NASA’s Mars InSight lander, which has been operating on the Martian surface for two years now. Although it’s had some technical issues, it’s offered a sea change in how geophysicists are interpreting the dynamics and makeup of the Martian core. In this episode, we talk about what we currently understand about Mars’ geophysical makeup and, among other things, whether it ever had plate tectonics which was so crucial for the evolution of sentient life here on Earth.

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In a new report on Science Advances, Mark Elowitz, and a team of scientists in physical sciences, optical physics, planetary science and radiation research in the U.S., U.K., India, and Taiwan, presented the first analysis of far-ultraviolet reflectance spectra of regions on Rhea’s leading and trailing hemispheres—as collected by the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph during targeted flybys. In this work, they specifically aimed to explain the unidentified broad absorption feature centered near 184 nanometers of the resulting spectra. Using laboratory measurements of the UV spectroscopy of a set of molecules, Elowitz et al. found a good fit to Rhea’s spectra with both hydrazine monohydrate and several chlorine-containing molecules. They showed hydrazine monohydrate to be the most plausible candidate to explain the absorption feature at 184 nm.

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Viasat on Feb. 2 received a $50.8 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a broad range of space systems.

WASHINGTON — Viasat, a provider of satellite communications and wireless networking technology, received a $50.8 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a broad range of space systems.

The Defense Department announced the contract Feb. 2. The contract was first announced Nov. 20. A spokesperson told SpaceNews at the time that the contract terms had not yet been finalized so the award would be reposted at a later day.

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Nikolai Kardashev, creator of the civilization ranking scale, outstanding space explorer, specialist in experimental and theoretical astrophysics and radio astronomy, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Director of the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute, died in August 3, 2019. The Russian scientist was 87 years old.

The scientist’s most famous work is the Kardashev Scale — the cosmic civilization ranking system. As part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), he proposed a model of cosmic civilisations and calculated the scale of ranking civilisations

The Kardashev Scale

In 1963, he studied the quasar CTA-102. It was the first contribution of Soviet scientists to SETI, since the radio source CTA-102 was first assumed to be evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.

In his paper ‘Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilisations’, published in 1964, Kardashev explored the idea that other galactic civilisations may have existed for billions of years before ours, so they would be far more advanced. He proposed a theoretical scale of technological development of civilisations based on the amount of energy that civilization is able to utilize. According to the theory, there are 3 main types of advanced civilisations:

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Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behavior from a ‘radio-loud’ magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the Universe.

Their new findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), suggest magnetars have more complex magnetic fields than previously thought – which may challenge theories of how they are born and evolve over time.

Magnetars are a rare type of rotating neutron star with some of the most powerful magnetic fields in the Universe. Astronomers have detected only thirty of these objects in and around the Milky Way —most of them detected by X-ray telescopes following a high-energy outburst.

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Quantum computing offers the promise of solutions to previously unsolvable problems, but in order to deliver on this promise, it will be necessary to preserve and manipulate information that is contained in the most delicate of resources: highly entangled quantum states. One thing that makes this so challenging is that quantum devices must be ensconced in an extreme environment in order to preserve quantum information, but signals must be sent to each qubit in order to manipulate this information—requiring, in essence, an information superhighway into this extreme environment. Both of these problems must, moreover, be solved at a scale far beyond that of present-day quantum device technology.

Microsoft’s David Reilly, leading a team of Microsoft and University of Sydney researchers, has developed a novel approach to the latter problem. Rather than employing a rack of room-temperature electronics to generate voltage pulses to control qubits in a special-purpose refrigerator whose base temperature is 20 times colder than interstellar space, they invented a control chip, dubbed Gooseberry, that sits next to the quantum device and operates in the extreme conditions prevalent at the base of the fridge. They’ve also developed a general-purpose cryo-compute core that operates at the slightly warmer temperatures comparable to that of interstellar space, which can be achieved by immersion in liquid Helium. This core performs the classical computations needed to determine the instructions that are sent to Gooseberry which, in turn, feeds voltage pulses to the qubits. These novel classical computing technologies solve the I/O nightmares associated with controlling thousands of qubits.

Quantum computing could impact chemistry, cryptography, and many more fields in game-changing ways. The building blocks of quantum computers are not just zeroes and ones but superpositions of zeroes and ones. These foundational units of quantum computation are known as qubits (short for quantum bits). Combining qubits into complex devices and manipulating them can open the door to solutions that would take lifetimes for even the most powerful classical computers.

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