Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 661
April 3, 2021
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity touches down on the Red Planet, ,
The first helicopter on Mars is officially on Martian soil.
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity touched down on the surface of the Red Planet after being dropped by its mother ship, the Perseverance rover, the space agency announced late Saturday (April 4). The helicopter’s first flight is just over a week away.
“#MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed! Its 293 million mile (471 million km) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 cm) from the rover’s belly to the surface of Mars today,” officials with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California wrote in a Twitter announcement. “Next milestone? Survive the night.”
Video: Watch NASA’s Mars helicopter unfold like a butterfly
Image 1 of 3[image error]
NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is seen on the surface of the Red Planet after being deployed by the Perseverance rover on April 4, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)Image 2 of 3[image error]
NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is seen on the surface of the Red Planet after being deployed by the Perseverance rover on April 4, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)Image 3 of 3[image error]
NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is seen on the surface of the Red Planet after being deployed by the Perseverance rover on April 4, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)Join our Mars talk!
Join our forums here to discuss the Perseverance rover on Mars. What do you hope finds?
Weighing in at just 4 lbs. (1.8 kilograms), Ingenuity is a tiny, solar-powered helicopter that relies on a rechargeable battery to keep its systems warm during the harsh Martian night. Until today, Ingenuity has been attached to Perseverance’s belly, feeding off the rover’s nuclear-powered system to stay warm.
Now, the helicopter is using its internal battery to power a vital heater.
“This heater keeps the interior at about 45 degrees F through the bitter cold of the Martian night, where temperatures can drop to as low as -130 F (minus 90 degrees Celsius),” NASA’s Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the Mars Helicopter project, wrote in a status update Friday (April 2). “That comfortably protects key components such as the battery and some of the sensitive electronics from harm at very cold temperatures.”
Ingenuity is expected to make its first flight on April 11, with the data from that test reaching Earth on April 12, NASA officials have said. The $85 million drone is the first helicopter ever sent to another world and is designed to test technologies for future flying vehicles on other planets. Ingenuity carries two cameras to document its flights, which will also be observed by the Perseverance rover.
If all goes well, Ingenuity will perform a series of ever-longer flights over Jezero Crater (where the Perseverance rover landed on Feb. 18) over the next 31 Martian days, which are called sols. Each flight should reach no higher than 16.5 feet (5 m) and will be conducted over a 300-foot-long (90 m) flight range.
NASA plans a series of tests before that first flight to fire up Ingenuity’s four rotor blades (they spin at up to 2,537 revolutions per minute) while Perseverance watches from a safe distance. The rover will be stationed a safe 16.5 feet away from the drone before the first flight.
In photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover on the Red Planet
But first, of course, Ingenuity must survive the bitter cold of its first night alone on Mars. The helicopter’s battery will power its heater enough to maintain a steady temperature of about 5 degrees F (minus 15 degrees C).
“The Ingenuity team will be anxiously waiting to hear from the helicopter the next day,” Balaram wrote Friday. “Did it make it through the night? Is the solar panel working as expected?”
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This graphic shows the activities NASA has planned for its Ingenuity Mars helicopter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)Mission team members will closely watch Ingenuity’s temperature and battery performance over the weekend to ensure the helicopter is healthy, Balaram added. If everything looks good, Ingenuity can then move on to its rotor tests and other system checks ahead of the first flight, he said.
As novel as Ingenuity is, the helicopter is just part of NASA’s ambitious Perseverance rover mission to explore an ancient delta in Mars’ Jezero Crater. The rover is expected to spend the next two years exploring the area to seek out signs of ancient life. Perseverance will also collect samples of Mars rocks to be collected and returned to Earth on a later mission.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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A deep look at the experiences of Asian Americans in tech, including going unheard, getting passed over for promotions, and stereotyped as passive and diligent (Megan Rose Dickey/Protocol)
The post A deep look at the experiences of Asian Americans in tech, including going unheard, getting passed over for promotions, and stereotyped as passive and diligent (Megan Rose Dickey/Protocol) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Analysis: average smartphone NAND flash capacity crossed 100GB for the first time in 2020; avg. capacity in iPhones was 140.9GB in Q4 ’20 vs. 95.7GB for Android (Brady Wang/Counterpoint Research)
Amazon apologizes for lying about pee — and attempts to shift the blame,
Amazon has issued a rare public apology — but not to its workers, and with no real admission of guilt.
