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The whole world has been awestruck by the magnificent images produced by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb has already turned astronomy on its head and renewed debate about how the cosmos first formed and evolved. But there were years of delays in its development that frustrated both researchers and the public at large.

So, at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) this month in Seattle, a major topic of discussion was lessons learned from Webb’s extended gestation period. And, specifically, how to take this hard-won experience and use it to proceed with the next generation of revolutionary space telescopes.

NASA and the astronomical community at large have already started initial planning on the next generation of space telescopes. Three new large space observatories could all see operation by 2045.

Continue reading “After Webb? NASA Is Already Planning New Great Space Observatories” »

The standard model of particle physics tells us that most particles we observe are made up of combinations of just six types of fundamental entities called quarks. However, there are still many mysteries, one of which is an exotic, but very short-lived, Lambda resonance known as Λ(1405). For a long time, it was thought to be a particular excited state of three quarks—up, down, and strange—and understanding its internal structure may help us learn more about the extremely dense matter that exists in neutron stars.

Investigators from Osaka University were part of a team that has now succeeded in synthesizing Λ(1405) for the first time by combining a K^- meson and a proton and determining its complex mass (mass and width). The K⁻ meson is a negatively charged particle containing a strange quark and an up antiquark. The much more familiar proton that makes up the matter that we are used to has two up quarks and a down quark. The researchers showed that Λ(1405) is best thought of as a temporary bound state of the K^- meson and the proton, as opposed to a three-quark excited state.

In their study published recently in Physics Letters B, the group describes the experiment they carried out at the J-PARC accelerator. K⁻ mesons were shot at a deuterium target, each of which had one proton and one neutron. In a successful reaction, a K⁻ meson kicked out the neutron, and then merged with the proton to produce the desired Λ(1405).

Every spacecraft glitches occasionally, and even the most powerful space telescope ever launched isn’t immune.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) launched in December 2021 and has been conducting science observations since July 2022, stunning the world with its gorgeous images and revolutionary data. But on Jan. 15, JWST’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument “experienced a communications delay within the instrument, causing its flight software to time out,” according to a Jan. 24 statement (opens in new tab) from NASA. NIRISS can’t currently be used for science, the statement noted.

This video covers Mars in 2050 and 10 future technologies in the first Mars city. Watch this next video about the world in 2050: https://bit.ly/3J23hbQ.
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SOURCES:
• https://scitechdaily.com/mars-settlement-likely-by-2050-says…-elon-musk.
• https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/elon-musk-and-nasa-may-fina…79184.html.
• https://2050.earth/predictions/a-sustainable-civilization-of-humans-on-mars.
• https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-plans-1-million-pe…2020-1
• https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex.
• https://www.inverse.com/article/54358-elon-musk-explains-how…rs-by-2050
• https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-million-people-mars-2050
• https://www.lpi.usra.edu/V2050/presentations/Tuesday/6_8236_Ehlmann.pdf.
• https://www.mars-one.com.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars.
• https://www.nationalgeographic.org/hires/human-settlement-mars/
• https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/
• https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070008279/downloads/20070008279.pdf.
• https://www.space.com/how-feed-one-million-mars-colonists.html.
• https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/12/30/col…091010001/
• https://eatlikeamartian.org/

Continue reading “Mars in 2050: 10 Future Technologies In The First Mars City” »

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Asteroids may serve as future bases and colonies for humanity as we travel into space, but could they also be converted into spaceships to take us strange new worlds around distant stars?

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Continue reading “Using Asteroids As Spaceships” »

Whether conscious of it or not, when entering a new space, we use our sense of smell to assess whether it is safe or a threat. In fact, for much of the animal kingdom, this ability is necessary for survival and reproduction. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester are finding new clues to how the olfactory sensory system aids in threat assessment and have found neurons that “learn” if a smell is a threat.

“We are trying to understand how animals interact with smell and how that influences their behavior in threatening social and non-social contexts,” said Julian Meeks, Ph.D., principal investigator of the Chemosensation and Social Learning Laboratory. “Our recent research gives us valuable tools to use in our future work and connects specific sets of neurons in our olfactory system to the memory of threatening smells.”

How the brain responds to a social threat may be guided by smell. In mice, researchers have identified a specific set of neurons in the accessory olfactory system that can learn the scent of another mouse that is a potential threat. These findings are described in a paper recently published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Earth’s potassium arrived by meteoritic delivery service finds new research led by Carnegie’s Nicole Nie and Da Wang. Their work, published in Science, shows that some primitive meteorites contain a different mix of potassium isotopes than those found in other, more-chemically processed meteorites. These results can help elucidate the processes that shaped our solar system and determined the composition of its planets.

“The extreme conditions found in stellar interiors enable stars to manufacture elements using nuclear fusion,” explained Nie, a former Carnegie postdoc now at Caltech. “Each stellar generation seeds the raw material from which subsequent generations are born and we can trace the history of this material across time.”

Some of the material produced in the interiors of stars can be ejected out into space, where it accumulates as a cloud of gas and dust. More than 4.5 billion years ago, one such cloud collapsed in on itself to form our sun.

Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.

Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.

But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”

From the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer to the return to Earth of an asteroid explorer to India’s first India’s private space launch, 2023 is set to be as busy a space exploration year as 2022. Here’s a preview.