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Category: futurism

On March 122021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover continues to find safe place to deploy Mars Helicopter Ingenuity and collect Mars Samples. Rover’s latest pics from Mars show Helicopter’s shield attached to bottom of the rover. Perseverance will gather samples from Martian rocks and soil using its drill. The rover will then store the sample cores in tubes on the Martian surface. This entire process is called “sample caching”. Mars 2021 is the first mission to demonstrate sample collection on Mars. It could potentially pave the way for future missions that could collect the samples and return them to Earth for intensive laboratory analysis.

For the first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet from the ground, hover in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and land. That will be a major milestone: the very first powered flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars. After that, the team will attempt additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Source for NASA’s Mars Helicopter page: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Deployment.

#mars #perseverance #helicopter

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Three species of shark that inhabit the twilit depths of the ocean just turned out to have been bioluminescent this whole time.

The kitefin shark, the blackbelly lanternshark, and the southern lanternshark have all been discovered to have softly glowing blue patterns on their skin, a first for sharks found in New Zealand waters.

Of those three, the kitefin shark, which grows up to 180 centimetres (5 feet 11 inches) long, is now the largest known bioluminescent shark in the world.

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Facebook has announced a new AI project called Learn From Video, which will use public Facebook videos to train its machine learning models. The company is vague about future applications, but it says such models could be used to improve captions, search functions, and much more.

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A study by Monash scientists has found that a rare earth affects the fate of a key reaction with copper, gold, silver, and uranium mineralisation.

The work is part of the “Olympic Dam in a test tube” project, where researchers tried to reproduce the processes that resulted in the concentration of more than a trillion dollars worth of metals at Olympic Dam in South Australia in the laboratory.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that Cerium, which belongs to the group of elements called ‘rare earths’ speeds up important reactions and plays other significant roles.

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