Latest news with #JPL
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Listen to the eerie sounds of Mars recorded by a NASA rover
A NASA rover ambling over the red desert planet for the past four years has been recording audio of Mars. In this alien world 156 million miles away in space, even the everyday whispers of wind and mechanical parts are exotic to human ears. Scientists say that's because the Martian atmosphere is about 1 percent as dense as Earth's, which alters the volume, speed, and characteristics of sound. How to describe what Perseverance has heard at Jezero crater? Well, it doesn't not sound like the eerie ambient noise of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you can listen for yourself. Like an aspiring DJ or singer-songwriter, Perseverance has a Soundcloud account, where people can experience the latest Martian tracks. NASA shared this week some of the strange audio the rover has captured. You can find a sampling further down in this story. SEE ALSO: A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration When the rover touched down on Mars in 2021, it didn't just bring cameras, drills, and tubes for rock samples. It also carried two microphones — nothing special, just a couple of off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy online. The only modification NASA made was to attach little grids at the end of the mics to protect them from Martian dust. One of the microphones, mounted on the rover's head, is known as the SuperCam and has recorded most of the audio; another is attached to the body. What they've picked up is changing the way scientists think about the Red Planet. This is the first time humanity has ever been able to listen to the din of another world. "We've all seen these beautiful images that we get from Mars," said Nina Lanza, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, in a NASA video, "but having sound to be able to add to those images, it makes me feel like I'm almost right there on the surface." NASA shared Martian audio in the above post on X. Researchers published the first study of acoustics on Mars in the journal Nature, based on Perseverance's recordings, in 2022. Apparently, the Red Planet is a much quieter place than originally thought, and not just because it's unpopulated. It's so silent, in fact, there was a time the rover team believed the mics had stopped working. But Perseverance just wasn't getting much material from its surroundings. That's largely due to Mars' low-atmospheric pressure, though the pressure can vary with the seasons. The team studying these sounds found that Mars' thin air, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, makes sound waves behave differently. On Earth, sound travels at roughly 767 mph. On Mars, deeper pitches move at about 537 mph, with higher ones traveling a bit faster, at 559 mph. The thin atmosphere also causes sound to drop off quickly. A sound that could be heard from 200 feet away on Earth falls silent after 30 feet on Mars. Higher-pitched tones have an even shorter range. The microphones mounted to Perseverance are off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy off the internet. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech "Sounds on Earth have very rich harmonics. You can hear multiple frequencies. It gets a really nice depth to the sound," said Justin Maki, a NASA scientist, in a video. "On Mars, the atmosphere attenuates a lot of those higher frequencies. So you tend to hear the lower frequencies, and it's a much more isolated sound, a little more muted than the sounds we hear on Earth." With this data, scientists have learned that some of their earlier models for how they thought sound should move on Mars missed the mark. "The Martian atmosphere can propagate sound a lot further than we thought it could," Lanza said. Translation: The Red Planet can literally carry a tune.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA plans to build a giant radio telescope on the 'dark side' of the moon. Here's why.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA scientists are currently working on plans to build a giant radio telescope in a nearly mile-wide crater on the "dark side" of the moon. If approved, it could be constructed as early as the 2030s and cost more than $2 billion, project scientists told Live Science. Astronomers want to build the first-of-its-kind dish, known as the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), to help unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries — but also because they are concerned about growing levels of invisible radiation leaking from private satellite "megaconstellations," which could soon disrupt Earth-based radio astronomy. The proposed telescope will be built entirely by robots and consist of a giant wire mesh suspended via cables within a crater on the moon's far side, similar to the collapsed alien-hunting Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico or China's giant Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), which were both built within natural depressions on Earth. This will shelter the dish from satellite signals, as well as prevent interference from solar radiation and Earth's atmosphere. The LCRT project is currently being investigated by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology. It was first proposed in 2020 and was awarded $125,000 in "phase I" funding from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). In 2021, the project reached "phase II" and was awarded an additional $500,000 of NIAC funding. The team is preparing to apply for "phase III" funding, which could be granted as early as next year, and they are currently building a 200:1 scale prototype that will be tested at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California later this year, Gaurangi Gupta, a research scientist at JPL who is part of the LCRT project, told Live Science. If the funding is approved — and the project passes this final phase — it will become a fully-fledged mission and the telescope could potentially be built at some point in the 2030s, Gupta said. Related: Scientists may finally be close to explaining strange radio signals from beyond the Milky Way The most up-to-date plans for the telescope include a 1,150-foot-wide (350 meter) meshed reflector, which is larger than Arecibo's collapsed dish but smaller than FAST. This is around three times smaller than the 3,300-foot (1,000 m) reflector initially proposed in 2020, which would have been the largest single telescope ever built. The researchers have already selected their preferred crater — a 0.8-mile-wide (1.3 km) depression in the moon's Northern Hemisphere — but are keeping its exact location under wraps. This is not the