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NASA selects 9 scientists to join 2022 Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter mission, ,

Nine U.S. scientists will join South Korea’s first lunar orbiter mission launching next year.

The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in August 2022 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft will orbit the moon for about a year, representing South Korea’s first space exploration mission to travel beyond Earth’s orbit, according to a statement from NASA.

NASA announced on Tuesday (March 30) that it has selected nine U.S. scientists to join the mission as part of the agency’s KPLO Participating Scientist Program. The new members will work with the spacecraft’s five science instruments, which will take measurements of the lunar surface from orbit to learn more about the moon’s environment and resources and to identify potential landing sites for future missions.

Related: Lunar timeline: Humanity’s explorations of the moon

“The KPLO Participating Scientist Program is an example of how international collaborations can leverage the talents of two space agencies, to achieve greater science and exploration success than individual missions,” Sang-Ryool Lee, KPLO Project Manager, said in the statement. “It’s fantastic that the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) lunar mission has NASA as a partner in space exploration — we’re excited to see the new knowledge and opportunities that will arise from the KPLO mission as well as from future joint KARI-NASA activities.”

The nine scientists selected by NASA include William Farrand, Caleb Fassett, Ian Garrick-Bethell, Rachel Klima, Mikhail Kreslavsky, Shuai Li, Gorden Videen, Jean-Pierre Williams and Naoyuki Yamashita, who are affiliated with a range of academic and research institutions. The new members will join the KPLO science team later this year, and will be funded for three years, according to the NASA statement.

“It is important that the participating scientists are fully embedded in the existing KARI and NASA teams well before the mission is due to launch,” Shoshana Weider, leader of the KPLO Participating Scientist Program from NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said in the statement. “This means they will have plenty of time to collaborate with their KARI colleagues during the pre-launch mission-planning phase, which will help ensure that the science return of their projects, and the mission as a whole, is maximized.”

KPLO is a joint mission between the KARI and NASA. Korea will manage the manufacturing and operation of the orbiter, while NASA will support the mission with the development of one of the science payloads, as well as help with communications and navigation for the spacecraft, according to an agreement signed in 2016.

The orbiter’s scientific instruments include three cameras, a magnetometer and a gamma-ray spectrometer. NASA will provide one of the cameras, called ShadowCam, which will be used to map the reflectance within permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles to search for evidence of frost or ice deposits on the moon’s surface. ShadowCam, which is based on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Narrow Angle Camera, will capture high-resolution optical images.

In addition to investigating the physical characteristics of the lunar surface, the KPLO mission aims to expand South Korea’s technological capabilities in space exploration and develop instruments for deep-space exploration on future missions. Data collected from this mission will also help support the planning of NASA’s Artemis program, according to the statement.

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Astronomers see a ghostly ‘radio jellyfish’ rise from the dead in the southern sky, ,

Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe bound together by gravity. They can contain thousands of galaxies, enormous oceans of hot gas, invisible islands of dark matter and — sometimes — the glowing ghost of a jellyfish or two.

In the galaxy cluster Abell 2877, located in the southern sky about 300 million light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered one such jellyfish. Visible only in a narrow band of radio light, the cosmic jelly is more than 1 million light-years wide and includes a large lobe of supercharged plasma, dripping with tentacles of hot gas.

The structure’s jelly-like appearance is both “ghostly” and “uncanny,” according to the authors of a new paper published March 17 in the Astrophysical Journal. However, even more astonishing than the space jelly’s shape is how quickly the structure vanishes from view, the authors said.

Related: 12 Trippy objects hidden in the Zodiac

“This radio jellyfish holds a world record of sorts,” lead study author Torrance Hodgson, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Australia, said in a statement. “Whilst it’s bright at regular FM radio frequencies, at 200 megahertz the emission all but disappears. No other extragalactic emission like this has been observed to disappear anywhere near so rapidly.”

The universe is swimming with energetic structures that are only visible in radio wavelengths, like the mysterious X-shaped galaxies cartwheeling through space, or the twin blobs at the center of the Milky Way. However, no structure this large has ever been observed in such a narrow band of the radio spectrum.

According to the researchers, that likely means this cosmic jellyfish is actually an odd bird known as a “radio phoenix.”

Like the mythical bird that died in flame and rose again from the ashes, a radio phoenix is a cosmic structure that’s born from a high-energy explosion (like a black hole outburst), fades over millions of years as the structure expands and its electrons lose energy, then finally gets reenergized by another cosmic cataclysm (such as the collision of two galaxies).

To create a radio phoenix, that last cosmic event must be powerful enough to send shockwaves surging through the dormant cloud of electrons, causing the cloud to compress and the electrons to spark with energy again. According to the study authors, that could cause a structure like the jellyfish cluster to glow brightly in certain radio wavelengths, but dim rapidly in others.

