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NASA’s spacecraft Juno just had a super-close encounter with the most volcanic world in the solar system—but its stunning first image could be among its last after 56 orbits of Jupiter.

On December 30, the bus-sized spacecraft—orbiting Jupiter since 2016—got very close to Io, the giant moon of Jupiter. It reached a mere 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the moon’s surface. However, the spacecraft’s camera has suffered radiation damage and may not last much longer.

The first image to come back from this, the closest pass since NASA’s Galileo probe imaged the volcanic moon in October 2001, was published on social media by NASA on December 31. “The JunoCam instrument aboard our Juno Mission acquired six images of Jupiter’s moon Io during its close encounter today,” read the tweet. “This black-and-white view was taken at an altitude of about 1,500 miles (2,500 kilometers).”

The fact that the universe is not locally real is one of the more disquieting discoveries of the last half-century.

An international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and involving the University of Bonn has mapped the cold, dense gas of future star nurseries in one of our neighboring galaxies with an unprecedented degree of detail. The data will enable the researchers for the first time to mount an in-depth study of the conditions that exist within the gas during the early stages of star formation outside the Milky Way at the scale of individual star-forming regions.

Their findings have now been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Paradoxically, hot stars begin to form in some of the coldest regions of the universe, specifically in thick clouds of gas and dust that straddle entire galaxies. “To investigate the early phases of star formation, where gas gradually condenses to eventually produce stars, we must first identify these regions,” says Sophia Stuber, a doctoral student at the MPIA in Heidelberg and the first author of the research paper.

What astronomers see in the light bouncing across the universe.

Scientists studying the chemical makeup of asteroid Ryugu and the Murchison meteorite find intriguing differences in their organic molecules.

O.o!!!

NEW DELHI: The “Devil Comet,” officially known as 12P, is currently making its way towards Earth and is anticipated to undergo a significant eruption soon. This comet, which is nearly three times the size of Mount Everest, is classified as a cryovolcano, which means it erupts due to the build-up and ignition of gas and ice, much like a frozen soda can exploding. The comet is notably large, with a diameter of 18.6 miles, comparable to the size of a small city.

According to Astronomy.com, it’s a short-period comet, completing an orbit around the Sun approximately every 71.2 years, a pattern similar to the well-known Halley’s Comets like this, with an orbital period of less than 200 years, are categorized as short-period comets.

Continue reading “‘Devil comet’, bigger than Mount Everest, racing towards Earth and is set to explode soon” »

Early PDP-11 models were not overly impressive. The first PDP-11 11/20 cost $20,000, but it shipped with only about 4KB of RAM. It used paper tape as storage and had an ASR-33 teletype printer console that printed 10 characters per second. But it also had an amazing orthogonal 16-bit architecture, eight registers, 65KB of address space, a 1.25 MHz cycle time, and a flexible UNIBUS hardware bus that would support future hardware peripherals. This was a winning combination for its creator, Digital Equipment Corporation.

The initial application for the PDP-11 included real-time hardware control, factory automation, and data processing. As the PDP-11 gained a reputation for flexibility, programmability, and affordability, it saw use in traffic light control systems, the Nike missile defense system, air traffic control, nuclear power plants, Navy pilot training systems, and telecommunications. It also pioneered the word processing and data processing that we now take for granted.

And the PDP-11’s influence is most strikingly evident in the device’s assembly programming.

Boeing and SpaceX have shared footage of U.S. Space Force’s secretive X-37B mini-shuttles in space with a payload-laden service module attached. A brief video clip showing the X-37B with the module separating from its launch rocket after being lofted into space in 2020 was included in a video montage shown ahead of the latest launch of an X-37B yesterday. You can find out more about what we can expect from the new X-37B mission in The War Zone’s previous reporting.

SpaceX broadcast the video montage that included the clip in question just minutes before a Falcon Heavy rocket with an X-37B on top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last night. User @DutchSpace on X, formerly known as Twitter, was among the first to spot the clip of the X-37B separating into space.

Continue reading “Look At An X-37B In Space With An Extended Payload Module” »