The Independent Articles

Last week, the space agency announced that it had selected 14 agencies to develop technology that would allow for sustainable moon missions by the end of the decade.The network will provide communication for data transmission, including command and control functions, the remote navigation of lunar robots, and streaming high-definition video.Astronauts will be able to communicate via voice and video as well as exchange biometric data through the wireless communications, Nokia says. Read moreSetting up a lunar network is more challenging than achieving the same task on Earth, but Nokia says that its equipment has been specifically designed to withstand both the difficult conditions of the launch and will continue to operate in space without an atmosphere.Nokia also expects to upgrade from a 4G to a 5G system in time.”Leveraging our rich and successful history in space technologies, from pioneering satellite communication to discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by the Big Bang, we are now building the first ever cellular communications network on the Moon”, Marcus Weldon, Chief Technology Officer at Nokia, said in a statement.“Reliable, resilient and high-capacity communications networks will be key to supporting sustainable human presence on the lunar surface.”The move is a part of Nasa’s $28 billion plan to send the first woman and the next man to the moon, the first time since 1972 that humans have set foot on its surface.The plan involves test flights in 2021 and 2023, before a crewed mission in 2024.“We’re going back to the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers. As we build up a sustainable presence, we’re also building momentum toward those first human steps on the Red Planet”, Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said last month.This is not the first time that Nasa has attempted to launch a mobile network on the moon. In 2018, Nokia and Vodafone worked with Nasa to try and launch ultra-light mobile masts using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; the project, however, was never completed.

Our Milky Way is surrounded by a “clumpy halo” that could be hiding mysterious missing matter, astronomers have said.The galaxy is wrapped in a ring of hot gases that are constantly being topped up as stars are born and die, scientists say.And inside that halo could be basic matter that has been missing since the birth of the universe, researchers say.The new discoveries are based on observations made by HaloSat, a “minisatellite” funded by Nasa’s Astrophysics Division and built by the University of Iowa. Its findings are reported in a new article published in the journal Nature Astronomy.The heated halo is called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM, and helped nurture the Milky Way when it was formed around 10 billion years ago. Researchers built the spacecraft to look for X-rays being sent out by the CGM, in an attempt to better understand it, its behaviour and shape.All galaxies have their own CGM, and understanding how they operate is key to explaining not just how the galaxies formed but how they could become the busy mix of stars, planets and other objects that we live in today.”Where the Milky Way is forming stars more vigorously, there are more X-ray emissions from the circumgalactic medium,” says Philip Kaaret, professor in the Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy and corresponding author on the new study.”That suggests the circumgalactic medium is related to star formation, and it is likely we are seeing gas that previously fell into the Milky Way, helped make stars, and now is being recycled into the circumgalactic medium.”The chief aim of HaloSat was to look for baryonic matter, atomic remnants that are believed to have been missing since the universe was born almost 14 billion years ago. Researchers think that matter could be hiding in the CGM and that examining it could help them find that long lost matter.In order to answer that question, the researchers attempted to build a picture of the nature of the CGM itself. With the help of the minisatellite, they wanted to understand whether the halo is large and extended, perhaps many times the mass of our galaxy – in which case there would be enough atoms to include the missing baryonic matter – or if it was instead thin and puffy, made up of recycled material and so not a likely home for the lost matter.The new research is inconclusive.”What we’ve done is definitely show that there’s a high-density part of the CGM that’s bright in X-rays, that makes lots of X-ray emissions,” Professor Kaaret said. “But there still could be a really big, extended halo that is just dim in X-rays. And it might be harder to see that dim, extended halo because there’s this bright emission disc in the way.”So it turns out with HaloSat alone, we really can’t say whether or not there really is this extended halo.”But the data did show that the halo was unexpectedly clumpy, with dense regions where stars are forming and material is being sent back and forth between the CGM and the galaxy.”It seems as if the Milky Way and other galaxies are not closed systems,” Kaaret says. “They’re actually interacting, throwing material out to the CGM and bringing back material as well.”But by mixing the data from the minisatellite with other observations from around the world, astronomers hope they are getting closer to understanding where all of that matter might be.”Those missing baryons better be somewhere,” Professor Kaaret said. “They’re in halos around individual galaxies like our Milky Way or they’re located in filaments that stretch between galaxies.”An article describing the research, ‘A disc-dominated and clumpy circumgalactic medium of the Milky Way seen in X-ray emission’, is published online in Nature Astronomy  on 19 October.