first time that scientists have proposed putting a radio telescope on the moon. The idea dates back to at least 1984, Gupta said. However, due to the technical challenges of building such a structure, it has never been seriously considered until now. "But with state-of-the-art technology, LCRT can potentially solve all these issues and make this concept a reality," Gupta said. However, the latest "rough estimate" suggests the construction of the LCRT could cost around $2.6 billion, Gupta said. This might prove to be the final stumbling block, especially as NASA's budget is being severely slashed by the Trump administration. The number of satellites orbiting Earth is rising fast, thanks to the emergence of private satellites, particularly SpaceX's rapidly growing Starlink constellation. This can create several problems, including an increase in space junk, rising light pollution in the night sky and a build-up of metal pollution in the upper atmosphere from satellite reentries. A lesser-known issue is that private satellites are prone to accidentally leaking radiation into space, which can interfere with radio telescopes trying to study distant objects such as ancient galaxies, nearby exoplanets and supermassive black holes. Several radio astronomers recently told Live Science that, if the number of satellites around our planet reaches maximum capacity, we could reach an "inflection point" beyond which radio astronomy would be extremely limited, and even impossible in some wavelengths. If this were to happen, "it would mean that we are artificially closing 'windows' to observe our universe," Federico Di Vruno, an astronomer at the Square Kilometer Array Observatory and co-director of the International Astronomical Union's Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Live Science. Having a shielded telescope on the moon could allow radio astronomy to persist even if this worst-case scenario comes to pass. However, this one telescope would only allow us to do a fraction of the science currently being achieved by radio observatories across the globe, meaning our ability to study the cosmos would still be drastically limited. Other researchers are also exploring the possibility of using a constellation of moon-orbiting satellites, as an accompaniment or alternative to the LCRT, Gupta said. However, these will likely have a much reduced window for observations than the larger telescope. In addition to preserving radio astronomy, LCRT could also allow us to scan wavelengths that Earth-based telescopes cannot. Radio signals with wavelengths greater than 33 feet (10 m), known as ultra-long wavelengths, do not easily pass through Earth's atmosphere, making them almost impossible to study from the ground. But these wavelengths are also vital in studying the very beginning of the universe, known as the cosmic dark ages, because signals from this epoch have been extremely red-shifted, or stretched out, before they reach us. "During this phase, the universe primarily consisted of neutral hydrogen, photons and dark matter, thus it serves as an excellent laboratory for testing our understanding of cosmology," Gupta said. "Observations of the dark ages have the potential to revolutionize physics and cosmology by improving our understanding of fundamental particle physics, dark matter, dark energy and cosmic inflation." The LCRT would also be shielded from solar radiation, which can also interfere with some other radio signals, allowing those wavelengths to be more easily studied on the moon. If LCRT is approved it will be a major coup for science. But it will not actually be the first lunar radio telescope. In February 2024, Intuitive Machine's Odysseus lander — the first private spacecraft to land on the moon and the first American lunar lander for more than 50 years — carried NASA's first Radiowave Observations on the Lunar Surface of the photo-Electron Sheath (ROLSES-1) instrument to the moon's near side. Despite the fact that the lander face-planted and ended up tilted on its side, the 30-pound (14 kilogram) telescope was still able to briefly collect the first lunar radio data. However, because ROLSES-1 was facing Earth, almost all the signals it collected came from our own planet, offering little astronomical value, according to a study uploaded March 12 to the pre-print journal arXiv. "This is a good demonstration of why we need to be on the far side for reliable measurements of the dark ages signal in a radio-quiet environment," Gupta said RELATED STORIES —Radio signal from 8 billion light-years away could reveal the secrets of the universe's 'dark age' —Astronomers discover new 'odd radio circle' near the center of our galaxy —Strange radio signals detected from Earth-like planet could be a magnetic field necessary for life Later this year, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost II lander will also attempt to land on the moon's far side. Among its scheduled payloads is the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE Night) — a mini radio telescope from the U.S. Department of Energy that will scan the sky for ultra-long-wavelength signals, Live Science's sister site previously reported. "The observations from these telescopes would be valuable for understanding the lunar environment, and the challenges and potential mitigation strategies to detect ultra-long wavelength signals," Gupta said.
LeMonde
26-05-2025
- Science
- LeMonde
NASA restarts one of Voyager 1's thrusters after 21 years of inactivity
47 years and eight months after its launch, Voyager 1 continues to push the limits of what seemed possible. Currently 24.88 billion kilometers from Earth – 166 times the distance between Earth and the Sun – Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from our planet. The legendary NASA probe, launched in 1977 alongside its twin, Voyager 2, is set to have its mission extended a little longer since engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced on May 14 that they had successfully revived, remotely, a thruster critical to the spacecraft's survival. Voyager 1 navigates using the positions of stars, which it can read by controlling its roll – that is, its rotation relative to the axis of its antenna – using two thrusters (a main and a backup). Over time, leftover propellant residue deposited after each firing gradually clogged the narrow inlet pipes of the main thruster. This forced engineers to switch both Voyager 1 and 2 to their backup roll thrusters to keep them pointed at their guide stars. But the backup thruster itself gradually became "clogged," leaving the ground team with few options, especially since the main system failed in 2004. At the time, engineers concluded that the failure was "probably irreversible."
