A member of the L3Harris team removes a cloth from the Roman Space Telescopes primary mirror. Credit: L3Harris Technologies

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescopes primary mirror, which will collect and focus light from cosmic objects near and far, has been completed. Using this mirror, Roman will capture stunning space vistas with a field of view 100 times greater than Hubble images.

Achieving this milestone is very exciting, said Scott Smith, Roman telescope manager at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Success relies on a team with each person doing their part, and its especially true in our current challenging environment. Everyone plays a role in collecting that first image and answering inspiring questions.

Roman will peer through dust and across vast stretches of space and time to study the universe using infrared light, which human eyes cant see. The amount of detail these observations will reveal is directly related to the size of the telescopes mirror, since a larger surface gathers more light and measures finer features.

Romans primary mirror is 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) across. While its the same size as the Hubble Space Telescopes main mirror, it is less than one-fourth the weight. Romans mirror weighs only 410 pounds (186 kilograms) thanks to major improvements in technology.

The Roman Space Telescopes primary mirror reflects an American flag. Its surface is figured to a level hundreds of times finer than a typical household mirror. Credit: L3Harris Technologies

The primary mirror, in concert with other optics, will send light to Romans two science instruments the Wide Field Instrument and Coronagraph Instrument. The first is essentially a giant 300-megapixel camera that provides the same sharp resolution as Hubble across nearly 100 times the field of view. Using this instrument, scientists will be able to map the structure and distribution of invisible dark matter, study planetary systems around other stars, and explore how the universe evolved to its present state.

The coronagraph demonstrates technology that blocks out the glare of stars and allows astronomers to directly image planets in orbit around them. If the coronagraph technology performs as anticipated, it will see planets that are almost a billion times fainter than their host star and enable detailed studies of giant planets around other suns.

Roman will observe from a vantage point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun. Romans barrel-like shape will help block out unwanted light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon, and the spacecrafts distant location will help keep the instruments cool, ensuring that it will be able to detect faint infrared signals.

Crane operators lower the support equipment to move the Roman Space Telescopes primary mirror. Using this mirror, Roman will provide a new view into the universe, helping scientists solve cosmic mysteries related to dark matter, dark energy, and planets around other stars. Credit: L3Harris Technologies

Because it will experience a range of temperatures between manufacture and testing on Earth and operations in space, the primary mirror is made of a specialty ultralow-expansion glass. Most materials expand and contract when temperatures change, but if the primary mirror changed shape it would distort the images from the telescope. Romans mirror and its support structure are designed to reduce flexing, which will preserve the quality of its observations.

Development of the mirror is much further along than it would typically be at this stage since the mission leverages a mirror that was transferred to NASA from the National Reconnaissance Office. The team modified the mirrors shape and surface to meet Romans science objectives.

The newly resurfaced mirror sports a layer of silver less than 400 nanometers thick about 200 times thinner than a human hair. The silver coating was specifically chosen for Roman because of how well it reflects near-infrared light. By contrast, Hubbles mirror is coated with layers of aluminum and magnesium fluoride to optimize visible and ultraviolet light reflectivity. Likewise, the James Webb Space Telescopes mirrors have a gold coating to suit its longer wavelength infrared observations.

Romans mirror is so finely polished that the average bump on its surface is only 1.2 nanometers tall more than twice as smooth as the mission requires. If the mirror were scaled to be Earths size, these bumps would be just a quarter of an inch high.

The mirror was precisely finished to the Roman Space Telescopes optical prescription, said Bonnie Patterson, program manager at L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York. Since its so much smoother than required, it will provide even greater scientific benefit than originally planned.

Next, the mirror will be mounted for additional testing at L3Harris. It has already been extensively tested at both cold and ambient temperatures. The new tests will be done with the mirror attached to its support structure.

Romans primary mirror is complete, yet our work isnt over, said Smith. Were excited to see this mission through to launch and beyond, and eager to witness the wonders it will reveal.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at Goddard, with participation by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from research institutions across the United States.

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NASAs Roman Space Telescope Primary Mirror Completed Field of View 100 Times Greater Than Hubble - SciTechDaily

Hurricane Laura's winds intensified from 75 mph to 140 mph in just 24 hours, taking the storm from a Category 1 to a Category 4.

Such rapid intensification, which drove Laura to make landfall in Louisiana with 150 mph winds last week, is difficult to forecast. But a team of researchers led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is hoping machine learning can help.

Future storms: Climate change might make Hurricane Lauras 150 mph winds less rare

Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricane's wind speeds increase by 35 mph (or more) within 24 hours. This is difficult to accurately predict because it's dependant on both the environment outside and inside a hurricane. And on the inside, it's difficult to measure a storm's characteristics -- such as how hard it's raining or how quickly the air is moving vertically -- and to determine which ones result in rapid intensification, according to a NASA news release.

To create a new forecast model, described in a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the team of researchers sifted through years of satellite data and determined that rainfall rate in the dense wall of thunderstorms surrounding the storm's eye is a good indicator of intensification. The harder it's raining inside a hurricane, the more likely the storm is to intensify.

The researchers also noticed the ice water content of clouds within a hurricane and the temperature of air flowing away from the eye at the top of a hurricane factor into intensity changes.

Ultimately, the team added rainfall rate, ice water content and temperature of the air flowing away from the eye (called the outflow temperature) to predictors that National Hurricane Center uses in its operational model. Then the team came up with its own predictions using machine learning.

The researchers tested their model on storms from 2009 to 2014, and then they compared its performance with the National Hurricane Center's operational forecast model for the same storms.

Expect more activity:An already busy hurricane season is about to kick into high gear

For hurricanes with winds that increased by at least 35 mph within 24 hours, the researchers' model had a 60 percent higher probability of detecting the rapid intensification compared to the National Hurricane Center's current operational forecast model. For hurricanes with winds that increased by at least 40 mph, the new model outperformed the operational one at detecting these events by 200 percent, according to the news release.

Hui Su, an atmospheric scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was the lead author on the team's paper. Su and her colleagues, including researchers from the National Hurricane Center, are testing their model this hurricane season and, in the future, plan to sift through satellite data for additional hurricane characteristics that could improve their machine learning model.

"It's an important forecast to get right because of the potential for harm to people and property," Su said in the release.

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NASA researchers use machine learning to better predict if a hurricane will rapidly intensify - Houston Chronicle

searching for leaders for missions to the MoonExpedition 61 Flight Directors Marcos Flores, left, and Pooja Jesrani, right, along with their team of flight controllers monitor operations on the International Space Station on Dec. 24, 2019. (NASA image)

NASA is looking for leaders for one of the best jobs on Earth for human spaceflight including missions to the Moon the position of flight director in mission control at the agencys Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA will accept applications for new flight directors Thursday, Sept. 3, through Thursday, Sept. 10. U.S. citizens can apply at:

http://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/577699400

Those chosen as NASA flight directors will lead human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station, as American astronauts once again are launching on American rockets and spacecraft from American soil to the orbiting laboratory.

For almost 20 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space.

Flight directors also will lead upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon, and eventually the first human missions to Mars.

Flight directors are responsible for leading teams of flight controllers, research and engineering experts, and support personnel around the world, and making the real-time decisions critical to keeping NASA astronauts safe in space.

NASA flight directors need a unique mixture of confidence and humility, innovation and organization, said Holly Ridings, chief flight director at Johnson.

The situations you have to deal with are occasionally very tough, and the stakes are always very high. But if you are able to handle that responsibility, there is nothing like knowing that you played a key role in the historic work that NASA does on a day-to-day basis.

To be considered, flight director candidates must be U.S. citizens with a bachelors degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics.

They also will need substantial related, progressively responsible professional experience, including time-critical decision-making experience in high-stress, high-risk environments. Many flight directors have previously been NASA flight controllers, though it is not a prerequisite to apply.

NASA will announce selections later this fall. The new flight directors then will receive extensive training on flight control and spacecraft systems, as well as operational leadership and risk management.

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Do You Have What it Takes? NASA Seeks Next Class of Flight Directors for Human Spaceflight Missions - SpaceCoastDaily.com

The Moon is both seductively close to Earth and cosmically far away: Decades after the end of the space race, it remains extraordinarily expensive and difficult to actually get there.

