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Solar sails are an exciting way to travel through the Solar System because they get their propulsion from the Sun. NASA has developed several solar sails, and their newest, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (or ACS3), launched a few months ago into low-Earth orbit. After testing, NASA reported today that they extended the booms, deploying its 80-square-meter (860 square feet) solar sail. They’ll now use the sail to raise and lower the spacecraft’s orbit, learning more about solar sailing.

“The Sun will continue burning for billions of years, so we have a limitless source of propulsion. Instead of launching massive fuel tanks for future missions, we can launch larger sails that use ‘fuel’ already available,” said Alan Rhodes, the mission’s lead systems engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, earlier this year. “We will demonstrate a system that uses this abundant resource to take those next giant steps in exploration and science.”

And for all you skywatchers out there, NASA said that given the reflectivity of the large sail and its position in orbit (about 1,000 km/600 miles) above Earth, ACS3 should be easily visible at times in the night sky. The Heavens Above website already has ACS3 listed on their page (just put in your location to see when to catch the solar sail passing over your area.) There should be info and updates available on social media, so follow NASA.gov and @NASAAmes on X and Instagram for updates.

ACS3 is part of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, which has the objective of deploying small missions that demonstrate unique capabilities rapidly. ACS3 launched in April 2024 aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from New Zealand. The spacecraft is a twelve-unit (12U) CubeSat built by NanoAvionics that’s about the size of a microwave oven. The biggest challenge designing and creating lightweight booms that could be small enough to fit inside the spacecraft while being able to extend to about 9 meters (30 ft) per side, and being strong enough to support the solar sail. The lightweight but strong composite carbon fiber boom system unrolled from the spacecraft to form rigid tubes that support the ultra-thin, reflective polymer sail.

This video shows how the booms work and the sail deploys:

When fully deployed, the sail forms a square that is about half the size of a tennis court. To change direction, the spacecraft angles its sails. Now with the boom deployment, the ACS3 team will perform maneuvers with the spacecraft, angling the sails and to change the spacecraft’s orbit.

The primary goal of the mission was to demonstrate boom deployment. With that now successfully achieved, the ACS3 team also hopes the mission will prove that their solar sail spacecraft can actually work for future solar sail-equipped science and exploration missions.?

This image shows the ACS3 being unfurled at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The solar wind is reliable but not very powerful. It requires a large sail area to power a spacecraft effectively. The ACS2 is about 9 meters (30 ft) per side, requiring a strong, lightweight boom system. Image Credit: NASA

Since ACS3 is a demonstration mission, the goal is to build larger sails that can generate more thrust. With these unique composite carbon fiber booms, the ACS3 system has the potential to support sails as large as 2,000 square meters, or about 21,500 square feet, or about half the area of a soccer field.

“The hope is that the new technologies verified on this spacecraft will inspire others to use them in ways we haven’t even considered,” Rhodes said.

And look for photos of the ACS3 fully deployed sail next week. The spacecraft has four cameras which captured a panoramic view of the reflective sail and supporting composite booms. NASA said that high-resolution imagery from these cameras will be available on Wednesday, Sept. 4.

NASA is providing updates on this mission on their Small Satellite Missions blog page.

The post NASA's New Solar Sail Extends Its Booms and Sets Sail appeared first on Universe Today.

A team of scientists has unlocked the potential of 6G communications with a new polarization multiplexer. This allows multiple data streams to be transmitted simultaneously over the same frequency band, effectively doubling data capacity.

Thread that contains the part of a potato plant that is normally thrown away could be a sustainable alternative to pure cotton

Rogue Planets, or free-floating planetary-mass objects (FFPMOs), are planet-sized objects that either formed in interstellar space or were part of a planetary system before gravitational perturbations kicked them out. Since they were first observed in 2000, astronomers have detected hundreds of candidates that are untethered to any particular star and float through the interstellar medium (ISM) of our galaxy. In fact, some scientists estimate that there could be as many as 2 trillion rogue planets (or more!) wandering through the Milky Way alone.

