TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
June 26, 2024
Timelapse: Aurora, SAR, and the Milky Way
What's happening in the sky this unusual night? Most striking in the featured 4.5-hour 360-degree panoramic video, perhaps, is the pink and purple aurora. That's because this night, encompassing May 11, was famous for its auroral skies around the world. As the night progresses, auroral bands shimmer, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises, and stars shift as the Earth rotates beneath them. Captured here simultaneously is a rare red band running above the aurora: a SAR arc, seen to change only slightly. The flashing below the horizon is caused by passing cars, while the moving spots in the sky are satellites and airplanes. The featured video was captured from Xinjiang, China with four separate cameras.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
https://science.nasa.gov/open-science/ai-language-model-science-research/
NASA-IBM Collaboration Develops INDUS Large Language Models for Advanced Science Research
JUN 25, 2024
Collaborations with private, non-federal partners through Space Act Agreements are a key component in the work done by NASA's Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT).
A collaboration with International Business Machines (IBM) has produced INDUS, a comprehensive suite of large language models (LLMs) tailored for the domains of Earth science, biological and physical sciences, heliophysics, planetary sciences, and astrophysics and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources.
INDUS contains two types of models; encoders and sentence transformers. Encoders convert natural language text into numeric coding that can be processed by the LLM.
The INDUS encoders were trained on a corpus of 60 billion tokens encompassing astrophysics, planetary science, Earth science, heliophysics, biological, and physical sciences data.
Its custom tokenizer developed by the IMPACT-IBM collaborative team improves on generic tokenizers by recognizing scientific terms like biomarkers and phosphorylated.
Over half of the 50,000-word vocabulary contained in INDUS is unique to the specific scientific domains used for its training.
The INDUS encoder models were used to fine tune the sentence transformer models on approximately 268 million text pairs, including titles/abstracts and questions/answers.
By providing INDUS with domain-specific vocabulary, the IMPACT-IBM team achieved superior performance over open, non-domain specific LLMs on a benchmark for biomedical tasks, a scientific question-answering benchmark, and Earth science entity recognition tests.
By designing for diverse linguistic tasks and retrieval augmented generation, INDUS is able to process researcher questions, retrieve relevant documents, and generate answers to the questions.
For latency sensitive applications, the team developed smaller, faster versions of both the encoder and sentence transformer models.
Validation tests demonstrate that INDUS excels in retrieving relevant passages from the science corpora in response to a NASA-curated test set of about 400 questions.
IBM researcher Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee commented on the overall approach:
“We achieved superior performance by not only having a custom vocabulary but also a large specialized corpus for training the encoder model and a good training strategy.
For the smaller, faster versions, we used neural architecture search to obtain a model architecture and knowledge distillation to train it with supervision of the larger model.”
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INDUS was also evaluated using data from NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division. Dr. Sylvain Costes, the NASA BPS project manager for Open Science, discussed the benefits of incorporating INDUS:
“Integrating INDUS with the Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) Application Programming Interface (API) enabled us to develop and trial a chatbot that offers more intuitive search capabilities for navigating individual datasets.
We are currently exploring ways to improve OSDR's internal curation data system by leveraging INDUS to enhance our curation team's productivity and reduce the manual effort required daily.”
At the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC), the INDUS model was fine-tuned using labeled data from domain experts to categorize publications specifically citing GES-DISC data into applied research areas.
According to NASA principal data scientist Dr. Armin Mehrabian, this fine-tuning “significantly improves the identification and retrieval of publications that reference GES-DISC datasets, which aims to improve the user journey in finding their required datasets.”
Furthermore, the INDUS encoder models are integrated into the GES-DISC knowledge graph, supporting a variety of other projects, including the dataset recommendation system and GES-DISC GraphRAG.
Kaylin Bugbee, team lead of NASA’s Science Discovery Engine (SDE), spoke to the benefit INDUS offers to existing applications: "Large language models are rapidly changing the search experience.
The Science Discovery Engine, a unified, insightful search interface for all of NASA's open science data and information, has prototyped integrating INDUS into its search engine.
Initial results have shown that INDUS improved the accuracy and relevancy of the returned results."
