Lifeboat Foundation

They weren’t scheduled to return to Earth until April 28th at the earliest, so why did NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, suit up and climb aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience on April 5th? Because a previously untested maneuver meant that after they closed the hatch between their spacecraft and the International Space Station, there was a chance they weren’t going to be coming back.

On paper, moving a capsule between docking ports seems simple enough. All Resilience had to do was undock from the International Docking Adapter 2 (IDA-2) located on the front of the Harmony module, itself attached to the Pressurized Mating Adapter 2 (PMA-2) that was once the orbital parking spot for the Space Shuttle, and move over to the PMA-3/IDA-3 on top of Harmony. It was a short trip through open space, and when the crew exited their craft and reentered the Station at the end of it, they’d only be a few meters from where they started out approximately 45 minutes prior.

Continue reading “Crew Dragon’s Short Hop Begins The Era Of Valet Parking At The ISS” »

Was Mars green? Evidence Mars may have been alive — and may yet harbor some life deep underground.

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On April 14, 2021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover sent amazing images of Mars’s rocks captured by Mastcam-Z. Several rocks has interesting erosion component to be analyzed. There are also diverse aeolian processes that, in addition to dune forms, result in small abrasion forms on exposed rocks. Rover strongly uses Mastcam-Z. That is a pair of cameras that takes color images and video, three-dimensional stereo images, and has a powerful zoom lens. Like the Mastcam cameras on the Curiosity rover, Mastcam-Z on Mars 2020 consists of two duplicate camera systems mounted on the mast that stands up from the rover deck. The cameras are next to each other and point in the same direction, providing a 3D view similar to what human eyes would see, only better. They also have a zoom function to see details of faraway targets.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Continue reading “Perseverance Rover photographed this on Mars using Mastcam-Z onboard camera” »

To make some of the most precise measurements we can of the world around us, scientists tend to go small — right down to the atomic scale, using a technique called atom interferometry.

Now, for the first time, scientists have performed this kind of measurement in space, using a sounding rocket specially designed to carry science payloads into low-Earth space.

Continue reading “For The First Time, Scientists Have Performed Atom Interferometry in Space” »

Extremely precise measurements are possible using atom interferometers that employ the wave character of atoms for this purpose. They can thus be used, for example, to measure the gravitational field of the Earth or to detect gravitational waves. A team of scientists from Germany has now managed to successfully perform atom interferometry in space for the first time—on board a sounding rocket. “We have established the technological basis for atom interferometry on board of a sounding rocket and demonstrated that such experiments are not only possible on Earth, but also in space,” said Professor Patrick Windpassinger of the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), whose team was involved in the investigation. The results of their analyses have been published in Nature Communications.

A team of researchers from various universities and research centers led by Leibniz University Hannover launched the MAIUS-1 mission in January 2017. This has since become the first rocket mission on which a Bose-Einstein condensate has been generated in space. This special state of matter occurs when atoms—in this case atoms of rubidium—are cooled to a temperature close to absolute zero, or minus 273 degrees Celsius. “For us, this ultracold ensemble represented a very promising starting point for atom interferometry,” explained Windpassinger. Temperature is one of the determining factors, because measurements can be carried out more accurately and for longer periods at lower temperatures.

A serendipitous discovery by citizen scientists has provided a unique new window into the diverse environments that produce stars and star clusters, revealing the presence of “stellar nurseries” before infant stars emerge from their birth clouds, according to Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Grace Wolf-Chase.

“Yellowballs are small compact features that were identified in infrared images acquired by the Spitzer Space Telescope during online discussions on the Milky Way Project, an initiative on the online citizen science platform zooniverse.org, that asked citizen scientists to help identify features associated with young, massive stars greater than 10 solar masses,” said Wolf-Chase, lead author of “The Milky Way Project: Probing Star Formation with First Results on Yellowballs from DR2,” which appears in the Astrophysical Journal. “Early research suggested yellowballs are produced by young stars as they heat the surrounding gas and dust from which they were born.”

The yellowballs discovered by citizen scientists shed infrared light on a very early stage in the development of star clusters, when they are a ‘mere’ hundred thousand years old. “This is the point at which their presence is first revealed, but they remain embedded in their dusty birth cocoons,” Wolf-Chase said. “This allows us to link the properties of stars with their birth environments, as if a human were giving birth to a hundred or so infants at once.”

Domino’s and Nuro teamed up for autonomous pizza delivery in Houston. Don’t get your hopes up, though, for a driverless drop-off: Many restrictions apply, and only a handful of hungry people can opt in right now.

Beginning this week, select customers who place a prepaid website order from the lone participating pizza shop in Woodland Heights can opt to have their food delivered by Nuro’s R2 robot. Those lucky patrons receive text alerts highlighting R2’s location, and can track the vehicle via GPS on the order confirmation page. Domino’s also provides a unique personal identification number required to open the bot’s door and reveal that piping hot pizza.

“We’re excited to continue innovating the delivery experience for Domino’s customers by testing autonomous delivery with Nuro in Houston,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer, said in a statement. “There is still so much for our brand to learn about the autonomous delivery space.”

Topological insulators have notable manifestations of electronic properties. The helicity-dependent photocurrents in such devices are underpinned by spin momentum-locking of surface Dirac electrons that are weak and easily overshadowed by bulk contributions. In a new report now published on Science Advances, X. Sun and a research team in photonic technologies, physics and photonic metamaterials in Singapore and the U.K. showed how the chiral response of materials could be enhanced via nanostructuring. The tight confinement of electromagnetic fields in the resonant nanostructures enhanced the photoexcitation of spin-polarized surface states of a topological insulator to allow an 11-fold increase of the circular photogalvanic effect and a previously unobserved photocurrent dichroism at room temperature. Using this method, Sun et al. controlled the spin transport in topological materials via structural design, a hitherto unrecognized ability of metamaterials. The work bridges the gap between nanophotonics and spin electronics to provide opportunities to develop polarization-sensitive photodetectors.

Chirality

Chirality is a ubiquitous and fascinating natural phenomenon in nature, describing the difference of an object from its mirror image. The process manifests in a variety of scales and forms from galaxies to nanotubes and from organic molecules to inorganic compounds. Chirality can be detected at the atomic and molecular level in fundamental sciences, including chemistry, biology and crystallography, as well as in practice, such as in the food and pharmaceutical industry. To detect chirality, scientists can use interactions with electromagnetic fields, although the process can be hindered by a large mismatch between the wavelength of light and the size of most molecules at nanoscale dimensions. Designer metamaterials with structural features comparable to the wavelength of light can provide an independent approach to devise optical properties on demand to enhance the light-matter interaction to create and enhance the optical chirality of metamaterials. In this work, Sun et al.

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured new imagery on April 13, 2021 of the Red Planet and the Sun. On April 12, NASA announced that Ingenuity needs a software update and will not fly until at least next week. Full Story: https://www.space.com/nasa-delays-mars-helicopter-ingenuity-flight-again.

Credit: Space.com | imagery courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU | produced & edited by Steve Spaleta (http://www.twitter.com/stevespaleta)

Continue reading “Perseverance stares at rocks & Sun while Mars helicopter flight is delayed” »