This delicately layered atmosphere is considered a “mille-feuille” by experts at the European Space Agency.
Category: space – Page 22
NASA Will Crash The International Space Station in 2030. Here’s What Comes Next
For 24 hours a day, seven days a week since November 2000, NASA and its international partners have sustained a continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit, including at least one American – a streak that will soon reach 25 years.
When viewed in the history of spaceflight, the International Space Station is perhaps one of humanity’s most amazing accomplishments, a shining example of cooperation in space among the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia. But all good things must come to an end.
In 2030, the International Space Station will be deorbited: driven into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.
Astronomers pinpoint the location of the brightest fast radio burst to date
An international collaboration of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Toronto, have detected the brightest Fast Radio Burst (FRB) to date—and have been able to pinpoint its location in a nearby galaxy by using a network of radio telescopes.
FRBs are extremely energetic flashes from distant sources from across the universe that are caused by extreme astrophysical phenomena. Yet, they remain poorly understood by scientists and are among astronomy’s most mysterious phenomena. Pinpointing their location promises to usher in a new era of discovery, allowing scientists to trace their true cosmic origins.
The new FRB signal, called FRB 20250316A and playfully nicknamed RBFLOAT (“radio brightest flash of all time”), was very precisely localized using a new FRB Outrigger array as part of the Canadian Hydrogen-Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), which has detected thousands of FRBs since 2018. These smaller versions of the CHIME instrument—located in British Columbia, Northern California and West Virginia—allow astronomers to perform very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), a technique that can pinpoint the location of FRBs with unprecedented accuracy.
NASA Satellite Swarm’s Expanded Mission Powers Smarter Operations
NASA continues to study how autonomy will assist future exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other worlds. As exploration continues to evolve, future spacecraft swarms will one day “see” and communicate with each other autonomously, navigating new destinations more efficiently.
The success of NASA’s Starling mission extension, called Starling 1.5+, shows greater autonomy in space missions can give spacecraft a higher degree of independence, allowing them to make decisions and coordinate actions without the constant oversight of human operators. Improving this technology opens doors to operating swarms of spacecraft farther from Earth, like at the Moon or Mars, where communications are limited, and autonomy could play a critical role.
Device-independent method certifies genuinely entangled subspaces in photonic and superconducting systems
In a study published in Reports on Progress in Physics, researchers have achieved device-independent characterization of genuinely entangled subspaces (GESs) in both optical and superconducting quantum systems, completing the self-checking of the five-qubit error correction code space.
In quantum information, genuinely multipartite entangled states require the existence of entanglement correlations between any two subsystems within the system. The GES constituted by the states has application value especially in designing quantum error-correcting codes. By encoding quantum information in the subspace, it can prevent error propagation caused by local decoherence.
Scientists have constructed a new Bell inequality based on the stabilizer code framework constructed, and the entangled subspace can be universally characterized by using it. Any quantum state (including mixed states) within this subspace could maximally violate this inequality, providing a theoretical basis for the self-testing of genuine entangled subspaces.
Astronomers Capture First-Ever Photo of a Baby Planet Being Born in Darkness
Astronomers have captured something extraordinary: the first-ever direct photo of a baby planet growing inside a dusty ring around a young star.
Using cutting-edge adaptive optics, the team detected the glowing hydrogen gas streaming onto the infant world, essentially catching it mid-birth.
First detection of a growing exoplanet.
Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43 million years ago
A decades-long scientific debate over the origins of the Silverpit Crater in the southern North Sea has been resolved. New evidence confirms that it was caused by an asteroid or comet impact about 43–46 million years ago.
A team led by Dr. Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh used seismic imaging, microscopic analysis of rock cuttings and numerical models to provide the strongest evidence yet that Silverpit is one of Earth’s rare impact craters. Their findings are published in Nature Communications.
The Silverpit Crater sits 700 meters below the seabed in the North Sea, about 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire.