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Watch Rocket Lab launch new NASA solar sail tech to orbit today
Glucose monitors may misclassify people as being at risk of diabetes
Glucose monitors may misclassify people as being at risk of diabetes
SpaceX launching 23 Starlink satellites from Florida this evening
Is There a Human Hiding behind That Robot or AI? A Brief History of Automatons That Were Actually People
When human labor is hidden under the veneer of a robot or AI tool, that’s “fauxtomation”
How Ugandan Tobacco Farmers Inadvertently Spread Bat-Borne Viruses
By cutting trees in response to international demand for tobacco, farmers induced wildlife to start eating virus-laden bat guano
Pluto's heart-shaped scar may offer clues to the frozen world's history
Space Team Europe for Ariane 6: Julien Guiridlian
They say it takes a village to raise a child. To launch a rocket, we have the combined expertise and passion of Space Team Europe. Julien Guiridlian is one of many making the first Ariane 6 launch possible and has been interviewed as part of a series highlighting some of the people that make up this dream team.
Working for France’s space agency CNES, Julien is Ariane launch complex assistant, which means he takes care of the ground segment for the combined tests on Europe’s new rocket. Julien takes care of coordinating everything from the fuel for the launcher, to ensuring there is electricity and the mechanical connections between the rocket and the launch pad. Ariane 6 is all about teamwork, and the team is ready for the match.
Stay tuned for more from #SpaceTeamEurope: an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.
NASA Restores Communications with Voyager 1
The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally phoning home again. This is much to the relief of mission engineers, scientists, and Voyager fans around the world.
On November 14, 2023, the aging spacecraft began sending what amounted to a string of gibberish back to Earth. It appeared to be getting commands from Earth and seemed to be operating okay. It just wasn’t returning any useful science and engineering data. The team engineers began diagnostic testing to figure out if the spacecraft’s onboard computer was giving up the ghost. They also wanted to know if there was some other issue going on.
It wasn’t completely surprising that Voyager 1 would have issues, after all. And, this isn’t the first time Voyager 1 has sent back garbly data. It’s been traversing space since its launch in 1977. Currently, the spacecraft is rushing away from the Solar System toward interstellar space. The spacecraft systems will eventually fail due to age and lack of power. But, people have always held out hope for them to last as long as possible. That’s because Voyager 1 is probing unexplored regions of space.
What Happened to Voyager 1?The diagnostic testing led the engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to look at old engineering documents and manuals for the onboard computers. Eventually, they found that the flight data subsystem (FDS) was having an issue. In the spacecraft’s data handling pipeline, this system takes information from the instruments and packages it into a data stream for the long trip back to Earth.
It turns out that the FDS has a bit of a memory problem. The engineers found this out by poking at the computer—literally sending a “poke” command to Voyager 1. That prompted the FDS to disgorge a readout of its memory—including the software code and other code values. The readout showed that about 3 percent of the FDS memory is corrupted due to a single chip failing. That’s just enough to keep the computer from doing its normal work of packaging science and engineering data. Unfortunately, engineers can’t replace the chip. No repair is possible, so the technical team devised a workaround.
Fixing the Faulty Code and ChipSo, how did engineers reach across 24 billion kilometers of space to restore communication with Voyager 1? They focused on a specific part of the computer. The loss of the code on that failed chip made it impossible for the computer to do its job. So, they figured out a way to divide the code into sections and store them in various locations around the FDS. Then they had to make the sections work together to do their original job.
They started out by taking the code that packages engineering data and moving it to a safe spot in FDS. Then they sent some commands to the spacecraft for the FDS to do some tasks. That worked because, on April 20th, they heard back from the spacecraft with clear, intelligible data. Now, they just need to do the same thing with other bits of code so that the spacecraft can send back both engineering and science data.
