Astronomy

Trumps retreat from climate agreements and tech funding will help China dominate global clean energy markets

Giant filaments crisscross the universe, connecting galaxy clusters like superhighways between cities. But due to their complex shapes, they are stubbornly difficult to measure.

If you're looking for a Christmas gift for the Trekkie in your life, it's time to live comfortably and prosper with the Oddballs Star Trek range

CubeSats are becoming more and more capable, and it seems like every month, another CubeSat is launched doing something new and novel. So far, technology demonstration has been one of the primary goals of those missions, though the industry is moving into playing an active role in scientific discovery. However, there are still some hurdles to jump before CubeSats have as many scientific tools at their disposal as larger satellites. That is where the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal (SpIRIT) CubeSat, the first from the Univeristy of Melbourne’s Space Lab, hopes to make an impact. Late in 2023, it launched with a few novel systems to operate new scientific equipment, and its leaders published a paper a few months ago detailing the progress of its mission so far.

SpIRIT represents a first not only for the Melbourne Space Lab but also for Australia as a whole. Their space agency was first set up in 2018 and began funding the SpIRIT project in 2020, as the COVID pandemic started making joint development efforts difficult. To contribute to the nation’s overall learning of how to build and control CubeSat, as much equipment as possible was sourced directly from Australian companies, including an ion drive from Neumann Space and a solar panel platform from Inovor Technologies.

However, the most exciting part of the SpIRIT mission was the instruments explicitly designed for it. There were several interesting ones, including HERMES, an X-ray and gamma-ray detector; TheMIS, a thermal management system used to cool HERMES; LORIS, an edge computing system; and Mercury, for use in low-latency communications.

This video describes the importance of SpIRIT to the Australian space program.
Credit – Australian Space Agency YouTube Channel

Each system is designed to address a specific development problem plaguing CubeSats more generally. They aren’t typically able to capture light in specific wavelengths, such as gamma waves, because the sensors for those wavelengths, which include infrared, require active cooling systems that are too bulky to fit into a CubeSat’s space constraints.

Additionally, the sheer amount of data collected by modern sensors would be overwhelming for the communication links available to standard CubeSats. A single sensor could produce as much as 100Gb of data per day, while a standard downlink channel would allow only 1Gb of data to be sent back to Earth. Combining “edge computing,” where preliminary data processing is done on the CubeSat, with a low-latency communication line is SpIRIT’s solution to that problem. However, TheMIS would also have to deal with the additional heat generated by inefficiencies in the processing unit.

Preliminary results of the project look good, with HERMES beginning complete observations in March and TheMIS successfully managing thermal loads automatically. LORIS has successfully captured some camera images and started performing image recognition algorithms. Mercury has been more of a struggle, with intermittent communication happening throughout the satellite’s lifetime. Since the whole project has primarily been considered a technology demonstration mission, those growing pains are understandable and don’t seem to affect the overall mission operation.

Members of the Spirit Team discuss the development of the project.
Credit – ARES Unimelb YouTube Channel

In addition to technical derisking, many of the lessons the mission operators at the Melbourne Space Lab learned were about managing space projects more generally. Project management and personnel allocation might not be the most interesting topics, but they are necessary for completing a technical project like SpIRIT.

With over 2000 successful CubeSat launches, SpIRIT is another valuable industry contribution. As CubeSats become more widely used as scientific platforms, expect to see more and more efforts like SpIRIT reporting on their progress soon.

Learn More:
Trenti et al. – SpIRIT Mission: In-Orbit Results and Technology Demonstrations
UT – A Gamma Ray Burst Lasted So Long it Triggered a Satellite Twice
UT – A 2022 Gamma Ray Burst Was So Powerful, it was Detected by Spacecraft Across the Solar System
UT – What are CubeSats?

Lead Image:
Depiction of the SpIRIT CubeSat.
Credit – Trenti et al.

The post SpIRIT CubeSat Demonstrates a Operational Gamma and X-Ray Detector appeared first on Universe Today.

Buried in the treasure trove of the Gaia catalog were two strange black hole systems. These were black holes orbiting sun-like stars, a situation that astronomers long thought impossible. Recently a team has proposed a mechanism for creating these kinds of oddballs.

The two black holes, dubbed BH1 and BH2, are each almost ten times the mass of the Sun. That’s not too unusual as black holes go, but what makes these systems strange is that they each have a companion star with roughly the same properties as the Sun. And those stars are orbiting on very wide orbits.

The problem with this setup is that typically sun-like stars don’t survive the transition of a companion turning into a black hole. The end of a giant star’s life is generally violent. When they die, they tend to either eject their smaller companion from the system completely, or just outright swallow them. Either way, we don’t expect small stars to orbit black holes.

But now researchers have a potential solution. They tracked the evolution of extremely massive stars, no smaller than 80 times the mass of the Sun. They found at the end of their lives they eject powerful winds that siphon off enormous amounts of material. This prevents the star from swelling so much that it just swallows its smaller companion. Eventually the star goes supernova and leaves behind a black hole.

Then the researchers studied just how common this kind of scenario is. They found many cases where a sun-like star with a wide enough orbit could survive this transition phase. The key is that the strong winds coming from the larger star have to be powerful enough to limit its late stage violence while still weak enough to not affect the smaller star. The researchers found that this was a surprisingly common scenario and could easily explain the existence of BH2 and BH2.

Based on these results the researchers believe that there might be hundreds of such systems in the Gaia data set that have yet to be discovered. It turns out that the universe is always surprising us and always much more clever than we could ever realize.

