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A high-resolution camera mounted on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped pictures of unusual, almost perfectly circular sand dunes on the Red Planet’s surface.

AI or bust. Right now, AI is what everyone is talking about, and for good reason. After years of seeing AI doled out to help automate the processes that make businesses run smarter, we’re finally seeing AI that can help the average business employee working in the real world. Generative AI, or the process of using algorithms to produce data often in the form of images or text, has exploded in the last few months. What started with OpenAI’s ChatGPT has bloomed into a rapidly evolving subcategory of technology. And companies from Microsoft to Google to Salesforce and Adobe are hopping on board.

What started with ChatGPT has bloomed into an entire subcategory of technology with Meta, AWS, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft all racing to out innovate and deliver exciting generative AI capabilities to consumers, enterprise, developers, and more. Exploring the rapid progress in the AI space.

International Space Station’s time in orbit ends on 2030.

The International Space Station’s time in orbit will end in 2030. It’ll have to be taken out of its orbit through controlled disintegration into the Earth’s atmosphere. For this, NASA is developing a spacecraft that will maneuver safe disposal of the station.

This was revealed when the Biden administration allocated a budget of $27.2 billion to NASA for the fiscal year 2024, which includes $180 million “to initiate the development of a new space tug” that could deorbit the ISS.

Sand dunes are not uncommon on the surface of Mars. However, during observations to see how the frost from winter melts on the planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of strange Martian dunes that appear almost completely circular. This almost perfectly circular appearance is unusual, which has sparked the interest of NASA and astronomers worldwide.

According to NASA’s page detailing the image, the strange Martian dunes appear to have steeper sides on the south side. NASA says this is because the windows on Mars generally move towards the south. Of course, they can vary, but the effect is clearly seen in these images, where the southern side of the circular dunes is steeper.

The images of these strange Martian dunes were made possible thanks to the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), an instrument on the MRO. HiRISE is the largest and the most powerful camera that humanity has ever sent to another planet, and it has delivered exceptional observations about the surface of the Red Planet.

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Researched and Written by Leila Battison.
Narrated and Edited by David Kelly.
Animations by Jero Squartini https://www.fiverr.com/share/0v7Kjv.
Incredible thumbnail art by Ettore Mazza, the GOAT: https://www.instagram.com/ettore.mazza/?hl=en.

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Communicating with far-off Mars is hard, but new satellite arrangements could make things easier for future missions.

A few years from now, a small radio telescope on the far side of the moon could help scientists peer into the universe’s ancient past.

The moon instrument, called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), is a pathfinder being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

A project to map the earliest structures of the universe has found 15,000 more galaxies in its first snapshot than captured in an entire deep field survey conducted 20 years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the new preeminent observatory in the sky, saw about 25,000 galaxies in that single image, dramatically surpassing the nearly 10,000 shown in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field Survey (Opens in a new tab). Scientists say that little piece of the space pie represents just four percent of the data they’ll discover from the new Webb survey by the time it’s completed next year.

“When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful,” said Caitlin Casey, a University of Texas at Austin astronomer co-leading the investigation, in a statement (Opens in a new tab).

Learning that your whole life is a lie while you’re trapped in space is a tough combo.