The Voyager 1 flight team members celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20 after receiving confirmation that their repair to the spacecraft’s FDS worked. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFor now, at least, the science and engineering teams can check the spacecraft’s health and its systems. Once they relocate the other bits of code and test them after being moved, they should be able to start receiving science data again. This could take several weeks to accomplish. They’re communicating with a spacecraft that’s 22.5 light-hours away, so having a lengthy diagnostic conversation with Voyager is going to take some time. This isn’t the only problem engineers have had to contend with recently with Voyager 1. In October 2023, they worked to overcome a fuel flow problem affecting its thrusters.
Voyager 1 Into HistoryVoyager 1 was launched on a planetary flyby trajectory on September 5, 1977. It passed by Jupiter in March 1979 and Saturn in November 1980. The mission then morphed into an extended period of exploration and exited the heliopause in 2012. On its way out of the Solar System, the spacecraft also “looked back” at Earth. Now, it’s exploring the interstellar medium but has not yet traversed the Oort Cloud, the outermost portion of the Solar System.
This updated version of the iconic “Pale Blue Dot” image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechSeveral of Voyager 1’s science instruments are shut down, including its ultraviolet spectrometer, the plasma subsystem, planetary radio astronomy instrument, and scan platform. In the not-too-distant future, more instruments will be powered down, along with the data tape recorder, the gyroscopes, and other systems will be off. Sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft won’t have enough power to keep anything running, and that is when we’ll finally lose contact with Voyager 1.
This will probably happen by the mid-2030s, and by that time, Voyager 1 will have been “in service” for around 55 years. Along with its twin, Voyager 2, this spacecraft opened up exploration of the outer solar system and interstellar space. They’ll continue out to the stars, their last mission being as a calling card to any civilizations that might find them in the distant future.
For More InformationNASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution
The post NASA Restores Communications with Voyager 1 appeared first on Universe Today.
Sols 4161-4163: Double Contact Science
2 min read
Sols 4161-4163: Double Contact Science This image was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4159 (2024-04-18 13:24:29 UTC). NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSEarth planning date: Friday, April 19, 2024
Curiosity has a three-sol weekend plan coming up as it makes progress along the edge of upper Gediz Vallis ridge. We have observations planned to investigate multiple bedrock targets with interesting rippled textures, dark-toned float, and the ridge. With two contact science targets, lots of targeted and untargeted remote observations, and a drive scheduled, Curiosity will have a busy three-sol plan ahead!
On the first sol of the plan, we have two contact science bedrock targets for MAHLI and APXS to analyze. MAHLI will image these targets up close, and APXS will acquire spectra from the targets for analysis of their elemental compositions. One of these bedrock targets (“Florence Lake”) is light-toned with laminations and will be brushed first to remove the dust on its surface. The other contact science target (“Mist Falls”) is a block of unbrushed, light-toned bedrock with a rippled texture. MAHLI also has a rotational stereo observation of “Castle Rock Spire” (a light-toned block of bedrock) and observations of the REMS UV sensor. In addition to bedrock observations by MAHLI and APXS, ChemCam has a LIBS observation of dark-toned float target “Silver Peak” on the first sol of this plan. ChemCam will also acquire long-distance RMIs of the rim of upper Gediz Vallis ridge and Fascination Turret to document stratigraphy. Mastcam will acquire mosaics to document exposed bedding, Kukenan butte, and Pinnacle Ridge.
Observations of Pinnacle Ridge by Mastcam will complement the ChemCam long-distance RMI observation of it on the second sol of the plan. This sol also has a ChemCam LIBS observation of “Needle Lake” to document different degrees of erosion of bedrock across laminations and a ChemCam passive dark test. Mastcam will image the two LIBS targets and will also acquire several mosaics of “Pahoa Island”, “Quail Flat”, and “The Nose” to document light-toned laminated bedrock, ripple structures, and characteristics of a dark float rock, respectively. On the second sol Curiosity will drive away. The third sol of the plan features untargeted remote observations, including ChemCam Passive Sky activities, dust devil observations, and Mastcam tau measurements.
