NASA has published a new sequence showing the carbon monoxide plume generated by the wildfires in Brazil, tracking the changes each day starting from August 8. The country has experienced record wildfires this year, and, as of August 23, has more than 2,500 active fires throughout the Amazon. NASA’s time-series map shows the carbon monoxide concentrations at an altitude of 18,000ft.
O.o.
Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ( PPPL ) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.
“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by stellarator coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma ’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”
Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.
The first-ever artificial intelligence simulation of the universe seems to work like the real thing — and is almost as mysterious.
Researchers reported the new simulation June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The goal was to create a virtual version of the cosmos in order to simulate different conditions for the universe’s beginning, but the scientists also hope to study their own simulation to understand why it works so well.
“It’s like teaching image-recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” study co-author Shirley Ho, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, said in a statement. “Nobody knows how it does this, and it’s a great mystery to be solved.” [Far-Out Discoveries About the Universe’s Beginnings].
Posted in space
A few hundred episodes ago, I answered the question, “What is the Universe Expanding Into?” The gist of the answer is that the Universe as we understand it, isn’t really expanding into anything.
If you go in any one direction long enough, you just return to your starting point. As the Universe expands, that journey takes longer, but there’s still nothing that it’s going into.
“We don’t have the official results of that testing, but we are told it went very, very well, so we are really excited about that,” Lindsey said.
Key to SNC’s habitat design is its ability to grow in volume once it is launched into space. The Large Inflatable Fabric Environment, or LIFE, habitat can start out compact enough to fit inside an 18-foot (5.4 meters) rocket fairing but then expand to 27 feet in diameter and 27 feet long (8 by 8 m).
The House of Representatives has taken the first step toward honoring a pioneering woman in astronomy.
Most of the spacecraft in science fiction are ridiculously spacious, but real life is much less luxurious. The International Space Station (ISS) has just 388 cubic meters of habitable space, and future deep-space assignments could have astronauts serving much longer tours of duty. NASA has partnered with Sierra Nevada Corporation to explore ways to make spacecraft a bit less cramped, and the company has now completed a prototype inflatable habitat module with almost as much living space as the entire ISS.
NASA originally funded the NextSTEP-2 program to develop technologies for long-term missions like the Lunar Gateway station and a journey to Mars. The current plan is to make the Lunar Gateway a smaller modular station that will initially have just a small life support area and docking for lunar landers. The inflatable habitat shown off at Johnson Space Center this week could eventually add a lot more living areas to the Gateway and other missions.
This isn’t NASA’s first look at inflatable habitats. The agency partnered with Bigelow Aerospace to deploy a small inflatable prototype module to the ISS called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). The 16 cubic meter volume of BEAM is a far cry from the Sierra Nevada mockup, though.
How do you weigh a ghost? If you’re a cosmologist, you could use… the Universe. Combine vast cosmological data with info from particle accelerators, and, it turns out, you have a pretty good scale for measuring the mass of a neutrino — also known as the ‘ghost particle’.
This is how a team of scientists, for the first time, have set an upper limit on the mass of the lightest of the three different types of neutrino.
Neutrinos are peculiar little things. They are among the most abundant subatomic particles in the Universe, similar to electrons, but without a charge and almost massless. This means they interact very rarely with normal matter; in fact, billions are passing through your body right now.
NASA just successfully demonstrated the first of three tools designed to refuel spacecraft in space, right outside of the International Space Station.
The space agency’s Robotic Refuelling Mission 3 was able to unstow a special adapter that can hold super-cold methane, oxygen or hydrogen, and insert it into a special coupler on a different fuel tank.
Future iterations of the system could one day allow us to gas up spacecraft with resources from distant worlds, such as liquid methane as fuel. And that’s a big deal, since future space explorations to far away destinations such as the Moon and Mars will rely on our ability to refuel after leaving Earth’s gravity.