Scientists have solved a fundamental problem that had prevented a “miracle material” from being used in next-generation solar cells.The breakthrough paves the way for the widely acclaimed mineral perovskite to transform the solar industry through cheaper and more efficient photovoltaics, according to researchers in Australia who made the discovery.Perovskite, which is forged deep within the Earth’s mantle, has been hailed for its unprecedented potential to convert sunlight into electricity. Researchers have already improved its sunlight-to-energy efficiency from around 3 per cent to over 20 per cent in the space of just a few years.“It’s unbelievable, a miracle material,” Z. Valy Vardeny, a materials science professor from the University of Utah, said about perovskite in 2017.At the time it was thought that it would be at least 10 years before it reached a point that the material could be used in commercial solar cells, however the latest breakthrough could see the wide uptake of the technology much sooner.Read more”It was one of those unusual discoveries that you sometimes hear about in science,” said Dr Hall from the University of Melbourne.“We were performing a measurement, looking for something else, and then we came across this process that at the time seemed quite strange. However, we quickly realised it was an important observation.”With the help of researchers at the University of Sydney, the scientists were able to use computational modelling to solve the problem of instability within the material when exposed to sunlight.

Nasa is preparing to grab a piece of asteroid and bring it back to Earth.The dramatic manoeuvre will be the culmination of two years that a Nasa spacecraft has spent orbiting and examining an asteroid known as Bennu, hundreds of millions of miles away.The Osiris-Rex mission will see the spacecraft drop onto the asteroid, scoop up a piece of rubble, and stash it away so that it can be brought back down to Earth.The drama will unfold on Tuesday as the US has its first go at collecting asteroid samples for return to Earth, a feat accomplished only by Japan so far.Nasa is looking to bring back at least two ounces (60 grams) worth of asteroid Bennu, the biggest such haul from beyond the moon.The van-sized spacecraft is aiming for the relatively flat middle of a tennis court-sized crater named Nightingale – a spot comparable to a few parking places here on Earth. Boulders as big as buildings loom over the targeted touchdown zone.Read more”So for some perspective, the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop and walk inside, think about the challenge of navigating Osiris-Rex into one of these spots from 200 million miles away,” Nasa’s deputy project manager Mike Moreau said.Once it drops out of its half-mile-high (0.75 km-high) orbit around Bennu, the spacecraft will take a deliberate four hours to make it all the way down, to just above the surface.Then the action cranks up when Osiris-Rex’s 11-foot (3.4-metre) arm reaches out and touches Bennu.Contact should last five to 10 seconds, just long enough to shoot out pressurised nitrogen gas and suck up the churned dirt and gravel.Programmed in advance, the spacecraft will operate autonomously during the unprecedented touch-and-go manoeuvre. With an 18-minute lag in radio communication each way, ground controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin near Denver cannot intervene.If the first attempt does not work, Osiris-Rex can try again. Any collected samples will not reach Earth until 2023.While Nasa has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles, it has never attempted to sample one of the nearly one million known asteroids lurking in our solar system until now.Japan, meanwhile, expects to get samples from asteroid Ryugu in December – in the milligrams at most – 10 years after bringing back specks from asteroid Itokawa.Bennu is an asteroid picker’s paradise. The big, black, roundish, carbon-rich space rock – taller than New York’s Empire State Building – was around when our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago.Scientists consider it a time capsule full of pristine building blocks that could help explain how life formed on Earth and possibly elsewhere.The mission’s principal scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said: “This is all about understanding our origins.”Additional reporting by AP