The journey just got a bit easier, however, thanks to a freshly published NASA invention.

The agency's patent doesn't cover a new piece of equipment or lines of code, but a trajectory a route designed to save a lunar-bound mission time, fuel, and money, and boost its scientific value.

On June 30, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted and publishedNASA's patentfor a series of orbital manoeuvres, which Business Insider first learned about viaa tweetby a lawyer named Jeff Steck.

The technique isn't meant for large spaceships that carry astronauts or rovers, but for smaller, more tightly budgeted missions tasked with doing meaningful science.

And the first spacecraft to take advantage of this new orbital path could deliver unprecedented discoveries from the far side of the Moon.

Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder, or Dapper, spacecraft. (University of Colorado Boulder/NASA)

Called theDark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder, or Dapper, the upcoming mission aims to record, for the first time, low-frequency radio waves emitted during the earliest epochs of the Universe when atoms, stars,black holes, and galaxies were just beginning to form, and where scientists may detect the first signals of as-yet-unseen dark matter.

When NASAlaunched three astronauts to the Moon in 1968, it took the crew just a few days to get there. Such direct shots are expensive, though, requiring an enormous rocket to climb out of Earth's deep gravity well.

There are far more efficient paths to the Moon that can use smaller rockets if you have time to spare, which robots do.

By taking time to swing around the Earth, for instance, a spacecraft cansteal some of the planet's momentumand slingshot out to the Moon in a series of long orbits that cost it little to no fuel.

Fuel remains necessary to correct orbits and manoeuvre through space, but every ounce a spacecraft carries is mass that an engineer can't dedicate toward other components, including scientific instruments.

The calculus is especially tricky for compact spacecraft like Dapper, which would be about the size of a microwave, since there is (quite literally) less margin for error.

Faced with the extra challenge of trying to fly Dapper on a relatively thin US$150 million budget fromNASA's Explorers program, the team behind the mission concept realised they couldn't buy their own rocket ride all the way to lunar orbit.

"This trajectory to the Moon arose out of necessity, as these things often do,"Jack Burns, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and leader of the Dapper mission, told Business Insider. "We needed to keep the launch costs low and find a cheap way to get to the Moon."

They started with a flight they knew they could afford: one togeosynchronous or high-Earth orbit, a region about 22,236 miles from Earth's equator (about one-tenth of the way to the Moon). It's a common destination for telecommunications and other satellites built to hover above one spot on the planet. Dapper is small enough to piggyback on such missions.

"If we could just get a launch into high-Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, then we could get the rest of the way there with only a modest tank of fuel," Burns said.

After crunching the numbers, the team found a new low-energy trajectory to the Moon, which their patent describes as a "method for transferring a spacecraft from geosynchronous transfer orbit to lunar orbit."

It enlists the help of Earth and the Moon's gravity to speed up and slow down Dapper at the right moments, cutting down on the amount of propellant required.

NASA-patented trajectory from Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit to the Moon. (NASA)

NASA saysthis new spin on the gravity assist keeps the flight time to about 2 1/2 months, whereas similar options can take six months.

The trajectory also comes with numerous options to slip a spacecraft into an orbit of any angle around the Moon, at practically any time. And it avoids a zone of radiation around Earth called theVan Allen belts, which can damage sensitive electronics.

It may seem odd to patent lunar travel, but Burns said it is really no different from any other invention.

"It's a creation that was the result of doing numerical modelling of planetary trajectories, he said. "So it is intellectual property."

NASA patents and licenses inventions to achieve the "widest distribution" of a technology, Dan Lockney, a NASA executive,told IPWatchdog in 2018.

"Securing patents and licensing the technologies is a method NASA and other government agencies use to ensure access to government-funded innovations," Clare Skelly, a NASA representative, told Business Insider in an email.

The agency charges as much as $US50,000 to licence its patents but typically asks for $US5,000 to $US10,000, plus royalties.

"It is through the upfront fees that NASA seeks to recover some of its investment in the patent filing and maintenance costs," the agency's licensing website says.

In other words: Doing the grunt work of patenting and then charging a minimum for that work is a formal and industry-compatible practice of disseminating the fruits of NASA's labors.

Unofficially, NASA's scheme also keeps private companies and foreign nations from stockpiling important space technologies for exorbitant sums, and that helps foster American missions and international collaborations. (The agency does occasionally release patentsinto the public domain.)

Burns said he didn't believe that NASA will "ever make any money" off the new trajectory patent, since it's often a matter of historical record-keeping.

"It just is a marker that lays down that this was your intellectual property you did this, and you were the creator of it so that at least when people use it, they give credit," he said.

Dapper's goal is to study the Universe from a "cone of silence" on thefar side of the Moon. In that solitary region, humanity's cacophony of wireless emissions can't interfere with antennas trying to pick up weak, low-frequency emissions from more than 13 billion years ago.

"This is the only truly radio-quiet region in the inner solar system," Burns said.

Humanity's pollution of radio waves which leak out of almost every electronic device can easily bend around corners and over horizons (so erecting barriers to block them is fruitless). "In order to get the same amount of quiet, you'd have to go out past the orbit of Jupiter, and go that far out in order for the noise just from Earth."

Specifically, the mission seeks to detect radio emissions of the "neutral hydrogen" that dominated the very early Universe. The cosmos produced the nuclei, or cores, of these first-ever atoms within a microsecond of the Big Bang; the event's dense, hot soup of energy had expanded and cooled off, permitting protons, neutrons, and electrons to form.

About 380,000 years later, that particle soup had cooled off further, allowing the positively charged protons to capture negatively charged electrons and become neutrally charged hydrogen atoms.

The phase is often called the "Dark Ages" because, in visible wavelengths of light, a human wouldn't have seen anything.

"There's no stars. There's no galaxies. There's no other source of radiation. So how do you probe that part of the Universe?" Burns said. "You use the one thing that you've got a lot of, which is neutral hydrogen."

The problem is that those radio signals, which reach Earth in the 10-to-100-megahertz range, not only are scrambled by our planet's atmosphere, but match the emissions of countless power supplies, garage-door openers, radio transmitters, space satellites, digital TV signals, and more.

"The radio spectrum down at these frequencies? It's just absolutely filled with garbage," Burns said.

Even in space, there's so much interference from humanity and the Sun that the radio-equivalent temperature around Earth is "nearly a million degrees," Burns said.

By slipping behind the Moon at a moment when the sun is blocked as well as the Earth, Dapper is expected to make the first clear recordings of a neutral hydrogen signal. The spacecraft might also gather evidence of the first stars, and possibly the first black holes and galaxies that formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called "Cosmic Dawn."

And maybe just maybe the spacecraft could turn up the first direct detection ofdark matter, which makes up about 80 percent of the mass in the Universe but hasyet to be identified.

For the researchers that successfully pull off such a mission, two Nobel Prizes in science could await.

"One is you're detecting when the first stars and galaxies form and what they are. And No. 2, you're detecting dark matter," said Burns, who pooh-poohed the idea of winning any such prize himself.

Burns and others came up with theDark Ages Radio Explorerlunar mission about 10 years ago, which is why that mission and not Dapper is described in the patent, which NASA filed in 2015. (The USPTO is a notoriously slow-moving federal organ.)

Burns said that while NASA was excited about DARE no one had ever done something like it before the agency was bound by rules that favoured established science and hardware over newer approaches.

"There is no history of low-frequency experiments in space. So, on the one side, people are excited: 'Wow, you're opening up an entire new field of cosmology. This is great. This is fantastic. You need to do it,'" Burns said. "The other side is, 'Well, you've never done it before, so it must be risky.' And so you get marked down for the risks."

After years of being passed up, Burns and his colleagues decided to shrink the car-size spacecraft, ditch novel hardware for proven "heritage" technologies, and try again.

The gambit appears to be working. NASA hasawarded Dappera few million dollars to prove out the concept and mature its hardware design to a flight-ready state over the next two years.

When that work concludes, Dapper would have a good chance of getting NASA's full funding to build the spacecraft and book a rocket ride, possibly from SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, or some other provider. (Burns said the mission is estimated to cost about $US70 million, plus the price of a launch.)

