NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year’s 2019 close encounter.
Some very cool listening!
As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets.
Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone.
In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time. The researchers also trained their system to rate debris disks according to their likelihood of containing detectable exoplanets. In a paper describing the new work in the journal Astronomy and Computing, the MIT researchers report that their system identified 367 previously unexamined celestial objects as particularly promising candidates for further study.
The work represents an unusual approach to machine learning, which has been championed by one of the paper’s coauthors, Victor Pankratius, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory. Typically, a machine-learning system will comb through a wealth of training data, looking for consistent correlations between features of the data and some label applied by a human analyst — in this case, stars circled by debris disks.
Source: news.mit.edu/2018/computer-searches-telescope-data-evidence-distant-planets-0330
There has been a lot of hype about the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) and a lot of discussion about SpaceX’s ability to deliver on its plans. Additionally the plans of SpaceX have also shown up what NASA is planning to do with the Space Launch System (SLS). NASA’s plans are a little less ambitious as far as the timeline goes but are certainly a lot more richer in what they want to achieve, including a return to the Moon and a space station orbiting the Moon. SpaceX, on the other hand, have single minded ambition on getting to Mars and may well just do that. Either way it’s looking increasingly likely that the US will be the first nation to put humans on Mars, it might be SpaceX, it might be NASA or it might be some combination of both of them. The timeline could be anywhere from 7 years to 17 years but it’s increasingly looking like it will happen.
https://milky-way.kiwi/2018/03/25/bfr-sls-krk-and-long-march-9-and-probably-in-that-order/
Very interesting read about the microprocessors used in various spacecraft . Throughout the years, microprocessors have played a large role in spacecrafts. space-qualified microprocessors are designed to be exceptionally reliable and highly durable. Due to their unique nature, the same set of chips that have been tested and proven to work are used in many spacecrafts.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, born on 3 January 106 BC, bestrides Latin literature like a colossus. The combination of an immense output of writings and a strong afterlife in the schools of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, means that more manuscripts of Cicero’s work survive than of any other classical Latin author. Only Augustine of Hippo can claim a more fertile manuscript tradition.
Astronomical treatises continued to be hugely popular in the Middle Ages, and are frequently to be found in miscellaneous manuscripts.
Source: http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/01/ciceros-map-to-the-stars.html
There’s a very good reason – it wasn’t discovered until 1992. At that stage, Voyager 1 was almost all the way across the the Kuiper Belt and Voyager 2 halfway through it!
Source: pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Perspectives.php?page=piPerspective_02_28_2018
From the article –
“But, perhaps most important is the question: could Voyager have flown by a small KBO as New Horizons will do this December and January? Regrettably, the answer is no, for a number of reasons. First, even once the Kuiper Belt had been detected in 1992, the Hubble Space Telescope (the only telescope capable of finding such distant flyby targets, even today) hadn’t been repaired to properly focus light. That repair didn’t occur until December 1993. By then, Voyager 1 was exiting the Kuiper Belt near 55 AU, and Voyager 2 was near 42 AU. But even after its repair, the Hubble wasn’t sensitive enough to detect KBOs as small and common as MU69, so there would have been no way to find a flyby target—that capability only came in 2009, when a more advanced and sensitive wide-field camera was placed aboard the Hubble during a servicing mission.”
New Horizons is the fifth spacecraft to traverse the Kuiper Belt, but the first to conduct a scientific study of this mysterious region beyond Neptune. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Magda Saina
Fabulous to see!
Time stands still for Launceston’s planetarium with little changing in the past 50 years.
Source: www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-23/launceston-planetarium-marks-50-years/9408338
Always loved the idea of going to Mars on an atomic rocket.
Nuclear-powered spacecraft would cut travel time to the red planet.
THIS I LIKE! Replica of the Apollo era DSKY computer.
Compared to the computer interfaces of today, the display keyboard used by the Apollo astronauts aboard their spacecraft might look quaint — until you recall that it was central to flying to the first humans to the moon almost half a century ago.
Now, a Columbus, Georgia electronics company that has recreated World War II Enigma machines and specialized in “location-based entertainment” devices has set its sights on offering the Apollo Guidance Computer’s (AGC) display keyboard as an open source, Arduino-based replica ready in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 2019.
The southernmost part of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft could “see” during closest approach in July 2015 contains a range of fascinating geological features, and offers clues into what might lurk in the regions shrouded in darkness during the flyby.
Source: www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-methane-snowcaps-on-the-edge-of-darkness
Wow – Mercury is geologically active.
It’s small, it’s hot, and it’s shrinking. Surprising new NASA-funded research suggests that Mercury is contracting even today, joining Earth as a tectonically active planet.
Source: www.nasa.gov/feature/the-incredible-shrinking-mercury-is-active-after-all/
Looks like they found the Philae lander!
Less than a month before the end of the mission, Rosetta’s high-resolution camera has revealed the Philae lander wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Source: www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found
Mars definitely deserves its Red Planet nickname. But scientists use such a range of photographing techniques that the planet can end up a rainbow of colors.
Source: www.businessinsider.com/new-mars-reconnaissance-orbiter-hirise-photos-2016-8/