Lifeboat Foundation

When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists’ first—and, so far, only—close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling new mysteries confronted scientists. The energized particles around the planet defied their understanding of how magnetic fields work to trap particle radiation, and Uranus earned a reputation as an outlier in our solar system.

Now, new research analyzing the data collected during that flyby 38 years ago has found that the source of that particular mystery is a cosmic coincidence. It turns out that in the days just before Voyager 2’s flyby, the planet had been affected by an unusual kind of space weather that squashed the planet’s magnetic field, dramatically compressing Uranus’s magnetosphere.

“If Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have observed a completely different magnetosphere at Uranus,” said Jamie Jasinski of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of the new work published in Nature Astronomy. “The spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time.”

A scientist simulated the contents of the ice giant worlds, and found that a fluid layer may explain each planet’s strange magnetic field.

The Space Coast set a new launch record in 2023 with 72 orbital missions from either Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pace of launches could ramp up by the end of 2024 to a near twice-weekly rate with as many as 111 missions possible.

Check back for the latest information on upcoming launches.

Very limited time Black Friday deal: 20% off on all Hoverpens and free shipping to most countries with code SABINE:
North America / UK / Australia / International: https://bit.ly/sabine_novium.
EU: https://bit.ly/sabine_noviumeu.

Is the universe really infinite? Or could it close back on itself like a sphere? If it’s infinite, how can it expand? And is it true that there might be copies of you in it? Today I want to explain how much we know about those questions and what the expansion of space has to do with Hilbert’s Hotel.

Continue reading “Is the Universe Infinite or Finite?” »

The fabric of space and time is not exempt from the effects of gravity. Plop in a mass and space-time curves around it, not dissimilar to what happens when you put a bowling ball on a trampoline.

This dimple in space-time is the result of what we call a gravity well, and it was first described over 100 years ago by Albert Einstein’s field equations in his theory of general relativity. To this day, those equations have held up. We’d love to know what Einstein was putting in his soup. Whatever it was, general relativity has remained pretty solid.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Found a Quirk in Einstein’s Predictions of Space-Time” »

Originally published on Towards AI.

ABSTRACT: The fundamental problem of causal inference defines the impossibility of associating a causal link to a correlation, in other words: correlation does not prove causality. This problem can be understood from two points of view: experimental and statistical. The experimental approach tells us that this problem arises from the impossibility of simultaneously observing an event both in the presence and absence of a hypothesis. The statistical approach, on the other hand, suggests that this problem stems from the error of treating tested hypotheses as independent of each other. Modern statistics tends to place greater emphasis on the statistical approach because, compared to the experimental point of view, it also shows us a way to solve the problem. Indeed, when testing many hypotheses, a composite hypothesis is constructed that tends to cover the entire solution space. Consequently, the composite hypothesis can be fitted to any data set by generating a random correlation. Furthermore, the probability that the correlation is random is equal to the probability of obtaining the same result by generating an equivalent number of random hypotheses.

Asteroids are remnants of the formation of our solar system, and while many can be found within the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, some cannot. One such object is asteroid (162173) Ryugu, a 1 km-wide near-Earth asteroid believed to have originated in the asteroid belt. However, it has since moved to cross Earth’s orbit, located 300 million km from our planet.

The asteroid is constantly bombarded by debris in space and new research, published in The Astrophysical Journal, has suggested that even microscopic particles can have damaging effects.

Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Hayabusa2 spacecraft to conduct remote sensing and sample collection on the asteroid in 2018 and 2019. Laboratory work on these samples identified a distinct pattern of dehydration of phyllosilicates (sheet-like silicate minerals, such as magnesium-rich serpentine and saponite), whereby the bonds between the included oxygen and hydrogen atoms are broken.

Free-space optical communication links promise better security and increase bandwidths but can suffer from noise in daylight. This is particularly detrimental in quantum communications where current mitigation techniques, such as spectral, temporal, and spatial filtering, are not yet sufficient to make daylight tolerable for satellite quantum key distribution (SatQKD). As all current SatQKD systems are polarization-encoded, polarization filtering has not been investigated. However, by using time-and phase-encoded SatQKD, it is possible to filter in polarization in addition to existing domains. Scattered daylight can be more than 90% polarized in the visible band, yielding a reduction in detected daylight between 3 dB and 13 dB, such that polarization filtering can reduce the brightness of 780 nm daylight to below the unfiltered equivalent at 1,550 nm. Simulations indicate that polarization filtering increases the secure key rate and allows for SatQKD to be performed at dawn and dusk. This could open the way for daylight SatQKD utilizing shorter near-infrared wavelengths and retaining their benefits.

Published by Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

The Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron pegs the odds of “go for launch” weather at 85%. Chief meteorological risks include thick cloud layers and liftoff winds, coupled with a low-to-moderate risk of upper-level wind shear.

Check back for live FLORIDA TODAY Space Team launch coverage updates on this page, starting about 90 minutes before the launch window opens. When SpaceX’s live webcast kicks off about five minutes before liftoff, look for it posted below the countdown clock.