Stratolaunch's huge Roc plane flies with fueled-up hypersonic vehicle for 1st time

Roc, the biggest airplane in the world, conducted a captive-carry flight with a powered Talon-A test vehicle on Sunday (Dec. 3).

The world's biggest airplane took to the skies over the weekend with a new type of payload under its expansive wings.

Stratolaunch's Roc carrier plane conducted its first-ever captive-carry flight with a powered and fueled-up hypersonic test vehicle on Sunday (Dec. 3).

The main goal was to evaluate the propulsion system of that vehicle — the first of Stratolaunch's robotic Talon-A craft, known as TA-1 — and to see more generally how it behaves while being carried in flight, company representatives said.

"Talon-A's propulsion system supports a liquid-propellant rocket engine that provides the thrust needed for Talon-A to reach hypersonic speeds," Stratolaunch CEO Zachary Krevor said in a statement on Sunday.

https://www.space.com/stratolaunch-roc-fueled-hypersonic-vehicle-test-flight

An international research team led by quantum physicist Markus Arndt (University of Vienna) has achieved a breakthrough in the detection of protein ions: Due to their high energy sensitivity, superconducting nanowire detectors achieve almost 100% quantum efficiency and exceed the detection efficiency of conventional ion detectors at low energies by a factor of up to a 1,000. In contrast to conventional detectors, they can also distinguish macromolecules by their impact energy. This allows for more sensitive detection of proteins and it provides additional information in mass spectrometry. The results of this study were recently published in the journal Science Advances.

The detection, identification, and analysis of macromolecules is interesting in many areas of life sciences, including protein research, diagnostics, and analytics. Mass spectrometry is often used as a detection system a method that typically separates charged particles (ions) according to their mass-to-charge-ratio and measures the intensity of the signals generated by a detector. This provides information about the relative abundance of the different types of ions and therefore the composition of the sample. However, conventional detectors have only been able to achieve high detection efficiency and spatial resolution for particles with high impact energy a limitation that has now been overcome by an international team of researchers using superconducting nanowire detectors.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231204135147.htm