Burns isn't sure the mission will require the new patent to reach lunar orbit anymore. In the years since his team came up with it, commercial rocket providers have started planninglaunches to the Moon. NASA is also working toward the launch of its massiveSpace Launch Systemrocket, which could easily carry Dapper on a flight in the mid-2020s.

"The possible ways to get there have widened considerably since this orbital trajectory was first designed," Burns said.

But time is growing short. There's a push to land humans (and their noisy electronics) at the Moon's poles, including an effort by China.

That nation's space agency has also landed spacecraft on the lunar far side, where its robots areexploring the surface for the first time.

"Given how simple we have made the Dapper instrument now, a lot of people could build it. A lot of countries, even individual companies, could build this," Burns said. "Every so often I see a paper coming out of China with my figures in it, and they're talking about their own mission."

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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NASA Discovered a Faster, Cheaper Way of Getting to The Moon... And Patented It - ScienceAlert

Melvin, who was never afraid launching into space on two Space Shuttle Atlantis missions to help build the International Space Station, never knew what was going to happen when the cops pulled him over.

"I've been on this rocket with millions of pounds of thrust and not once was I afraid of going to space," said Melvin, who is Black. "It's when I've been stopped by police officers that I didn't even know ... I was starting to sweat and just holding the steering wheel really hard."

"Every father in the Black community has a conversation with their son to tell them that if you get stopped by an officer, you know, you assume the position, which is 10-2 (hands on the wheel), look straight ahead," he added. "You tell the officer, you know, you're real respectful, you say you're reaching for your obvious things."

Panelists -- who shared their personal experiences and discussed the Black Lives Matter movement, the death of George Floyd, and subsequent protests -- included former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, NASA Deputy Manager of Commercial Lunar Payload Services Camille Alleyne and Danielle Wood, director of the Space Enabled Research Group in MIT's Media Lab.

Melvin can still remember one traffic stop when he was a student at Heritage High School in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he graduated in 1982.

"I was in a car with my girlfriend and a police officer rolled up on us," Melvin said. "He took her out of the car and told her that I was raping her because he wanted me to go to jail.

"And you know, when Black men get into the prison system, that they really never get out and have a second chance. I was going to college on scholarship and want to be a chemistry major."

Melvin urged people to make sure they're not part of the problem by contributing to racism, asking people to assess both what they're doing to hurt and how they can help fight racism.

The path to space

Luckily that stop didn't derail his career. Melvin ended up logging more than 565 hours in space, but space was not his first choice.

During the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Melvin said he was the "antenna engineer," holding the antennas for his parents while they watched it.

"And the next day all the kids in the neighborhood said, 'Do you want to be an astronaut?' No, I don't see someone who looks like me," Melvin recalled.

Five blocks down the street from where Melvin grew up, Arthur Ashe learned how to play tennis. Ashe, the only Black man to win singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open, turned pro in 1969. Ashe was also the first Black player selected to the United States Davis Cup team.

"My dad talked about his perseverance his athleticism, his intelligence," Melvin said. "'I want you to be like him.' It wasn't until I got to NASA, when a friend said, 'You'd be a great astronaut.'"

Melvin didn't fill out an application until his friend, Charlie Camarda, got into the astronaut program. "If that guy can get in, I can get in, and that's when I applied."

Melvin was drafted in 1986 to play in the National Football League for the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys but pulled his hamstrings and didn't end up playing any regular season games.

In 1989, he began working at NASA Langley Research Center in the Fiber Optic Sensors group of the Nondestructive Evaluation Sciences Branch, according to NASA. He was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1998.

In addition to serving as an astronaut, Melvin has also headed NASA's education program, co-chaired the White House's Federal Coordination in STEM Education Task Force and chaired the International Space Education Board.

Contrasting moments

"I see this Black man getting his life snuffed out, saying he can't breathe," Melvin said. "And when I heard him calling for his mother, that's when I started crying because I thought about my mother. I thought about if that was me, being the life snuffed out of me."

Floyd's death as now-former police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes was in sharp contrast with the achievement of launching American astronauts from US soil on US rockets for the first time since 2011.

"If we can (send people to the International Space Station), we can do anything. We can fix these problems."

And it leads back to the necessity of diversity, Melvin said.

Melvin said his "aha" moment in space came unexpectedly. He anticipated it would happen as he helped install the European Space Agency's Columbus Laboratory on the International Space Station in 2008.

But it wasn't until NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson invited Melvin over to the Russian segment of the station to share a meal. The crew included astronauts with Russian, French, German, African American and Asian American backgrounds and was hosted by Whitson -- the first female commander of the space station, Melvin said.

"We were breaking bread at 17,500 miles per hour, going around the planet every 90 minutes. And that was when my head exploded, and I had this epiphany about our planet and looking back at it, getting this thing called the orbital perspective."

It's something astronauts gain as they gaze down at our planet as a whole.

"I think we as a civilization need to take that thing that we get in space as astronauts," he said. "And we know that if we don't work together as a team, and we were one of the most diverse teams in space, then we (would) perish."

Working together is the only way Melvin thinks humanity can survive on this planet, get back to the moon and get to Mars.

"The way we do it is with the right perspective. And we bring this perspective home from space, to go back to space as a civilization of diverse people," he said. "It's perspective together, that we work together, we live together, and we change the universe together."

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Former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin was never afraid to go to space. But a police stop made him sweat - CNN

The Fourth Industrial Revolutions velocity, scope, and systems-level impact contribute to a shift in business models across all industries. The on-demand economy and changing nature of work, especially amid COVID-19, have led to a significant skills gap[1]. There are 1.7 million unfulfilled tech jobs across industries in the U.S. and Europe[2].

At Microsoft, our goal is to help people throughout the entire education and learning continuumfrom education through ones professional careerto fully participate in the digital economy. Part of this is about preparing the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow. Our unique responsibility and opportunity is to ensure everyone has access to the promise and potential of technology for the digital economy. This contributes to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe that those who create with technology are those who write history and shape our future; everyone should have access to learning these skills.

Our ambition is to empower all students to confidently create with technology. Our products like Minecraft: Education Edition, MakeCode, and Visual Studio Code bringthis to life by providing a canvas for creating with technology. We offer a range of options for learners of all ages to learn coding.

To prepare the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow while inspiring their creativity, we have partnered with Wonder Woman 1984, Smithsonian Learning Labs, and NASA to create distinct portfolios of project-based lessons that teach programming. We wanted to cultivate learning by connecting content to something interesting, relevant, and most importantly, inspiring for learners of all ageswhether they are 8, 18, or 80.

Included in these collections are:

Five Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Lab lessons

Three lessons inspired by NASA

These new modules and learning paths created by Sarah Guthals are inspired by NASA scientists. They help prepare learners for a career in space exploration.

1 World Economic Forum. March 2019. The digital skills gap is widening fast. Heres how to bridge it.

2 Wall Street Journal. October 15, 2019. Americas Got Talent, Just Not Enough in IT, citing data from CompTIA.

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Learn to code with Wonder Woman, Smithsonian Learning Labs, and NASA - Microsoft

From the start, Machs principle was a controversial addendum to general relativity. Some of Einsteins contemporaries, especially the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, labored to show that his concept of inertia was inconsistent with other mathematical implications of general relativity. But it was the physicist Carl Brans who finally expelled the idea from respectable physics. In Brans PhD thesis, published in 1961, he used mathematics to demonstrate that inertia could not be explained by the gravitational influence of distant matter in the universe. After Brans paper, everybody assumed that inertia la Einstein was not contained in general relativity, Woodward says. Thats still the view of most general relativists.

But as Woodward dug deeper into the history and science of general relativity, he couldnt shake the feeling that Brans had gotten it all wrong. And as he discovered in the autumn of 1989, if you accepted Einsteins view that inertia was inextricably linked to gravity, it opened up the possibility for propellantless propulsion.

Woodwards views on gravity and inertia arent mainstream, but its not crazy to think Einstein might have been right all along. I'm pretty comfortable with Jim's take on it, because it's very historically oriented, says Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and historian of science at the University of Arkansas, who has collaborated with Woodward. He is very much motivated by Einstein's understanding of Machs principle. It's not at all unusual for an idea to be discovered, rejected, and then later make a comeback.

