A new analysis of data from the 1978 Pioneer Venus mission, by researchers at Cal Poly Pomona, finds evidence not only for phosphine, but also possible chemical disequilibrium in Venus’ atmosphere, an additional possible sign of biological activity.
Category: space – Page 663
Study identifies a universal property for efficient communication
Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity. Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity. For example, many languages have a word that denotes the color red, but no language has individual words to distinguish ten different shades of the color. These additional words would complicate the vocabulary and rarely would they be useful to achieve precise communication.
A study published on 23 March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed how artificial neural networks develop spontaneous systems to name colors. A study by Marco Baroni, ICREA research professor at the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), conducted with members of Facebook AI Research (France).
For this study, the researchers formed two artificial neural networks trained with two generic deep learning methods. As Baroni explains: “we made the networks play a color-naming game in which they had to communicate about color chips from a continuous color space. We did not limit the “language” they could use, however, when they learned to play the game successfully, we observed the color-naming terms these artificial neural networks had developed spontaneously.”
NASA’s New Horizons probe reaches rare distance, looks out to farthest Voyager
New Horizons is the fifth most distant spacecraft from Earth.
Pioneer 10, which was launched in 1972 and was the first probe to pass through the asteroid belt and to fly by Jupiter, reached 50 AU on Sept. 22, 1990. Today, it is approximately 129 AU from Earth.
Its sister ship, Pioneer 11, reached 50 AU a year later in 1991. It was launched in 1973 and in addition to flying by Jupiter, was the first to make direct observations of Saturn. It is now about 105 AU from Earth.
Crew Dragon’s Short Hop Begins The Era Of Valet Parking At The ISS
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.
The maneuver was designed to be performed autonomously, so technically the crew didn’t need to be on Resilience when it switched docking ports. But allowing the astronauts to stay aboard the station while their only ride home undocked and flew away without them was a risk NASA wasn’t willing to take.
Evidence Mars May Have Been Alive — and May Yet Harbor Some Life
Was Mars green? Evidence Mars may have been alive — and may yet harbor some life deep underground.
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Perseverance Rover photographed this on Mars using Mastcam-Z onboard camera
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yPtL1rM6GF0&feature=share
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
Source for NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/
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For The First Time, Scientists Have Performed Atom Interferometry in Space
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.
It’s a significant step towards being able to perform matter-wave interferometry in space, for science applications that range from fundamental physics to navigation.