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SpaceX Crew Dragon rocket moving four astronauts launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida

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A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft — conveying four space travelers from three countries — took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida Friday morning, beginning their six-month stay in space.

NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur will be joined by French space traveler Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan. They’re expected to go through a half year on board the International Space Station after their Crew Dragon case docks early Saturday morning.

The Crew Dragon capsule, named “Endeavour,” recently conveyed NASA’s Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the space station in May 2020. Attempt took off into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that was likewise singed with ash from a past mission it flew in November 2020. SpaceX has since quite a while ago made reusability a cornerstone of its business plan, trusting that recovering and refurbishing hardware will drive down the expense of spaceflight. In spite of the fact that the organization has re-flown boosters and spacecraft dozens of times on satellite and cargo launches in the course of recent years, this will stamp the first run through the organization will reuse hardware for a crewed mission.

After enjoying time at the beach shore Thursday and getting some sleep, the team was at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to get ready soon after 12 PM. They at that point delighted in handpicked playlists — one of which included tunes by Ozzy Osbourne, Foo Fighters and Metallica — inside the Teslas that drove them to the platform before they were rushed up the dispatch tower, and got to the spacecraft by means of aerial walkway.

The astronauts went through hours being tied into the container by a group of SpaceX helpers, and going through a series of communications and safety checks. The group momentarily kept themselves engaged during the checks by playing rounds of rock-paper-scissors, an odd practice that all space explorers that jump start out of KSC see before flight.

At that point, not long before 6 am ET, the Falcon 9 rocket fired to life and pushed the space apparatus to in excess of 17,000 miles each prior hour isolating from the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

SpaceX likewise landed the first-stage rocket booster on a seafaring platform so it very well may be utilized once more on a later mission.

The Crew Dragon, then, is currently hurtling through space. It’ll remain freeflying through circle as it continuously moves nearer to the ISS, which circles around 250 miles over the ground. It’s scheduled to dock with the ISS around 5 am ET Saturday.

Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet, and Hoshide will join seven astronauts already on board the station, four of whom showed up on a SpaceX Crew Dragon case in November. That will bring the space station’s complete staff to 11 — probably the biggest group the ISS has at any point facilitated. Yet, that number will rapidly drop down to seven when four different space explorers hitch a ride home from the station on April 28.

NASA has gone through over 10 years attempting to help staffing on board the 21-year-old space station after the retirement of its Space Shuttle program in 2011 remaining Russia’s Soyuz space apparatus as the solitary alternative for getting space explorers to and from the ISS. The United States had been paying Russia as much as $90 million for every seat for those excursions.

For quite a long time, SpaceX worked under a $2.6 billion fixed-price contract to build up its Crew Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which without precedent for space office history gave over the undertaking of building and testing a group commendable space apparatus to the private area. SpaceX impacted the world forever last May with the first crewed launch of a Crew Dragon on a mission called Demo-2, which carried NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS for a four-month stay. A second crewed SpaceX mission took off in November.

(Boeing (BA) is working under a comparable contract to build up its own container for the program, called Starliner, though it is still in the testing phase.)

A great focal point of the space explorers’ main goal will be to study “tissue chips,” or “small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body” and that NASA expectations will propel the improvement of medications and immunizations, as indicated by the space agency. That work will expand on long periods of examining natural and other logical marvels on board the ISS, where the microgravity environment can give researchers a better fundamental understanding of how something works.

McArthur is a Space Shuttle veteran and is hitched to Behnken, who co-guided the noteworthy Demo-2 mission last May. McArthur told columnists throughout the end of the week that she had the option to get “years of experience” with the Crew Dragon vehicle as Behnken worked close by SpaceX during the Crew Dragon development process.

“I had several years, really, of learning from him along the way,” McArthur, who will pilot the Crew-2 mission and holds a doctorate in oceanography, said.

McArthur will be joined by NASA’s Kimbrough, a retired Army colonel and a veteran of two past ISS missions. Their crewmates, Japan’s Hoshide and France’s Pesquet, both have earlier spaceflight experience also.

Pesquet said he liked the opportunity to fly on board the repaired rocket supporter that helps lift the capsule into the deep darkness. The weathered hardware actually shrouded in ash from their earlier flights, permitted him and his crew mates to “draw our initials” on the vehicle.

“I don’t know if [the writing] is gonna stick, but I’ve found it really cool,” he said.