Time of India
25-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
NASA acidentally discovers super bacteria that could survive on Mars
In a surprising discovery, NASA scientists found 26 new bacterial species in a JPL clean room, raising concerns about planetary contamination. These resilient microbes, resistant to radiation and toxins, evolved despite rigorous sterilization. While posing a threat to space missions, their unique survival traits could lead to advancements in medicine, food preservation, and biotechnology. According to the study, published in journal Microbiome, the microbes evolved to resist the clean room's repeated sterilization efforts. They boast powerful DNA repair systems, fast metabolism, and the ability to neutralize toxins. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Bacteria Built for the Impossible Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads More Than a Space Threat: Earthly Benefits Too Stronger antibiotics or extreme-condition medicines Better food preservation methods without synthetic additives Innovative materials for use in biotechnology and manufacturing Could They Survive on Mars? In an unexpected twist, NASA scientists have discovered 26 previously unknown species of bacteria—right inside one of the cleanest places on Earth. The find, made at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), reveals that some microbes are not only resilient but may even be capable of surviving the extreme conditions of Mars The bacteria were found in a highly sterilized clean room at JPL, where the Phoenix spacecraft was assembled in 2007. Designed to be virtually free of life to prevent contaminating other planets, the lab instead harbored 215 bacterial strains. Among them, scientists identified 53 strains that belonged to 26 never-before-seen bacteria were already present before the spacecraft arrived. Others appeared during its construction and testing. Despite rigorous sterilization procedures, including exposure to toxic chemicals and radiation, these microbes didn't just survive—they adapted.'This is a serious concern for planetary protection ,' microbiologist Alexandre Rosado was quoted as saying by the Dailygalaxy. He noted that such organisms could accidentally hitch a ride to other worlds, potentially interfering with life-detection newly discovered microbes possess traits typically found in Earth's most extreme environments. They showed high resistance to radiation, toxic substances, and disinfection chemicals—features that echo extremophiles like those living in deep-sea vents or to the study, published in journal Microbiome, the microbes evolved to resist the clean room's repeated sterilization efforts. They boast powerful DNA repair systems, fast metabolism, and the ability to neutralize toxins. As co-author Junia Schultz from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) put it, 'They're true survivalists.'While their resilience raises concerns about planetary contamination, these bacteria could offer breakthroughs here on believe the same genes that help them endure harsh conditions could aid in developing:This accidental discovery also reinforces the need for more stringent cleanliness standards in space missions. NASA has already begun reviewing protocols to minimize the risk of microbial contamination during future interplanetary big question: Could these bacteria survive off Earth?While that's still being studied, their durability certainly raises the possibility. If Earth microbes are accidentally introduced to Mars or another planet, they could interfere with life-detection missions or be mistaken for alien life . They could outcompete native organisms—if any exist in the alien has previously conducted experiments on how microbes handle near-space environments, and this new research adds a powerful data point to that growing body of scientists continue to push the boundaries of space and life sciences, these rogue bacteria may turn out to be unlikely pioneers—showing us both the strength of life on Earth and the care needed when searching for it elsewhere.
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Business Standard
24-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Jagran Prakashan Q4 results: Net loss of ₹51.46 cr as revenue dips 5.6%
Jagran Prakashan Ltd, the publisher of Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, on Saturday reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 51.46 crore for the March quarter of FY'25. The company had posted a net profit of Rs 6.02 crore in the January-March quarter of the previous fiscal, according to an exchange filing from Jagran Prakashan Ltd (JPL). Its revenue from operations was down 5.6 per cent to Rs 481 crore in the March quarter. It was at Rs 509.64 crore in the corresponding quarter a year ago. JPL's total expenses were up 11.36 per cent to Rs 580.51 crore in the March quarter of FY'25. Its revenue from printing, publishing and digital was at Rs 377.12 crore, down 6.8 per cent in the March quarter. Revenue from the FM radio business was down 12.7 per cent to Rs 54.67 crore in Q4 of FY'25. However, its revenue from other segments, which comprise outdoor advertising and event management and activation services, was up 16.5 per cent to Rs 50.47 crore. Total income of JPL, which includes other income, in the March quarter was down 3.47 per cent to Rs 515.01 crore. For the financial year ended March 31, 2025, JPL's profit declined 43 per cent to Rs 93.93 crore, from Rs 164.91 crore a year ago. In FY25, Jagran Prakashan's total consolidated income was down 1.5 per cent to Rs 1,993.45 crore. Moreover, the board of JPL at its meeting held on Saturday approved an interim dividend of 300 per cent, which is Rs 6/- per equity share on face value of Rs 2/- per equity share for the financial year ending March 31, 2025.