In Einsteins famous equation, E=mc2, an objects energy, E, is equal to its mass, m, multiplied by the speed of light squared. That means if you change an objects energy, you will also change its mass. An objects mass is a measure of its inertiathats why it takes greater force to push a more massive object than a less massive oneso changing its energy will also change its inertia. And if, per Machs principle, inertia and gravity are one and the same, then changing an objects energy means messing with the very fabric of spacetime. In theory, anyway.

Woodward realized that if Einstein was right and inertia really is gravity in disguise, it should be possible to detect these brief changes in an objects mass as its energy fluctuates. If part of an object accelerated at the exact moment when it became a little heavier, it would pull the rest of the object along with it. In other words, it would create thrust without propellant.

Woodward called these temporary changes in mass Mach effects, and the engine that could use them a Mach-effect thruster. By combining hundreds or thousands of these drives, they could conceivably produce enough thrust to send a spaceship to the stars in less than a human lifetime. How to keep a person alive in space for decades is still an enormous question. But it is a mere footnote to the more fundamental issue of figuring out how to cross a void trillions of miles wide in any reasonable amount of time.

By 1995, Woodwards ideas about Mach effects had coalesced into a full theory, and he turned his attention to building a thruster to prove it. The design he settled on was simple and opportunistic. A local electronics manufacturer was relocating, and an employee had alerted the university it had some leftover materials on offer. Woodward swung by its old office and snapped up a pile of piezoelectric disks the company had left behind.

To build his interstellar engine, Woodward mounted the piezoelectric disks to a block of brass and put a cap on the other end to hold it all in place. When piezoelectric disks are hit with a pulse of electricity, they bulge slightly. This expansion causes them to push off of the brass block and accelerate in the opposite direction. According to Woodwards theory of Mach effects, the electric current would also make the piezoelectric disks ever-so-slightly heavier. This causes them to pull the brass block toward them. When the electricity stops flowing, the whole ensemble will have scooted slightly forward. By repeating this process over and over, Woodward figured, the Mach-effect thruster should accelerate. Fearn, his closest collaborator, compares it to rowing a boat on the ocean of spacetime.

Photograph: Rozette Rago

A homemade vacuum chamber houses Woodwards Mach-effect thruster and test stand. The smallest breeze would invalidate the results.

Over the next few years, he managed to coax a few hundred nanonewtons of thrust out of his Mach-effect drive. Most of Woodwards peers dismissed his nearly imperceptible results as a measurement error. It is not hard to see whywhen you blow out candles on a birthday cake, you produce around three orders of magnitude more force than what Woodward was reporting. Even if the device did work, it wouldnt be enough to move a small satellite, much less a starship.

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Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel - WIRED

The lessons use space exploration and the challenges of cosmic exploration to teach the fundamentals of programming.

Image: NASA

Over the decades, NASA has inspired generations of computer scientists, astronauts, and others to broaden humankind's knowledge of the ever-expanding cosmos. In recent years, machine learning, AI, and other technologies have been tapped to assist with a host of operational tasks and procedures ranging from confirming new exoplanets to artificial intelligence (AI) astronaut assistants. To teach the next generation of computer scientists the basics of Python programming, Microsoft recentlyannounced a partnership with NASA to create a series of lessons based on space exploration efforts.

SEE:Hiring kit: Python developer(TechRepublic Premium)

Overall, the project includes three different NASA-inspired lessons. These learning pathways were created by computer scientist and entrepreneur Sarah Guthals to teach programming fundamentals using space exploration challenges and themes. The Introduction to Python for Space Exploration lesson will provide students with "an introduction to the types of space exploration problems that Python and data science can influence." Made up of eight units in total, this module also details the upcoming Artemis lunar exploration mission.

SEE:Key details: NASA's mission to Mars (free PDF)(TechRepublic)

In another learning path, students will learn to design an AI model capable of classifying different types of space rocks depicted in random photos, according to Microsoft. However, the company recommends a "basic understanding of Python for Data Science" as a prerequisite for this particular lesson.

The last of the three learning paths serves as an introduction to machine learning and demonstrates ways these technologies can help assist with space exploration operations.

Students are presented real-world NASA challenges, particularly rocket launch delays, and learn how the agency can leverage machine learning to resolve the issues.

The primary objective of the machine learning lesson is "to get students excited and curious to discover how machine learning could help solve other problems in space discovery and different aspects of life," according to Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced partnerships with Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Labs to curate five additional programming lessons for students. In Museum Heist, students learn how to code using Minecraft: Education Edition. Players explore a museum and are tasked with solving a series of puzzles to help identify the location of a stolen piece of artwork.

In another lesson, students must decode a secret message to unlock a Wonder Woman 1984 Easter egg. This lesson requires no previous experience with Python and serves as an introductory lesson to the programming lesson, according to Microsoft.

From the hottest programming languages to the jobs with the highest salaries, get the developer news and tips you need to know. Weekly

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Python programming in the final frontier: Microsoft and NASA release student learning portal - TechRepublic

Jake Eckardt is starting to sift through the boxes, the papers, the ham radio gear.

John Chitwood, his late husband, loved to build things and take them apart, but he rarely threw anything out.

Eckardt found the letters he wrote to Mr. Chitwood after they met in 1995 at a convention for ham radio operators. They were with other people then but stayed in touch. Eckardt didnt know Mr. Chitwood had saved the letters.

His awards from a 37-year career at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center are scattered about the office, the garden shed and the garage.

And settled onto any available space ham radio gear.

During his life, Mr. Chitwood connected with ham radio operators all over the world. Through his work at NASA on planetary probes and satellites, he helped connect this world to places way beyond it.

Mr. Chitwood, who was hospitalized for a fall and then tested positive for the coronavirus, died June 26. He was 73.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. Chitwoods grandfather brought home a 17-tube, Zenith shortwave radio, and before long, the elementary schooler took over a corner of his fathers workbench and started building ham radios.

His first, brother David Chitwood remembers, was made from a metal file box.

Mr. Chitwood moved on to the radio club in high school at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and got his novice license in ham radio in 1961.

He loved to talk to people, his brother said on the radio, at family events, as a DJ at his college radio station at Drexel University. At 18, through a program between his university and the industry, Mr. Chitwood started working at NASAs Goddard campus in Greenbelt, Md.

There, he spent his career working on new ways to communicate.

At Goddard, Mr. Chitwoods desk was covered with neat towers of papers and technical magazines. He could find anything in those piles quickly, said Michael Powers, who worked for Mr. Chitwood in the Microwave Systems Branch.

Cathy Long worked for him, too, and chose his team when she joined NASA because, as one of the few women there at the time, she thought hed be a supportive boss.

She was right.

He gave his young reports big jobs and hid in the back of group pictures, remember Powers and Long, who are married.

Mr. Chitwood worked on the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE. In 2006, two scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for work that looks back into the infancy of the Universe and attempts to gain some understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars. It is based on measurements made with the help of the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989.

John was a major contributor to the success of that mission, Long said.

At work and with family, Mr. Chitwood was intensely private.

We had to be very careful in those days, Eckardt said.

In 2002, Mr. Chitwoods long-time partner died.

More than a decade later, Mr. Chitwood stopped his brother as he started to leave a holiday gathering.

Theres something I have to tell you, he said. Ive fallen in love for the second time in my life.

Mr. Chitwood and Eckardt moved to St. Pete in 2015. They married in 2017.

Here, Eckardt said, they traveled the world, had their best years together, made friends and memories.

One evening, Eckardt remembers, Mr. Chitwood took his husband to stand in the front yard. Eckardt looked up at the night sky. Mr. Chitwood looked down at his watch.

The space station should be coming over the horizon, he said.

There it came, Eckardt said. It was just a little star that flew across the sky.

Were collecting stories of the people weve lost to the coronavirus. Please share suggestions at khare@poynter.org. And read our collection of obituaries here.

Coach G pushed generations of athletes to believe in themselves

Michael Konrad spent his life making his co-workers and community better

Deo Persaud built his life from scratch in Guyana, then did it again in America

Rita Mosely walked miles each day for work and pushed her family much farther

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NASA engineer who died from the coronavirus reached this world and beyond - Tampa Bay Times

A new NASA space observatory could push planet-hunting forward at warp speed by gathering data up to 500 times faster than the venerable Hubble Space Telescope does.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST) passed a key ground-system design review this month, according to NASA. Roman, as the telescope is called in short, relies on technology that was originally built for spy missions on Earth. Instead, after its launch in the mid-2020s, Roman will spy on exoplanets across the galaxy, as well as many other cosmic phenomena.