The post Sun-Like Stars Around Black Holes: What Gives? appeared first on Universe Today.

Sweeping reorganization and more research scrutiny could be on the way for the U.S. National Institutes of Health

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Explore the immense power of water as ESA’s Mars Express takes us on a flight over curving channels, streamlined islands and muddled ‘chaotic terrain’ on Mars, soaking up rover landing sites along the way.

This beautiful flight around the Oxia Palus region of Mars covers a total area of approximately 890 000 km², more than twice the size of Germany. Central to the tour is one of Mars’s largest outflow channels, Ares Vallis. It stretches for more than 1700 km and cascades down from the planet’s southern highlands to enter the lower-lying plains of Chryse Planitia.

Billions of years ago, water surged through Ares Vallis, neighbouring Tiu Vallis, and numerous other smaller channels, creating many of the features observed in this region today.

Enjoy the flight!

After enjoying a spectacular global view of Mars we focus in on the area marked by the white rectangle. Our flight starts over the landing site of NASA’s Pathfinder mission, whose Sojourner rover explored the floodplains of Ares Vallis for 12 weeks in 1997. 

Continuing to the south, we pass over two large craters named Masursky and Sagan. The partially eroded crater rim of Masursky in particular suggests that water once flowed through it, from nearby Tiu Vallis.

The Masurky Crater is filled with jumbled blocks, and you can see many more as we turn north to Hydaspis Chaos. This ‘chaotic terrain’ is typical of regions influenced by massive outflow channels. Its distinctive muddled appearance is thought to arise when subsurface water is suddenly released from underground to the surface. The resulting loss of support from below causes the surface to slump and break into blocks of various sizes and shapes.

Just beyond this chaotic array of blocks is Galilaei crater, which has a highly eroded rim and a gorge carved between the crater and neighbouring channel. It is likely that the crater once contained a lake, which flooded out into the surroundings. Continuing on, we see streamlined islands and terraced river banks, the teardrop-shaped island ‘tails’ pointing in the downstream direction of the water flow at the time.

Crossing over Ares Vallis again, the flight brings us to the smoother terrain of Oxia Planum and the planned landing site for ESA’s ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover. The primary goal of the mission is to search for signs of past or present life on Mars, and as such, this once water-flooded region is an ideal location.

Zooming out, the flight ends with a stunning bird’s-eye view of Ares Vallis and its fascinating water-enriched neighbourhood. 

Disclaimer: This video is not representative of how Mars Express flies over the surface of Mars. See processing notes below.

How the movie was made

This film was created using the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera Mars Chart (HMC30) data, an image mosaic made from single orbit observations of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The mosaic, centred at 12°N/330°E, is combined with topography information from the digital terrain model to generate a three-dimensional landscape. 

For every second of the movie, 50 separate frames are rendered following a predefined camera path in the scene. A three-fold vertical exaggeration has been applied. Atmospheric effects such as clouds and haze have been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. The haze starts building up at a distance of 300 km. 

The HRSC camera on Mars Express is operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The systematic processing of the camera data took place at the DLR Institute for Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof. The working group of Planetary Science and Remote Sensing at Freie Universität Berlin used the data to create the film.

The moon and Mars will share a close approach tonight (Nov. 20) during a conjunction as the two visit the Cancer constellation, the Crab.

A social scientist looks at the portrait of U.S. voters, and voting, in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election that put Trump into the White House

Researchers directed electric current to activate targeted facial muscles and then asked study participants how they felt

Many restaurants in countries such as England and the US now print calories on their menus, but some researchers question whether this is really tackling their obesity problem

Many restaurants in countries such as England and the US now print calories on their menus, but some researchers question whether this is really tackling their obesity problem

An artificial banana floated in the microgravity environment of outer space. No longer needing its attached tethers, it just hung there in the bay of its spacecraft's otherwise empty cargo hold.

A study of births in New Jersey reveals a troubling disparity between unscheduled C-sections for Black people.

The best pictures we have of the sun yet have been delivered thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft

The best pictures we have of the sun yet have been delivered thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft

Zoom into Solar Orbiter's four new Sun images, assembled from high-resolution observations by the spacecraft's PHI and EUI instruments made on 22 March 2023. The PHI images are the highest-resolution full views of the Sun's visible surface to date, including maps of the Sun's messy magnetic field and movement on the surface. These can be compared to the new EUI image, which reveals the Sun's glowing outer atmosphere, or corona.

This super easy-to-use motorized telescope is currently available with a 20% saving off the regular price.

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At ESA, through the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems programme, we’re addressing solutions for when safety and security of communication services cannot be guaranteed by the terrestrial networks alone. With our programme Space systems for Safety and Security, or 4S, we are pioneering cutting-edge development of secure and resilient satellite communication systems, technologies and services to improve life on Earth. 

Picture a world where our critical infrastructure is protected from cyber threats, and where communication links work when the world around them doesn't. A transportation network where safety is not just a priority, but a guarantee. Where air traffic flows completely efficiently, reliable and connected. Railways operate without interruption, and shipping can navigate safely and securely.

Imagine that our first responders are coordinating via seamless communications, and institutional agencies are acting rapidly and decisively when there's a crisis. All thanks to secure and safe satellite communication systems, orbiting above the planet. This is the future we're building with the 4S programme. A future where space systems safeguard our security, making sure that connectivity remains our greatest strength. Join us as we continue to push the boundaries of innovation.

 

The effects of being in space can worsen an astronaut's working memory, processing speed and attention - which could be a problem for future missions