INDUS enhances scientific research by providing researchers with improved access to vast amounts of specialized knowledge. INDUS can understand complex scientific concepts and reveal new research directions based on existing data.
It also enables researchers to extract relevant information from a wide array of sources, improving efficiency. Aligned with NASA and IBM’s commitment to open and transparent artificial intelligence, the INDUS models are openly available on Hugging Face.
For the benefit of the scientific community, the team has released the developed models and will release the benchmark datasets that span named entity recognition for climate change, extractive QA for Earth science, and information retrieval for multiple domains.
The INDUS encoder models are adaptable for science domain applications, and the INDUS retriever models support information retrieval in RAG applications.
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Sprites from space! Astronaut photographs rare red lightning phenomenon from ISS
June 25, 2024
An astronaut captured an elusive glimpse of red lightning from space.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick imaged the rare red sprite phenomenon from the International Space Station earlier in the year, which may build on earlier studies of the lightning type on the orbiting complex.
"Super lucky a few weeks ago when shooting a timelapse of a lightning storm off the coast of South Africa.
One of the frames in the timelapse had a red sprite," NASA astronaut Dominick wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday (June 20).
"A rare event. My knowledge is pretty much just from Wikipedia but I want to know more," he added, adding in a second post that he would like to collaborate with "red sprite experts" for "tips on how to capture more of these."
Related: Eerie, ultra-detailed photo of a lightning 'sprite' exposes one of nature's least understood phenomena
Red sprites, also known as red lightning, occur during some extremely intense thunderstorms.
Most lightning flashes move down from the clouds to the ground, a sprite goes in the opposite direction: up, into the upper atmosphere.
These sprites are very brief, lasting only for about a millisecond, which makes them difficult to observe even with professional equipment from orbit. That said, they can be very large, sometimes spanning as large as 30 miles (48 km) across.
Lightning has been studied for many years on the ISS, including 2015 images of different phenomena (blue jets, or upside-down lightning) that European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured from space.
His photos made the covers of the top-tier prestigious journals Science and Nature. Mogensen also managed to capture red sprites of his own during his latest 2023-24 excursion to space.
Mogensen used a new camera during his second excursion on the ISS to "study the formation and development of these types of lightning in much more detail," Mogensen told Space.com last year.
The camera is neuromorphic, obtaining images differently than the way standard cameras do.
"Instead of taking images by collecting light through the camera shutter, the camera measures differences in light and uses that information to create an image," ESA officials wrote in a statement in September 2023.
The lightning may also be changing due to human-induced climate change, according to an April 2023 presentation on the study at the European Geophysical Union hybrid conference held in Vienna and online.
The new study, lead author Olivier Chanrion with DTU Space said at the time, provides "the opportunity to analyze and quantify their (lightning storms') impact, and to check to which extent they are associated with overshooting thunderclouds tops that inject greenhouse gases and aerosols in the stratosphere."
https://www.space.com/iss-red-lightning-sprite-thunderstorm-image
Collins Aerospace pulls back from NASA spacesuit contract
June 26, 2024
As NASA grapples with more spacesuit problems on the International Space Station, the company it selected to develop replacement suits says it is pulling back from that effort.
In a statement to SpaceNews June 25, a spokesperson for Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of RTX Corp., said the company and NASA had agreed to “descope” work on spacesuit development for the ISS under task orders that are part of a contract awarded two years ago. Reuters first reported that the company was seeking to drop out of the contract.
“After a thorough evaluation, Collins Aerospace and NASA mutually agreed to descope Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) task orders. Collins remains committed to supporting NASA and human spaceflight programs,” the company stated.
NASA announced in June 2022 that it selected Collins and Axiom Space for the xEVAS program, which seeks to develop spacesuits commercially that will be offered to NASA as a service.
NASA subsequently awarded a task order to Collins to work on a suit for use at the ISS, while Axiom received a task order to develop spacesuits for Artemis lunar missions.
Collins had publicly reported good progress on that suit. In February, the company said it completed tests of a prototype of the suit on parabolic aircraft flights that generated 20 seconds of microgravity at a time.
“My honest opinion is that it is a far more capable suit,” Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who later became chief test astronaut at Collins, said at the time.
The company did not disclose why it sought to descope the work on the project.
