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NASA calls on the public to send their names on its Europa Clipper mission by Paul Hill Every now and again, NASA gets ready to launch a major mission into space and sometimes offers the public a chance to get their name sent into space. The organization has opened up another opportunity such as this. You now have the opportunity to send your name on NASA's upcoming Europa Clipper mission, which is set to land on Jupiter's second Galilean moon, Europa, in 2030. People’s names will accompany a poem called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. They will be stencilled onto a microchip and head off on the journey in October 2024. If you’re interested in including your name, you must add it to NASA’s website by December 31. Since the programme was announced on the evening of June 1, 2,767 people have added their names. The majority of these submissions are from the United States but names from all the continents have started coming in too. Within the United States, most signatures have come from California, Texas, Florida, and New York. "'Message in a Bottle' is the perfect convergence of science, art, and technology, and we are excited to share with the world the opportunity to be a part of Europa Clipper's journey," said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "I just love the thought that our names will be travelling across our solar system aboard the radiation-tolerant spacecraft that seeks to unlock the secrets of Jupiter's frozen moon." As mentioned, NASA has held similar programmes for its Artemis I mission to the moon and for several missions to Mars. While anyone is free to add their name, NASA will definitely be hoping that it piques the interest of children who may be more interested to pursue a job in the sciences as a result. In addition to adding your name, the website provides a world map that displays the locations where signatures are being added from. You can also find a live feed of the Clipper clean room to see work going on.

Ariane 5 successfully launches European Space Agency's JUICE mission to the Jovian system by Paul Hill The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed the successful launch of an Ariane 5 rocket carrying the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). JUICE tried to launch on Thursday but bad weather delayed it until Friday. The spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in July 2031 and do its work in the Jovian system until September 2035. The journey to Jupiter is a little bit complex and includes several gravity assists, here’s how it will go. In August, JUICE will perform a Lunar-Earth flyby and head off towards Venus. A year later, it will perform a flyby of Venus before heading back towards Earth for a flyby in September 2026. Three years later, in January 2029, it will perform another flyby of Earth and head for Jupiter. It will arrive at Jupiter in July 2031 and until November 2034 will perform a tour of the Jovian system doing 35 icy moon flybys. Finally, from December 2034 to September 2035, it will enter orbit around Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. JUICE will use remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to learn more about its destinations. It will learn about Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation, and plasma environment and its interactions with its moons. Hopefully, we’ll learn if there are signs of life in the region and get great pictures back.

TWIRL 109: European Space Agency to send JUICE to Jupiter and its moons by Paul Hill There’s not too much going on this week in terms of rocket launches but of most interest is the launch of the JUICE spacecraft which is heading to the Jovian system to explore the gas giant Jupiter and three of its icy moons; Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. Wednesday, April 12 The first launch of the week will be a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying several smallsats as part of the Transporter-7 rideshare mission. The satellites will be placed in a Sun-synchronous orbit and will perform a whole host of missions of their own. This mission will take off at 6:45 a.m. UTC from Vandenberg AFB in California. It should be available on the SpaceX website to live stream. Thursday, April 13 The final launch of the week, and most exciting, is the launch of Arianespace’s Ariane 5 ECA+ rocket. The launch itself is not what’s special, but the payload. It will be launching the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft which will be heading off to investigate Jupiter and three of its moons; Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa – all of which have oceans that could contain life. After the launch, which is due at 12:15 p.m. UTC from French Guyana, we’ll have to wait until July 2031 until the craft reaches our closest gas giant. If you want to watch, tune into ESA Web TV at the time of launch. Recap The first launch last week was a Falcon 9 carrying the Tranche 0 mission for the Space Development Agency (SDA). The satellites will be used for communications, data, and missile warnings. Next, we saw the maiden flight of the Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-2. It carried the Love Space Science remote-sensing satellite into a Solar-synchronous orbit. Next up was another Falcon 9, this time carrying the Intelsat IS-40e satellite with NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument aboard. Below is a video of the satellite’s deployment. The final launch was that of iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. The launch was done to test measures taken after a prior failed launch. That’s all for this week, check in next time!