Betelgeuse, one of the best-known stars in our sky, is actually much closer and smaller than we’d realised, astronomers have said.In fact, it might be another 100,000 years until it dies in an explosion, according to a new study. The research suggests that the star is actually much further from its end than many had thought.”It’s normally one of the brightest stars in the sky, but we’ve observed two drops in the brightness of Betelgeuse since late 2019,” said Meredith Joyce from the Australian National University, who led the study.”This prompted speculation it could be about to explode. But our study offers a different explanation. We know the first dimming event involved a dust cloud. We found the second smaller event was likely due to the pulsations of the star.” But as they did that research, the astronomers found that the star is actually smaller than we had realised. After calculating the star’s actual size, researchers re-evaluated how near it could be – and discovered that its relative proximity had tricked us.Read more”The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery – earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the Sun,” said László Molnár from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, a co-author on the paper.”Once we had the physical size of the star, we were able to determine the distance from Earth. Our results show it’s a mere 530 light-years from us — 25 percent closer than previously thought.” The star is still not so near that it would pose any danger on Earth when it explodes. But it is close enough that studying it will give detailed information on what happens to stars before they do, scientists said.”It’s still a really big deal when a supernova goes off. And this is our closest candidate. It gives us a rare opportunity to study what happens to stars like this before they explode,” said Dr Joyce in a. statement. 

On 22 September, the three astronauts serving aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were ordered to shelter near an escape craft in the Russian segment of the station. Nasa had detected a large piece of space debris heading towards them and initiated emergency thrusters to avoid what it called a “possible conjunction” with the object.It was the third time since January that the space station had been forced into an unscheduled manoeuvre, and once again highlighted the ever-growing issue of rogue debris in Earth’s orbit. Earlier this week, space junk tracker LeoLabs issued a warning that another major collision could be about to take place.Part of a discarded Chinese rocket and a decommissioned Soviet satellite were on course to pass within 25 metres of each other, with a 10 per cent probability of collision. Their combined mass of 2,800kg, together with a relative velocity of 53,000km/h, meant any collision would be catastrophic.“This is a potentially serious event,” former astronaut and LeoLabs co-founder Ed Lu said.”It is between two large objects and at high altitude, 991km. If there is a collision there will be lots of debris which will remain in orbit for a long time.”The hundreds – potentially thousands – of pieces of debris resulting from the crash would have exploded in different directions, creating countless more collision possibilities. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who is based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said it would increase the amount of space debris by “10 to 20 per cent”.A 1978 study by Nasa scientist Donald Kessler warned that the domino effect of such an event could create an impenetrable layer of debris that would make terrestrial space launches impossible – essentially trapping us on Earth.The research prompted Nasa to set up the Orbital Debris Program a year later, aimed at developing ways to monitor space junk and develop ways to remove it.The issue has only gotten worse since. There are currently an estimated 200,000 objects between 0.4 and 4 inches, and tens of thousands of objects larger than 4 inches, according to the United States Space Surveillance Network.

It’s part of an investigation into the influencer industry the watchdog launched two years ago. Regulators are concerned that Instagram wasn’t doing enough under consumer protection laws to stop hidden advertising, which is illegal in the U.K. They want to make it harder to mislead people with posts that aren’t labeled as ads. Influencers are online personalities with thousands of followers who can earn hefty fees from brands for endorsing or reviewing their products or services.“These changes mean there will be no excuse for businesses to overlook how their brands are being advertised either – making life a lot harder for those who are not upfront and honest with their followers,” CMA Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said. Under the new policy, Instagram will ask users to confirm if they’re getting a reward for promoting a product or service and if they are, make them disclose it clearly.The company will also start using technology and algorithms to spot users who haven’t clearly revealed that their posts are advertisements, and then report those users to the businesses they’re promoting. Instagram is also opening up its “paid partnership” tool, so that any user can display a label at the top of a post. The changes apply to all U.K.-based users as well as anyone globally who is targeting Instagram users in the U.K. As part of its investigation, the competition authority last year secured formal commitments from 16 celebrities, including singers Ellie Goulding and Rita Ora, to label any posts that involved payments for or gifts of products they were pitching.