Roman will be optimized for a kind of planetary survey called microlensing, which is an observational effect that happens when mass warps the fabric of space-time. At its most extreme, this kind of gravitational lensing is used to observe very massive objects such as galaxies or black holes. In miniature, however, microlensing creates enough "warping" in smaller stars and planets for planet-hunting.

Related: 7 ways to discover alien planets

At this smaller scale, microlensing happens when one star aligns closely with a second star, from the vantage point of Earth. The star that is closer to our planet focuses and amplifies the light from the star that is further away, allowing scientists to see it in a little more detail than usual. Even planets that are orbiting the foreground star can magnify the star's light, creating a spike in brightness.

Roman's microlensing capabilities will be coupled with a wide field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble's, while capturing stars and planets with the same resolution as the famed telescope. NASA expects Roman to pick up more data than any of the agency's other astrophysics missions.

Roman's efforts will build on other NASA missions optimized for planet-hunting, including the past Kepler mission that found thousands of exoplanets and the current Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) looking for Earth-like planets close to us. Hubble, while not designed for planet-hunting since it launched just when discoveries were beginning, has done plenty of exoplanet science as well. Numerous observatories on Earth have found their own planets or confirmed observations made by space telescopes, creating a larger community of exoplanet science that Roman will contribute to after its launch.

"With such a large number of stars and frequent observations, Roman's microlensing survey will see thousands of planetary events," Rachel Akeson, task lead for the Roman Science Support Center at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, said in a NASA statement. "Each one will have a unique signature, which we can use to determine the planet's mass and distance from its star."

Gathering the data is one challenge. Parsing and understanding the information for discoveries and "lessons learned" is another. The ground systems supporting Roman will rely on cloud-based remote services and advanced analytical tools to make sense of the enormous amounts of data the telescope collects: Roman's design calls for the telescope to watch hundreds of millions of stars every 15 minutes for several months at a stretch.

Another notable change from previous flagship missions is the speed at which Roman's data will become public; NASA has promised to make all data available only days after observations are collected.

"Since scientists everywhere will have rapid access to the data, they will be able to quickly discover short-lived phenomena, such as supernova explosions. Detecting these phenomena quickly will allow other telescopes to perform follow-up observations," NASA added in the same statement.

Exoplanets and supernovas are not the only things Roman will discover. It will hunt for brown dwarfs, which are "failed stars" (objects much more massive than Jupiter that are not quite large enough to sustain nuclear fusion). Other expected astronomy targets include runaway stars and bizarre cosmic objects such as the neutron stars and black holes that are left behind when stars run out of fuel.

Roman will also join other observatories in trying to figure out the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which is impossible to observe except through monitoring effects on other objects. Roman's observations will allow the telescope collect precise measurements from numerous galaxies, mapping the distribution and structure of regular matter and dark matter across the universe's history.

Among other applications, Roman's work in dark energy and dark matter could help scientists understand why the universe is expanding, and why that expansion is accelerating as the universe gets bigger. That discovery of acceleration got an assist from Hubble in the 1990s, eventually leading to a Nobel Prize in 2011.

Another Roman partnership with its predecessor will be follow up on Hubble's Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS). This survey charted how galaxies develop over time; Hubble took 21 days to gather the information, but Roman will only take half an hour to conduct a similar investigation.

"With its incredibly fast survey speeds, Roman will observe planets by the thousands, galaxies by the millions, and stars by the billions," Karoline Gilbert, mission scientist for the Roman Science Operations Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in the same NASA statement. "These vast datasets will allow us to address cosmic mysteries that hint at new fundamental physics."

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will send the hunt for exoplanets into warp speed - Space.com

Abnormally warm temperatures have spawned an intense fire season in eastern Siberia this summer. Satellite data show that fires have been more abundant, more widespread, and produced more carbon emissions than recent seasons.

The area shown in the time-lapse sequence above includes the Sakha Republic, one of the most active fire regions in Siberia this summer. The images show smoke plumes billowing from July 30 to August 6, 2020, as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAAs Suomi NPP satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra satellite. Strong winds occasionally carried the plumes as far as Alaska in late July. As of August 6, approximately 19 fires were burning in the province.

After the Arctic fires in 2019, the activity in 2020 was not so surprising through June, said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. What has been surprising is the rapid increase in the scale and intensity of the fires through July, largely driven by a large cluster of active fires in the northern Sakha Republic.

Estimates show that around half of the fires in Arctic Russia this year are burning through areas with peat soildecomposed organic matter that is a large natural carbon source. Warm temperatures (such as the record-breaking heatwave in June) can thaw and dry frozen peatlands, making them highly flammable. Peat fires can burn longer than forest fires and release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Parrington noted that fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide (CO2) in June and July 2020 alone than in any complete fire season since 2003 (when data collection began). That estimate is based on data compiled by CAMS, which incorporates data from NASAs MODIS active fire products.

The destruction of peat by fire is troubling for so many reasons, said Dorothy Peteet of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As the fires burn off the top layers of peat, the permafrost depth may deepen, further oxidizing the underlying peat. Peteet and colleagues recently reported that the amount of carbon stored in northern peatlands is double the previous estimates.

Fires in these regions are not just releasing recent surface peat carbon, but stores that have taken 15,000 years to the accumulate, said Peteet. They also release methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

If fire seasons continue to increase in severity, and possibly in seasonal extent, more peatlands will burn, said Peteet. This source of more carbon dioxide and methane to our atmosphere increases the greenhouse gas problem for us, making the planet even warmer.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kasha Patel.

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Another Intense Summer of Fires in Siberia - nasa.gov

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While you were teleworking and hunting online for fashion masks, a major federal new procurement rule sprang up. Right now it only applies to the Defense Department and NASA. But it could soon come to all agencies. For what it is and how it changes things,Federal Drive with Tom Teminturned to Washington D.C. procurement attorney Joe Petrillo.

Tom Temin: Joe, this I guess implements something from an older NDAA. Tell us about this rule.

Joe Petrillo: Sure. Well it started with the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. And so this is about three and a half years later, and we finally have a FAR rule implementing that provision. It became effective August 3. So were right on the cusp of the beginning of this, this new system. If the regulation creates a new type of multiple award task and delivery order contract for services, its not going to apply to goods, just services. And its at the option of the acquiring agency, they can do things the old way or they can try this new technique. The basic concept here is that price or cost is not evaluated at the time of contract award. Right now the laws and regulations require the evaluation of price or cost at the time of contract award. Thats not going to happen here. Instead, every offer or offeror with a technically acceptable proposal that otherwise conforms to the solicitation gets a contract award. But when the orders are awarded and competed, then price or cost is evaluated for every order thats placed under the vehicle.

Tom Temin: So a single agency with a need can create almost like a miniature GWAC just for itself against which it will issue task orders, but it will have multiple awards initially.

Joe Petrillo: Itll have multiple awards, and those awards are made without consideration of price. The price competition and the price consideration comes later on when the orders are being competed. There are a few other requirements, the vehicle has to have an expected value over the simplified acquisition threshold, which was also raised with new regulations to about $250,000, half a million in certain conditions. The contracts have to be for the same or similar services and the vehicle cant be used for sole source 8a awards. But other than that, it is stated.

Tom Temin: If I have a requirement for services, say Im going to modernize my IT infrastructure in my agency, and thats going to take a series of services, I can put out a solicitation and I can make four or five or six awards but not actually give anyone any money. And then once those awards are made, as I come up with task orders, then I pick one of the awardees based on the price of that task order. Is that how it works?

Joe Petrillo: Thats the basic idea. But actually the number of awards isnt really going to be up to the agency, its going to be every offeror who submits a technically acceptable proposal that otherwise conforms to the solicitation requirements. One question is why do this at all? And the reason is because evaluating price in these umbrella services contracts, where the work is done under task orders, extremely difficult. Sometimes you have a sample task, but those arent always actual orders that are going to be placed. You might write up some theoretical proposal for an order thats never going to be placed and how valid is that really? And other times the agency will make an estimate of what the different types of services are, what the different labor category hours are going to be during the contract performance when the actual orders are placed. But thats just a wild estimate and it could vary quite differently for different offerors. So that leads to a real difficulty and understanding and making a valid price comparison. So this addresses that but then it creates perhaps other other problems.

