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A solar energy absorber that uses quartz to trap heat reached 1050°C in tests and could offer a way to decarbonise the production of steel and cement

A solar energy absorber that uses quartz to trap heat reached 1050°C in tests and could offer a way to decarbonise the production of steel and cement

If a building is hit with an earthquake or explosives, the entire thing can collapse – but a design balancing strong and weak structural connections lets part of it fall while preserving the rest

If a building is hit with an earthquake or explosives, the entire thing can collapse – but a design balancing strong and weak structural connections lets part of it fall while preserving the rest

Ageism is pervasive, accepted and invisible. Stamping out this prejudice won’t just benefit society, it will also have huge payoffs for those people who hold it

Ageism is pervasive, accepted and invisible. Stamping out this prejudice won’t just benefit society, it will also have huge payoffs for those people who hold it

A preview of NASA's latest issue of "Astrobiology," their fun ongoing graphic novel series

4 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft sits on the ramp at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California during sunrise, shortly after completion of painting. With its unique design, including a 38-foot-long nose, the X-59 was built to demonstrate the ability to fly supersonic, or faster than the speed of sound, while reducing the typically loud sonic boom produced by aircraft at such speeds to a quieter sonic “thump”. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which seeks to solve one of the major barriers to supersonic flight over land, currently banned in the United States, by making sonic booms quieter. NASA/Steve Freeman

NASA has taken the next step toward verifying the airworthiness for its quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft with the completion of a milestone review that will allow it to progress toward flight.

A Flight Readiness Review board composed of independent experts from across NASA has completed a study of the X-59 project team’s approach to safety for the public and staff during ground and flight testing. The review board looked in detail at the project team’s analysis of potential hazards, focusing on safety and risk identification.

Flight Readiness Review is the first step in the flight approval process. The board’s work will provide the X-59 team with insights and recommendations toward systems checkouts on the ground and first flight.

“It’s not a pass-fail,” said Cathy Bahm, NASA’s Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project manager. “We’ll be getting actions from the board and will work with them to resolve those and work toward the Airworthiness and Flight Safety Review.”

NASA and prime contractor Lockheed Martin Skunk Works are developing the X-59 to reduce the sound of a sonic boom to a quieter “thump.” The aircraft is at the center of NASA’s Quesst mission, which will use it to gather data that could revolutionize air travel, potentially paving the way for a new generation of commercial aircraft that can travel faster than the speed of sound. Commercial supersonic flight over land has been banned for more than 50 years because of the noise of sonic booms.

“The Flight Readiness Review focused on specific aspects of the X-59 team’s work on the aircraft, but also served as an overview and update on the entire project,” said Jay Brandon, chief engineer for the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project.

 “It gave us the opportunity to stop working for a minute and gather what we’ve done so we could tell our story, not just to the board, but to the whole project team,” Brandon said.

With the Flight Readiness Review complete, the upcoming Airworthiness and Flight Safety Review will be the next safety milestone. The Airworthiness and Flight Safety Review board includes senior leaders from several NASA centers and Skunk Works. It will review findings from the Flight Readiness Review, as well as the project team’s response to those filings. The board will send a recommendation to NASA Armstrong’s center director, who signs the airworthiness certificate.

Finally, the team will provide a technical brief to another review board based on test objectives, how the tests are being carried out, the risks involved, and the risk-mitigation actions the team has taken. The X-59 team would have to address any issues raised in the brief before the board, led by NASA Armstrong chief engineer Cynthia J. “CJ” Bixby, will sign a flight request.

“It’s really an exciting time on the project,” Bahm said. “It’s not an easy road, but there’s a finite set of activities that are in front of us.”

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy speaks on stage immediately following the unveiling of the agency’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft at a January 12, 2024 event at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which seeks to solve one of the major barriers to supersonic flight over land, currently banned in the United States, by making sonic booms quieter.NASA/Steve Freeman The Path Forward

There are significant steps to be completed before flights can begin. The X-59 team is preparing for upcoming major ground tests focused on systems integration engine runs, and electromagnetic interference.

The X-59 aircraft is a bold, new design, but many of its components are from well-established aircraft, including landing gear from an Air Force F-16 fighter, a cockpit canopy from a NASA T-38 trainer, and a control stick from an Air Force F-117 stealth fighter are among those parts.

“None of these systems have ever worked and played together before,” said Brad Neal, chairman for the X-59 Airworthiness and Flight Safety Review board. “It’s a brand-new thing that we are developing, even though they’re components that have been on different legacy aircraft. As we get into integration testing here, it’s going to be a great opportunity to learn.’’