Industry sources said they believed that Collins had suffered delays and cost overruns and concluded that it was no longer feasible for the company to continue work on it, particularly given the fixed-price nature of the contract.
NASA has not commented on the decision by Collins to end work on the suit and what steps, if any, it would take to find a new suit developer.
Besides Axiom and Collins, SpaceX has been independently developing its own spacesuit that will be tested on the Polaris Dawn private astronaut mission flying on a Crew Dragon. That mission is scheduled to launch as soon as mid-July.
NASA issued “crossover” task orders to both Axiom and Collins last July, allowing Axiom to start examining how it could adapt its lunar spacesuit for use on the ISS and Collins to adapt its ISS spacesuit for lunar missions.
Axiom has been focused on the Artemis suit, including a recent integrated test with NASA and SpaceX to demonstrate how the suits would integrate with the Starship lunar lander and other elements of the Artemis 3 mission.
The announcement by Collins comes after NASA experienced two consecutive scrubbed spacewalks from the ISS. NASA called off a June 13 spacewalk after astronaut Matt Dominick reported a “suit discomfort” issue shortly before the spacewalk was scheduled to begin.
NASA did not elaborate on the specific problem with the suit.
NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt were scheduled to perform another spacewalk June 24, carrying out the tasks scheduled for the earlier, postponed spacewalk.
However, just as the outer hatch to the airlock opened, Dyson reported a water leak when she disconnected a service and cooling umbilical line to her suit, as planned.
“There’s literally water everywhere,” Dyson reported as the water turned to ice, forming a layer on her helmet visor. Reconnecting the line stopped the leak, but NASA called off the spacewalk as a precaution.
The agency said June 25 that astronauts inspected the suit and examined procedures for future spacewalks, but did not confirm if a planned July 2 spacewalk would take place as scheduled.
The spacesuits currently used on the station, known as Extravehicular Mobility Units or EMUs, are decades old and have suffered problems as they age.
In 2022, NASA held off using the suits for routine spacewalks for several months after an astronaut reported seeing a thin layer of water on the inside of his visor at the end of a spacewalk.
NASA concluded that “integrated system performance” rather than a specific hardware flaw caused that water to form. NASA safety advisers have warned about the risks posed by the aging EMUs for some time.
“It is an undeniable fact that the 40-year-old EMUs used in ISS operations are reaching the end of their useful life,” NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel noted in a 2019 recommendation, calling for an “immediate transition” to new suits “before the risk to EVA [extravehicular activity] becomes unmanageable.”
That recommendation remained open as of the panel’s latest annual report in January.
https://spacenews.com/collins-aerospace-pulls-back-from-nasa-spacesuit-contract/
UK Ministry of Defence secretly investigated UFOs and came to 'strong' conclusion
UPDATED07:31, 25 JUN 2024
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) secretly investigated UFO sightings and came to a "very strong" conclusion.
In recent years the Pentagon in the US has released reports into UFO activity following the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
The most recent came in March this year, and unsurprisingly it found no evidence of any alien activity.
However, people are only just realising something similar has occurred in the UK. It comes following a post on X (formerly Twitter) from the account of BBC TV show QI.
The post read: "In 1950 the UK Ministry of Defence created a secret organisation to look into UFOs called the Flying Saucer Working Party. It disbanded within a year."
Sir Henry Tizard, the Chief Scientific Adviser in the MoD at the time, established the Flying Saucer Working Party in October 1950.
The group's final report was published in June 1951 and, just like researchers in the US, concluded all the sightings they studied could be explained away.
Each sighting, they said, was attributable to one or more of the following causes - astronomical or meteorological phenomena, misidentification, optical illusions and psychological delusions, or hoaxes.
The main body of the report ended with the following statement: "We accordingly recommend very strongly that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available."
The next study of its kind, completed in 2000 and released in 2006, was codenamed Project Condign.
Again, it concluded most UFO sightings could be explained by misidentification or meteorological phenomena.
The BBC quoted an MoD spokesperson as saying at the time: "Both this study and the original 'Flying Saucer Working Party' concluded that there is insufficient evidence to indicate the presence of any genuine unidentified aerial phenomena.
It is unlikely that we would carry out any future studies unless such evidence were to emerge."
