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Category: space

Human skin is a fascinating multifunctional organ with unique properties originating from its flexible and compliant nature. It allows for interfacing with external physical environment through numerous receptors interconnected with the nervous system. Scientists have been trying to transfer these features to artificial skin for a long time, aiming at robotic applications.

Robotic systems heavily rely on electronic and magnetic field sensing functionalities required for positioning and orientation in space. Much research has been devoted to implementation of these functionalities in a flexible, compliant form. Recent advancements in flexible sensors and organic electronics have provided important prerequisites. These devices can operate on soft and elastic surfaces, whereas sensors perceive various physical properties and transmit them via readout circuits.

To closely replicate natural skin, it is necessary to interconnect a large number of individual sensors. This challenging task became a major obstacle in realizing electronic skin. First demonstrations were based on an array of individual sensors addressed separately, which unavoidably resulted in a tremendous number of electronic connections. In order to reduce the necessary wiring, important technology had to be developed—namely, complex electronic circuits, current sources and switches had to be combined with individual magnetic sensors to achieve fully integrated devices.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Capella Space, an information services company providing Earth observation data on demand, today unveiled its evolved satellite design to enable on-demand observations of anywhere on Earth. Informed by extensive customer feedback and findings from the launch of Denali, Capella’s testbed satellite, the re-engineered design features a suite of technological innovations to deliver timely, flexible and frequent sub-0.5 meter very high quality images to the market. The enhanced technology package will deliver the most advanced offering for small satellite SAR imagery on the market.

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Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.

“The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they’re making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth’s energetics—in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy—may need to be recalculated,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study, published May 23 in PLoS ONE.

The ability of fungi to live off radiation could also prove useful to people: “Since ionizing radiation is prevalent in outer space, astronauts might be able to rely on fungi as an inexhaustible food source on long missions or for colonizing other planets,” says Dr. Ekaterina Dadachova, associate professor of nuclear medicine and microbiology & immunology at Einstein and lead author of the study.

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Circa 2019

A gamma-ray burst registered in December of 2017 turns out to be “one of the closets GRBs ever observed”. The discovery is featured in Nature – and it has yielded valuable information about the formation of the most luminous phenomenon in the universe. Scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen helped carrying out the analysis.

Jonatan Selsing frequently receives text messages from a certain sender regarding events in space. It happens all around the clock, and when his cell phone goes ‘beep’ he knows that yet another gamma-ray burst (GRB) notification has arrived. Which, routinely, raises the question: Does this information — originating from the death of a massive star way back, millions if not billions of years ago – merit further investigation?

“GRBs represent the brightest phenomenon known to science – the luminous intensity of a single GRB may in fact exceed that of all stars combined! And at the same time GRBs – which typically last just a couple of seconds – represent one of the best sources available, when it comes to gleaning information about the initial stages of our universe”, explains Jonatan Selsing.

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ESA’s technical heart has begun to produce oxygen out of simulated moondust.

A prototype plant has been set up in the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, based in Noordwijk in the Netherlands.

“Having our own facility allows us to focus on , measuring it with a mass spectrometer as it is extracted from the regolith simulant,” comments Beth Lomax of the University of Glasgow, whose Ph.D. work is being supported through ESA’s Networking and Partnering Initiative, harnessing advanced academic research for space applications.

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If humans are going to have a long-term presence on the Moon, they’re going to need breathable air and rocket fuel — and the ESA might just have a way to create both using the Moon itself. The agency is running a prototype plant that converts moondust (currently simulated, of course) into oxygen that could be used for air and fuel. The technique unlocks the high amounts of oxygen in regolith using molten salt electrolysis that superheats the dust and migrates the oxygen along the salt until it’s collected at an anode. The basic process has already been used for metal and alloy production, but the ESA tweaked it to ensure oxygen was available to measure.

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Scientists have created the fastest spinning object ever made, taking them a big step closer to being able to measure the mysterious quantum forces at play inside ‘nothingness’.

The record-breaking object in question is a tiny piece of silica, capable of whipping around billions of times per second — creating sufficient sensitivity that the team think they’ll be able to use it to detect unfathomably small amounts of drag caused by the ‘friction’ within a vacuum.

The science of nothingness is quickly becoming a big deal in physics, as we strive to understand how the Universe operates at its very foundations.

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A new ‘Data in Action’ ArcGIS Story Map at NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) maps deforestation in Cambodia using NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Cover and Vegetation Continuous Fields datasets to highlight land cover changes.

The southeastern Asian country of Cambodia continues to struggle with extensive loss of its forests. In 2013, Dr. Matthew Hansen and colleagues found that Cambodia lost nearly 12,600 square kilometers of forest from 2000 to 2012. This ranked fifth worldwide for the time period (Hansen et al. 2013). Since 2012, Cambodia has continued to experience forest loss at alarming rates, loss that has extended even into the country’s national parks and protected areas. Large scale vegetation loss, or gains, can be monitored using Earth observation land data products derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on-board the Terra satellite. Data products like these are archived and distributed free of charge by NASA’s LP DAAC.

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