Written by Abigail Knight, Graduate Student at Washington University
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NASA Astronaut to Inspire Artemis Generation in Boston
April 22, 2024
NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen, along with representatives from NASA and the International Space Station National Laboratory, will visit Boston on Wednesday, April 24, and Thursday, April 25, as part of the agency’s Destination Station to highlight research opportunities aboard the station.
Destination Station was created to educate the public and engage prospective researchers about the benefits, capabilities, and opportunities to use the space station. The space station has been continuously inhabited for more than 23 years, enabling more than 5,000 researchers to conduct more than 3,500 innovative experiments in the areas of biology and biotechnology, human health, space and physical science, and technology.
Throughout the week, NASA and the ISS National Lab will meet with a variety of academic institutions, business incubators, and private-sector companies with ties to the Boston community. During the visits, Bowen will provide perspectives on living and working in space.
Media who wish interview Bowen during the outreach events in Boston, should contact Kara Slaughter at kara.c.slaughter@nasa.gov or 281-483-5111.
Bowen was the first submarine officer selected to be a NASA astronaut. He most recently served as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission to the station where he was part of a six-month research mission, Expedition 69. He is a veteran of three space shuttle flights to the station, including STS-126, STS-132, and STS-133. Bowen has logged a total of 227 days in space and conducted 10 extravehicular activities in his career. His 10 spacewalks make him one of five humans who have conducted that many spacewalks and he is third on the all-time list for most cumulative spacewalking time. Bowen and the crews of Expedition 68 and 69 conducted more than 200 science experiments including tissue chip research, bioprinting human cells and tissues in space, and studying antibodies in microgravity. Bowen is a Massachusetts native and earned his bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and his master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Over the years, NASA’s Destination Station has led to research collaborations aboard the orbiting laboratory with a variety of academic and commercial companies. This visit also is a prelude to the 13th annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference at the Boston Marriott Copley Square from July 29 – Aug. 1, 2024.
Learn more about the International Space Station and its crews at:
Discover the International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory at:
https://www.issnationallab.org
-end-
Kara Slaughter
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
NASA Invites Media to Learn About New Tech Mission Powered by the Sun
A new NASA mission is testing a new way to navigate our solar system by hoisting its sail into space – not to catch the wind, but the propulsive power of sunlight.
NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System is led by the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The microwave oven-sized CubeSat is scheduled to launch aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula of New Zealand. The launch window opens at 3 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, April 23 (10 p.m. UTC). Successful deployment and operation of the solar sail’s lightweight composite booms will prove the capability and open the door to larger scale missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Once it arrives in its orbit, roughly 600 miles above Earth, the CubeSat will deploy a lightweight sunlight-powered composite solar sail system that measures more than 800 square feet. Much like a sailboat uses wind to traverse the ocean, the solar sail technology will use the pressure of sunlight to travel through space and perform a series of maneuvers to demonstrate orbit raising and lowering. Throughout the demonstration, the spacecraft may be visible to the naked eye in the night sky.
Media interested in scheduling an interview with one of the NASA Ames engineers involved with the development of the CubeSat should email the NASA Ames Office of Communications at arc-dl-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.
A media resource reel including animated clips of the solar sail system is available here.
Get launch updates, breaking news, and images on the small satellites blog as well as NASA Ames’ Instagram, Facebook, and X.
For more information about NASA’s Ames Research Center, visit:
-end-
Rachel Hoover
Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, Calif.
650-604-4789
Some scientists say insects are conscious – it doesn't settle anything
Some scientists say insects are conscious – it doesn't settle anything
Cosmic fountain is polluting intergalactic space with 50 million suns' worth of material
Ep. 716: The God**** Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs
Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle.
Transcript(This is an automatically generated transcript)
Fraser Cain [00:01:05] Astronomy cast episode 716 The God Particle remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey, Pam. How are you doing?
Pamela Gay [00:01:28] I am doing well, I, I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a whole bunch of our Cosmic Quest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face to face, including some I had never met in person. At one point we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the, lead up to the eclipse as everyone was prepping in house.
Fraser Cain [00:02:01] Can absorb that.