TWIRL 34: William Shatner prepares himself to go to space for real [Update] by Paul Hill It has not been long since the last crew to the Chinese Space Station returned to Earth but now three more taikonauts are preparing to go aboard. Also this week, NASA is launching its Lucy spacecraft to visit some of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids and Blue Origin will be launching its second crewed New Shepard mission which will be carrying William Shatner, famous for playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series, among others. Tuesday, October 12 The first launch of the week will come on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. UTC. Blue Origin will launch its New Shepard suborbital rocket from the West Texas suborbital Launch Site. It’s the second crewed mission that the rocket will perform and its crew will consist of William Shatner, Chris Boshuizen, Glen de Vries and Audrey Powers. As the craft is only capable of suborbital flights so their mission to space will be quite brief but they will experience low gravity. Thursday, October 14 At 9:40 a.m. UTC a Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying OneWeb internet satellites will take off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. There will be 36 satellites aboard which will work in conjunction with the rest of the OneWeb constellation. OneWeb beams internet back down to Earth helping customers get online in hard to connect areas. Friday, October 15 At 4:24 p.m. UTC, China will launch a Long March rocket carrying Shenzhou 13 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Aboard will be three taikonauts, Zhai Zhigang (the first Chinese citizen to perform a spacewalk), Wang Yaping (the second Chinese woman in space) and Ye Guangfu. This is China’s eighth crewed space mission and the second to the Chinese Space Station since it began operations earlier this year. For a couple of days, the number of people in space will reach 12, which is higher than average. Saturday, October 16 The final launch of the week will be exciting; an Atlas V rocket will launch from Cape Canaveral carrying NASA’s Lucy spacecraft which will head out past Mars, past the Asteroid Belt out to Jupiter where it will explore the gas giant’s Trojan asteroids. These asteroids orbit the Sun in front of and behind Jupiter and are quite unique making them of interest to the space agency. The mission will last about 12 years. The craft was named Lucy after a hominin skeleton because these Trojan asteroids could be the ‘fossils of planet formation’ that give us a better understanding of how our and other star systems develop. Recap The only launch last week was the Soyuz rocket carrying an all-Russian crew to the International Space Station. You can see the launch below. The crew also docked with the ISS, you can see footage below. Update: Shatner's flight has now been delayed due to winds and will instead launch on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. UTC.

NASA Juno Mission Site | Mission Juno Site | Juno Official Twitter | Juno Launch (Aug 5, 2011) Orbital insertion is scheduled for early July 2016.

This week in science: the old Jupiter; quantum entanglement-based communication; more by Gabriel Nunes This week in science is a review of the most interesting scientific news of the past week. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jupiter is the oldest planet in the Solar system Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Münsterin, Germany, have found evidence that Jupiter is the oldest planet in the solar system. Because no samples from the planet itself are currently available, they have analyzed tungsten and molybdenum isotopes from iron meteorites known to be made up from two distinct nebular reservoirs that coexisted when the solar system begun but were separated by the time of Jupiter's formation. As stated by Thomas Kruijer, lead author of the paper: Our measurements show that the growth of Jupiter can be dated using the distinct genetic heritage and formation times of meteorites. Jupiter's solid core of about 20 Earth masses formed within the first one million years after the beginning of the solar system, what was inferred from isotope signatures of meteorites. The solid core then created a barrier against the transport of material across the solar accretion disk of gas and dust, what first separated those two nebular reservoirs. It took another two to four million years for Jupiter to achieve 50 Earth masses and the barrier may also explain why no super-Earth exists in the solar system as well. Source: Phys.org Success in a groundbreaking experiment on quantum entanglement-based communication Quantum entanglement is a weird phenomena in which photons are linked once created and are aware of each other's experiences even when physically separated by a great distance. Because of such property and the possibility of being used to create quantum-based security channels, this phenomena is being widely studied as a potential alternative for current communication technologies. A team of scientists from the Hefei University in China have successfully generated, for the first time, pairs of entangled photons in space. They have used a laser on a satellite orbiting 300 miles above the planet, which were transmitted to two ground-based stations 750 miles (or 1,200 kilometers) apart without breaking the entanglement, what accounts for ten times the previous record. In order to increase the distance, the team has placed both receiver stations in the mountains of Tibet. Because the stations were both at a high altitude, the entangled photons trajectories had less air to traverse and, therefore, less likelihood of interacting with other particles and breaking the entanglement. American and European teams are also considering to send quantum-based equipment to the International Space Station, and one interesting test being targeted is the study of gravitational effects on quantum entanglement. Such a test is of high importance because the link between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, which deals with gravity, is one of the main open questions of Physics. Source: Phys.org Quantum dot transistors that operate like neurons A transistor capable of seeing light, counting, and storing information in its own structure was invented by a team of researchers from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil, Würzburg University in Germany, and the University of South Carolina in the United States. Because the device doesn't require a memory unit, it operates in a way that resembles a neuron. According to Victor Lopez Richard, from UFSCar: Transistors based on quantum dots can perform complex operations directly in memory. This can lead to the development of new kinds of device and computer circuit in which memory units are combined with logical processing units, economizing space, time, and power consumption. In order to develop the memory functionality, the researchers have used the dynamics of charging and discharging the quantum dots, that could be modulated either by applying a voltage to the transistor's gates or by the absorption of light by the quantum dots. Unfortunately, the new transistor can currently work only at extremely low temperatures of approximately four Kelvin, which is the temperature of liquid helium. The team now aims at enabling the device to operate at higher temperatures, including room temperature. Source: Phys.org