Tom Temin: It seems that this could really undermine some of the existing government wide acquisition contracts for services, where you just go with a test quarter as needed, and everythings already awarded and all this is done. This is seems to steer agencies in between going to the big GWACs or going to a full and open competition for every service they need that might be related to a string of services so that they can establish their own little multiple award schedule.

Joe Petrillo: Well not exactly. I dont see anything in the rule that says it cant be used for GWACs. But, of course, DoD, NASA and the Coast Guard only run so many of those. I think the way agencies will see it as a benefit is it retains two features that they like a lot about these large multiple award IDIQs. One is theyve pre qualified a group of bidders. They know that these folks have met a certain minimum level of standards, and they have some confidence in them. Secondly, it provides some protection against protests. As you know, you cannot protest a task order under a certain dollar threshold for most reasons. And thats $10 million for civilian agencies and $25 million for the agencies that are affected by this order. So those two benefits are preserved by this particular method.

Tom Temin: What happens if you put out a solicitation and 300 vendors show up? Theyre all on?

Joe Petrillo: Well, thats what youve hit on as the potential problem with this. Were going to set out this method. and if 300 vendors show up, and most of them make the qualifications, theyd have to get the awards. So now youre in a situation where you potentially have 100 vendors bidding on each opportunity, its probably not workable and that may be the fear that keeps this from getting off the ground.

Tom Temin: What was the origin? Who wanted this?

Joe Petrillo: Im not entirely sure. For one thing, it was passed three and a half years ago, and I dont recall who is who is pushing it back then. But I think the problem it seeks to address as a very real one, which is how do you you do price comparisons and price competitions in these big procurements? Youll see protests in which there are questions about price reasonableness and if its evaluated price realism, and you can see very, very wide disparities in hourly rates. And yet, they all seem to fall under the category of reasonableness or realism.

Tom Temin: And if an agency wants to not do it this way and just pick someone in an open competition, can they still do that and what do they have to do?

Joe Petrillo: Absolutely. This is just an option they have to doing it in the usual single contract mode or using a multiple award vehicle where price has been evaluated, price or cost has been evaluated in the contract award process.

Tom Temin: Well you can try it out starting August 3, I guess. Procurement attorney Joseph Petrillo is with Petrillo and Powell. Thanks so much for joining me.

Joe Petrillo: Well thank you Tom. Have a good day.

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Major federal procurement rule gets first try with DoD and NASA - Federal News Network

You would think a cosmic boom that shook the universe could be heard from everywhere (except maybe the Nostromo)but no one was actually around to hear it when it went off.

Like most phenomena in space that are billions and billions of years old, the signal often referred to as the space roar started out as a mystery. It remains an unsolved mystery 14 years after it was first detected. Scientists have come up with multiple hypotheses on where it might have come from. Did it spawn from the Milky Way? Is it extragalactic? Is there any way to observe the early stars it is obscuring? Now a new radio telescope that will be able to zero in on this noise may finally be able to demystify its origin, because in space, someone may actually hear you scream.

NASAs ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission) instrument first heard the roar as it floated on a giant space balloon right above Earth. Its purpose was to get a closer look at the cosmic microwave background, seek out the heat of primordial stars and remnants of the Big Bang and catch a glimpse of the first stars and galaxies coming into being. It had to do the spacecraft equivalent of squinting to see most of these extremely distant phenomena. Something billions of light-years away is seen from our planet as it was billions of years ago, since its light took that long to reach us. ARCADE was looking out for radio waves since light from that far away loses energy and turns into radio waves by the time it gets over here.

Unlike other radio telescopes, ARCADE was able to measure the actual brightness of anything it observed instead of an objects brightness relative to another object. That was when one signal screamed over everything. NASA scientists back on Earth then had to carry out the tedious task of separating that signal from galactic radiation. Where the signal came from eluded them, though they were able to discern what it was.

Evidently, the space roar didnot originatefrom just one source because it was so diffuse. It was found to be made of synchrotron radiation, which is unleashedby charged particles zooming near the speed of light when a magnetic field or other force changes their trajectory. Wavelengths can vary. Jupiter gives off synchrotron radiation at radio wavelengths when electrons in its magnetic field are disrupted. The roar is a radio synchrotron background. This background of synchrotron radiation from various objects, with its multiple sources making it so diffuse, is what has confounded scientists for years. It could originate from pretty much anything. NASA has considered sending ARCADE up there again, but an even more powerful telescope could figure that out.

The Green Bank Observatorys radio telescope in West Virginia will be able to map radio waves in the brightest regions of the sky more precisely than anything else ever has. It will also prioritize measuring the background, as opposed to most telescopes which make the cosmic background a secondary objective. It will also measure how much the radio synchrotron background varies. While it is more likely the roar came from somewhere beyond this galaxy, because gargantuan radio-emitting haloes have never been observed in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the telescope at Green Bank might be able to confirm that.

With an investigation like this going on for almost a decade and a half, who says that in space, no one can hear you scream?

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Earplugs! NASA heard the loudest sound that ever boomed in the universe, and its screaming a mystery - SYFY WIRE

FP TrendingAug 10, 2020 17:37:45 IST

When the Perseverance rover started on its journey to Mars, it carried with it a number of important instruments to study the soil composition and environmental conditions onthe Red Planet, as well asunderstand its geological features below the surface.

One of these instruments, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), will be able to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere just like a tree does here on Earth. If MOXIE is able to generate oxygen successfully, it will be a boon for future manned missionsas a resource tohelp build a biosphere that can support life.

The 17.1-kilogram device will be able to churn out up to 10 grams of oxygen every hour, according to NASA. Speakingofthe objectives of the MOXIE experiment,the Principal Investigatorof thedeviceMichael Hecht said that liquid oxygen propellant is something that could be madebyhuman colonies on Mars given the right technology.

The instruments on the Perseverance rover. Image credit: NASA

Whenpeople are sent to Mars,theirsafe return is a priority,which meansthat a fuelled rocket is needed to lift them off the planet. Oxygen happens to be essential ingredient, a propellant, to powerrockets on top of its fundamental role in sustaining human life.

"One idea would be to bring an empty oxygen tank and fill it up on Mars," he said. However, the tiny level of oxygen generation is not a point of worry as it is a test model. Future oxygen generators, which will be supporting human missions on Mars, will be about 100 times larger according to NASA.

The device works like a tree, in terms of taking in CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and generating O2. According to a report published in Science Alert, it will be electrochemically splitting carbon dioxide molecules to generate oxygen and carbon monoxide. MOXIE will be aiming at producing 99.6 per cent pure O2.

Once generated, the device will be releasing both the oxygen and carbon monoxide molecules back into the atmosphere. This is also a test feature as future models are going to store the generated oxygen.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.

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Tree-like MOXIE on NASA's Perseverance rover will turn carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars - Firstpost

NASA astronauts safely returned to Earth this past weekend, splashing down off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, after completing a trip to the International Space Station. The journey, carried out through private company SpaceX, was the first manned spacecraft to take off from U.S. soil since NASAs shuttle program retired in 2011.

[Photo: SpaceX/courtesy NASA]The mission was captivating, but it caught the attention of design and NASA fanatics for another reason: The worm was back. The wordmark was designed by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn of design agency Danne & Blackburn in 1974, adopted by NASA in 1975, and retired in 1992 until officially reappearing this year. But truthfully, its never gone away. Its developed a cult following of its own over the decades and has been a part of fashion collaborations and pop culture generally. Its gained such cultural cachet that SpaceX was determined to resurrect this for the launch, according to Danne.

[Image: NASA]The question is, why? Why does a logo that was only in use for 17 yearsand was retired for 28have such staying power? It comes down to three components: its removal, its design, and what it represents beyond NASA.