Reacting to the recent post on X about the formation and swift disbandment of the Flying Saucer Working Party, one user joked: "Great name for a band."
Another said: "'It disbanded within a year' - that's what THEY want you to think."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-ministry-defence-secretly-investigated-33065448
AFRL releases video footage of XQ-67A first flight
06.26.2024
The Air Force Research Laboratory successfully flew the first of a second- generation of Autonomous Collaborative Platforms known as the XQ-67A demonstrator, built and flown in the Off-Board Sensing Station, or OBSS, program Feb. 28, 2024.
The AFRL OBSS program is the validation of a design, build and test process that has resulted in the XQ-67A.
It is the first of its kind to be built on a common chassis or genus — much like that of a motor vehicle frame — and with its first successful flight, the XQ-67A is proof that the genus approach works.
This enables a faster and more cost-effective replication of the aircraft.
This new approach also responds to the challenge of great power competition by speeding delivery of affordable, advanced capabilities to the warfighter.
AFRL provides our nation and our warfighters with advanced technologies leading to reliable, effective and integrated capabilities for use today and tomorrow.
Designed, built, ground tested and flown in just over two years, AFRL’s XQ-67A builds on the success of the XQ-58A Valkyrie and complements the Air Force Test Center’s X-62 VISTA and F-16 VENOM efforts to speed fielding of Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA. AFRL flight testing actively pursues initiatives that allow AFRL to deliver science and technology at the speed of need through agile and continuous development.
The XQ-67A is remotely piloted but is capable of autonomous flight. Under AFRL’s Low Cost Attritable Aircraft Platform Sharing, or LCAAPS, program, the lab’s Aerospace Systems Directorate explored development of a chassis or “genus” as the foundational core architecture from which several “species” of aircraft can be built.
This provides an alternate acquisition approach for ACP aircraft using a product line philosophy that enables faster development, lower costs and opportunities for frequent technology refreshes.
https://www.dvidshub.net/news/474793/afrl-releases-video-footage-xq-67a-first-flight
Vivienne Westwood Andreas Kronthaler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Westwood
Scientists closer to finding alien life after uncovering new 'telltale signs' of an inhabited planet
UPDATED: 10:03 EDT, 26 June 2024
Alien life has yet to be found in space, but a new study has uncovered 'telltale' signs of an inhabited planet.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) discovered that greenhouse gases, like those emitted on Earth, would mean a distant world had been terraformed - or artificially altered.
Signatures of methane, ethane, and propane, along with gases made of nitrogen and fluorine or sulfur and fluorine could indicate technology-using life forms due to the gases only forming through manufacturing.
Scientists ran simulations on a hypothetical planet, finding NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could spot the gasses as easily as it could ozone on Earth.
UCR astrobiologist and lead study author Edward Schwieterman said: 'For us, these gases are bad because we don't want to increase warming.
'But they'd be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.'
The five gases proposed by the researchers are used on Earth in industrial applications such as making computer chips.
Researchers chose to simulate a planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system because it is home to seven known rocky words and is one of the most studied planetary systems.
They used the Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG), which is a model designed to synthesize and retrieve data about a planet's atmosphere and surface.
The team simulated the five gasses on the hypothetical planet and calculated how many observations JWST would need to detect them using its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which sees wavelengths from 5 to 12 micrometers.
MIRI features both a camera and a spectrograph, which separates incoming light by its frequency and records the resulting spectrum.
MIRI also has sensitive detectors that lets it see redshifted light of distant galaxies, newly forming stars, and faintly visible comets as well as objects in the Kuiper Belt.
The study showed that JWST was able to pic up the greenhouses gases as easily as it would identifying Earth's ozone.
And the system revealed that JWST detected the gasses with just five transits for high concentrations like 100 parts per million (ppm).
Another advantage of searching for the greenhouse proposed gases is that they are exceptionally long-lived and would persist in an Earth-like atmosphere for up to 50,000 years.
'They wouldn't need to be replenished too often for a hospitable climate to be maintained,' Schwieterman said.
Other members of the research team echoed Schwieterman's enthusiasm for the potential of finding signs of intelligent life, but also for how much closer current technology has brought us to that goal.
Daniel Angerhausen at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology said: 'Our thought experiment shows how powerful our next-generation telescopes will be.
'We are the first generation in history that has the technology to systematically look for life and intelligence in our galactic neighborhood.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13568951/Scientists-finding-alien-life-new-telltale-signs.html
Count Binface challenges U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for Parliament seat
June 25, 2024
The polls suggest that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may be on track to lead his Conservative Party to its worst election defeat in its nearly 200-year history.
And to compound that possible embarrassment, when the results are read out in his own district on the night of July 4, he’ll be standing alongside a candidate who describes himself as an intergalactic space lord and leader of the Recyclons from Planet Sigma.
Count Binface, a recurring satirical character in British elections, is challenging the prime minister for the Parliament seat representing Richmond and Northallerton.
Most polls suggest that Sunak will retain his seat, as every prime minister has before him. But his national approval rating is so low that an Ipsos survey released Saturday found that Sunak was only four percentage points ahead of Binface on favorability.
Binface, in turn, was viewed more favorably than former prime minister Liz Truss.
This is a candidate whose big policy ideas include banning loud snacks in theaters, building “at least one affordable house” and, in a kind of reverse Brexit, inviting other European nations to join the United Kingdom. He also wants to represent the U.K. at Eurovision.
The main party leaders in British elections, unsurprisingly, focus on the British press; getting one-on-one interviews with the leaders is a challenge for foreign correspondents.
But Count Binface — played by 44-year-old comedian Jon Harvey — responded quickly to our interview request. And he had much to say about “Bindependence Day,” which is what he is calling the July 4 snap elections.
When pressed on his loud-snacks policy, Binface said, “What’s the point of going out and spending half your mortgage and you can’t hear anything because of the noisy snack brigade? It’s madness.”
Harvey’s first outing as a satirical candidate in a British election was in 2017. Candidates who meet age and citizenship requirements have to pay 500 pounds ($634) and submit 10 signatures from voters in the constituency they plan to contest.
So Harvey declared himself a challenger to Prime Minister Theresa May, and he assumed the role of Lord Buckethead, a character inspired by a Star Wars spoof movie who has taken part in U.K. general elections going back to 1987.
But Harvey ran into “an issue on Planet Copyright” — American filmmaker and Buckethead creator Todd Durham threatened to sue him.
“So I respawned into my true form, Count Binface.” In 2019, he ran against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as well as someone else officially authorized to pose as Buckethead.
When we asked if we could speak to Harvey, straight-faced Binface countered with a warning: “Your belief in the character is starting to fall away. … If that happens, this humor will disintegrate faster than a laser blast.”
Who actually votes for a character like this? In the recent London mayoral election, Binface — running on a pledge to put a price cap on croissants — won more than 24,000 votes.
Perhaps that’s not surprising in a country that voted for “Boaty McBoatface” when asked to name a $288 million research ship, or where a census question on religious identity once got nearly 400,000 people answering that they were Jedi knights from Star Wars.
But in this particular moment, there is a genuine dissatisfaction with politics, as well as anger driven by government scandals, the fallout of Brexit, cost-of-living pressures, political turmoil and stretched public services.
A recent British Social Attitudes survey found that public trust and confidence in politics is at an all-time low.
“If you don’t know what you’re going to do, and you go into the polling booth and you see ‘Lord Buckethead’ or ‘Count Binface,’ you might think, I’ll send a message by voting for him,” said Martin Baxter, founder of Electoral Calculus, a political consulting firm.
Baxter said satirical candidates have occasionally had political significance — as when the Monster Raving Loony Party, which encourages people to “vote for insanity,” outperformed what remained of the Social Democratic Party in a special election, underscoring that that party’s days were over.
Asked what he would consider a good result on July 4, Count Binface said, “I don’t want to get dewy-eyed, or dewy-visored. If I get any votes, that’s fine. If I get zero votes, that’s fine. Ultimately, it’s the being there that counts.
This will be a capping moment for 14 Earth Years of some of the worst government leadership any major country has ever suffered.”
cont.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/count-binface-challenges-u-k-prime-minister-rishi-sunak-for-parliament-seat/ar-BB1oQxuC?item=flightsprg-tipsubsc-v1a/