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Starlink promises high speed and low latency internet access.

On Saturday, CEO Elon Musk posted on his Twitter page that Starlink service is active in Ukraine, with more terminals en route. Previously, Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine, had tweeted to Musk on Saturday, February 26, calling for the tech billionaire to provide some assistance to Ukraine amidst the Russian attack on the country.

Starlink is designed to help people in areas without access to reliable, ground-based internet get online — so long as they have a view of the sky. Starlink promises high-speed and low latency service without relying on expensive ground-based fiber optic cables or local infrastructure. Just point a dish at the sky, and the supplied hardware will connect to the internet using the satellites orbiting above.

An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology — a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge, and national security.

University of Birmingham researchers from the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing have reported their achievement in Nature. It is the first in the world for a quantum gravity gradiometer outside of laboratory conditions.

The quantum gravity gradiometer, which was developed under a contract for the Ministry of Defence and in the UKRI-funded Gravity Pioneer project, was used to find a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world conditions one meter below the ground surface. It wins an international race to take the technology outside.

Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov confirmed his country received a shipment of Starlink equipment after he tweeted at Elon Musk over the weekend asking for “Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”

Ukraine’s vice prime minister confirmed that the Starlink shipment Musk promised has arrived.

Fortescue begins construction of world’s biggest electrolyser factory, to double global production.

Physics World.

Once it’s in space, it’ll be known as GOES-18.

“A big part of the GOES-R [series] mission is actually doing solar observations,” said Pam Sullivan, NOAA’s GOES-R program director.

Before GOES-T can begin its weather-watching mission, it does have to reach space. To do that, it will need good weather.

Continue reading “Advanced new GOES-T weather satellite is ‘go’ for launch on March 1, NASA says” »

With the launch just weeks away, SpaceX and Axiom are making their final preparations for the first all-private, all-commercial Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Axiom-1 will be the first all-commercial mission flown to the ISS by SpaceX in partnership with Axiom Space.

Axiom-1 will launch using a flight-proven Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 from historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center. The mission will launch on March 30, 2022, at 2:46 PM EDT (18:46 UTC). Axiom-1 will be the second commercial Crew Dragon flight and the first mission to use a Crew Dragon that has flown three times.

The material could replace rare metals and lead to more economical production of carbon-neutral fuels.

An electrochemical reaction that splits apart water molecules to produce oxygen is at the heart of multiple approaches aiming to produce alternative fuels for transportation. But this reaction has to be facilitated by a catalyst material, and today’s versions require the use of rare and expensive elements such as iridium, limiting the potential of such fuel production.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts.

Poli imagines using quantum gravity sensors to monitor groundwater or magma beneath volcanoes, or to help archaeologists uncover hidden tombs or other artifacts without having to dig them up (SN: 11/2/17). These devices could also help farmers check soil quality or help engineers inspect potential construction sites for unstable ground.

“There are many tools to measure gravity,” says Xuejian Wu, an atomic physicist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., who wasn’t involved in the study. Some devices measure how far gravity pulls down a mass hanging from a spring. Other tools use lasers to clock how fast an object tumbles down a vacuum chamber. But free-falling atoms, like those in quantum gravity sensors, are the most pristine, reliable test masses out there, Wu says. As a result, quantum sensors promise to be more accurate and stable in the long run than other gravity probes.