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The Science Behind COVID's Six-Foot Rule
Attacks on Anthony Fauci over guidance on masking and social distancing issued during the COVID pandemic ignore the science on viral spread
Astrophotographer captures planetary parade with the moon in stunning photo
Hubble Pauses its Science Again
The Hubble Space Telescope has been shut down temporarily after one of its gyroscopes sent faulty telemetry readings back to Earth in late May. The venerable space-based observatory, which has been responsible for some of the most remarkable scientific advances of the last three decades, and stunning astrophotography that became a cultural mainstay, is in its thirty-fourth year of operation.
Hubble’s many and varied accomplishments have been achieved despite a plague of technical challenges over the years. Right out of the gate, it launched with blurry vision, due to an improperly polished lens. The problem was fixed with a space shuttle servicing mission in 1993, three years after launch. Four more servicing missions between 1997 and 2009 repaired and upgraded various parts of the spacecraft.
With the retirement of the space shuttle, the space telescope has now been operating for 15 years without servicing.
Pauses in science operations like the current one are common events for Hubble these days, occurring several times a year in recent times. Hubble’s gyroscopes are the usual culprit.
In fact, a faulty gyroscope previously caused a shutdown barely a month ago, in April 2024, and did the same back in November 2023. In every case, NASA was able to get the space telescope back up and running in short order.
That doesn’t mean there is no cause for concern. Gyroscopes help the telescope orient itself in space, keeping it stable to point at astronomical targets in the distant universe. The last servicing mission in 2009 left the telescope with six operational gyroscopes, but it has been running on three since 2018.
Hubble needs all three to operate at full capacity.
The end of a Hubble gyro reveals the hair-thin wires known as flex leads. They carry data and electricity inside the gyro, and their corrosion has caused gyroscope failures in the past. NASABut having two wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the mission. It would reduce the area of the sky Hubble can observe, and slow down science operations.
Regardless of the outcome of the current troubles, NASA appears confident that this is not the end of the line, stating in a press release on May 31:
“NASA anticipates Hubble will continue making discoveries throughout this decade and possibly into the next, working with other observatories, such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope for the benefit of humanity.”
It doesn’t appear that that will be the last word on the subject, however. A press conference has been called for 4PM EDT on June 4, where NASA’s Director of the Astrophysics Division, Mark Clampin, and Hubble’s project Manager, Patrick Crouse, are expected to give an update on Hubble’s condition.
In the event that Hubble is reduced to two working gyroscopes, NASA recently indicated that it would likely put one of them into safe mode, relying on just one gyroscope and keeping the last in good working order for the future.
With just one gyroscope in operation, magnetometers, sun sensors, and star trackers will need to make up for the work that the other gyroscopes used to do. This takes more time, and would reduce Hubble’s working capacity by 20-25%. Hubble would no longer be able to look at objects closer to Earth than Mars, it would be less capable of catching transient events at a moment’s notice, and it would have to pause observations during parts of its orbit when the Moon and Earth get in the way of its star trackers.
But it would keep the mission alive longer, which is good news for astronomers and astronomy fans everywhere. There is even hope for a future Hubble repair mission, an idea proposed by Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut who will command the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Currently, Dragon is incapable of docking with Hubble, leaving the idea firmly in the speculative stage for the moment.
As for more immediate plans, we’ll have to see what NASA has to say. Stay tuned for the press conference at 4PM June 4.
The post Hubble Pauses its Science Again appeared first on Universe Today.
Ada Lovelace’s 180-Year-Old Endnotes Previewed the Future of Computers
Ada Lovelace’s wisdom about the first general-purpose computer can be found buried in the appendix of another paper
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NASA 3D Instagram 'experience' brings nebulas into your home
Fauci Calls COVID Cover-Up Claim ‘Preposterous’
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NASA Awards University Research Projects to Support Agency Missions
NASA announced the recipients of the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) grants, which will support scientific and technical research projects for more than 20 universities and organizations across the United States.
“NASA’s EPSCoR awards are a tool to strengthen research capacity in areas across our nation that have historically been underrepresented in government research,” said Torry Johnson, deputy associate administrator of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Engagement Programs at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The goal with each award is to provide institutions a long-term and sustainable pathway to participating in the aerospace industry by cultivating competitive research capabilities and fostering strategic relationships with NASA experts.”