In recent news, a team of astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced the discovery of six rogue planet candidates in an unlikely spot. The planets, which include the lightest rogue planet ever identified (with a debris disk around it), were spotted during Webb‘s deepest survey of the young nebula NGC 1333, a star-forming cluster about a thousand light-years away in the Perseus constellation. These planets could teach astronomers a great deal about the formation process of stars and planets.

The team was led by Adam Langeveld, an Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He was joined by colleagues from the Carl Sagan Institute, the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, the Mont Mégantic Observatory, the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Victoria, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) at the University of St Andrews. The paper detailing the survey’s findings has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

Most of the rogue planets detected to date were discovered using Gravitational Microlensing, while others were detected via Direct Imaging. The former method relies on “lensing events,” where the gravitational force of massive objects alters the curvature of spacetime around them and amplifies light from more distant objects. The latter consists of spotting brown dwarfs (objects that straddle the line between planets and stars) and massive planets directly by detecting the infrared radiation produced within their atmospheres.

In their paper, the team describes how the discovery occurred during an extremely deep spectroscopic survey of NGC1333. Using data from Webb‘s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), the team measured the spectrum of every object in the observed portion of the star cluster. This allowed them to reanalyze spectra from 19 previously observed brown dwarfs and led to the discovery of a new brown dwarf with a planetary-mass companion. This latter observation was a rare find that already challenges theories of how binary systems form. But the real kicker was the detection of six planets with 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter (aka. super-Jupiters).

This means these six candidates are among the lowest-mass rogue planets ever found that formed through the same process as brown dwarfs and stars. This was the purpose of the Deep Spectroscopic Survey for Young Brown Dwarfs and Free-Floating Planets survey, which was to investigate massive objects that are not quite large enough to become stars. The fact that Webb’s observations revealed no objects lower than five Jupiter masses (which it is sensitive enough to detect) is a strong indication that stellar objects lighter than are more likely to form the way planets do.

Said lead author Langeveld in a statement released by JHU’s new source (the Hub):

“We are probing the very limits of the star-forming process. If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, is it possible that it could have become a star under the right conditions? This is important context for understanding both star and planet formation.”

New wide-field view mosaic from the James Webb Space Telescope spectroscopic survey of NGC1333 with three of the newly discovered free-floating planetary-mass objects indicated by green markers. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

The most intriguing of the rogue planets was also the lightest: an estimated five Jupiter masses (about 1,600 Earths). Since dust and gas generally fall into a disk during the early stages of star formation, the presence of this debris ring around the one planet strongly suggests that it formed in the same way stars do. However, planetary systems also form from debris disks (aka. circumsolar disks), which suggests that these objects may be able to form their own satellites. This suggests that these massive planets could be a nursery for a miniature planet system – like our Solar System, but on a much smaller scale.

Said Johns Hopkins Provost Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and senior author of the study (who also leads the survey group):

“It turns out the smallest free-floating objects that form like stars overlap in mass with giant exoplanets circling nearby stars. It’s likely that such a pair formed the way binary star systems do, from a cloud fragmenting as it contracted. The diversity of systems that nature has produced is remarkable and pushes us to refine our models of star and planet formation…

“Our observations confirm that nature produces planetary mass objects in at least two different ways—from the contraction of a cloud of gas and dust, the way stars form, and in disks of gas and dust around young stars, as Jupiter in our own solar system did.”

In the coming months, the team plans to use Webb to conduct follow-up studies of these rogue planets’ atmospheres and compare them to those of brown dwarfs and gas giants. They also plan to search the star-forming region for other objects with debris disks to investigate the possibility of mini-planetary systems. The data they obtain will also help astronomers refine their estimates on the number of rogue planets in our galaxy. The new Webb observations indicate that such bodies account for about 10% of celestial bodies in the targeted cluster.

Current estimates place the number of stars in our galaxy between 100 and 400 billion stars and the number of planets between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion. At 10%, that would suggest that there are anywhere from 90 to 360 billion rogue worlds floating out there. As we have explored in previous articles, we might be able to explore some of them someday, and our Sun may even capture a few!

Further Reading: HUB

The post Webb Discovers Six New “Rogue Worlds” that Provide Clues to Star Formation appeared first on Universe Today.

