NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity “lost its orientation…partway through its last set of activities,” reported a planetary geologist on the rover’s team Monday. Curiosity had lost track of its position in space and the position of its various parts like its robotic arm. “Thus, Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered. Curiosity kept sending…
Tag: Maryland
TESS mission uncovers its first world with two stars
In 2019, when Wolf Cukier finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, he joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a summer intern. His job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-tess-mission-uncovers-world-stars.html…
Bushfires Release Over Half Australia’s Annual Carbon Emissions
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country’s annual carbon dioxide emissions in another setback to the fight against climate change. Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tons of carbon dioxide since Aug. 1, which is more…
Scientists map a pulsar for the 1st time
Using a revolutionary X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station, scientists have finally created the 1st pulsar surface “map.” It shows odd hot spots and suggests that pulsar magnetic fields are more complicated than anyone had assumed. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/pulsar-surface-map-hot-spots-size-mass-j0030-nicer…
Scientists correlate photon pairs of different colors generated in separate buildings
Particles can sometimes act like waves, and photons (particles of light) are no exception. Just as waves create an interference pattern, like ripples on a pond, so do photons. Physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have achieved a major new feat—creating a bizarre “quantum” interference between two photons of markedly different colors, originating from…
‘The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer’
“A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years,” writes Wired, addingi that “They’re comparatively tiny — and may be key to hitting our climate goals.” For the last 20 years, the future of nuclear power has stood in a high bay laboratory tucked away on the Oregon State University campus in the western part of…
Astronomers catch a comet outburst
Remember comet 46P/Wirtanen? It was a bright comet about this time last year. Around the time it swept near the Earth and sun, the comet entered the field of view NASA’s TESS planet-hunter. And boom! It underwent an outburst, caught by TESS. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/comet-46p-wirtanen-outburst-caught-by-tess…
NASA’s exoplanet-hunting mission catches a natural comet outburst in unprecedented detail
Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers at the University of Maryland (UMD), in College Park, Maryland, have captured a clear start-to-finish image sequence of an explosive emission of dust, ice and gases during the close approach of comet 46P/Wirtanen in late 2018. This is the most complete and detailed observation to date of the formation and dissipation…
India’s Ominous Future: Too Little Water, or Far Too Much
Throughout India, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased over the last century. At the same time, the dry spells between storms have gotten longer. Showers that reliably penetrate the soil are less common. For a country that relies on rain for the vast share of its water, that combination is potentially ruinous. The New York Times reports:…
Humans Placed in Suspended Animation For the First Time
Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death. From a report: Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient…