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Category: space – Page 684

NASA changed its mind and decided not to buy a seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to deliver its astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in the spring of 2021, according to Roscosmos’ 2019 annual report.

In May, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine announced that the option of acquiring a seat on the Soyuz MS-18 manned spacecraft, which would be launched in April 2021, is being considered. In August, a source in the space industry said that for the first time in the history of the ISS, a crew consisting of only Russian cosmonauts would fly on Soyuz MS-18, but there was no official confirmation of this so far.

“At the beginning of 2020, the US side announced its readiness to purchase services for the delivery of only one astronaut in the fall of 2020: the conditions are currently being discussed, the modification project is being adjusted,” the report says. In December 2019, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin announced the decision to provide NASA with one seat on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft to be launched in October 2020 and Soyuz MC-18 to be launched in April 2021.

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An alert pops up in your email: The latest spacecraft observations are ready. You now have 24 hours to scour 84 hours-worth of data, selecting the most promising split-second moments you can find. The data points you choose, depending on how you rank them, will download from the spacecraft in the highest possible resolution; researchers may spend months analyzing them. Everything else will be overwritten like it was never collected at all.

These are the stakes facing the Scientist in the Loop, one of the most important roles on the Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission team. Seventy-three volunteers share the responsibility, working weeklong shifts at a time to ensure the very best data makes it to the ground. It takes a keen and meticulous eye, which is why it’s always been left to a carefully-trained human – at least until now.

A paper published recently in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences describes the first artificial intelligence algorithm to lend the Scientist in the Loop a (virtual) hand.

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Malak Trabelsi Loeb

The present generation has witnessed a rare phenomenon during one’s life: the rise of a new civilization. Fueled by the global-minded elite who influenced and controlled the comprehensive economic policies and strategies, a new wave of globalization has emerged. Targowski (2014) defined “global civilization” as the following:

“Global Civilization is a large Global Society living in integrated horizontally whole or partial spaces of contemporary, autonomous civilizations as a fuzzy reification (invisible-visible) which is not a part of the larger one and exists over an extended period of time.”

For Targowski, this new global civilization is characterized by an advanced global culture, a “wealth and power-driven global business religion,” and global societal values based on shared knowledge systems.

Continue reading “The Inspirational Impact of Space on The Global Civilization” | >

Many colorful stars are packed close together in this image of the globular cluster NGC 1805, taken by the NASA /ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This tight grouping of thousands of stars is located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The stars orbit closely to one another, like bees swarming around a hive. In the dense center of one of these clusters, stars are 100 to 1000 times closer together than the nearest stars are to our Sun, making planetary systems around them unlikely.

The striking difference in star colors is illustrated beautifully in this image, which combines two different types of light: blue stars, shining brightest in near-ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared. Space telescopes like Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet because they are positioned above Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs most of this wavelength, making it inaccessible to ground-based facilities.

This young globular cluster can be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the Dorado constellation, which is Portugese for dolphinfish. Usually, globular clusters contain stars which are born at the same time; however, NGC 1805 is unusual as it appears to host two different populations of stars with ages millions of years apart. Observing such clusters of stars can help astronomers understand how stars evolve, and what factors determine whether they end their lives as white dwarfs, or explode as supernovae.

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Meteorite material presumed to be devoid of water because it formed in the dry inner Solar System appears to have contained sufficient hydrogen to have delivered to Earth at least three times the mass of water in its oceans, a new study shows.

While the idea that enstatite chondrite (EC) meteorites contained enough hydrogen to provide water to the growing proto-Earth has been proposed, efforts to rigorously test this scenario have been hampered by difficulties in measuring hydrogen concentrations in ECs — an obstacle this study overcame.

According to models of Solar System formation, Earth should be dry. However, our blue planet’s vast oceans, humid atmosphere and well-hydrated geology boldly defy such predictions, making it unique among the other rocky planets of the inner Solar System.

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Electric current is everywhere, from powering homes to controlling the plasma that fuels fusion reactions to possibly giving rise to vast cosmic magnetic fields. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found that electrical currents can form in ways not known before. The novel findings could give researchers greater ability to bring the fusion energy that drives the sun and stars to Earth.

“It’s very important to understand which processes produce electrical currents in plasma and which phenomena could interfere with them,” said Ian Ochs, graduate student in Princeton Universitys Program in Plasma Physics and lead author of a paper selected as a featured article in Physics of Plasmas. “They are the primary tool we use to control plasma in magnetic fusion research.”

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Groups of stars can tear their planet-forming disk to shreds, leaving behind warped, misaligned rings, scientists find in a breakthrough study.

Solar systems like ours generally form with their planets all orbiting in the same, flat plane. But, as an international team of scientists has found in a new study, this isn’t always the case.

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Please have a listen to Episode 14 of Cosmic Controversy with guest Julie Castillo, NASA’s Dawn mission project scientist. We spend much of the episode discussing the beguiling dwarf planet Ceres and the need for a sample return mission.

This week’s guest is NASA Dawn project scientist Julie Castillo-Rogez who led the hugely successful robotic mission on the first in-depth look at the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Castillo talks about why there’s a growing consensus that Ceres may have long had habitable subsurface conditions and why we need a sample return mission to launch in 2033. We also discuss Mars’ moons of Deimos and Phobos and the first interstellar asteroid, Oumuamua.

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