Scientists have discovered that Earth has a third field. We all know about the Earth’s magnetic field. And we all know about Earth’s gravity field, though we usually just call it gravity.

Now, a team of international scientists have found Earth’s global electric field.

It’s called the ambipolar electric field, and it’s a weak electric field that surrounds the planet. It’s responsible for the polar wind, which was first detected decades ago. The polar wind is an outflow of plasma from the polar regions of Earth’s magnetosphere. Scientists hypothesized the ambipolar field’s existence decades ago, and now they finally have proof.

The discovery is in a new article in Nature titled “Earth’s ambipolar electrostatic field and its role in ion escape to space.” The lead author is Glyn Collinson from the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

“It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space.”

Glyn Collinson, Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The Space Age gained momentum back in the 1960s as the USA and USSR launched more and more satellites. When spacecraft passed over the Earth’s poles, they detected an outflow of particles from Earth’s atmosphere into space. Scientists named this the polar wind, but for decades, it was mysterious.

Scientists expect some particles from Earth to “leak” into space. Sunlight can cause this. But if that’s the case, the particles should be heated. The wind is mysterious because many particles in it are cold despite moving at supersonic speeds.

“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said lead author Collinson.

Collinson is also the Principal Investigator for NASA’s “Endurance” Sounding Rocket Mission. “The purpose of the Endurance mission was to make the first measurement of the magnitude and structure of the electric field generated by Earth’s ionosphere,” NASA writes in their mission description. Endurance launched on May 22nd, 2022, from Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago.

This image shows NASA’s Endurance rocket launching from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, Norway. It flew for 19 minutes to an altitude of about 780 km (484 mi) above Earth’s sunlit polar cap. It carried six science instruments and could only be launched in certain conditions to be successful. Image Credit: NASA/Brian Bonsteel.

“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester, UK, and co-author of the paper.

Svalbard is key because there are open magnetic field lines above Earth’s polar caps. These field lines provide a pathway for ions to outflow to the magnetosphere.

This figure from the research shows Endurance’s flight profile and its path over Earth. The rocket had to fly near the open magnetic field lines that exist at Svalbard’s high polar latitudes. Image Credit: Collinson et al. 2024.

After it was launched, Collinson said, “We got fabulous data all through the flight, though it will be a while before we can really dig into it to see if we achieved our science objective or not.”

Now, the data is in, and the results show that Earth has a global electric field.

Prior to its discovery, scientists hypothesized that the field was weak and that its effects could only be felt over hundreds of kilometres. Even though it was first proposed 60 years ago, scientists had to wait for technology to advance before they could measure it. In 2016, Collinson and his colleagues began inventing a new instrument that could measure the elusive field.

At about 250 km (150 mi) above the Earth’s surface, atoms break apart into negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. Electrons are far lighter than ions, and the tiniest energetic jolt can send them into space. Ions are more than 1800 times heavier, and gravity draws them back to the surface.

If gravity were the only force at work, the two populations would separate over time and simply drift apart. But that’s not what happens.

Electrons and ions have opposite electrical charges. They’re attracted to one another and an electric field forms that keeps them together. This counteracts some of gravity’s power.

The field is called ambipolar because it’s bidirectional. That means it works in both directions. As ions sink down due to gravity, the electrical charges mean that the ions drag some of the electrons down with them. However, at the same time, electrons lift ions high into the atmosphere with them as they attempt to leave the atmosphere and escape into space.

via GIPHY

The result of all this is that the ambipolar field extends the atmosphere’s height, meaning some of the ions escape with the polar wind.

After decades of hypothesizing and theorizing, the Endurance rocket measured a change in electric potential of only 0.55 volts. That’s extremely weak but enough to be measurable.

“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Collinson said. “But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.”

Hydrogen ions are the most plentiful particles in the polar wind. Endurance’s results show that these ions experience an outward force from the magnetic field that’s 10.6 times more powerful than gravity. “That’s more than enough to counter gravity — in fact, it’s enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds,” said Alex Glocer, Endurance project scientist at NASA Goddard and co-author of the paper.