Pamela Gay [00:02:02] It can, although keeping the dogs separated is necessary. Was was a fascinating game of gates.
Fraser Cain [00:02:11] But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us. Yes, both saw totality clear skies. It was perfect. So yay us!
Pamela Gay [00:02:25] We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse.
Fraser Cain [00:02:30] No way. I want to see war. But it was it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the the. Cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some fun travel ideas. So. So keep trying out there and. Yeah, yeah. I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017. Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to see it.
Pamela Gay [00:03:05] We tried. We tried. The universe mocked us.
Fraser Cain [00:03:08] Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right. Pamela. What? Who is Peter Higgs?
Pamela Gay [00:03:29] He was a British theoretical physicist. Who? Every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity and. Just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts. As much as it was needed to help them understand. He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down, because most of the time they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens.
Fraser Cain [00:04:26] But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. His his what? You call it his background. His. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his background, but also leading up to his. Ma’am. What’s the right word? I guess his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. So? So how did. Was he the person that figured this out?
Pamela Gay [00:04:55] So he was one of them. And so. So basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He he went to a private school when he was in high school or a magnet school. I’m not sure quite what the right words are.
Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Yeah, I know, it’s like public school means not what you think he does in private schools. I mean, what you think it means.
Pamela Gay [00:05:16] So he wanted England now?
Fraser Cain [00:05:18] Right, right. So did did he go to the one where the regular people go to? Or the one where people pay for them to go?
Pamela Gay [00:05:25] He went to the one that that Paul Dirac had gone to. And that’s the key point. Okay, is he went to the same, high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word. But Paul Dirac had graduated from well before him, but he knew about Paul Dirac because he was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the City of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school before starting university. And so this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life. So first of all, when I like this story already. Yeah. He then bounced around, did his undergraduate hitchhike for a while, fell in love with the city of Edinburgh while hitchhiking. Which which is just pleasing. It was is the 50s. It was safer back then. When got his PhD when he was 25, did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there. And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to Physics Letters that outlined how maths, which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time, said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass, but they have mass. And so there was this very deeply confusing issue.
Fraser Cain [00:07:10] And at this point, I mean, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out. There was it.
Pamela Gay [00:07:17] Wasn’t as complete.
Fraser Cain [00:07:19] Right? Right. I mean, we knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron, but also the quarks and the various particles that the subatomic particles, some of which had been confirmed in with particle accelerators and others which hadn’t, but everyone just assumed they had to be. There was just a matter of time before they were found.
Pamela Gay [00:07:38] And and so he was working in trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the, the boson that would go on to hold his name, and a scalar field that permeated all of space and time. The particles couple went through that boson, and it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as mass in our laboratories. And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work. The paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So like the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, no science for you do not believe.
Fraser Cain [00:08:39] Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:08:40] And he added one paragraph to the paper, submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review. And and it got published. Now here is where he is such an awesome human. So his work was not the only work on on trying to understand this. There are three different teams at the time that were all working on this at the same time, and throughout his entire life, he always gave credit to all the other teams. And so you see it called the Higgs field. You see it called by a variety of other different names. And he made sure every time he referred to it, he listed everyone involved, usually by an alphabet soup of all their names, which is about the nicest thing a human being could do. And in preparing for this episode, I was rewatching and I didn’t make it all the way through. But I was rewatching, Particle Fever, which is a documentary.
Fraser Cain [00:09:53] That’s great documentary.
Pamela Gay [00:09:54] Yeah, yeah, it’s by David Kaplan. It’s available. Not for streaming, but you can purchase it or rent it, pretty much everywhere. And he’s he’s not playing a major role in it. And so while they have all these other physicists where they’re like, this human only writes papers with three authors because Nobel Prizes can only go to three people. Peter Higgs is, like, shown crying when they find the well, I mean, he’s not doing this. He’s wiping away tears. But, like, Peter Higgs is just like they they found it. He’s so sweet, so nice. And they catch him crying, and everyone else is just like, oh. Because they weren’t the ones getting the Nobel Prize. And here he is the day. This is my favorite story so far. So, like, everyone knows when they’re going to be making the calls for the Nobel Prize. The people who are nominated often have an idea they don’t know who’s going to be the winner, but they know to stay home and stay next to the phone. And Peter Higgs went out for a walk and left his phone at home because he didn’t want to deal with it. And it was one of his neighbors. As he’s walking home, that lets him know, right, that you got the Nobel Prize in physics and it’s just awesome.
