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Astronauts on Long Missions Will Need Personal AI Assistants
How can artificial intelligence (AI) help astronauts on long-term space missions? This is what a recent study presented at the 2024 International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the German Aerospace Center introduce enhancements for the Mars Exploration Telemetry-Driven Information System (METIS) system and how …
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Could Primordial Black Holes Be Hiding in Plain Sight?
Are Primordial Black Holes real? They could’ve formed in the unusual physics that dominated the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. The idea dates back to the 1960s, but so far, the lack of evidence makes them purely hypothetical. If they do exist, a new paper suggests they may be hiding in places so unlikely …
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NASA Wants Students’ Help Designing Missions to Other Moons
One of NASA’s primary missions is to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to join the STEM field. It does so by producing inspirational and educational content on various platforms. But sometimes, it takes a more direct approach by rewarding students for their contributions to solving a particular problem NASA is facing. Recently, …
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Antarctica Has Gotten 10 Times Greener in 35 Years
Our satellites are dispassionate observers of Earth’s climate change. From their vantage point they watch as pack ice slowly loses its hold on polar oceans, ice shelfs break apart, and previously frozen parts of the planet turn green with vegetation. Now, scientists have compiled 35 years of satellite data showing that Antarctica is slowly, yet …
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White Dwarfs Could Have Habitable Planets, Detectable by JWST
White dwarfs are dead stars like our Sun. Although they're no longer performing fusion in their cores, they're still hot and putting out radiation that could support life. A new paper calculates that a white dwarf could support planets in a new habitable zone for 7 billion years, providing the right temperature and radiation to support a biosphere. They're also small and dim, which makes it easier to study planets in orbit around them for potential biosignatures.
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Catch Jupiter at Opposition 2024 This Coming Weekend
Now is the time to catch Jupiter at its best. The King of the Planets rules the winter night skies. Early December gives sky watchers a good reason to brave the cold, as Jupiter shines at its best. Look for the regal planet rising in the east at sunset, while the Sun sets to the …
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Dragonfly is Going to Titan on a Falcon Heavy
NASA has given SpaceX the contract to launch the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. A Falcon Heavy will send the rotorcraft and its lander on their way to Titan in 2028, if all goes according to plan, and the mission will arrive at Titan in 2034. Dragonfly is an astrobiology mission designed to measure …
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A New Reconfigurable Structure Could Be Used to Make Space Habitats
Even some fields that seem fully settled will occasionally have breakthrough ideas that have reverberated impacts on the rest of the fields of science and technology. Mechanics is one of those relatively settled fields – it is primarily understood at the macroscopic level, and relatively few new breakthroughs have occurred in it recently. Until a …
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What's Inside Uranus and Neptune? A New Way to Find Out
Uranus and Neptune are "ice giants," containing chemicals like methane and ammonia, but compressed under intense pressure. This is just speculation from a couple of flybys with Voyager 2 and telescope observations. A new paper suggests that Uranus and Neptune have distinct layers, which don't easily mix and could explain their unusual magnetic fields. Below the cloud layers is a deep ocean of water and then a compressed fluid of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen.
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Just Built a Giant, Next Generation Planet Hunting Space Telescope? Here’s Where to Point It
You know what it’s like. You get a new telescope and need to know where to point it! The bigger the telescope, the more potential targets and the harder the decision! To date, we have found over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets (5,288 to be exact) with thousands more candidates. With missions like Gaia identifying thousands of …
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