Over a week ago, the company was caught publicly lying to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) that its workers never feel the need to pee in water bottles (which is, in fact, a well-documented issue at Amazon because of how it robotically tracks and fires its laborers).
Now, late on the Friday evening before Easter weekend, when few (hat tip to GeekWire) are paying attention, the company is apologizing to Pocan — and no one else. Amazon only apologizes for not being “accurate” enough, too — not for actually creating and contributing to situations where workers pee in bottles.
In fact, Amazon goes so far as to suggest the whole pee bottle thing is simply a regrettable status quo, pointing out a handful of times when other companies’ delivery drivers were also caught peeing in bottles, as well as embedding a handful of random comments on Twitter that happen to support Amazon’s views. You can almost hear Jeff Bezos saying “Why aren’t these people blaming UPS and FedEx? Let’s get more people thinking about them instead.”
The blog post also strongly suggests that this is only an issue for delivery drivers, not Amazon’s warehouse workers — even though a 2018 expose from an undercover reporter found Amazon warehouse workers were also forced to skip bathroom breaks, and a worker who spoke to journalists just last week suggested bathroom breaks were still an issue in 2021. “You’re sitting there and you have to go take a piss, but you don’t want to rack up ‘time off task,'” she told Motherboard.
Amazon is currently facing a lawsuit over missed lunch breaks as well. And most importantly, all of this is happening in the shadow of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama that could help shape the future of labor in the United States, let alone at Amazon.
Amazon’s apology to Pocan is the kind of memo that deserves to be annotated, line-by-line, partially because one of its lines is actually fairly good — “Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions” — but because it’s past 1AM here and it turns out The Verge‘s blockquote tool doesn’t let me embed tweets, I’ll just give you the primary guts for now:
On Wednesday last week, the @amazonnews Twitter account tweeted the following back to Representative Mark Pocan:
This was an own-goal, we’re unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan.
First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers. A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of restrooms, and employees are able to step away from their work station at any time. If any employee in a fulfillment center has a different experience, we encourage them to speak to their manager and we’ll work to fix it.
Second, our process was flawed. The tweet did not receive proper scrutiny. We need to hold ourselves to an extremely high accuracy bar at all times, and that is especially so when we are criticizing the comments of others.
Third, we know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed.
This is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon. We’ve included just a few links below that discuss the issue.
Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions.
We will continue to speak out when misrepresented, but we will also work hard to always be accurate.
We apologize to Representative Pocan.
You can read the full version here. When you’re finished, perhaps check out Motherboard‘s interview with six female Amazon delivery drivers, for whom the pee situation is obviously much worse.
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A look at Xiaomi’s investments in chip-related companies, as it bought or increased its stake in 34 companies since 2019 (Nikkei Asia)
The post A look at Xiaomi’s investments in chip-related companies, as it bought or increased its stake in 34 companies since 2019 (Nikkei Asia) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
April 2, 2021
How Facebook’s stance that it won’t ban posts unless they “cause imminent harm”, reversed in Feb. 2021, has led people to believe dangerous lies about COVID-19 (Bloomberg)
The post How Facebook’s stance that it won’t ban posts unless they “cause imminent harm”, reversed in Feb. 2021, has led people to believe dangerous lies about COVID-19 (Bloomberg) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Amazon apologizes for tweeting “you don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” and says the tweet didn’t contemplate its large driver population (John Cook/GeekWire)
The post Amazon apologizes for tweeting “you don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” and says the tweet didn’t contemplate its large driver population (John Cook/GeekWire) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Biden’s $2T infrastructure proposal allocates $50B for creating a technology directorate at the NSF and $50B for funding semiconductor manufacturing and R&D (Emily Birnbaum/Protocol)
The post Biden’s $2T infrastructure proposal allocates $50B for creating a technology directorate at the NSF and $50B for funding semiconductor manufacturing and R&D (Emily Birnbaum/Protocol) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Why is there water on Earth?, ,
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .
Laurette Piani , Cosmochimiste, chargee de recherche CNRS au Centre de Recherches Petrographiques et Geochimiques (CRPG) de Nancy, CNRS, Universite de Lorraine
Guillaume Paris , Geochimiste, charge de recherche CNRS au Centre de recherches petrographiques et geochimiques de Nancy, Universite de Lorraine
Water is essential to life as we know it and it seems completely normal to have water all around us. Yet Earth is the only known planet to be covered by oceans. Do we know exactly where its water came from?