Fraser Cain [00:11:12] So, you know, he had predicted this particle and the field and the interactions between these two. And I think that’s that’s the key. You know, it’s very easy to just say, oh, there’s got to be some field that contributes to mass. There’s got to be some particle that makes mass. But to recognize this connection between the particle, the boson and the field, and there’s some great analogies to describe how the Higgs boson would work. Do you have a do you have a favorite?
Pamela Gay [00:11:42] I do, I read this initially in Scientific America back in the 90s. So the way to think about the the Higgs boson in the Higgs field is if you’re trying to walk through a room and you’re a nobody, you have no mass, you just fly through the room because there’s nothing slowing you down. You have nothing dragging you. You have nothing connecting. You zoom. You’re through the room. Now, if you have. A few friends, you might get slowed down because like, hey, how’s it going? Hey, great. How’s how’s how’s the trip?
Fraser Cain [00:12:20] What do you think about this? Yeah. What do you think about this? Yeah. I want you to meet this person.
Pamela Gay [00:12:25] And so this is someone who has or something that has a little bit of mass. They have a few bosons coupling them to the Higgs field, and this slows down their passage. Now, the more famous you are, or the more massive you are, the more you have dragging you down by coupling you to that field. And so more massive objects have a stronger coupling. They have more Higgs bosons tying them to that Higgs scalar field. And so there’s no direction to the field is just everywhere all the time. And, we all get stuck to it by these Higgs bosons. And I, for one, could do with a few fewer Higgs bosons.
Fraser Cain [00:13:07] Right? But like Taylor Swift trying to move through that party and make no progress.
Pamela Gay [00:13:12] And that is a massive particle.
Fraser Cain [00:13:15] A very massive particle. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So so key predicts the particle predicts the field. But but how did this get translated into what is one of the greatest scientific experiments in human history?
Pamela Gay [00:13:30] Well, this is a combination of really good promotion by another Nobel Prize winner and also the entire field, trying really hard to check all the boxes in the standard model, trying to find all the things. So first we have Leon Letterman, who won his Nobel Prize for work on neutrinos, who wrote a book that he intended to call the God four letter word, I’m not going to say on Air Particle. And his publisher was like, no, no, Leon, we cannot do that. And so the God four letter word that I’m not going to say on air particle, became the book The God particle. Right. And and what.
Fraser Cain [00:14:16] It would be the it was the god damn particle, right?
Pamela Gay [00:14:19] Yeah. Now you’re going to say the word that I. Yeah. That’s fine. You do it. Yeah, yeah. So, so, when Letterman was going to name his book The Goddamn Particle, his publisher was like, no, no, we cannot do that. And, and and one of the reasons it was called that is because it was so frustrating to find it’s such a massive particle.
Fraser Cain [00:14:38] Right, right. So the name is not is not like its incredible purpose in the universe. It is just like it. How frustrating it’s been to find this thing that the most powerful particle accelerators, which have been trying to find it, have failed because they don’t have enough energy. You don’t have the right tools to get to this stupid, elusive particle.
Pamela Gay [00:15:01] Yeah. And and then, of course, because early on, Letterman had done that, a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to to make this the most important particle ever, because it is what gives the universe mass. And with mass, gravity can evolve all the things. And so it’s it’s not so much a back rename as a back rename where they, they gave it all the import after it had been done by a publisher trying to. Yeah. But I think that because of the book, because of the popularity of the idea, that probably helped with keeping the funding turned on to make this happen. So, so the idea that we needed to build bigger and bigger and bigger particle accelerators have been around for a while here in the United States. We’ve been trying to build the super collider, super colliding.
