An asteroid larger than some of the world’s tallest buildings will zip by Earth next month.
Category: space – Page 760
Terraforming would be a monumental task. How about this instead?
Humanity could make patches of the Red Planet habitable relatively cheaply and efficiently by placing thin layers of silica aerogel on or above the Martian surface, a new study suggests. The insulating aerogel would warm the ground enough to melt water ice and would also block harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, potentially creating an environment where plants and other photosynthetic life could flourish.
Aug. 27 (UPI) — Built-in night vision may not be far off. Scientists have developed nanoparticles that allow mice to see near-infrared light.
Researchers are scheduled to describe the technological breakthrough on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. ET at the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting, held this week in San Diego. Their presentation will be streamed live online.
“When we look at the universe, we see only visible light,” lead researcher Gang Han, a material scientists and biochemist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said in a news release. “But if we had near-infrared vision, we could see the universe in a whole new way. We might be able to do infrared astronomy with the naked eye, or have night vision without bulky equipment.”
Read more about this major milestone: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-…first-time
Reaching a major milestone, engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California. Once it reaches space, NASA’s most powerful and complex space telescope will explore the cosmos using infrared light, from planets and moons within our solar system to the most ancient and distant galaxies.
The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and unitized pallet structures (UPSs) that fold up around the telescope for launch, are seen partially deployed to an open configuration to enable telescope installation.
During his year in space, Scott Kelly was zapped relentlessly by radiation — the equivalent of 10 chest X-rays a day for more than 11 months starting in March of 2015. The onslaught damaged the astronaut’s DNA and affected his immune system while raising his risk for cancer. And Kelly was aboard the International Space Station, whose tight orbit around Earth lies within the magnetic field that surrounds our planet and blocks the most damaging forms of radiation.
Astronauts who travel to Mars or other destinations in deep space will leave Earth’s protective cocoon for months or years at a time. And a new NASA-funded study suggests that chronic exposure to radiation could harm astronauts’ minds as well as their bodies — potentially affecting space flyers’ moods and even their ability to think.
That could be a big deal.
Researchers have successfully created a model of the Universe using artificial intelligence, reports a new study.
Researchers seek to understand our Universe by making model predictions to match observations. Historically, they have been able to model simple or highly simplified physical systems, jokingly dubbed the “spherical cows,” with pencils and paper. Later, the arrival of computers enabled them to model complex phenomena with numerical simulations. For example, researchers have programmed supercomputers to simulate the motion of billions of particles through billions of years of cosmic time, a procedure known as the N-body simulations, in order to study how the Universe evolved to what we observe today.
“Now with machine learning, we have developed the first neural network model of the Universe, and demonstrated there’s a third route to making predictions, one that combines the merits of both analytic calculation and numerical simulation,” said Yin Li, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, and jointly the University of California, Berkeley.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) puts out lots of public requests for scientific research, including high-profile competitions involving robotics and space launch tech. But today, the agency tweeted a very simple plea: it needs a massive, maze-like underground facility for running experiments, and it needs it right now.
LIVINGSTON, La. — About a mile and a half from a building so big you can see it from space, every car on the road slows to a crawl. Drivers know to take the 10 mph (16 km/h) speed limit very seriously: That’s because the building houses a massive detector that’s hunting for celestial vibrations at the smallest scale ever attempted. Not surprisingly, it’s sensitive to all earthly vibrations around it, from the rumblings of a passing car to natural disasters on the other side of the globe.
As a result, scientists who work at one of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors must go to extraordinary lengths to hunt down and remove all potential sources of noise — slowing down traffic around the detector, monitoring every tiny tremor in the ground, even suspending the equipment from a quadruple pendulum system that minimizes vibrations — all in the effort to create the most “silent” vibrational spot on Earth.
There are many famous innovators in the Western world who have a bold vision, go after massively transformative projects and despite investor and public criticism deliver on their promises. Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs are household names who went against the current, pushed their vision through and succeeded touching everyone on the planet and making the world a better place.
Since the passing of Steve Jobs, the crown of the bold inventor, innovator and high-tech businessman passed to Elon Musk who despite frequent criticism is the undisputed leader of disruptive entrepreneurship. However, when I ask some of the most informed westerners in my network to recall one global entrepreneur with an Asian name disrupting their life in the same positive way and at the same scale as Elon, very few can recall anyone besides Jack Ma, Dr. Lee Kai-Fu, or Dr. Ge Li. Even fewer would be able to name the exact contribution these people made to their health and wellbeing. For example, few people know that Dr. Ge Li’s companies that act as global open research platforms assisted in the discovery of many of the cutting-edge life-saving treatments that are benefiting everyone on the planet. There will be books written about the transformative role of these people in the future and, hopefully, Netflix documentaries.
But there are many great innovators and entrepreneurs, who are working on bold new ideas and technologies that will change everyones’ life in a very impactful and positive way but are not known to the general public in the West. These innovators often face criticism from the investor community which wants to see business models and projects that they can understand, projects they can believe and get the immediate returns. Like Elon Musk they face a lot of resistance but over time prevail and will impress every one of us. They will go down in history as pioneers and their names will be known in every household.
MOUNTAIN VIEW (KPIX 5) — A Silicon Valley 3D printing company has been awarded a contract with NASA to launch a project creating a satellite that will manufacture and assemble itself in orbit.
A top NASA administrator visited Mountain View’s Ames Research Center Monday and toured state-of-the-art facilities of Made In Space. NASA awarded Made in Space a $73 million contract to launch Archinaut by 2022, an “autonomous robotic manufacturing and assembly platform.”
Jim Bridenstine, the space agency‘s top official, called Ames a “jewel” and praised the work of Made In Space as “impressive.” The manufacturing company 3D prints structures, parts, tools and more while in orbit.