The EPSCoR awards will compliment NASA’s research portfolio to benefit future missions. Selected proposals cover a range of science and technology needs including in space manufacturing, heliophysics, astronaut health, and climate research.
The NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research grants, funded by the agency’s Office of STEM Engagement, will award approximately $100,000 to each project over the course of a one-year performance period for fiscal year 2024.
The awarded institutions are:
- University of Alabama in Huntsville
- University of Arkansas in Little Rock
- University of Delaware in Newark
- Iowa State University in Ames
- University of Idaho in Moscow
- University of Kentucky in Lexington
- Louisiana Board of Regents in Baton Rouge
- University of Mississippi in University
- Montana State University in Bozeman
- University of North Dakota in Grand Forks
- University of Nebraska in Omaha
- New Mexico State University in Las Cruces
- Nevada System of Higher Education in Reno
- Oklahoma State University in Stillwater
- Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island
- College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina
- South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City
- West Virginia University in Morgantown
- University of Wyoming in Laramie
NASA establishes partnerships with government, higher education, and industry to create lasting improvements in research infrastructure while enhancing national research and development competitiveness. The program is directed at those jurisdictions that have traditionally been underrepresented in competitive aerospace and aerospace-related research activities.
For more information about NASA STEM, visit:
-end-
Gerelle Dodson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
gerelle.q.dodson@nasa.gov
Aerospace Trailblazer: Shirley Holland-Hunt’s Visionary Leadership Transforms Space Exploration
From pioneering space initiatives to championing diversity and innovation, Shirley Holland-Hunt’s multifaceted leadership at NASA exemplifies the future of aerospace exploration. Her efforts have driven technological advancements and advocated for the inclusion of women and minorities in STEM fields.
Holland-Hunt currently serves as the associate division chief for Houston’s Johnson Space Center Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division, where she drives engineering design, development, testing, and evaluation for all phases of space flight.
She supports the identification and establishment of center partnerships and Space Act Agreements that drive the research and development of new space exploration technology. Holland-Hunt also coordinates business activities and workforce development, including planning, programming, budgeting, and execution, as well as facility management and Johnson’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives.
Holland-Hunt was a member of the Dare | Unite | Explore team that launched the “Propel the Space Economy Coalition” initiative, which supports the sustainable growth of the global space economy.
Official portrait of Shirley Holland-Hunt. Credit: NASA/James Blair
As an alumna of Prairie View A&M University, a Historically Black College and University, Holland-Hunt holds a bachelor of science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Phoenix. She helped develop Johnson’s first Request for Information document, showcasing her pivotal role in advancing the center’s initiatives to collect data that inform future procurement actions.
She also spearheaded initiatives to promote women in leadership roles. She founded the networking group “The Women of ES” within the Structural Engineering Division to help women leaders seek opportunities and gain promotions. Additionally, she launched “The Women of EG” within the Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division, which conducts outreach to schools to encourage girls to pursue STEM careers.
“Each division leaves its own footprint,” she said. “Sometimes you need those small entities within a culture because the issues are different, the people are different. It’s so fulfilling to be a part of these outreach activities and see the outcome.”
Shirley Holland-Hunt leads a discussion at a STEM outreach event for Brownsville Independent School District.
Holland-Hunt emphasizes the importance of persistence and continuous learning in your career. “Every little thing that you do or contribute to is huge. You might not see the results right away, but there is an outcome.”
She motivates students interested in pursuing space exploration careers to recognize their skills, know their worth, and work hard. “Strive to do your best daily but know that things are going to happen. Just be the best you can be.”
One of her core beliefs is to treat others with respect and acknowledge that diversity of thought is a strength. “Different means that somebody has a different way of thinking than you do, and that is a plus.”
Shirley Holland-Hunt at a NASA Pathways internship outreach event at Prairie View A&M University.
Holland-Hunt is also involved in a discovery program at her church, educating young girls about careers in STEM and supporting minority students pursuing graduate programs in those fields. She recalls teachers doubting her potential to become an engineer. “I don’t want another little girl to hear that she can’t be something that she wants to be,” she said.
Her advice to women is to embrace new challenges without fear. “Learn and grow in everything you do. Don’t be afraid to move around in your career. You don’t need to have 100% of the skills to do it,” said Holland-Hunt. “Networking is also important—get to know people who can make a positive impact on your life.”
Shirley Holland-Hunt at a Texas Independent School District STEM outreach event in Galveston.
