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Category: space – Page 84

Data centers are facilities that house the computing hardware used to process and store data. While some businesses maintain their own data centers on site, many others rely on ones owned and operated by someone else.

As our digital world continues to grow, demand for data centers — and clean electricity to operate them — is also increasing. To find out how we’ll be able to keep up, let’s look at the history of data centers, the challenges facing them, and ideas for overcoming those issues — on land, at sea, and in space.

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Some experts believe that the future of fusion in the U.S. may be found in compact, spherical fusion vessels. A smaller tokamak is seen as a potentially more economical solution for fusion energy. The challenge lies in fitting all necessary components into a limited space. Recent research indicates that removing one key component used to heat the plasma could create the additional space required.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the private company Tokamak Energy, and Kyushu University in Japan have proposed a design for a compact, spherical fusion pilot plant that heats the plasma using only microwaves. Typically, spherical tokamaks also use a massive coil of copper wire called a solenoid, located near the center of the vessel, to heat the plasma. Neutral beam injection, which involves applying beams of uncharged particles to the plasma, is often used as well. But much like a tiny kitchen is easier to design if it has fewer appliances, it would be simpler and more economical to make a compact tokamak if it has fewer heating systems.

The new approach eliminates ohmic heating, which is the same heating that happens in a toaster and is standard in tokamaks. “A compact, spherical tokamak plasma looks like a cored apple with a relatively small core, so one does not have the space for an ohmic heating coil,” said Masayuki Ono, a principal research physicist at PPPL and lead author of the paper detailing the new research. “If we don’t have to include an ohmic heating coil, we can probably design a machine that is easier and cheaper to build.”

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How do astronauts cope with life onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and how can scientists study it? This is what a recent study published in PLoS ONE hopes to address as an international team of researchers used archaeological investigation strategies to ascertain how ISS crew members managed their lives in space, specifically pertaining to the astronauts’ habits of using and storing the various materials onboard the orbiting outpost. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand how humans cope with living in space for long periods of time, which could be useful for trips to the Moon and Mars, someday.

The study, known as the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) experiment, was conducted over a 60-day period between January and March 2022 where six common locations onboard the ISS were designated as “squares”, which is a common archaeology strategy of digging pits to ascertain the most viable areas of further investigation. During the study, the astronauts photographed each square every day to ascertain how they were used, and the researchers would compare that to the location’s original purpose.

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Impulse Space will use the upgraded Mira on LEO missions as well, with its first mission slated to launch in late 2025. Among the customers for Mira is in-space refueling company Orbit Fab, which will host a fuel depot on a Mira vehicle in 2026 as part of a mission to refuel the U.S. Space Force’s Tetra-5 satellite in GEO.

As it rolls out the upgraded Mira vehicle, Impulse Space is moving into development of Helios, including preparing to begin tests of the powerpack for the engine that will power the stage as well as working on tanks for the vehicle. Helios will also reuse avionics created for Mira.

“Last year was mostly about Mira and getting that LEO Express 1 mission up,” Mueller said. “This year is mostly about Helios.”

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Images that NASA’s DART spacecraft captured of an asteroid moments before it intentionally collided with the object in 2022 have now allowed researchers to gain fresh insights into the celestial bodies.

The slew of studies published this week using data gathered from the asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos are an indication, researchers say, that the DART mission accomplished far more than just proving that potentially dangerous asteroids can be redirected from a trajectory toward Earth.

The findings published Tuesday across five research papers help to characterize the origin, evolution and physical characteristics of the two asteroids, located within 7 million miles of Earth. What the researchers discovered could help scientists better understand binary asteroids, such as Didymos and Dimorphos, in which the smaller body orbits the other.

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Using a laser to raise the energy state of an atom ’s nucleus, known as excitation, can lead to the development of the most precise atomic clocks. This process has been challenging because the electrons surrounding the nucleus are highly reactive to light, necessitating more light to affect the nucleus. UCLA physicists have overcome this by bonding the electrons with fluorine in a transparent crystal, allowing them to excite the neutrons in a thorium atom’s nucleus using a moderate amount of laser light. This achievement paves the way for significantly more accurate measurements of time, gravity, and other fields, far surpassing the current accuracy levels provided by atomic electrons.

For almost half a century, physicists have envisioned the possibilities that could arise from elevating the energy state of an atom’s nucleus with a laser. This breakthrough would enable the replacement of current atomic clocks with a nuclear clock, the most accurate timekeeping device ever conceived. Such precision would revolutionize fields like deep space navigation and communication.

It would also allow scientists to measure precisely whether the fundamental constants of nature are, in fact, really constant or merely appear to be because we have not yet measured them precisely enough.

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Can machine learning be used to advance exoplanet science, and can this be done by non-scientists, as well? This is what Ariel Data Challenge 2024 hopes to address as participants from around the world will compete to develop machine learning algorithms designed to analyze data from space telescopes with the goal of gaining greater insight into exoplanet atmospheres. This competition will be featured at the NeurIPS 2024 machine learning conference and holds the potential to not only advance the field of exoplanets but also enable non-scientists to conduct pioneering research, as well.

“By supporting this challenge, we aim to find new ways of using AI and machine learning to develop our understanding of the universe,” said Dr. Caroline Harper, who is the Head of Space Science at the UK Space Agency. “Exoplanets are likely to be more numerous in our galaxy than the stars themselves and the techniques developed through this prestigious competition could help open new windows for us to learn about the composition of their atmospheres, and even their weather.”

Along with the UK Space Agency, other institutions supporting this challenge include the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility, European Space Agency (ESA), and STFC RAL Space. The competition is named after the ESA’s Ariel Space Mission, which is currently scheduled for launch in 2029 with the goal of using the transit method for identifying more than 1,000 exoplanets.

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