Slack appears to have stopped working properly again, with users seeing messages appear out of order – or not at all.The workplace chat app has been hit by a run of problems in recent weeks, often relating to users being able to read their messages as usual.Slack’s status page confirmed that it was aware of the issues and was working to find a fix.“Some users are struggling to connect to Slack, or facing trouble with the app operating slowly,” the company wrote. “We are currently investigating, and apologise for the inconvenience caused.”Updates that followed suggested that the company was struggling to find the cause of the issues. Some 90 minutes after they had begun, it posted an update suggesting that it had not yet identified the problem let alone any possible fix.Read more”We’re still investigating the cause of the performance issues that users may be facing,” it wrote.The problems come as many workplaces have moved to relying on apps like Slack and Zoom to keep their employees in contact through lockdowns and other measures.

Scientists have suggested building a network of a billion pendulums that could together finally find dark matter.Despite the fact that dark matters makes up some 27 per cent of the universe – far more than the 5 per cent comprised of the ordinary matter that we can see – it remains almost entirely mysterious. Scientists know that it must exist because of its effects on the universe, but it can only be examined indirectly, and is invisible.But the new research would aim to look for dark matter by looking at the way that its gravity interacts with normal matter. Rather than examining that on the grand scale of the cosmos, they hope to do so by looking for dark matter particles with the mass of a grain of salt.Previous attempts to look for evidence of dark matter on Earth have focused on a particular kind of dark matter known as WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particles. The search has focused on detectors that watch for those particles through collisions with chemicals, which would emit light or electric charge – but no definitive evidence has yet arrived.Now researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, have proposed a new way of seeing them more directly, using the large array of tiny pendulums.Read more”Our proposal relies purely on the gravitational coupling, the only coupling we know for sure that exists between dark matter and ordinary luminous matter,” said study co-author Daniel Carney in a statement.The nature of the research means that if someone were to build the experiment, it would give a reasonably decisive answer to the question of whether dark matter exists as it is speculated. It will either be discovered or not – and if it is not then scientists will be able to “rule out all dark matter candidates over a wide range of possible masses”, said Carney.If researchers were able to. wild a sensor that included a billion tiny mechanical sensors, spread out over a cubic metre, it would be sensitive enough to tell a dark matter particle from an ordinary one or other noise that might be detected in the system. Real dark matter would fly through the array, moving every detector; ordinary particles would just touch one and then stop, and noise would move randomly through the machine.To achieve a similar effect, researchers could also try holding spheres in the air and levitating them using lasers. The lasers would then be switched off, letting the objects fall – passing dark matter particles would have enough gravity to disturb the objects slightly as they dropped down.Similar techniques have already been used successfully to detect gravitational waves. In that case, scientists suspend large mirrors that work like pendulums, moving less than the length of an atom when a gravitational wave passes by.

An iPhone 12 has been seen in real life for the first time, during an appearance on Good Morning America.The new Apple handsets – available in four versions – were unveiled during a livestreamed virtual event from the company’s Apple Park campus this week.Usually, journalists would get their hands on the new phones during a hands-on period following the announcement, allowing the public to see them in the form of videos and photos.But with no real life keynote because of global lockdowns, and the phone being announced in a video produced by Apple, there has not yet been a chance to see the phone in the hands of someone not employed by the company.The first opportunity to do so came on Wednesday when the reporter Becky Worley showed off the phones and introduced their features.It allowed potential customers to see the new blue colours that have arrived with the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. The company introduced a different version of the colour for each edition of the iPhone, and Ms Worsley demonstrated the look of each on the show.Watch moreThe demonstration is also the first time that the MagSafe features that arrived with the new phones could be shown in use. Ms Worley showed the accessories being snapped on and off the back of the device.In the same segment, Apple’s Kaiann Drance, its vice president of iPhone marketing, appeared on the show to speak about some of the other decisions made in the phone – including the fact that the iPhone 12 will come without charging plugs or earphones in the box.The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro open for pre-orders on 16 October, and go on sale on 23 October. The 12 Mini and 12 Pro Max will not arrive until November.