Reflecting on her career, Holland-Hunt shares, “I started at NASA in a technical field but learned later that I have a passion for people, which was shocking because I always thought I was shy and an introvert. Now, I have a passion for seeing people grow and giving back in any way I can.”
Holland-Hunt worked in flight software and avionics for the Space Shuttle Program, which she said was her favorite program to work on at NASA. “When the program ended, I had to figure out how to use my background at Johnson for future capabilities,” she said. “That is the great part of working at NASA; there are many opportunities that bring together a range of people and perspectives to foster innovation.”
Holland-Hunt’s previous role managing a materials and processing group helped overcome her initial fear that her technical knowledge would hinder her ability to manage people. “I empowered everyone in that group with the respect I had for their work. They could teach me, and we trusted and learned from each other,” she said. “I know that I’m working with the best engineers in the world, and I learn so much from everyone that I work with.”
She believes that challenging herself and moving to different programs has revealed her hidden strengths and talents. “Knowing yourself is very important to be successful.”
Shirley Holland-Hunt in front of NASA’s Space Exploration Vehicle at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Holland-Hunt is also a member of the Ensemble Theatre in Houston, Texas, which aims to preserve African American artistic expression. She and her husband enjoy attending car shows and driving her 1972 Pontiac GTO.
Coming from a large family of eight, with a father who was a sharecropper, Holland-Hunt helped her family pick cotton. Despite her parents not graduating from junior high school, she and her eight siblings graduated from college, with five becoming engineers. Her husband also works for Axiom Space, one of the agency’s commercial space partners.
Holland-Hunt believes that experiencing adversity at a young age developed her character. “My parents always told me to be the best we can be and to love ourselves. That made us feel special and empowered me to do great things,” she said. “We never got new books, but we never saw it as a reason not to learn or excel. It teaches you to work with what you have. Now, when challenges come, I think, ‘That’s nothing. I’ve lived through worse.’”
Solid State Quantum Magnetometers—Seeking out water worlds from the quantum world
4 min read
Solid State Quantum Magnetometers—Seeking out water worlds from the quantum world Left: Jupiter’s moon Europa and its presumed interior. A thick ice shell covers a planetary saltwater ocean, presumed to hold twice as much water as Earth’s oceans. Right: Simulation of the ocean bending the magnetic field lines emitted by Jupiter that are close to Europa Image credit: C. Cochrane/ NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Follow the water!” The solar system is full of water in different states, from the Sun’s water vapor to the ice of Pluto and beyond. Water is not only linked to the possibility to sustain life, it is also interesting for its own geological properties and potential uses. For example, ice on the Moon and Mars could support human exploration. Comets that hit Earth may have deposited water on our planet. The icy comets and rings of Saturn reveal how solar systems change over time.
Liquid water, however, has a special role in enabling life. Scientists have discovered indications that liquid water might exist on a number of moons orbiting our solar system’s gas and ice giants. The mantra of the astrobiology community is to “Follow the Water” to find life, so subsurface oceans on Jupiter’s Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus, and other moons are compelling targets for future missions.
However, looking beneath the miles-thick ice crusts of these planetary bodies with conventional remote-sensing instruments, like cameras and radar, is challenging. Until we can send landers or rovers that drill or melt through the ice, we can use other techniques to track down these enormous, but elusive, water bodies. One method—Magnetometry—stands out since magnetic fields penetrate solid material and can therefore provide information about the interior of planet-sized bodies.
Briny water conducts electricity; therefore, a saltwater ocean can function as a planet-sized electric circuit. The strong rotating magnetic field of the parent planet of an ocean world can induce an electric current in this “circuit,” which in turn disturbs and modifies the magnetic field near the ocean world under investigation. These magnetic field disturbances can be observed from a spacecraft and may indicate the presence of liquid water. For example, a distortion of Jupiter’s magnetic field in the vicinity of Europa was measured by the magnetometer on NASA’s Galileo mission, providing further evidence for the initial suspicions of a water ocean under that moon’s icy crust.
