Lifeboat Foundation

More than 13 months after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars (on 18 February 2021), the rover’s cameras have finally spotted some of the parts of the Mars 2020 landing system that got the rover safely to the ground.

The parachute and backshell were imaged by Perseverance’s MastCam-Z, seen off in the distance, just south of the rover’s current location. The image was taken on Sol 404, or 6 April 2022 on Earth.

Continue reading “After 404 Days on Mars, Perseverance Has Finally Spotted Its Parachute” »

Musk plans to build a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Here is what you need to know about Musk’s mission.

Continue reading “SpaceX Mars City: Why, when, and how Elon Musk wants to build his ambitious plan” »

Can robots adapt their own working methods to solve complex tasks? Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new form of AI, which, by observing human behavior, can adapt to perform its tasks in a changeable environment. The hope is that robots that can be flexible in this way will be able to work alongside humans to a much greater degree.

“Robots that work in human environments need to be adaptable to the fact that humans are unique, and that we might all solve the same task in a different way. An important area in robot development, therefore, is to teach robots how to work alongside humans in dynamic environments,” says Maximilian Diehl, Doctoral Student at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and main researcher behind the project.

Continue reading “Researchers develop new AI form that can adapt to perform tasks in changeable environments” »

Types of measurements can be further distinguished by how the sum of the three types of information compares to the information in the quantum state. Whereas optimal measurements preserve the total information in the quantum state, such that it is entirely split between the three types, in non-optimal measurements some information is lost. This lost information can be due to noise in the experiment or inefficient estimates of the original quantum state. Yet sometimes it is inherent in the quantum measurement itself. Such inescapable information loss in non-optimal measurements could give insights into how the classical world appears to emerge from quantum measurements.

Preserving three-way information using photons

In their experimental study, which is published in Physical Review Letters, Seongjin Hong and colleagues at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study showed how the information about a quantum state splits into these three parts. The researchers used photons to experimentally demonstrate information-preserving optimal measurements in which each photon could be in one of three possible states. They then used optical components to perform measurement and reversing operations on the photons, before characterizing their final states and demonstrating the quantitative balance between the three information types.

Spintronic transistor uses 5% less energy and gives you equal data storage with 75% fewer per chip.

U of Nebraska and Buffalo develop graphene-chromium-oxide transistors more energy-efficient and smaller in form factor than current devices.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Space Force in 2025 plans to launch to geostationary orbit three small satellites that will attempt to dock with a propellant tanker so they can be refueled in space.

The idea is to “test out pieces of the refueling infrastructure,” Col. Joseph Roth, director of innovation and prototyping at U.S. Space Systems Command, told SpaceNews last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

The $50 million experiment, called Tetra-5, is run by the Space Force’s Space Enterprise Consortium. Bids for the project closed earlier this month.

“You can do it quickly, you can do it cheaply, or you can do it right. We did it right.” These were some of the opening remarks from David Toback, leader of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, as he announced the results of a decadelong experiment to measure the mass of a particle called the W boson.

I am a high energy particle physicist, and I am part of the team of hundreds of scientists that built and ran the Collider Detector at Fermilab in Illinois – known as CDF.

After trillions of collisions and years of data collection and number crunching, the CDF team found that the W boson has slightly more mass than expected. Though the discrepancy is tiny, the results, described in a paper published in Science on April 7, 2022, have electrified the particle physics world. If the measurement is correct, it is yet another strong signal that there are missing pieces to the physics puzzle of how the universe works.

Ars Technica had the opportunity to tour NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a clean-room sneak peek at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that learning more about this unusual asteroid will advance our understanding of planet formation and the earliest days of our Solar System.

Discovered in March 1,852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, 16 Psyche is an M-type asteroid (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from the earliest days of our Solar System, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren’t consistent with an entirely metallic remnant core. Rather, it’s more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.

Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it’s an object like 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.

At the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), a team of researchers have developed a new kind of 3D printer whose technology combines a CT scanner and light. By reversing the principle of CT scanning, they could create all types of parts in record time from different polymer resins and play on their hardness. They would thus be able to reproduce the appearance of blood vessels or muscle tissue.

Today’s CT scans allow us to make slice images of our body parts and to visualize tissues of different densities. This X-ray machine is therefore used in the medical sector to establish a diagnosis. In this case, it was used to design a new, faster resin 3D printer.