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AI is changing sea ice melting climate projections

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AI is changing sea ice melting climate projections

The tremendous melting of sea ice at the poles is one of the most urgent problems facing planet as it warms up so quickly. These delicate ecosystems, whose survival depends so heavily on floating ice, have a difficult and uncertain future.

As a result, climate scientists are using AI more and more to transform our knowledge of this vital habitat and the actions that can be taken to preserve it.

Determining the precise date at which the Arctic will become ice-free is one of the most urgent problems that must be addressed in order to develop mitigation and preservation strategies. A step toward this, according to Princeton University research scientist William Gregory, is to lower the uncertainty in climate models to produce these kinds of forecasts.

“This study was inspired by the need to improve climate model predictions of sea ice at the polar regions, as well as increase our confidence in future sea ice projections,” said Gregory.

Arctic sea ice is a major factor in the acceleration of global climate change because it cools the planet overall by reflecting solar radiation back into space. But because of climate change brought on by our reliance on gas, oil, and coal, the polar regions are warming considerably faster than the rest of the world. When the sea is too warm for ice to form, more solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth’s surface, which warms the climate even more and reduces the amount of ice that forms.

Because of this, polar sea ice is extremely important even outside of the poles. The Arctic Ocean will probably eventually have no sea ice in the summer, which will intensify global warming’s effects on the rest of the world.

AI coming to the rescue

Predictions of the atmosphere, land, sea ice, and ocean are consistently biased as a result of errors in climate models, such as missing physics and numerical approximations. Gregory and his colleagues decided to use a kind of deep learning algorithm known as a convolutional neural network for the first time in order to get around these inherent problems with sea ice models.

“We often need to approximate certain physical laws in order to save on [computational] time,” wrote the team in their study. “Therefore, we often use a process called data assimilation to combine our climate model predictions together with observations, to produce our ‘best guess’ of the climate system. The difference between best-guess-models and original predictions provides clues as to how wrong our original climate model is.”

The team aims to show a computer algorithm  “lots of examples of sea ice, atmosphere and ocean climate model predictions, and see if it can learn its own inherent sea ice errors” according to their study published in JAMES.

Gregory explained that the neural network “can predict how wrong the climate model’s sea ice conditions are, without actually needing to see any sea ice observations,” which means that once it learns the features of the observed sea ice, it can correct the model on its own.

They achieved this by using climate model-simulated variables such as sea ice velocity, salinity, and ocean temperature. In the model, each of these factors adds to the overall representation of the Earth’s climate.

“Model state variables are simply physical fields which are represented by the climate model,” explained Gregory. “For example, sea-surface temperature is a model state variable and corresponds to the temperature in the top two meters of the ocean.

“We initially selected state variables based on those which we thought a-priori are likely to have an impact on sea ice conditions within the model. We then confirmed which state variables were important by evaluating their impact on the prediction skill of the [neural network],” explained Gregory.

In this instance, the most important input variables were found to be surface temperature and sea ice concentration—much fewer than what most climate models require to replicate sea ice. In order to fix the model prediction errors, the team then trained the neural network on decades’ worth of observed sea ice maps.

An “increment” is an additional value that indicates how much the neural network was able to enhance the model simulation. It is the difference between the initial prediction made by the model without AI and the corrected model state.

A revolution in progress

Though it is still in its early stages, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more used in climate science. According to Gregory, he and his colleagues are currently investigating whether their neural network can be applied to scenarios other than sea ice.

“The results show that it is possible to use deep learning models to predict the systematic [model biases] from data assimilation increments, and […] reduce sea ice bias and improve model simulations,” said Feiyu Lu, project scientist at UCAR and NOAA/GFDL, and involved in the same project that funded this study.

“Since this is a very new area of active research, there are definitely some limitations, which also makes it exciting,” Lu added. “It will be interesting and challenging to figure out how to apply such deep learning models in the full climate models for climate predictions.”  

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For a brief moment, a 5G satellite shines brightest in the night sky

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An as of late sent off 5G satellite occasionally turns into the most splendid article in the night sky, disturbing cosmologists who figure it in some cases becomes many times more brilliant than the ongoing suggestions.

Stargazers are progressively concerned human-created space equipment can obstruct their exploration endeavors. In Spring, research showed the quantity of Hubble pictures photobombed in this manner almost multiplied from the 2002-2005 period to the 2018-2021 time span, for instance.

