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Category: space – Page 717
Final Flight: 08/21/2020
This week on #SpaceToGround: a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) cargo spacecraft leaves the International Space Station.
U.S. military eyes a role in the great power competition for lunar resources
WASHINGTON — The competition for the moon between the Unites States and China is being closely watched by the Defense Department as the military expects to play a role protecting U.S. access to cislunar space.
One concern for the Pentagon is the possibility that China establishes a presence on the moon before the United States and tries to set the international rules of behavior in space, said Brig. Gen. Steven Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit.
DIU is a Defense Department organization based in Silicon Valley that works with commercial vendors developing technologies relevant to national security.
Deep learning will help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and do more science
NASA’s Mars rovers have been one of the great scientific and space successes of the past two decades.
Four generations of rovers have traversed the red planet gathering scientific data, sending back evocative photographs, and surviving incredibly harsh conditions—all using on-board computers less powerful than an iPhone 1. The latest rover, Perseverance, was launched on July 30, 2020, and engineers are already dreaming of a future generation of rovers.
While a major achievement, these missions have only scratched the surface (literally and figuratively) of the planet and its geology, geography, and atmosphere.
Scientists Discovered an Unexplained ‘Heartbeat’ of Bright Energy in Space
Another potential explanation is that the heartbeat is illuminated by more diffuse and unstructured outflows of gas and particles generated by the disk’s precession. These outflows are not as concentrated and luminous as the jets, but they could potentially ripple out to Fermi J1913+0515 and light it up in this unique way.
The team is in the midst of collecting follow-up observations with the IRAM 30m millimeter radio telescope in Spain that might constrain the origins of the strange gamma ray heartbeat.
“We discovered the source, and discovered its periodicity, but we do not know what it means or how it is produced, so we need more observations to continue the study,” Li said.
Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots
This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.
“Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot’s weight,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.
Applications for mobile robots are exploding, from delivery drones and bike-lane take-out bots to robotic nurses and warehouse robots. On the micro side, researchers are exploring swarm robots that can self-assemble into larger devices. Multifunctional structural batteries can potentially free up space and reduce weight, but until now they could only supplement the main battery.
Harvard Astronomers Propose That Our Star System Used to Be Binary
A team of Harvard astronomers have a wild new theory: the Sun used to have a companion star, making our solar system a binary one during its ancient history.
The astronomers say the theory could explain the formation of the Oort cloud, a theoretical cloud of dust and smaller objects in the distant regions of our solar system that many believe was created out of the left overs from the early solar system.
In a new preprint submitted last month to the preprint archive arXiv, the team suggests that the Sun used to have a long lost binary star companion. Such a system could explain how some objects were scattered to the far reaches of the solar system, sometimes even making it to neighboring systems and vice versa.
“Previous models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects,” Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student involved in the research, said in a statement. “The binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most Sun-like stars are born with binary companions.”
A binary star system would be far more likely to capture the Oort cloud.
The theory could explain the existence of Planet Nine.
Earth’s night sky as Milky Way and Andromeda merge
Billions of years from now, Earth’s night sky will change as the Andromeda galaxy rushes toward a merger with the Milky Way.