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Details Last Updated May 15, 2024 EditorDede DiniusLocationArmstrong Flight Research Center Related Terms

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A new planet candidate discovered in data from NASA's TESS mission could be an extreme lavaworld, pushed and pulled by the gravity of its own star and two other close-in planets.

The post Planet Candidate Could Be Incandescent with Lava Flows appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Astronomers have determined that the Milky Way's outer halo is filled with "magnetic donuts" that are as wide as 100,000 light-years. The discovery could shed light on how cosmic magnetic fields form and evolve.

An illuminated waning gibbous moon contrasts the deep black of space as the International Space Station soared 270 miles over the Southern Ocean.

An illuminated waning gibbous moon contrasts the deep black of space as the International Space Station soared 270 miles over the Southern Ocean.NASA

The waning gibbous moon stands out against the dark backdrop of space in this April 26, 2024, image from the International Space Station. Waning gibbous is one of eight moon phases, occurring after the full moon. The Sun always illuminates half of the Moon while the other half remains dark, but how much we can see of that illuminated half changes as the Moon travels through its orbit. As the Moon begins its journey back toward the Sun, the lighted side appears to shrink, but the Moon’s orbit is simply carrying it out of view from our perspective.

See NASA’s interactive map for observing the Moon—from Earth—every day of the year.

Image Credit: NASA

Astronomers have discovered an Earth-size planet orbiting a red dwarf star, making just the second planetary system seen around one of these tiny, cool, dim, but common, stars.

Mention the Milky Way and most people will visualise a great big spiral galaxy billions of years old. It’s thought to be a galaxy that took shape billions of years after the Big Bang. Studies by astronomers have revealed that there are the echo’s of an earlier time around us. A team of astronomers from MIT have found three ancient stars orbiting the Milky Way’s halo. The team think these stars formed when the Universe was around a billion years old and that they were once part of a smaller galaxy that was consumed by the Milky Way. 

The Milky Way is our home galaxy within which our entire Solar System and an estimated 400 billion other stars. It measures 100,000 light years from sided to side and is home to almost everything else we can see in the sky with our naked eyes. On a clear dark night we can see the combined light from all the stars in the galaxy forming a wonderful band of hazy light arching across the sky from horizon to horizon. If you could view the Galaxy from the outside its broad shape would resemble two fried eggs stuck back to back.

The story of the discovery takes us back to 2022 during a new Observational Stellar Archaeology course at MIoT when students were learning how they can analyse ancient stars. They then applied them to stars that have not yet been analysed. They worked with data from the 6.5m Magellan-Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and were searching for stars that had formed soon after the Big Bang. At this time in the evolution of the Universe, there was mostly hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of strontium and barium. The team therefore searched for stars with spectra indicating these elements. 

Precision manufacturing is at the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope. The surface of each mirror must be polished to within a fraction of the wavelength of light. Image: Giant Magellan Telescope Organization

They honed in on just three stars that had been observed in 2013 and 2014 but they had not been previously analysed so were a great study for the students. On completion of their analysis (which took several hundred hours at a computer), the team identified that the stars had very low levels of strontium and barium as predicted if they were ancient stars. The stars they studied were estimated at having formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago. What wasn’t clear was the origin of the stars.  How did they come to be in the Milky Way given that it was relatively new and young. 

The team decided to analyse the orbital characteristics of the stars to see how they moved. The stars were all in different locations through the Milky Way’s halo and all thought to be about 30,000 light years from Earth. Comparing the motion with data from the Gaia astrometric satellite they discovered the stars were going in the opposite direction to the majority of other stars in the Milky Way. We call this retrograde motion and it suggests the stars came from somewhere else, not having formed with the Milky Way. The chemical signatures of the stars coupled with their motion give strong credibility to the liklihood these ancient stars are not native to the Milk Way.

Now they have developed there approach to identify ancient stars, the students are keen to expand their search to see if any others can be located. However with 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, a slightly more efficient method needs to be found. 

Source : MIT researchers discover the universe’s oldest stars in our own galactic backyard

The post Three of the Oldest Stars in the Universe Found Circling the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged an actively star-forming galaxy named UGC 9684.

2 min read

Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star  This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a triple-star star system. NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The triple-star system is made up of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old ― in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old ― and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed.