Danne and Blackburn initially presented the wordmark during a time of flux at the agency. The Apollo era was behind it. The shuttle era was years away. Both publicity and excitement waned. The agency needed a rebrand. We were filling the gap and organizing on a communication level so it looked more progressive, says Danne. But it also needed practical help.

The design was meant to provide visual cohesion for nearly a dozen disparate departments across the agency. As Danne recalled, it had to be a simple solution to anchor all this garbage that we saw in this agency. So NASA introduced the worm, as it was derogatorily called at first, to complement the round meatball logo, which was more difficult to read and see at a distance. While the meatball logo was still used, lets just say it got eclipsed.

Fast-forward to 1992. As Danne tells it, the logo was retired by executive decision. The new NASA administrator at the time, Dan Goldin, allegedly didnt like the worm and wanted to bring back the meatball as the primary logo. According to Danne, it was quickly phased out. NASA confirmed it was an executive decision but didnt have any more details about Goldins motivations.

[Photo: Standards Manual]But while NASA retired the worm from its official capacity in 1992, it created a nostalgia market among a younger generation. The logo seemed to gain in stature when Goldin kiboshed it, says Danne. It became more visible, not less. Danne started seeing the wordmark on all sorts of unrelated products. This embracing also speaks to a broader trend, according to Jesse Reed, co-founder of Order design and Standards Manual, which will publish the monograph The Worm in October. The general public probably sees it as a nostalgic and retro representation of NASA, Reed says. Thats a whole genre into itself.

Theres another reason why the worm has saturated popular culture: Its damn good design. In fact, Reed says the fundamental architecture of the wordmark, which is anchored by two major visual elementsthe As and the very similar N and Sis so harmonious, its like perfect graphic design. The shape of the As also mimics the nosecones of a rocket or shuttle, and suggests vertical thrust, with curves borrowed from aerospace itself. And the monoweight of the line gives the wordmark a machine-like feel, almost like its bent out of metal, according to Order co-founder Hamish Smyth.

The visual details might be more than the average person would notice, but its worth recognizing because it also gives the logo profound versatility. The designer population probably understands how it needed to work on the piece of paper, on a letterhead or an invoice, and also on the side of a satellite, and how it needed to withstand those different applications, says Reed. The meatball isnt designed to withstand the types of design considerations that graphic designers think about.

Danne says these simple, elegant, and versatile visual elements also underscore a deeper meaning. NASA is very romantic and sexy, he says. Especially when compared to other government agencies, like the Department of Transportation. They both have motion built into their matrix, but NASA is the only one that has adventure and exploration. It represents an entity that takes humans to the furthest possible realms; In just four letters, it personifies innovation and moving ahead. And compared to the meatball, its also consistently been associated with young progressives at the agency, who enthusiastically embraced its arrival in the 70sand are now in charge.

But just like space, Danne still doesnt quite know how to explain the logos popularity (although hes thrilled about it). Hes currently on a NASA committee thats developing guidelines for an expanded use of the logotype, based on the SpaceX model and the worms enormous popularity today. I think we got it right and we rang a bell and that bell is still ringing. NASA certainly seems to agree.

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NASA's 'worm' logo lay dormant for 28 years. So why are people so obsessed with it? - Fast Company

Solar abundances have been historically assumed to be representative of cosmic abundances. However, our knowledge of the solar abundance of helium, the second most abundant element, relies mainly on models and indirect measurements through helioseismic observations, because actual measurements of helium in the solar atmosphere are very scarce.

In 2009, NASA launched a sounding rocket investigation to measure helium in the extended solar atmosphere.

For the first time, scientists have gathered a full global map of the helium and hydrogen emission in the solar corona.

To measure the amount of atmospheric helium and hydrogen, NASAs Helium Resonance Scattering in the Corona and Heliosphere, or HERSCHEL, the sounding rocket took images of the solar corona.

HERSCHELs observations demonstrated that helium wasnt evenly dispersed around the corona. The equatorial region had no helium, while the areas at mid-latitudes had the most. Comparing with images from ESA/NASAs Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the scientists were able to show the abundance at the mid-latitudes covers with where Suns magnetic field lines open out into the solar system.

This shows that the ratio of helium to hydrogen is strongly connected with the magnetic field and the speed of the solar wind in the corona. The equatorial regions with low helium abundance measurements matched measurements from the solar wind near Earth. This points to the solar atmosphere being more dynamic than scientists thought.

HERSCHEL remotely investigates the elemental composition of the region where the solar wind is accelerated, which can be analyzed in tandem with in situ measurements of the inner solar system, such as those of the Parker Solar Probe.

In the future, scientists are planning to take more observations to explain the difference in abundances. Two new instrumentsMetis and EUI onboard ESA/NASAs Solar Orbitercan make similar global abundance measurements and will help provide further information about the helium ratio in the corona.

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NASA sounding rocket discovered helium structures in the solar corona - Tech Explorist

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley strapped into Crew Dragon prior to the launch scrub May 27.

Update, Aug. 2, 11:54 a.m. PT: Crew Dragon has successfully splashed down. Read about it here.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission has been smooth sailing so far for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley launched to the International Space Station in late May and are now almost back to Earth.

Crew Dragon successfully undocked from the ISS at 4:35 p.m. PT on Saturday. NASA has been broadcasting the return process through a livestream onNASA TV.

Splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico is on schedule for 11:48 a.m. PT. There will be about an hour of excitement prior to that moment as Crew Dragon deorbits and re-enters Earth's atmosphere.

NASA and SpaceX are planning on a water landing off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, on Sunday while continuing to monitor any impact from Hurricane Isaias.

This will be the first crew recovery at sea of NASA astronauts since 1975 at the end of the Apollo moon exploration era, the space agency tweeted on Sunday.

A post-splashdown news conference is set for 1:30 p.m. PT on NASA TV.

The reentry process is dramatic. "Crew Dragon will be traveling at orbital velocity prior to reentry, moving at approximately 17,500 miles per hour. The maximum temperature it will experience on reentry is approximately 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit,"said NASA in a statement on July 24.

From the lab to your inbox. Get the latest science stories from CNET every week.

A SpaceX recovery vessel will meet Crew Dragon (which the astronauts named Endeavour) to collect the spacecraft and parachutes from the water. Endeavour will be hoisted onto the ship and Behnken and Hurley will be greeted by a medical team.

There's a lot riding on a safe, uneventful return for Crew Dragon. "This is SpaceX's final test flight and is providing data on the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket, Crew Dragon spacecraft and ground systems, as well as in-orbit, docking, splashdown and recovery operations," NASA said in a release.

If Crew Dragon passes these final tests, then SpaceX will be able to provide regular, operational flights to the ISS starting later this year. And it would end NASA's reliance on Russian spacecraft for the first time since the shuttle era.

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SpaceX splashdown: Watch live as NASA astronauts return to ...

NASAs next-generation rocket for the Artemis mission to the moon, the Space Launch System (SLS), has been through its share of troubles. But progress continues on the project, and NASA has announced that it has reached a milestone in progress toward firing the engines in the first hot fire test.

The SLS rocket core stage is currently undergoing a series of tests called Green Run, in which all of the hardware that makes up the stage is tested. This includes testing the flight computers, propellant tanks, propulsion systems, and more.

In total, Green Run consists of eight tests including the propellant tanks being loaded for the first time, checking the feed systems which carry propellant to the tanks, firing all four of the stages engines for the first time, and recreating the environment of the launch in terms of vibrations and temperature to check the hardware stands up to the rigors of launch.

Now, the first four of these eight tests have been completed. The most recent test was the checking of the propulsion system components which connect to the engines, to ensure that nothing is leaking and that everything works as intended. Instead of using actual rocket fuel for this test, NASA engineers used nitrogen and helium gases, pushing them through the system over a period of three weeks to look for leaks.

With test gases flowing through this many parts of a complex rocket stage, we expected the test team to encounter some issues, Jonathan Looser, who manages the SLS core stage main propulsion system, said in a statement.

Historically, theres never been a NASA human-rated launch vehicle flown without one or more full-up tests before flight, and they have all encountered first-time issues. As expected, we found a few with valves and seals and addressed them, and now were ready to complete the next four Green Run tests.