Fraser Cain [00:15:59] Superconducting SuperCollider.
Pamela Gay [00:16:00] Thank you in Texas. And then Congress canceled it after it had mostly been dug, after they had taken all of the land from the farmers via eminent domain, they sold the land to, real estate people who built McMansions, and they actually sold in the tunnel instead of using it for geologic research, which had been proposed. So that was just a hot mess. U.S was not going to find this particle. And and CERN was like, okay, we’re a multinational consortium. We have partners from nations that are all but at war with each other, and we’re still in the name of science going to use the wealth of all of these nations, the intellectual capabilities of all of these nations, to work together to build a. Accelerator capable of sending particles at higher and higher velocities. And collecting them in these instruments. Atlas being the key to finding the Higgs boson. And and full disclosure when I was a baby student at Michigan State University, I spent a summer weaving fiber for instruments for Atlas. Oh, wow. So, my skin cells are probably somewhere in Atlas.
Fraser Cain [00:17:19] This is personal.
Pamela Gay [00:17:21] Yeah, yeah. So I, I just, like, listened to audiobooks all summer and attach fibers very carefully over and over. Hundreds and hundreds of them. This is what undergraduates in physics do. But this is just an idea of how many members of the physics community in the astronomy community have been part of building this. There were thousands of students. There were hundreds of graduate students. There were probably hundreds of thousands, just fewer, hundreds working on all levels of this experiment, from the electronics to the optics to the control systems. It was a true, truly global endeavor to find the reason my bathroom scale makes me sad in the morning.
Fraser Cain [00:18:12] Right? So let’s talk about the experiment then. What was the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? What was sort of some of the key parts to this experiment?
Pamela Gay [00:18:24] So they needed to get a extremely large amount of energy, tens of electron volts, confined in the tiniest of volumes. And the reason they needed to do this is so that. That energy could then turn into the ever so briefly lived Higgs boson. So Higgs bosons have a mean lifetime, and I have to look at my screen for this. Of between 1.2 and 4.6 times ten to the -22 seconds. So 0.0, right? That zero 21 times.
Fraser Cain [00:19:13] Right?
Pamela Gay [00:19:14] 1.2 to 4.6.
Fraser Cain [00:19:17] Right. That is a very tiny amount of time. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second.
Pamela Gay [00:19:24] Yeah. So. So they not only needed to get a 125 giga electron volts divided by c squared, which is the crazy units that we use in particle physics of energy confined in one small area. They also had to have instruments capable of measuring the trails made by the particles created in that energy. Combine in that small area all at once. And so the way this was done was they were accelerating protons. They needed to get them going super, super fast. They needed to then make them go smash as you do. And then one of the biggest features of Atlas was layers upon layers of fiber optics of varying, kinds, with color sensitivities that would then be able to channel the energy through the photo multiplier tubes that could sense the light, the flickers of energy of these particles coming in and out of existence. And. They did it in there. What was amazing is there had been hints that this was the correct energy. There have been hints that things had previously been seen, at Fermi National Lab when they were running some of their high energy experiments. They had to turn off Fermi’s experiments while they were working on upgrading their things. Then they upgraded everything at CERN. CERN was the place that ultimately did the experiment, and it’s hoped with the next generation of of the CERN accelerator and all of its instruments, that they’ll be able to see more than just a signal created by these things, but they’ll actually start to be able to measure more and more of their properties and hopefully be able to start doing things like prove once and for all that the supersymmetric particles are or aren’t there, and find any particles that may or may not be dark matter. So it’s not that they did CERN just to find the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson helped. And Leon Letterman’s book popularizing the Higgs boson really helped. But this is fundamental physics. This this is what we do. We we go, okay, we have a theory. The theory says all these particles are going to exist. We’re now going to make sure all those particles actually exist, because if they don’t, the theory is wrong. Yeah. This was the last of the the core particles that should be discoverable. There’s a graviton out there that we probably will never find if it exists. But this was the last of the particles we knew we could find. If we could just turn the energy up to 11.