Hydrogen ions are light, but even the heavier particles in the polar wind are lifted. Oxygen ions in the weak electrical field effectively weigh half as much, yet they’re boosted to greater heights, too. Overall, the ambipolar field makes the ionosphere denser at higher altitudes than it would be without the field’s lofting effect. “It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space,” Collinson added.

“The measurements support the hypothesis that the ambipolar electric field is the primary driver of ionospheric H+ outflow and of the supersonic polar wind of light ions escaping from the polar caps,” the authors explain in their paper.

“We infer that this increases the supply of cold O+ ions to the magnetosphere by more than 3,800%,” the authors write. At that point, other mechanisms come into play. Wave-particle interactions can heat the ions, accelerating them to escape velocity.

These results raise other questions. How does this field affect Earth? Has the field affected the planet’s habitability? Do other planets have these fields?

Back in 2016, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission detected a 10-volt electric potential surrounding the planet. This means that positively charged particles would be pulled away from the planet’s surface. This could draw away oxygen.

Scientists think that Venus may have once had plentiful water. However, since sunlight splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, the electric field could’ve siphoned the oxygen away, eliminating the planet’s water. This is theoretical, but it begs the question of why the same thing hasn’t happened on Earth.

The ambipolar field is fundamental to Earth. Its role in the evolution of the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere is yet to be understood, but it must play a role.

“Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field,” Collinson said. “Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can begin learning how it’s shaped our planet as well as others over time.”

The post A NASA Rocket Has Finally Found Earth’s Global Electric Field appeared first on Universe Today.

A new process uses cheap catalysts to break down polyethylene and polypropylene into their building blocks, enabling common plastic objects to be turned into new products

Marmosets are the first non-human primates shown to use personalised signifiers to refer to each other – the discovery could help us better understand how language evolved

Digging in the ground is so commonplace on Earth that we hardly ever think of it as hard. But doing so in space is an entirely different proposition. On some larger worlds, like the Moon or Mars, it would be broadly similar to how digging is done on Earth. But their “milligravity” would make the digging experience quite different on the millions of asteroids in our solar system. Given the potential economic impact of asteroid mining, there have been plenty of suggested methods on how to dig on an asteroid, and a team from the University of Arizona recently published the latest in a series of papers about using a customized bucket wheel to do so.

Bucket wheel designs seem to be gaining popularity in space mining more generally lately. NASA’s ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) uses a similar design and has been advanced to Technology Readiness Level 5, according to its latest yearly report. However, it was designed for use on the Moon, where gravity is significantly larger than that of the asteroids that hold vastly more valuable materials.

According to the paper, the lowest 10% of asteroids have higher concentrations of platinum group metals, such as palladium and osmium, than the Moon does. They are also much more “energy accessible,” meaning that you would only need a delta-V of about 5% that of the Moon to get resources off an asteroid undergoing active mining. Since delta-V is equivalent to fuel weight and is therefore directly equivalent to cost, lower delta-V makes mining on these tiny bodies much more economically attractive.

This video, from nine years ago, shows how long the development path for asteroid mining technology is.

But they have their own engineering challenges to face. Most asteroids are known as “rubble piles,” meaning they are made up of clumps of rock simply stuck together by whatever minimal gravity their mass gives them. Even metal-rich M-type asteroids, such as Psyche, could be primarily composed of these small chunks of material. Such an environment would not be very hospitable to traditional mining techniques.

The University of Arizona researchers, led by Dr. Jekan Thangavelautham, have taken a rapid iteration approach to solving that problem. They developed a model representing the forces expected on the surface of an asteroid and applied those forces to models of different bucket wheel designs, selecting features that best suit the environment.

They also took the next step and started 3D printing prototypes of the different designs. They intended to use those printed prototypes to collect physical data on the mechanics of excavation; however, to do so, they needed realistic asteroid regolith simulant material. That doesn’t currently exist, so they decided to make their own. A combination of styrofoam and 3D-printed resin seemed to do the trick, however they weren’t able to make enough simulant yet to test a planned test assembly for this paper thoroughly.