As with all variable stars, HP Tau’s brightness changes over time. T Tauri stars are known to have both periodic and random fluctuations in brightness. The random variations may be due to the chaotic nature of a developing young star, such as instabilities in the accretion disk of dust and gas around the star, material from that disk falling onto the star and being consumed, and flares on the star’s surface. The periodic changes may be due to giant sunspots rotating in and out of view.

The box in the ground-based image reveals the location of Hubble’s view within the wider context of this triple-star system. NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America); Inset: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab)

Curving around the stars, a cloud of gas and dust shines with their reflected light. Reflection nebulae do not emit visible light of their own, but shine as the light from nearby stars bounces off the gas and dust, like fog illuminated by the glow of a car’s headlights.

HP Tau is located approximately 550 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Hubble studied HP Tau as part of an investigation into protoplanetary disks, the disks of material around stars that coalesce into planets over millions of years.

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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May 15, 2024

Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location Goddard Space Flight Center

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Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.

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“I grew up in China. In China, everybody talks about what they want to be [when they grow up]. Many want to grow up to be a scientist or engineer. So I aspired to be a scientist from an early age.

“… For the girls or women in science — or in any profession or job — opportunities are more abundant than they were previously. Sometimes you need to take bold steps. Just a little push, and then you will get there. I initially started as a foreign national, so not a lot of opportunities existed for a foreign national, and some of them [required a] green card or citizenship. I think it’s hard, but still, there is a path forward. I think it’s important to work hard and be optimistic, and you will find something.”

—Dr. Yihua (Eva) Zheng, Space Physics and Space Weather Scientist, Heliophysics Science Division, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Image Credit: NASA/Thalia Patrinos
Interviewer: NASA/Thalia Patrinos

Check out some of our other Faces of NASA. 

If you watch astronauts in space then you will know how they seem to float around their spaceship. Spaceships in orbit around the Earth are in free-fall, constantly falling toward surface fo the Earth with the surface constantly falling away from it. Any occupant is also in free-fall but living like this causes muscle tone to degrade slowly. One solution is to generate artificial gravity through acceleration in particular a rotating motion. A new paper makes the case for a rotating space station and goes so far that it is achievable now. 

Acceleration is a change in either direction or speed. In a lift you can feel a deceleration as you feel heavier when the lift slows at the bottom of its descent. It would certainly be possible to generate an artificial force of gravity in a box travelling through space if it constantly accelerates. This would produce a sense of a floor and pin the occupants to the rear wall. This is however, a fairly inefficient way to produce gravity as significant amounts of fuel would be required to continually accelerate the box. 

A recent paper published in Science Direct by lead author Jack J.W.A. van Loon shows how a spaceship that continuously rotates will produce an artificial gravity on the inner skin of the outer shell. The benefits to such an approach are significant; improved crew health and wellbeing, safety improvements, cost reductions and the simplification of numerous flight operations.  

There are many ways that astronauts attempt to limit the impacts on health from micro-gravity. Treadmills with straps to pull the astronauts down onto the running platform are just one of the ways they attempt to keep bones and muscles in tip top condition. If they don’t then bone and muscle density declines. Research has sown that for every month in space, an astronauts’ weight bearing bones become 1% less dense. Muscles wean too and this causes problems on their return to Earth and ‘normal gravity’ so it is a vitally important part of their routine. 

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst gets a workout on the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED). Credit: NASA

The team go on to explore a number of options such as a short arm centrifuge. These would certainly generate artificial gravity but the short arm would mean the gravity gradient from foot to head of occupants would be too great and have a negative health impact. An alternate solution, and more efficient feasible solution is to build a large rotating spacecraft. Such a craft would have benefits for long term missions such as trips to Mars but also benefit those in orbit around Earth for months on end. Savings would be impressive as significant investments are made combatting the effect of microgravity.

The team discuss what would be needed to simulate and Earth-like 1g environment on a spacecraft. A donut shaped spacecraft with a 25 m radius would need to be spun 6 times per minute to generate a 1g environment. Larger spacecraft could be revolved at a slower rate. Doing so not only benefits the astronauts but nearly every aspect of life in space would be enhanced and safer; liquids would behave in a normal way, flames too would behave in a more familiar way, toilets can of a more normal design as can self care systems. The benefits are significant so I don’t think it will be long before we see astronauts walking around in revolving spacecraft enjoying the luxury of normal gravity again. 

Source : Benefits of a rotating – Partial gravity – Spacecraft

The post A Rotating Spacecraft Would Solve So Many Problems in Spaceflight appeared first on Universe Today.

The direct air capture industry got a boost last week with the opening of Mammoth, the largest plant yet for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but questions remain about whether the technology can scale up