The tests are conducted at NASAs Stennis Space Center near Bay St Louis, Mississippi, where staff are preparing for the next set of tests culminating in a full firing of the four engines in the hot fire test before the stage is sent to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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NASA completes another testing milestone on its next-generation Artemis rocket - Digital Trends

In the early morning hours of August 5, 2020, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite got a clear view of Western Europe and its lights. The landscape was also well lit by the Moon, which was just one day past full. The following day was also mostly clear, as observed in the early afternoon by NASAs Aqua satellite.

The image was acquired through the use of the VIIRS day-night band (DNB), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, wildfires, airglow, and reflected moonlight. Since the launch of Suomi NPP in late 2011, scientists have been using VIIRS to provide unprecedented views of Earth at night. (See our gallery here).

Suomi NPP passes over any given location on Earth at roughly 1:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. local time each day, observing the planet in vertical strips from pole to pole. VIIRS is a spectroradiometer, detecting photons of light in 22 different wavelengths. The instrument produces an image by repeatedly scanning a scene and resolving it as millions of individual picture elements, or pixels.

The day-night band takes it a step further, determining whether to use its low, medium, or high-gain mode to ensure that each pixel accurately depicts the amount of light emitted. It can make quantitative measurements of light emissions and reflections, distinguishing the intensity and the sources of night light down to the scale of an isolated highway lamp or fishing boat. The sum of these measurements gives us a global view of the human footprint on Earth.

By mid-2000, at least 500 peer-reviewed journal papers have been published based on day-night band data, with another 120 combining DNB data with the older Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) observations. Subject areas have included social science (often demography and economics), atmospheric composition, civil engineering, biology, and natural resource monitoring and management.

Nighttime imagery provides an intuitively graspable view of our planet, said William Stefanov, a remote sensing scientist for the International Space Station science office. City lights provide a fairly straightforward means to map urban versus rural areas, and to show where the major population centers are and where they are not. They are also an excellent means to track urban and suburban growth, which feeds into planning for energy use and urban hazards, for studying urban heat islands, and for initializing climate models.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Story by Michael Carlowicz.

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All Clear on the Western Front - nasa.gov

The moon Io orbits Jupiter in this image from NASAs Cassini spacecraft. Jupiter and Io appear deceptively close in this image, when in fact the moon is orbiting 217,000 miles from the gas giant planet. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Jupiter, named for the king of the ancient Roman gods, commands its own mini-version of our solar system of circling satellites; their movements convinced Galileo Galilei that Earth is not the center of the universe in the early 17th century. More than 400 years later, astronomers will use NASAs James Webb Space Telescope to observe these famous subjects, pushing the observatorys instruments to their fullest capabilities and laying the groundwork for far-reaching scientific discovery.

A diverse team of more than 40 researchers, led by astronomers Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley and Thierry Fouchet of the Observatoire de Paris, have designed an ambitious observing program that will conduct some of Webbs first scientific observations in the solar systemstudying Jupiter, its ring system, and two of its moons: Ganymede and Io.

It will be a really challenging experiment, said de Pater. Jupiter is so bright, and Webbs instruments are so sensitive, that observing both the bright planet and its fainter rings and moons will be an excellent test of how to get the most out of Webbs innovative technology.

Cyclone storms encircle Jupiters North Pole, captured in infrared light by NASAs Juno spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Jupiter

In addition to calibrating Webbs instruments for Jupiters brightness, astronomers must also take into account the planets rotation, because Jupiter completes one day in only 10 hours. Several images must be stitched together in a mosaic to fully capture a certain areathe famous storm known as the Great Red Spot, for examplea task made more difficult when the object itself is moving. While many telescopes have studied Jupiter and its storms, Webbs large mirror and powerful instruments will provide new insights.

We know that the immediate atmosphere above the Great Red Spot is colder than other areas of Jupiter, but at higher altitudes, in the mesosphere, the atmosphere appears to be warmer. We will use Webb to investigate this phenomenon, de Pater said.

Webb will also examine the atmosphere of the polar region, where NASAs Juno spacecraft discovered clusters of cyclones. Webbs spectroscopic data will provide much more detail than has been possible in past observations, measuring winds, cloud particles, gas composition, and temperature.

Future solar system observations of the giant planets with Webb will benefit from the lessons learned in these early observations of the Jovian system. The team is tasked with developing methods for working with Webb observations of solar system planets, which can be used later by other scientists.

NASAs Galileo spacecraft captured an image of Jupiters ring system, including the diffuse outer gossamer ring. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell University

Rings

All four of the gas giant planets of the solar system have rings, with Saturns being the most prominent. Jupiters ring system is composed of three parts: a flat main ring; a halo inside the main ring, shaped like a double-convex lens; and the gossamer ring, exterior to the main ring. Jupiters ring system is exceptionally faint because the particles that make up the rings are so small and sparse that they do not reflect much light. Next to the brightness of the planet they practically disappear, presenting a challenge for astronomers.

We are really pushing the capabilities of some of Webbs instruments to the limit to get a unique new set of observations, said co-investigator Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley. The team will test observing strategies to deal with Jupiters scattered light, and build models for use by other astronomers, including those studying exoplanets orbiting bright stars.

The team will look to make new discoveries in the rings as well. De Pater noted that there may be undiscovered ephemeral moonlets in the dynamic ring system, and potential ripples in the ring from comet impacts, like those observed and traced back to the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

Ganymede

Several features of icy Ganymede make it fascinating for astronomers. Aside from being the largest moon in the solar system, and larger even than the planet Mercury, it is the only moon known to have its own magnetic field. The team will investigate the very outer parts of Ganymedes atmosphere, its exosphere, to better understand the moons interaction with particles in Jupiters magnetic field.

There is also evidence that Ganymede may have a liquid saltwater ocean beneath its thick surface ice, which Webb will investigate with detailed spectroscopic study of surface salts and other compounds. The teams experience studying Ganymedes surface may be useful in the future study of other icy solar system moons suspected of having subsurface oceans, including Saturns moon Enceladus and fellow Jovian satellite Europa.

NASAs Galileo spacecraft catches Io in the midst of a volcanic eruption. Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR

Io

In dramatic contrast to Ganymede is the other moon the team will study, Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system. The dynamic surface is covered with hundreds of huge volcanoes that would dwarf those on Earth, as well as lakes of molten lava and smooth floodplains of solidified lava. Astronomers plan to use Webb to learn more about the effects of Ios volcanos on its atmosphere.

There is still much we dont know about Ios atmospheric temperature structure, because we havent had the data to distinguish the temperature at different altitudes, said de Pater. On Earth we take for granted that as you hike up a mountain, the air gets coolerwould it be the same on Io? Right now we dont know, but Webb may help us to find out.

Another mystery Webb will investigate on Io is the existence of stealth volcanoes, which emit plumes of gas without the light-reflecting dust that can be detected by spacecraft like NASAs Voyager and Galileo missions, and so have thus far gone undetected. Webbs high spatial resolution will be able to isolate individual volcanoes that previously would have appeared as one large hotspot, allowing astronomers to gather detailed data on Ios geology.

Webb will also provide unprecedented data on the temperature of Ios hotspots, and determine if they are closer to volcanism on Earth today, or if they have a much higher temperature, similar to the environment on Earth in the early years after its formation. Previous observations by the Galileo mission and ground observatories have hinted at these high temperatures; Webb will follow up on that research and provide new evidence that may settle the question.

Team Effort

Webbs detailed observations will not supplant those of other observatories, but rather coordinate with them, Wong explained. Webbs spectroscopic observations will cover just a small area of the planet, so global views from ground-based observatories can show how the detailed Webb data fit in with whats happening on a larger scale, similar to how Hubble and the Gemini Observatory provide context for Junos narrow, close-up observations.

In turn, Webbs study of Jupiters storms and atmosphere will complement Juno data, including radio signals from lightning, which Webb does not detect. No one observatory or spacecraft can do it all, Wong said, so we are very excited about combining data from multiple observatories to tell us much more than we could learn from only a single source.

This research is being conducted as part of a Webb Early Release Science (ERS) program. This program provides time to selected projects early in the observatorys mission, allowing researchers to quickly learn how best to use Webbs capabilities, while also yielding robust science.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the worlds premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

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NASA's Innovative New Telescope Will Study Jupiter, Its Rings, and Two Intriguing Moons - SciTechDaily