Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 206

Scout Space selected for DARPA’s commercial tech initiative

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected the startup Scout Space to participate in the BRIDGES (Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems) consortium.

BRIDGES, launched by DARPA in 2023, aims to connect innovative small companies and nontraditional defense contractors with classified Department of Defense research and development efforts. The initiative seeks to bridge the gap between cutting-edge commercial technologies and classified defense needs, particularly in areas considered critical to maintaining U.S. military superiority.

Scout Space, based in Reston, Virginia, develops satellite flight software and space domain awareness sensors. The company announced July 8 it was selected by DARPA for its proposal outlining an approach to “advancing autonomous in-space threat response.”

Nine ventures join first SoCal-UK Space Accelerator

TAMPA, Fla. — Mandala Space Ventures, a Californian venture studio and incubator, announced July 8 the nine United Kingdom-based startups participating in its UK Space Agency-funded accelerator program this fall.

The eight-week virtual course starts Sept. 3 and culminates with an in-person investor pitch day at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.

The SoCal-UK Space Accelerator creates a “transatlantic portal for great ideas from the U.K.,” said Mandala founder and CEO Leon Alkalai, helping prepare them for venture capital and access to the U.S. market.

Astronomers find surprising ice world in the habitable zone with JWST data

A team of astronomers has identified a temperate exoplanet as a promising super-Earth ice or water world.

The findings, led by Université de Montréal, show that the exoplanet, LHS 1,140 b, is not likely a mini-Neptune, a small so-called gas giant—large planets composed mostly of gas—with a thick hydrogen-rich . The planet, located about 48 light-years away in the constellation Cetus, emerges as one of the most promising habitable zone exoplanet candidates known, potentially harboring an atmosphere and even a .

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were collected in December 2023 and added to previous data from other space telescopes Spitzer, Hubble, and TESS to solidify this result, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters this week and currently available on the arXiv preprint server.

A new approach to realize quantum mechanical squeezing

Mechanical systems are highly suitable for realizing applications such as quantum information processing, quantum sensing and bosonic quantum simulation. The effective use of these systems for these applications, however, relies on the ability to manipulate them in unique ways, specifically by ‘squeezing’ their states and introducing nonlinear effects in the quantum regime.

A research team at ETH Zurich led by Dr. Matteo Fadel recently introduced a new approach to realize quantum squeezing in a nonlinear mechanical oscillator. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could have interesting implications for the development of quantum metrology and sensing technologies.

“Initially, our goal was to prepare a mechanical squeezed state, namely a quantum state of motion with reduced quantum fluctuations along one phase-space direction,” Fadel told Phys.org. “Such states are important for and quantum simulation applications. They are one of the in the universal gate set for quantum computing with continuous-variable systems—meaning mechanical degrees of freedom, , etc., as opposed to qubits that are discrete-variable systems.”

Would Astronauts’ Kidneys Survive a Roundtrip to Mars?

The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL.

The study, published in Nature Communications, is the largest analysis of kidney health in space flight to date and includes the first health dataset for commercial astronauts. It is published as part of a Nature special collection of papers on space and health.

Researchers have known that space flight causes certain health issues since the 1970s, in the years after humans first travelled beyond Earth’s magnetic field, most famously during the first moon landing in 1969. These issues include loss of bone mass, weakening of the heart and eyesight, and development of kidney stones.

/* */