TYB
SAIC scores $444 million contract to upgrade data systems at U.S. space launch sites
March 11, 2024
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) has landed a $444 million contract to modernize the launch instrumentation and information systems at the Space Force’s launch sites in Florida and California.
SAIC, a defense and engineering contractor based in Reston, Virginia, beat out multiple rivals to secure the highly contested Digital Transformation, Acquisition, Modernization and Modification (DTAMM) contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
“Under this contract, SAIC will modernize antiquated space launch range instrumentation and processes to support an accelerated cadence of space missions,” the company announced March 11.
Five-year agreement
DTAMM is a five-year agreement, with options to extend for an additional five years. The work will be performed at the nation’s largest space launch ranges at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Some of the projects under the DTAMM contract include cloud infrastructure, software factory and software development services and cyber security strategies. This will support what the Space Force calls “data-driven range activities” to improve efficiency at the decades-old launch ranges.
https://spacenews.com/saic-scores-444-million-contract-to-upgrade-data-systems-at-u-s-space-launch-sites/
https://www.space.com/betelgeuse-red-supergiant-star-surface-spin-illusion
The boiling surface of giant star Betelgeuse may be creating an illusion
Mar 12, 2024
Recent observations of Betelgeuse, a star located in the constellation Orion, have created a mystery about the red supergiant. They suggest it is spinning much faster than a star its size should be able to.
Now, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, led by Ph.D. student Jing-Ze Ma, may have an explanation for why Betelgeuse appears to be spinning so utterly fast. Perhaps, the researchers say, it's actually an illusion created by the star's violently boiling surface.
Ma and colleagues think the star's bubbling surface could be mistaken for rotation — even by the most advanced telescopes. This mistake could lead to observers believing Betelgeuse, which is located between 500 to 600 light-years from Earth, appears to be rotating faster than should be possible for a star of such enormity.
"For most people, stars are just glowing dots in the sky. Our results highlight again that stars like Betelgeuse have such drastic boiling motions on the surface that we can see those motions in action in the telescopes," Ma told Space.com "As theorists, we are very excited that we can actually make predictions from our simulations that will be tested against observations in years to come."
Betelgeuse is an infamous red supergiant star that recently made headlines when its dimming led scientists to speculate that it may be about to explode.
"Most stars are just tiny points of light in the night sky. Betelgeuse is so incredibly large and nearby that, with the very best telescopes, it is one of the very few stars where we actually observe and study its boiling surface," Selma de Mink,
research coauthor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement. "It still feels a bit like a science fiction movie, as if we have traveled there to see it up close. And the results are so exciting."
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!
Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere over Earth, meaning it is well-studied for study — but, as observations of its dimming show, that doesn't mean it isn't capable of delivering surprises.
With a diameter greater than 620 million miles (1 billion kilometers), Betelgeuse is over 1,000 times larger than the sun, making it one of the largest stars in the known universe. If the sun and Betelgeuse were swapped, and the red supergiant was placed at the heart of the solar system, it would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, with its atmosphere extending all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter.
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Such massive stars are expected to have relatively sedate rotation speeds. This is because when stars "puff out" and expand during their red giant phase, the conservation of angular momentum suggests their rotation should slow. This is similar to an ice skater on Earth lowering and spreading out their arms to slow down their spins.
Yet, recent observations of Betelgeuse, particularly those made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Northern Chile, showed that Betelgeuse is rotating at around 11,200 miles per hour (5 kilometers per second). That's around eight times as fast as a Jet Fighter.
An investigation with ALMA, an observatory comprised of 66 radio antennas that together form a single telescope, revealed that while half of Betelgeuse appears to be approaching Earth, the other appears to be receding. It was this so-called "dipolar radial velocity map" on the outer layer of Betelgeuse that scientists interpreted as rapid rotation.
This interpretation hinges on Betelgeuse being considered a perfectly round sphere, however — and this isn't the case, the new study's researchers point out. The surface of the red supergiant star is turbulent with boiling bubbles. Some of those bubbles, in fact, are as large as Earth's entire orbit around the sun. These bubbles, powered by a heat-transfer mechanism called convection, can rise and fall at speeds as great as 67,000 mph (30 km/s), around three times as fast as the Orion Spacecraft, the crew vehicle of the Artemis mission.
To analyze this precise, bubbly picture of Betelgeuse, the team developed a new post-processing computer package to simulate synthetic ALMA images and compare them with 3D radiation hydrodynamic simulations of nonrotating red supergiant stars. This revealed that a cluster of boiling bubbles rising on one side of Betelgeuse as another cluster falls on the other would create a dipolar radial velocity map. This convection would be blurred in actual ALMA observations, the team says, making it indistinguishable from rapid rotation.
In fact, the crew found that in around 90% of their simulations, Betelgeuse would be interpreted as rotating at tens of thousands of miles per hour because of this large-scale boiling on the red supergiant's surface. Should the team's modeling be wrong, however, there may be other explanations. For instance, it could indicate the red supergiant star engaged in some stellar cannibalism long ago.
"If Betelgeuse is rapidly rotating after all, then we think it must have been spun up after eating a small companion star that was orbiting it," de Mink added.
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"Unresolved": US Government Releases Fresh Batch Of UFO Footage To The Public
Mar 11, 2024
The US Government has released a fresh batch of footage taken of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) around the world, as well as explanations that turn a few right back into FOs.
Releasing the footage, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) stated that they had found no evidence that any investigation into UFOs – aka unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – had "confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."
"All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification."
Amongst the released footage, however, were videos of phenomena that AARO is unable to fully explain.
One of these instances included footage shot by US Navy crew on board F/A-18 jets. In another incident in the Middle East, they were able to rule out that the unknown object was exhibiting "anomalous behavior", but were unable to identify it beyond that.
Of course, a few turned out to be quite explainable, after looking at commercial flight data.
"An MQ-9 forward-looking infrared video sensor captured this footage in South Asia as it was recording another MQ-9," AARO wrote of one UFOs on their website, alongside other cases they were able to explain.
"After analysis of the full motion video, inclusion of additional footage with a longer focal length, and analysis of commercial flight data in the region, AARO assesses that the object likely is a commercial aircraft and that the trailing cavitation is a sensor artifact resultant of video compression."
https://www.iflscience.com/unresolved-us-government-releases-fresh-batch-of-ufo-footage-to-the-public-73337
https://www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/Official-UAP-Imagery/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKZl5wIySO8
Been looking for a video from gamergate 1 that had a sound developer / engineer talking about where the sound effects really com from.