Fraser Cain [00:22:22] Right, right. And and there’s, like, a real beauty to that. I mean, was it 2012? They announced the the findings, but but we had for a couple of years leading up to that, we knew that they were that they were on the right track.
Pamela Gay [00:22:37] It was going on.
Fraser Cain [00:22:38] With higher level signals. It was going to work. They’d found it. It was really a matter of exactly, you know, trying to pin down the mass of this, of this particle. But how did the physics community, I guess, how did Higgs I mean, you mentioned early on he he wiped away tears from his eyes. Yeah, yeah. So, so how did that sort of change his perspective on on what he had originally proposed.
Pamela Gay [00:23:06] So, so he’s a shy human. So finding things like that wasn’t something I was able to do. He was the kind of person who showed up to these events, looked spectacularly happy in front of giant pictures of Atlas. And then when people were like, I don’t understand, he just explained the physics. This this was a human being that, as near as I can tell from everything I read, his true joy came in understanding our universe, having the theory proven true. But then it wasn’t all about, oh, look at me. It was, hey, let me explain the science to you. My favorite description was is he is someone whose shyness was overcome by explaining physics to others.
Fraser Cain [00:23:53] That’s wonderful.
Pamela Gay [00:23:54] It’s true. I wish I had met him, I really do.
Fraser Cain [00:23:57] Yeah, yeah, that sounds amazing. So I guess what comes next? What do you think is his legacy for physics and the future of of particle accelerators?
Pamela Gay [00:24:09] So he had some ideas on dark matter that that will either get proven or disproven. But mostly he’s been retired and following along for the past few years. And his legacy is all the particle physicists who inspired who he taught, who are going to be the humans working to figure out what is dark matter, what is dark energy? He worked as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He got to be at the place he loved when he went hitchhiking, and he trained generations of students. And that, in a lot of ways, is the best legacy anyone could have, other than, of course, the Nobel Prize.
Fraser Cain [00:24:50] I love the idea of an international physics community coming together to do this basic research work, too. Yeah, like on the one hand, the Higgs, you know, the the particle that interacts with the scalar field, that is the source of mass, the, you know, in the universe. Yeah, it seems very esoteric and and yet it is this basic building block of us to understand better the true nature of the cosmos. And who knows if there will ever be a practical use for it. But but we do know that we that we have one less mystery out there.
Pamela Gay [00:25:36] And and let this also just be a lesson about history. Remembers the workers, the helpers. And this is a human who was one of three different collaborations who proposed what became the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson and the Higgs field. And, well, pretty much everyone in everything refers to them as Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Higgs field. He was like, no, he called it the a b e g h k prime t h mechanism for Anderson, Brout, it Guralnik Hagen, Higgs, kibble, and to Hooft, right, right. He gave credit to everyone every time.
Fraser Cain [00:26:21] What a gentleman.
Pamela Gay [00:26:22] So yeah. Be be the helper.
Fraser Cain [00:26:25] Thank you, Peter Higgs. And thank you, Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:26:30] And and thank you to all the people out there who make this show possible. We would not be here without you. And I regret to say the names for this week were not listed. So I’m going to really, really hope that the names for April are good enough. And I’m going to read the April 3rd names, and I will make sure that everyone else who should have been read today, all of our $10 and up we break you across the month, people get. Acknowledged. So our $10 and up patrons whose names are going to be read are David Everson, Michael Proctor, John Faiz, Barry Gowan, Stephen Vai, Jordan Young, Jeannette Wang, Nano Phillips, Andrew Lester, Venkatesh Chaudhry, Brian Cagle, David Trog, Gerhard Gear hard Schweitzer, David Buzz parsec, Laura. Carlson, Robert. Plasma, les. Howard, Jack. Mudd, Joe. Holstein, Alexis. Gordon, doers, Richard. Drum, Adam, Annie’s Brown, Frank. Tippin, Greg Davis, William Andrews, and gold. And if you two would like to hear me stumble horribly over your name and be extremely grateful for you while doing it. Join at the $10 and up level. Thank you all.