“Our working theory is that around 2 billion years ago, a handful of supermassive black holes from multiple galaxies spewed out powerful jets of plasma,” Hodgson said.

That plasma’s energy faded over millions of years, until “quite recently, two things happened — the plasma started mixing at the same time as very gentle shock waves passed through the system,” Hodgson said. “This has briefly reignited the plasma, lighting up the jellyfish and its tentacles for us to see.”

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The researchers used a computer simulation to show that this explanation is a plausible origin story for that big jellyfish in the sky, though several big questions — such as where the “gentle shockwaves” came from — remain unanswered. The team hopes to take a closer look at the jellyfish in the future, following the completion of the Square Kilometre Array — a network of hundreds of radio telescope antennas planned for construction in the Australian Outback.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Experts say parents posting their kid shaming or kid punishment videos as a joke on platforms like TikTok have the potential to cause actual harm (Julie Jargon/Wall Street Journal)

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An adapted excerpt from the book “Your Computer Is on Fire”, on how voice assistants like Siri and Alexa alienate non-native and non-standard English speakers (Andrew Tarantola/Engadget)

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LG will shut down smartphone business in July to focus on smart home, robotics – CNET,

LG has experimented with different designs for its phones, like the the LG Wing, to try to attract buyers.
Angela Lang/CNET

LG on Sunday became the latest legacy handset maker to exit “the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector” as it struggles in a market dominated by Apple, Samsung and growing Chinese handset makers.

The South Korean company said it will close its mobile business unit by the end of July. Instead of smartphones, it will focus on smart home products — an area where it’s one of the biggest providers — as well as electric vehicle components, robotics, artificial intelligence, business-to-business products and other connected devices.

LG’s decision to wind down its phone business reflects the struggles faced by many companies in the market. Apple and Samsung have long been the only companies that make significant amounts of money from smartphones, and even they have struggled at times. Consumers are holding onto their phones longer than before, and they’re increasingly seeking out less expensive models, like Samsung’s Galaxy A lineup instead of its Galaxy S flagship devices.

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Other legacy phone brands like BlackBerry and Nokia have faced their own struggles, with neither company existing in its original form. HMD sells phones under Nokia branding, while TCL sold BlackBerry-branded phones before ending that partnership last year. Nokia and BlackBerry, the leaders in the flip phone world, failed to transition quickly to touch-screen smartphones, which doomed their chances in the mobile market. LG, too, struggled in the move to smartphones. While consumers have generally liked its devices, it didn’t have near the marketing might of Samsung or the cult following of Apple.

Over the past decade, it’s become harder to get consumer attention in mobile. LG has experimented with innovative designs over the past couple of years in an effort to attract buyers. Its LG Wing features two screens, one of which swivels on top of the other. And in January at virtual CES, it teased what it hoped would be the world’s first rollable phone. The device has a display that extends upward to create a larger, more tablet-like screen. As CNET’s Roger Cheng noted, “presumably, the bottom of the phone, when it’s in landscape mode, has a mechanism that furls and unfurls the display, similar to how its rollable OLED televisions work — but on a smaller scale.”

But with the death of LG’s mobile business comes the end of the would-be rollable phone.

“LG Rollable is no longer a part of our product strategy going forward,” LG spokesman Ken Hong told CNET.

LG said it will continue to sell current phone inventory, and it will provide service, support and software updates for customers of existing mobile devices for “a period of time, which will vary by region.” The company’s US business didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about how long it will support US-based customers.

LG likely will lay off some employees, though many probably will move to other parts of LG’s business. It has employees across the globe and manufactures its phones in China, Brazil and Vietnam. The company is looking at repurpose its manufacturing facilities to build other products like TVs, Hong said, but closure is also a possibility.

“Moving forward, LG will continue to leverage its mobile expertise and develop mobility-related technologies such as 6G to help further strengthen competitiveness in other business areas,” the company said in a statement. “Core technologies developed during the two decades of LG’s mobile business operations will also be retained and applied to existing and future products.”

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LG will shut down smartphone business in July to focus on smart home, robotics – CNET, Shara Tibken

It’s the end of an era for the one-time phone giant, which has struggled to compete with Apple, Samsung and Chinese brands.

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Profile of Bandcamp, profitable since 2012 without ads or major investors, which has paid out $196.3M to artists since March 2020, often foregoing its fees (Tatiana Cirisano/Billboard)

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How Big Tech firms rely on the interplay of collaboration and competition between each other in order to protect their market position (Wall Street Journal)

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Amsterdam-based Otrium, an online fashion marketplace helping retailers and brands sell their unsold inventory, raises $120M Series C and eyes entry into the US (Dan Taylor/Tech.eu)

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Researcher says GitHub Actions has been actively abused to plant and run cryptominers on GitHub’s server infrastructure since November; GitHub is investigating (Catalin Cimpanu/The Record)

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