This week in science: A close-up on Jupiter, a new method to test self-driving cars, and AI by Gabriel Nunes This week in science is a review of the most interesting scientific news of the past week. An image of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft. Credit: J.E.P. Connerney et al., Science (2017). First results revealed from Juno’s mission to Jupiter NASA's Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter since July 2016. It carries eight scientific instruments designed to study the planet's interior structure, atmosphere, and magnetosphere, in a mission to better understand gas giants and Jupiter itself. Juno’s first scientific results were published last week in a pair of papers in a special edition of the Science journal. The data was collected by the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE), which detects the electrons and ions associated with Jupiter's auroras, and by the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVS), which examines the auroras in UV light to study Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Credit: J.E.P. Connerney et al., Science (2017). Among the surprising features detected by the experiments was a north-south asymmetry in Jupiter's signature bands, which also disappears near its poles, as can be seen in the image above. Furthermore, the measurements of the planet’s gravity field differ significantly from what was expected. As stated by Dr. Scott Bolton, from the Southwest Research Institute: "[The difference in the gravity field measurements] has implications for the distribution of heavy elements in the interior, including the existence and mass of Jupiter's core." Both papers can be accessed on the Science website: S.J. Bolton et al., "Jupiter's interior and deep atmosphere: The initial pole-to-pole passes with the Juno spacecraft," Science (2017); J.E.P. Connerney at Space Research Corporation in Annapolis, MD et al., "Jupiter's magnetosphere and aurorae observed by the Juno spacecraft during its first polar orbits," Science (2017). Via: Phys.org Credit: University of Michigan. New method to test self-driving cars cuts 99.9 percent of validation time and costs Researchers from the University of Michigan have used data from more than 25.2 million miles of real-world driving that involved nearly 3,000 vehicles and volunteers over the course of two years to develop a new method to test autonomous vehicles. If applied in substitution to the current methods of testing, it could save 99.9 percent of testing time and costs. According to the researchers, for consumers to accept driverless vehicles, it is expected that consumers achieve an 80 percent confidence that those vehicles are 90 percent safer than human drivers. To achieve that, test vehicles using current validation methods would need up to 11 billion miles of real-world or simulated testing, mainly because the most important scenarios they need to tackle are rare. For example, a crash that results in a fatality, on average, occurs just once in every 100 million miles of driving. But the new accelerated evaluation method proposed breaks down difficult real-world driving situations into components that can be tested or simulated repeatedly. By doing so, self-driving cars could be exposed directly to the most important scenarios to accelerate the validation process. The researchers have estimated that just 1,000 miles of this kind of testing can yield the equivalent of 300,000 to 100 million miles of real-world driving. For now, the researchers have evaluated only two scenarios: an automated car following a human driver and a human driver merging in front of an automated car. Those are considered the most commonly expected to yield a serious crash. The next step is to perform the test on different potentially dangerous maneuvers. Source: Phys.org Chinese Go grandmaster Ke Jie, left, was defeated by the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo. Google's AlphaGo has defeated world's number one Go player As reported here at Neowin, AlphaGo defeated the current world number one Go player, Ke Jie, at DeepMind's "Future of Go Summit" in Wuzhen, China. The contenders have played three matches throughout the week, starting last Tuesday, and the AI-based program has managed to win all of them, marking "the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program". Following this week's achievements, DeepMind has decided to retire AlphaGo from playing against humans and will publish a special set of 50 AlphaGo vs AlphaGo games "played at full length time controls" to inspire the Go community. The first ten games can be accessed here.

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