Fraser Cain [00:27:51] So thanks everyone. We’ll see you next week.
Pamela Gay [00:27:53] And bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.
After Months of Gibberish, Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again
NASA scientists spent months coaxing the 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft back into healthy communication
India aims to achieve 'debris-free' space missions by 2030
NASA Announces 30th Human Exploration Rover Challenge Winners
NASA announced the winners of the 30th Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC) April 22, with Parish Episcopal School, from Dallas, winning first place in the high school division, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, capturing the college/university title.
The annual engineering competition – one of NASA’s longest standing challenges – held its concluding event April 19 and April 20, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The complete list of 2024 award winners is provided below:
High School Division
- First Place: Parish Episcopal School, Dallas
- Second Place: Academy of Arts, Careers and Technology, Reno, Nevada
- Third Place: Escambia High School, Pensacola, Florida
College/University Division
- First Place: University of Alabama in Huntsville
- Second Place: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Third Place: Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina
Ingenuity Award
- University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida
Phoenix Award
- High School Division: East Central High School, Moss Point, Mississippi
- College/University Division: North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota
Task Challenge Award
- High School Division: Erie High School, Erie, Colorado
- College/University Division: South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, South Dakota
Project Review Award
- High School Division: Parish Episcopal School, Dallas
- College/University Division: University of Alabama in Huntsville
Featherweight Award
- Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
Safety Award
- High School Division: NPS International School, Singapore
- College/University Division: Instituto Especializado de Estudios Superiores Loyola, San Cristobal, Dominican Republic
Crash and Burn Award
- KIET Group of Institutions, Delhi-NCR, India
Jeff Norris and Joe Sexton Memorial Pit Crew Award
- High School Division: Erie High School, Erie, Colorado
- College/University Division: Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina
Team Spirit Award
- Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Most Improved Performance Award
- High School Division: Jesco von Puttkamer School, Leipzig, Germany
- College/University Division: Universidad Católica Boliviana – San Pablo, La Paz, Bolivia
Social Media Award
- High School Division: Bledsoe County High School, Pikeville, Tennessee
- College/University Division: Universidad de Piura, Peru
STEM Engagement Award
- High School Division: Princess Margaret Secondary School, Surrey, British Columbia
- College/University Division: Trine University, Angola, Indiana
Artemis Educator Award
- Sadif Safarov from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Rookie of the Year
- Kanakia International School, Mumbai, India
More than 600 students with 72 teams from around the world participated as HERC celebrated its 30th anniversary as a NASA competition. Participating teams represented 42 colleges and universities and 30 high schools from 24 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 13 other nations from around the world. Teams were awarded points based on navigating a half-mile obstacle course, conducting mission-specific task challenges, and completing multiple safety and design reviews with NASA engineers.
“This student design challenge encourages the next generation of scientists and engineers to engage in the design process by providing innovative concepts and unique perspectives,” said Vemitra Alexander, HERC activity lead for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement at Marshall. “While celebrating the 30th anniversary of the challenge, HERC also continues NASA’s legacy of providing valuable experiences to students who may be responsible for planning future space missions including crewed missions to other worlds.”
HERC is one of NASA’s eight Artemis Student Challenges reflecting the goals of the Artemis program, which seeks to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon while establishing a long-term presence for science and exploration. NASA uses such challenges to encourage students to pursue degrees and careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
HERC is managed by NASA’s Southeast Regional Office of STEM Engagement at Marshall. Since its inception in 1994, more than 15,000 students have participated in HERC – with many former students now working at NASA, or within the aerospace industry.
To learn more about HERC, please visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/roverchallenge/home/index.html
-end-
Gerelle Dodson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-4637
gerelle.q.dodson@nasa.gov
Taylor Goodwin
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
taylor.goodwin@nasa.gov
