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Category: space – Page 65

Generalizing Safety Beyond Collision-Avoidance via Latent-Space Reachability Analysis

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a rigorous mathematical framework that enables robots to simultaneously detect unsafe states and generate actions that prevent future failures. While in theory, HJ reachability can synthesize safe controllers for nonlinear systems and nonconvex constraints.

In practice, it has been limited to hand-engineered collision

Avoidance constraints modeled via low-dimensional state-space representations and first-principles dynamics. In this work, our goal is to generalize safe robot controllers to prevent failures that are hard—if not impossible—to write down by hand, but can be intuitively identified from high-dimensional observations:

Meteorite discovery challenges long-held theories on Earth’s missing elements

Understanding where Earth’s essential elements came from—and why some are missing—has long puzzled scientists. Now, a new study reveals a surprising twist in the story of our planet’s formation.

A new study led by Arizona State University’s Assistant Professor Damanveer Grewal from the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in collaboration with researchers from Caltech, Rice University, and MIT, challenges traditional theories about why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs).

MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen. Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world. Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.

Solar cycle study reveals trends in charged particle numbers and interactions

A large team of researchers working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Collaboration, which has been analyzing eleven years’ worth of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station, has found trends in the number of particles moving around in the heliosphere and in the way they interact with one another.

The team has published two papers in the journal Physical Review Letters; one describing trends they found surrounding antiproton and elementary particle behavior over a single and the other covering solar modulation of cosmic nuclei behavior, also over a single solar cycle.

Prior research has shown that the sun follows a cycle that repeats itself every 11 years. The AMS has been running for more than 11 years, but the researchers working on both efforts focused on conditions during just one cycle. They wanted to know how the sun impacted energy particles in the and beyond.

By studying neutron ‘starquakes,’ scientists hope to transform their understanding of nuclear matter

The study of ‘starquakes’ (like earthquakes, but in stars) promises to give us important new insights into the properties of neutron stars (the collapsed remnants of massive stars), according to new research led by the University of Bath in the UK.

Such explorations have the potential to challenge our current approaches to studying , with important impacts for the future of both nuclear physics and astronomy. Longer term, there may also be implications in the fields of health, security and energy.

The value of studying asteroseismology—as these vibrations and flares are known—has emerged from research carried out by an international team of physicists that includes Dr. David Tsang and Dr. Duncan Neill from the Department of Physics at Bath, along with colleagues from Texas A&M and the University of Ohio.

What does Earth sound like from space?

They say space is silent, but turn your ears into radio wave receivers and suddenly it is a symphony of sounds. So what does Earth sound like from space?
https://brilliant.org/astrum/

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At 1.3 Billion Light-Years Wide, Quipu Is Officially The Biggest Thing in The Universe

Is it possible to understand the Universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely.

In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.

Astronomers have found the largest structure in the Universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.

The Shape of Mars: Discovering Wind Patterns Through Dune Formation

What can sand dunes on Earth and Mars teach us about the latter’s wind behavior and atmosphere? This is what a recently awarded NASA grant hopes to address as a PhD student at Texas A&M University will be tasked with analyzing what are known as “compound dunes”, which are large sand dunes that possess smaller dunes compounding on the top, giving the appearance they are “growing” on the top of the larger dunes. While compound dunes have been studied extensively on Earth, this will be the first time they are examined on the Red Planet.

Like sand dunes on Earth, Mars sand dunes are formed from wind processes (also called aeolian processes), which is the primary atmospheric behavior occurring on the Red Planet since its atmospheric pressure is far too low to have liquid water on its surface. Because of this, wind patterns drive sandstorms and dust storms, often encircling the entire planet and preventing sunlight from reaching the surface.

“The shape and pattern of these aeolian bedforms—geologic features shaped by wind—can tell us so much about the environment,” said Lauren Berger, who is the recipient of the NASA grant. “By comparing compound dunes on Mars to those on Earth, we can uncover similarities and differences that could help us better understand the Martian surface and atmosphere.”

The Bullseye Galaxy: A Stunning Case of a Galaxy ‘Hit’ by a Dwarf Galaxy

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha.

How many rings can galaxies have? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international team of researchers discovered a unique galaxy with nine rings, possessing six more rings than any known galaxy, that they aptly named the Bullseye Galaxy. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies throughout the universe, potentially resulting in identifying where we could find life.

The Bullseye Galaxy is known as a collisional ring galaxy (CRG) and whose radius is approximately 70 kiloparsecs (228,309 light-years), which is two and a half times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy, which is known as a spiral galaxy. After significant image analysis from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the researchers estimate the Bullseye Galaxy was created approximately 50 million years ago when a smaller blue dwarf galaxy collided with the center of the former, resulting in nine giant rings like ripples being created when a pebble is dropped in a water.

En route to Jupiter, Europa Clipper captures images of stars

Three months after its launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency’s Europa Clipper has another 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to go before it reaches Jupiter’s orbit in 2030 to take close-up images of the icy moon Europa with science cameras.

Meanwhile, a set of cameras serving a different purpose is snapping photos in the space between Earth and Jupiter. Called star trackers, the two imagers look for stars and use them like a compass to help mission controllers know the exact orientation of the spacecraft—information critical for pointing telecommunications antennas toward Earth and sending data back and forth smoothly.

In early December, the pair of star trackers (formally known as the stellar reference units) captured and transmitted Europa Clipper’s first imagery of space. The picture, composed of three shots, shows tiny pinpricks of light from stars 150 to 300 light-years away. The starfield represents only about 0.1% of the full sky around the spacecraft, but by mapping the stars in just that small slice of sky, the orbiter is able to determine where it is pointed and orient itself correctly.