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Category: space – Page 243

Earth’s magnetic field protects life on Earth from radiation, but it can move, and the magnetic poles can even flip

The Earth’s magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves.

Scientists have studied and tracked the motion of the magnetic poles for centuries. The historical movement of these poles indicates a change in the global geometry of the Earth’s magnetic field. It may even indicate the beginning of a field reversal—a “flip” between the north and south .

I’m a physicist who studies the interaction between the planets and space. While the north magnetic pole moving a little bit isn’t a big deal, a reversal could have a big impact on Earth’s climate and our modern technology. But these reversals don’t happen instantaneously. Instead, they occur over thousands of years.

Robot Dog Designed as Astronaut Companion

A companion robot dog, designed to provide emotional support to astronauts, has been unveiled by a student from South Korea’s Hongik University.

The small-scale robot dog Laika is named after the first dog to orbit the Earth aboard Sputnik 2.

A video shows Laika running, walking, barking and sitting. It’s designed to replicate the movements and behavior of real dogs to provide an approachable design that enables emotional connection for astronauts during lengthy missions.

The Military’s Big Bet on Artificial Intelligence

Number 4 Hamilton Place is a be-columned building in central London, home to the Royal Aeronautical Society and four floors of event space. In May, the early 20th-century Edwardian townhouse hosted a decidedly more modern meeting: Defense officials, contractors, and academics from around the world gathered to discuss the future of military air and space technology.

Things soon went awry. At that conference, Tucker Hamilton, chief of AI test and operations for the United States Air Force, seemed to describe a disturbing simulation in which an AI-enabled drone had been tasked with taking down missile sites. But when a human operator started interfering with that objective, he said, the drone killed its operator, and cut the communications system.

ESA’s Cheops mission uncovers rare star system 100 light-years away

The European Space Agency (ESA) has a number of missions ongoing to discover and study exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system.

One of those missions, Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), has uncovered a rare star system that lies around 100 light-years away.

It’s an important find because it can tell us about the formation and evolution of the planetary system, according to ESA.

A gamma-ray pulsar milestone inspires innovative astrophysics and applications

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in conjunction with the international Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration, announce the discovery of nearly 300 gamma ray pulsars in the publication of their Third Catalog of Gamma Ray Pulsars. This milestone comes 15 years after the launch of Fermi in 2008 when there were fewer than ten known gamma-ray pulsars.

“Work on this important catalog has been going on in our group for years,” said Paul Ray, Ph.D., head of the High Energy Astrophysics and Applications Section at NRL. “Our scientists and postdocs have been able to both discover and analyze the timing behavior and spectra of many of these newfound pulsars as part of our quest to further our understanding of these exotic stars that we are able to use as cosmic clocks.”

Pulsars are formed when have burned through their fuel supply and become unable to resist the inward pull of their own gravity. This results in the star collapsing into a dense, spinning, magnetized neutron star. Their spinning magnetic fields send out beams of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. As these beams sweep across the Earth, the highly sensitive Fermi gamma-ray telescope can observe their periodic energy pulses. With more than 15 years of data, Fermi has transformed the field of research.

Mars horizon captured in new image: “No Mars spacecraft has ever had this kind of view before”

NASA revealed multiple new panoramic images of clouds and dust in Mars’ skies and one of its two tiny moons taken by the spacecraft last May. They were captured by the Odyssey’s camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

The rare images were taken from an altitude of about 250 miles, the same altitude at which the International Space Station flies above Earth, according to NASA.

“If there were astronauts in orbit over Mars, this is the perspective they would have,” said Jonathon Hill, the operations lead of THEMIS. “No Mars spacecraft has ever had this kind of view before.”