This is not a simple question: it was long thought that Earth formed dry — without water, because of its proximity to the Sun and the high temperatures when the solar system formed. In this model, water could have been brought to Earth by comets or asteroids colliding with the Earth. Such a complex origin for water would likely mean that our planet is unique in the universe.
However, in a 2020 study, we showed that water — or at least its components, hydrogen and oxygen — may have been present in the rocks that initially formed the Earth. If that is so indeed, other “blue planets” with liquid water are more likely to exist elsewhere.
Water on Earth, water inside the Earth[image error]
(Image credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Adam Nieman, Author provided (No reuse))Liquid water covers more than 70% of Earth’s surface, with about about 95.6% of it in oceans and seas, and the remaining 4% in glaciers, ice caps, groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil humidity, and the atmosphere.
But most of Earth’s water is deep underground: between one and ten times the volume of the oceans are contained in the mantle.
At the surface of the Earth, “water” means two hydrogens for each oxygen (H20), whereas what we call “water” in the mantle corresponds to hydrogen incorporated in minerals, magmas and fluids. This hydrogen can bond with surrounding oxygen to form water at the appropriate temperature and pressure conditions.
While water represents less than 0.5% of the mass of the Earth, it is key to the evolution of the planet itself and to life at its surface.
In the early solar system, there was a lot of hydrogen, mainly in the form of dihydrogen gas (H2), or bonded with oxygen atoms to form water (H2O). However, Earth and the other rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) formed near the sun, where it was too hot for water to incorporate into rock as ice: it just would have evaporated. So why does the Earth now have so much water, both in its mantle and on its surface?
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The solar system began as a cloud of gas and dust, from which the planets and planetary bodies formed by the agglomeration of dust. At the low pressures of the interplanetary medium, the incorporation of water into planetary bodies depends on the surrounding temperature: above minus 184 degrees Fahrenheit, water is in its vapor form and does not agglomerate with other solids. (Image credit: Laurette Piani)The prevalent hypothesis: hydrogen delivered to Earth by hydrated asteroidsSome meteorites, called chondrites, come from small asteroids that, unlike the planets, have not geologically evolved since their formation. They are good witnesses of the first millions of years of the solar system.
The carbonaceous chondrites for instance formed far enough away from the Sun to initially contain water ice (all of which has since been incorporated in hydrated minerals through hydrothermal alteration). Contrastingly, ordinary and enstatite chondrites formed closer to the sun where water was gaseous and was incorporated in large amounts into rocks: like the rocky planets, ordinary and enstatite chondrites are considered to be “dry.”
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The Murchison meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite containing hydrated minerals and organic components that formed in the outer part of the solar system (0.46 g). Right: the Sahara 97096 meteorite, an enstatite chondrite with no hydrated minerals that formed in the inner part of the solar system (70 g). (Image credit: on Taylor/Flickr, and Laurette Piani and Christine Fieni/MNHN, CC BY-SA)Until now, the accepted hypothesis was that Earth formed from dry materials, and that its water was delivered by celestial bodies that formed further from the sun: hydrated meteorites, such as carbonaceous chondrites, or comets — although this last hypothesis was recently thwarted by the ESA space probe Rosetta.
Another origin for Earth’s water?Our study tells a different story. We analyzed the hydrogen in enstatite chondrites. Remember that these are among our best analogues for the rocks that formed Earth, so the hydrogen concentrations in these “dry” rocks hint at the possible presence of water during Earth’s formation.
We compared the Earth composition and that of enstatite chondrites by looking at the amounts of various isotopes (atoms of the same element but containing different numbers of neutrons). We find that, although enstatite chondrites do not contain hydrated minerals, they do contain small amounts of hydrogen with an isotopic ratio consistent with the Earth’s. Hydrogen is thought to have been present in trace amounts (<0.1%) in the minerals and organic compounds that agglomerated to form enstatite chondrites, explaining where most of the water contained in Earth’s mantle and in part of the oceans comes from. The majority of Earth’s water (more precisely its elements, hydrogen and oxygen) may thus have been present from the beginning.
What are the consequences of a local origin of water?This does not tell us when the oceans appeared on Earth’s surface, but we now know that Earth’s water was not necessarily delivered by hydrated bodies that formed very far from the sun. However, we do not yet understand in what form(s) and by what process hydrogen was incorporated and stored in rocks of the inner solar system.
Read more: Why is the Earth blue?
The presence of hydrogen in inner solar system rocks is particularly important because it could have been a water source for the other rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars). Similar rocks could then represent a source of water for planets orbiting other suns, a condition to develop life, at least life as we know it.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
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Why we need to get better at predicting space weather, ,
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .
Rami Qahwaji , Professor of Visual Computing, University of Bradford
The sun is the most important source of energy for sustaining life on Earth, but it gives us a lot more than just light and heat. It also gives us solar storms.
Disturbances on the sun, such as coronal mass ejections produced by solar flares that emanate from active sunspot regions, can cause solar storms. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections emit vast quantities of radiation and charged particles into space.
Many people still remember the collapse of Canada’s Quebec electrical grid on resulting in power outages and reduced system functionality. Satellites, space stations and astronauts, aviation, GPS, power grids and more can be affected.
As our civilization becomes more advanced, we become more vulnerable to the effects of solar storms. Now, as the sun’s activity is on the increase, we need to get better at predicting solar weather.
Many people still remember the collapse of Canada’s Quebec electrical grid on 13 March 1989, which lasted for nine hours and affected six million people. It caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost revenues. This blackout was caused by solar storms.
These days, we’re much more reliant on technology, which is in turn increasingly vulnerable to the effects of space and its unique natural disasters.dge technology in 1859 was limited to electrical telegraphs, and most of those failed all over Europe and North America, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks.
These days, we’re much more reliant on technology, which is in turn increasingly vulnerable to the effects of space and its unique natural disasters.
Space radiationSpace is vast, cold, dark and awash with radiation. Radiation in space comes mainly from galactic cosmic radiation — high energy particles thrown out from other galaxies — and solar particle events — high energy particles from our own sun.
In space radiation, atoms are accelerated in interstellar space to speeds close to the speed of light. Eventually, the electrons are stripped out and only the positively charged nucleus remains.
Humans have been observing and counting sunspots for more than 400 years, making this the longest running experiment in the world. The sun has an 11-year sunspot cycle, and at the moment, we are in the middle of that cycle. Now it’s approaching “solar maximum,” where the greatest solar activity occurs. The next solar maximum is expected to begin in 2025.
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The northern lights are caused by solar flares. (Image credit: Daniele Boffelli)People are familiar with the northern lights, which is one visible effect of solar radiation. Earth’s magnetic field, which protects us from most of the dangers of space radiation, directs the charged particles to the poles, where they enter our atmosphere and cause beautiful light displays.
But the radiation can also impact technology and people. During strong solar radiation storms, energetic protons can damage electronic circuits inside satellites and the biological DNA of astronauts. Passengers and crew flying over the north pole would be exposed to increased radiation.
These radiation storms can create errors that make navigation operations extremely difficult. Energetic protons can also ionize the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, creating a layer of free electrons. This layer can absorb high-frequency radio waves, causing a blackout of high-frequency communications, also known as shortwave radio.
With our increasing reliance on technology, predicting the weather in space is crucial. However, accurately predicting space weather has long been a challenging problem for experts.
Predicting space weatherUnderstanding the complexity of sunspots will help us predict whether significant solar flares may happen. My colleagues and I developed a real-time automated computer system which uses image processing and artificial intelligence technologies to monitor and analyse solar satellite data. This helps predict the likelihood of solar flares in the coming 24 hours.
We pioneered new techniques for automatic processing, detection and feature extraction of solar features — like active regions and sunspots — captured by NASA’s solar dynamics observatory satellite. We also introduced the first automated and real-time system to classify sunspots. Before this, the classification of sunspots was a manual process painstakingly carried out by experts.
Read more: Four graphs that suggest we can’t blame climate change on solar activity
Space missions and astronauts are much more likely to be affected by radiation, because they aren’t protected by Earth’s magnetic field. The effects on humans could include radiation sickness, increased risk for cancer, degenerative diseases and central nervous system effects.
Despite these risks, human and robotic activities are increasing in space and NASA is working to land humans on Mars by the 2030s. There are two rovers — Curiosity and Perseverance — and one lander currently operational on Mars, with another rover planned for launch in 2022.
Our space weather prediction system is publicly available, and is now used as one of the decision-making tools for NASA’s robotic missions and to manage radiation effects on NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory orbit.
As we continue venturing further into space, we’ll need to strengthen our current space weather prediction capabilities to build a greater picture of solar activity and mitigate its effects around the solar system.
This task is incredibly challenging, as most solar observations are taken for Earth’s field of view. Better modelling and investigation of the evolution of solar features is necessary to accommodate for the drastically different celestial orbits around the Sun.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
The post Why we need to get better at predicting space weather, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