The heart of optically pumped quantum magnetometers: a diamond crystal enriched with color centers. Unlike many other quantum systems, diamond and SiC solid state quantum color centers operate at room temperature and can be readily accessed electrically or optically. The bottom photo, filtering the laser light for the observer, shows the red-shifted emission response of the quantum system. This response is encoded with quantum spin information, and can be used to read environmental influences, such as temperature, pressure, electric and, most importantly for us, magnetic field properties. Image credit A. Gottscholl/ NASA/JPL-Caltech
Solid-state quantum magnetometers are an upcoming instrument class promising to measure magnetic fields at competitive sensitivities, while offering lower size, weight, and power footprints. In addition, these instruments offer quantum benefits like self-calibration on spin-nuclear quantum interaction, which means that the magnetometer can compensate for drifts over time. This capability is especially important for decades-long missions to the outer ice-giants. Other solid-state quantum advantages include radiation resilience and an inherent ability to withstand very high/low temperatures.
Solid-state quantum magnetometers leverage quantum color centers located in semiconductors such as diamond and silicon carbide. Color centers are defects in the crystal lattice—for example, a missing atom or a different atom replacing a crystal atom. In everyday life, color centers give crystals their color, but they can also be probed on the quantum level using modulated light. Due to their quantum spin properties these color centers are sensitive to environmental magnetic fields. As these color centers are exposed to varying magnetic fields, the changing quantum spin properties can be read electrically and/or optically, providing insight into the magnetic field properties and enabling us to detect the presence of water.
Research teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing two magnetometers to measure spin properties from space. The incredibly simple but elegant SiCMAG (Silicon Carbide Magnetometer, Lead Dr. Corey J. Cochrane) instrument reads spin properties electrically, while the OPuS-MAGNM (optically pumped solid state quantum magnetometer, Lead Dr. Hannes Kraus) promises access to higher sensitivities through the addition of optics. Optically pumped here means that the quantum system is pumped with green (diamond) or deep red (silicon carbide) laser light, and the system’s response is read with a light detector.
According to Dr. Kraus, “Novel quantum sensors not only enable new science, but also offer the chance to downscale former flagship-class instrumentation to a size and cost allowing flagship-class science on CubeSat-class platforms.”
NASA has been funding solid state quantum magnetometer sensor research through its PICASSO (Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations) program since 2016. A variety of domestic partners from industry and academia support this research, including NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the University of Iowa, Q-Cat LLC and QuantCAD LLC, as well as international partners such as Japan’s National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST Japan) and ETH Zurich, a public research university in Zurich, Switzerland.
PI Dr. Kraus (left) and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Andreas Gottscholl (right) in the JPL Quantum Magnetometer lab, with the optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) spectrometer apparatus—a larger-scale stepping stone towards a miniaturized integrated magnetometer instrument—built by Dr. Gottscholl in the background. The optically pumped quantum sensor crystals (not visible here, as the sensor itself is only millimeters in size) are located in the concentric barrel-shaped four-layer µ-metal chamber, which is capable of shielding the Earth’s and other magnetic field disturbances by a factor of 100,000. Image Credit H. Kraus/ NASA/JPL-Caltech
Acknowledgment: The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).
PROJECT LEADDr. Hannes Kraus, Dr. Corey Cochrane, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology
SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONScience Mission Directorate PICASSO, JPL R&D funding
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NASA Wallops Visitor Center Extended Hours June 12
The NASA Wallops Visitor Center will be open for extended hours from 4-6 p.m., Wednesday, June 12, to conduct outreach focused around NASA’s environmental work at Wallops. In addition, the Visitor Center exhibit gallery and auditorium will be open for the public to visit, and personnel will be onsite to share information on current and upcoming missions.
The Visitor Center is open to the public and admission is always free.
Wallops’ Environmental Team will be on-hand to discuss and answer questions about NASA’s ongoing work related to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) at the facility. Experts will also be available to share information on the new Wallops Island Causeway Bridge project.
Wallops conducts extended hours outreach events routinely at the Visitor Center, which is located on Virginia Route 175 about five miles from U.S. Route 13 and five miles from Chincoteague Island, Virginia.
By Jeremy Eggers
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.
Sun unleashes giant plasma plume and reels it back in apparent 'failed eruption' (video)
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China is sending giant pandas to US zoos for the first time in decades
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Cuckoos’ Evolutionary Arms Race Creates New Species
Cuckoos are “nest pirates” that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, setting off an evolutionary arms race that leads to the development of new species
Trump’s Personality Cult Plays a Part in His Political Appeal
Personality measures suggest Donald Trump exerts a cult of personality over his followers, people who are psychologically susceptible to his appeal. This could help explain how he has succeeded in U.S. politics while other populists have not