January 2, 2023
Lots and lots and lots of space stories occurred in 2022.
From DART to Landsat, Sagittarius A* black hole to CAPSTONE, the Korean Pathfinder to SpaceX, and to the ISS, Moon, and Mars, here’s a summary of major space exploration projects last year.
Looking forward to 2023 and beyond!
December 26, 2022
Happy holidays, everyone!
Best wishes for the 2023 New Year. See you on the other side!
December 21, 2022
It was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did, said the study’s lead author, who estimates there was just a 1-in-200 chance of capturing the audio.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/mars-rover-captures-first-sound-dust-devil-red-planet-rcna61642
Perseverance has been on Mars for almost two years now, and already recorded wind on Mars for the first time in February 2021.
This dust devil was recorded in late September 2021 (wonder why only now it’s being revealed?). The dust devil was “average size,” which is described as about 400 feet / 122 meters tall and 80 feet / 24 meters wide, traveling at 16 feet / 5 meters per second (≈ 11 mph / 18 mph).
UPDATE. NBC incorrectly reported in the above linked article that the dust devil was recorded by Perseverance. It was actually recorded by InSight, which has just fallen silent after four years of operation. Sigh. I should get science news directly from the source and not from unreliable “news” sites.
https://jirafeau.isae-supaero.fr/f.php?h=2JWSkdJR&p=1
There are a lot of dust devils on Mars. A whole lot. Any settlement would have to be extremely prepared to deal with dust all the time, everywhere. If it ever got into equipment that regulated, say, breathable air inside habitats…
December 20, 2022
In 2020, the UAE’s space agency launched its first Mars mission, less than a decade after it was created. How did they manage it?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221206-how-the-uae-got-a-spacecraft-to-mars-on-the-first-try
This is a great story about how true international cooperation rather than competition can result in scientific progress.
Thanks to their efforts, despite nearly being derailed thanks to the pandemic, we will soon have a complete picture of an entire year of Mars weather.
Not bad for a country whose space agency is so small “you could probably lose it in the car park of Nasa’s giant Johnson Space Centre in Houston.”
(Of course, the project’s findings may mean I have to rewrite some of my novel in progress, but why not? All in the name of science fiction…)
December 17, 2022
I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)
The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.
By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.
As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.
So far, I have asked the program to:
OK, and the verdict is:
Continue Reading
December 16, 2022
Mission success would also be a milestone in space cooperation between Japan and the United States…
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japans-ispace-readies-delayed-launch-220204283.html
OK, wait…
A Japanese start-up (I.e., a small private company)…
using a SpaceX rocket (I.e., a private company owned by the world’s wealthiest pri…er, person)…
sends up a small craft made in Germany… 🇩🇪
along with the Rashid rover (made by the UAE)…
and “a two-wheeled, baseball-sized device from Japan’s JAXA space agency”…
and somehow this is cooperation between the US and Japan versus China and Russia?
I’m not seeing it. The project may have used a NASA launchpad, but the people are charge (and the ones paying for it) are not part of any national government.
And I have a feeling this is the wave of the future. More and more private companies will get involved in space projects as they realize that they can thus ignore politics and aim at profits.
I, for one, welcome our future corporate overlords…
December 15, 2022
“Find my ebooks and a wide collection of great indie titles as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! Check out https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos before the end of the month and follow @smashwords for more promos like this! #SmashwordsEOYSale #ebook #sale #books2read #indiebooks”
(I swiped this from the Smashwords promo site as a “generic blurb.” But what else, really, do I need to write?
All my ebooks on Smashwords are “50%” off! That means the books that are listed as $0.99 are actually free, since they don’t do $0.49.
And don’t forget that all proceeds from Destiny in the Future are donated to fight cancer.
Gift an ebook to friends and family!
December 13, 2022
[ChatGPT] could teach his daughter math, science and English, not to mention a few other important lessons. Chief among them: Do not believe everything you are told.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html
They’re all the rage online. Type in a request for a description how two historical people who never actually met would respond to each other had they actually met, and the program will oblige.
They’ll cause all sorts of rage online, too, once the peddlers of incessant false news and innuendo realize what a bonanza they’ve stumbled upon.
You want an image of an event that never really happened?
No problem. A program can generate one for you. We can even call it “art,” for what that’s worth.
No, BIG problem, especially when it convinces the gullible that it DID happen.
2023 will tell 2020 and 2022 to hold its coffee.
Just what we all wanted, right?
Still, chatbots are not (repeat, NOT) true AI. Sorry, Google engineer who watched too much Ghost in the Shell. Chatbots repeat our very human bias. Repeatedly.
As in, there are way too many racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic comments online. Full stop.
At a minor level, as a writing instructor, a student telling a chatbot to write a 600-word comparison-contrast essay is the least of my worries.
For starters, the damn things are probably scouring the Internet right now and “learning” from text on web pages like…uh…this one…
😱
December 12, 2022
The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a “net energy gain” from an experimental fusion reactor.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-to-announce-major-scientific-breakthrough-amid-nuclear-fusion-reports-3598437/amp/1
This is being spread across various websites. FT and Washington Post wrote the most details, but both are behind paywalls (boo) so I cited NDTV instead.
If…a BIG if…this report is true, it would still take a decade or more to commercialize fusion to the point where it would make even a dent in climate change.
But it would be a big first step.
A BIG if.
(FWIW, European scientists claimed this back in February …and in June… and again in September, and then it all fizzled out. So I’m not holding my breath on yet another politically charged, puff out our nationalist chest claim until I see scientific evidence that the reaction can be sustained and repeated elsewhere.)
Can you say “billlyons and billyons of dollars”?
December 11, 2022
Think of pizza dough flattening into an enlarging disk as it’s tossed. Because the cloud had an initial rotation, this same direction of spin has persisted…
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a39729213/why-do-all-the-planets-orbit-in-the-same-direction/
So basically the answer is simply that that’s the way they all started out.
Some moons, however, do have retrograde orbits. I.e., they orbit in the opposite direction around their respective planets. Some small asteroids and comets also have retrograde orbits due to their small mass being easily affected by larger cosmic objects.
But I bet now you’re all thinking of pizza… 🍕
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