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A new mini-moon might be about to join Earth’s orbit briefly, before being hurled back into space.
‘Minimoons’ are only a few feet across, and each tends to do a stint of around a few months in orbit – before resuming their previous lives as asteroids.
But this particular mini-moon may be a little different – as experts have suggested it’s not a moon at all, but man-made space junk.
The “core space operators” deployed by the U.S. military’s controversial newest branch aren’t in orbit, they’re in Qatar.
Following a series of critical contract awards and hardware milestones, NASA has shared an update on its Artemis program, including the latest Phase 1 plans to land the first woman and the next man on the surface of the Moon in 2024.
Data from Southwest Research Institute-led instruments aboard ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft have helped reveal auroral emissions in the far ultraviolet around a comet for the first time.
At Earth, auroras are formed when charged particles from the Sun follow our planet’s magnetic field lines to the north and south poles. There, solar particles strike atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, creating shimmering curtains of colorful light in high-latitude skies. Similar phenomena have been seen at various planets and moons in our solar system and even around a distant star. SwRI’s instruments, the Alice far-ultraviolet (FUV) spectrograph and the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES), aided in detecting these novel phenomena at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G).
“Charged particles from the Sun streaming towards the comet in the solar wind interact with the gas surrounding the comet’s icy, dusty nucleus and create the auroras,” said SwRI Vice President Dr. Jim Burch who leads IES. “The IES instrument detected the electrons that caused the aurora.”
After repurposing facial recognition and deepfake tech to study galaxies and the Higgs boson, physicists think they can help shape the responsible use of AI.
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NASA has unlocked nuclear fusion on a tiny scale, with a phenomenon called lattice confinement fusion that takes place in the narrow channels between atoms. In the reaction, the common nuclear fuel deuterium gets trapped in the “empty” atomic space in a solid metal. What results is a Goldilocks effect that’s neither supercooled nor superheated, but where atoms reach fusion-level energy.
☢️ You like nuclear. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.
Enceladus may be even more interesting than we thought.
Saturn’s geyser-spewing moon Enceladus may be even more active than scientists had thought.
In a delightful alignment of astronomy and mathematics, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a “pi Earth”—an Earth-sized planet that zips around its star every 3.14 days, in an orbit reminiscent of the universal mathematics constant.
The researchers discovered signals of the planet in data taken in 2017 by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope’s K2 mission. By zeroing in on the system earlier this year with SPECULOOS, a network of ground-based telescopes, the team confirmed that the signals were of a planet orbiting its star. And indeed, the planet appears to still be circling its star today, with a pi-like period, every 3.14 days.
“The planet moves like clockwork,” says Prajwal Niraula, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), who is the lead author of a paper published today in the Astronomical Journal, titled: “π Earth: a 3.14-day Earth-sized Planet from K2’s Kitchen Served Warm by the SPECULOOS Team.”
The idea is to make space livable for everyday folks rather than only specially-trained astronauts.