Artist’s depiction of an implementation of a bucket wheel excavator
Credit – Hansen, Muniyasamy, & Thangavelautham

One of the other important findings of the paper was the impact different characteristics of the asteroid itself would have on two of the most important parameters for the design—the bucket volume and the cutting velocity (i.e., how fast the buckets move). Some characteristics, such as the resource concentration, had little impact on those two parameters. However, other obvious ones, such as the density, had a major impact. 

The research team found that high-volume, slow-moving buckets were ideal in this environment. However, part of that consideration was how quickly an orbiting support craft would fill up with material being excavated. To increase the throughput time of material from the bucket wheel to the storage system, the researchers suggest the use of a screw feeder, which would also allow the bucket to operate continuously – another necessity given the economic constraints of the system.

Additionally, they found that claws were necessary to hold onto the regolith. An extensible tubing system is also a “nice-to-have,” though it becomes more necessary if there are many buckets per wheel.

Details of this work are contained in the paper, and an associated presentation was given by the researchers at the ASCEND conference at the end of July. While these milestones are a step in the right direction, these technologies are still at a relatively low readiness level. However, they will eventually be needed if humans utilize some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. As our expansion to other worlds picks up, it’s only a matter of time before a bucket excavator lands on an asteroid and starts going to work.

Learn More:
Hansen, Muniyasamy, & Thangavelautham – Modified Bucket Wheel Design and Mining Techniques for Asteroid Mining
UT – Heavy Construction on the Moon
UT – A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze
UT – Robotic asteroid mining spacecraft wins a grant from NASA

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of NASA’s IPEx Bucket Excavator Robot.
Credit – NASA

The post What Type of Excavator Is Most Suitable for Asteroids? appeared first on Universe Today.

Chemists have developed a method to furnish a range of molecules with a trifluoromethyl group attached to a sulfur, nitrogen or oxygen atom. Their procedure avoids the use of PFAS reagents. It thus provides an environmentally friendly synthesis route for pharmaceutical and agrochemical compounds that rely on the presence of the trifluoromethyl group.

Chemists have developed a catalytic process that turns the largest component of today's plastic waste stream, polyolefin plastic bags and bottles, into gases -- propylene and isobutylene -- that are the building blocks of polypropylene and other types of plastics. The process uses inexpensive solid catalysts that can be scaled to industrial production, making this a potentially viable means of creating a circular economy for these throw-away plastics.

Researchers have developed a prototype for a smart mask that can be used to monitor a range of medical conditions, including respiratory ailments, such as asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and post-COVID-19 infections.

Researchers have developed a prototype for a smart mask that can be used to monitor a range of medical conditions, including respiratory ailments, such as asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and post-COVID-19 infections.

Wildfires can damage crops, even if flames come nowhere near the plants. One outcome can be an unpleasant flavor and smell of wine that is made from grapes exposed to smoke. But researchers say that they have developed a way to lessen this smoke taint to improve the palatability of the wine.

Testing for levels of microplastic contamination in marine plankton aims to help develop new ways to assess and manage the rising global pollution problem, experts say. Researchers examined the effects of five different chemical digestive aids on common plastics using low, medium and high levels of zooplankton.

Synchronizing periodic excitations of photocatalysts with a Michelson interferometer on operando FT-IR spectroscopy, researchers succeeded in observing and identifying the reactive electron species for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. In contrast to the traditional belief, this study demonstrates that not the free electrons in metal cocatalysts but the electrons trapped in the periphery of cocatalysts directly contribute to the photocatalysis.

Scientists have made a significant leap forward in the field of chiral molecules. The team achieved near-complete separation in quantum states for these essential components of life.

Scientists have made a significant leap forward in the field of chiral molecules. The team achieved near-complete separation in quantum states for these essential components of life.

To understand the mysteries surrounding black holes, researchers at Tohoku University have created a simulation of accretion disk turbulence that possesses the highest-resolution currently available.

Researchers resent a new molecule for visualizing the sphingomyelin metabolism. This offers prospects for innovative therapeutic approaches in infection research.

Immersive virtual reality could open up a whole new world for people with intellectual disability, enabling them to learn practical life skills much faster without relying on caregivers, according to a new study.