Research in Nature this week shows that the BlueWalker 3 satellite — model unit intended to convey 4 and 5G telephone signals — had become quite possibly of the most brilliant item in the night sky and multiple times surpass suggested limits many times over.

The exploration depended on a worldwide mission which depended on perceptions from both novice and expert perceptions made in Chile, the US, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Morocco.

BlueWalker 3 has an opening of 693 square feet (64m2) – about the size of a one-room condo – to interface with cellphones through 3GPP-standard frequencies. The size of the exhibit makes a huge surface region which reflects daylight. When it was completely conveyed, BlueWalker 3 became as splendid as Procyon and Achernar, the most brilliant stars in the heavenly bodies of Canis Minor and Eridanus, separately.

The examination – drove by Sangeetha Nandakumar and Jeremy Tregloan-Reed, both of Chile’s Universidad de Atacama, and Siegfried Eggl of the College of Illinois – likewise took a gander at the effect of the impacts of Send off Vehicle Connector (LVA), the spaceflight holder which frames a dark chamber.

The review found the LVA arrived at an evident visual size of multiple times more splendid than the ongoing Worldwide Cosmic Association suggestion of greatness 7 after it discarded the year before.

“The normal form out of groups of stars with a huge number of new, brilliant items will make dynamic satellite following and evasion methodologies a need for ground-based telescopes,” the paper said.

“Notwithstanding numerous endeavors by the airplane business, strategy creators, cosmologists and the local area on the loose to relieve the effect of these satellites on ground-based stargazing, with individual models, for example, the Starlink Darksat and VisorSat moderation plans and Bragg coatings on Starlink Gen2 satellites, the pattern towards the send off of progressively bigger and more splendid satellites keeps on developing.

“Influence appraisals for satellite administrators before send off could assist with guaranteeing that the effect of their satellites on the space and Earth conditions is fundamentally assessed. We empower the execution of such investigations as a component of sending off approval processes,” the exploration researchers said.

Last month, Vodafone professed to have made the world’s most memorable space-based 5G call put utilizing an unmodified handset with the guide of the AST SpaceMobile-worked BlueWalker 3 satellite.

Vodafone said the 5G call was made on September 8 from Maui, Hawaii, to a Vodafone engineer in Madrid, Spain, from an unmodified Samsung World S22 cell phone, utilizing the WhatsApp voice and informing application.

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Fans Of Starfield Have Found A Halo Easter Egg

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Starfield has a totally huge world to investigate, so it was inevitable before players began finding Hidden little goodies and unpretentious gestures to other science fiction establishments that preceded it. As of late, a specific tenable planet in the Eridani framework has fans persuaded it’s a diversion of a fairly sad world in the Corona series.

Players have found that Starfield’s rendition of the Epsilon Eridani star framework, a genuine star framework that is likewise a significant piece of Corona legend, incorporates a planet that looks similar to that of Reach, where 2010’s Radiance: Reach occurred. Portrayed on Halopedia as including “transcending mountains, deserts, and climate beaten timberlands,” Starfield’s Eridani II has comparative landscape to Reach. Unfortunately, nobody’s found any unusual ostrich-like birdies.

As referenced, Eridani II is a genuine star framework out there in the void. It was first expounded on in Ptolemy’s Inventory of Stars, which recorded north of 1,000 universes, as well as other Islamic works of cosmology. During the 1900s, being around 10.5 light-years from our planetary group was assessed. Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti—also featured in Starfield and Marathon, another Bungie shooter—were initially viewed by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project, which searches the skies for signs of other civilizations) as a likely location for habitable planets that either contained extraterrestrial life or might be a good candidate for future space travel.

Assuming that you might want to visit Eridani II in Starfield, you can do so from the beginning in the game. Beginning from Alpha Centauri (home of The Hotel and other early story minutes in Starfield), go down and to one side on the star guide and you’ll find the Eridani star framework, which is just a simple 19.11 light years away.

Navigate to Eridani II and land in any of its biome regions for pleasant weather and mountainous terrain once you’re there. As certain fans have called attention to, Eridani II’s areas are nearer to what’s found in the Corona: Arrive at level “Tip of the Lance” than its more rich, lush regions displayed in different places of the game’s mission. This is an ideal place for Radiance fans to fabricate their most memorable station (and you will not need to manage the difficulties of outrageous conditions).

You need to add a widget, row, or prebuilt layout before you’ll see anything here. 🙂

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