NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

July 21, 2024

King of Wings Hoodoo under the Milky Way

This rock structure is not only surreal – it's real. Perhaps the reason it's not more famous is that it is smaller than one might guess: the capstone rock overhangs only a few meters. Even so, the King of Wings outcrop, located in New Mexico, USA, is a fascinating example of an unusual type of rock structure called a hoodoo. Hoodoos may form when a layer of hard rock overlays a layer of eroding softer rock. Figuring out the details of incorporating this hoodoo into a night-sky photoshoot took over a year. Besides waiting for a suitably picturesque night behind a sky with few clouds, the foreground had to be artificially lit just right relative to the natural glow of the background. After much planning and waiting, the final shot, featured here, was taken in May 2016. Mimicking the horizontal bar, the background sky features the band of our Milky Way Galaxy stretching overhead.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2024/07/19/peter-theisinger-titan-of-mars-program-at-jpl-dies-at-78/

Peter Theisinger, ‘titan of Mars program’ at JPL, dies at 78

July 19, 2024 at 2:39 p.m.

Peter Theisinger raised the IQ of any room he entered. The man considered a giant at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who worked on missions to six planets and landed three NASA rovers on Mars, has died after a long illness. He was 78.

“The things we do at JPL, if we’re doing it right, are groundbreaking and change our understanding of our place in the world, and you need a certain boldness and self confidence to do that,” said Adam Steltzner, who worked with Theisinger as lead engineer of the team that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012.

“Pete had all of that, but he also had a humility in the face of it. He was a titan of the Mars program.”

Steltzner, chief engineer of JPL’s Mars Sample Return program, said Theisinger remained a mentor to him until his passing, on June 26.

“It’s hard to distill the influence Pete had and the toll his passing leaves, he was foundational at JPL,” he said.

Theisinger inspired his team to higher standards and was bright, kind and demanding in the best sense of the word.

“He was a straight shooter, a sort of all-around person in so many ways,” said Richard Cook, who shared project manager duties with Theisinger for the Curiosity rover mission to Mars.

The two were named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013.

Cook, now JPL’s deputy associate director for strategic integration, said Theisinger was a great leader who was able to motivate his team and be clear about his expectations, “and he was the first person to be complimentary when they did something amazing and everyone appreciated that.”

Even though the two leaders were the only ones officially designated to meet the press after the Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars in 2012, Theisinger encouraged his team to walk across the stage with them, in front of the press corps as well as NASA and JPL officials.

“He was so inclusive of people,” Cook said. The two spent many lunch hours in Cook’s office, commiserating over things that went wrong with the project.

“But we’d also talk about every other thing under the sun,” he said. “Pete had a million other interests and we would talk politics and movies. I cherish those times.”

Theisinger, a longtime resident of La Crescenta, led major unmanned space science flight missions in his 50 years with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

His work with the NASA rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 from the National Air and Space Museum, joining the ranks of Neil Armstrong and John Glenn.

Ed Stone, director of JPL, wrote that year that Theisinger is the latest heir “of NASA’s long history of building brilliant unmanned spacecraft and dispatching them around the cosmos.”

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>>21258691

Describing the engineer and project manager as energetic, inquisitive and smart, Stone said he did a stellar job “sending a one-ton spacecraft to a planet tens of millions of miles away, lowering it to the surface by cables and setting it free to roam about.”

Theisinger’s legacy continues in the work Jennifer Trosper does as project manager for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Theisinger interviewed her for a job at JPL about 30 years ago.

“He was like a father figure to me, wise, encouraging, had my best interest in mind, I learned so much from him, and I have so much great respect for him in the way he led our team,” Trosper said.

“I was this farm girl from Ohio, and there could have been a lot of reasons not to believe in me and what I could do but he did. In my opinion, he was unparalleled at JPL and across NASA. I loved him.”

Trosper credits Theisinger for her growth as a leader.

“The things I do well you could attribute to Pete,” she said. “He empowered us and believed in us. Those were some of our best days because we were working for Pete.”

The Fresno-born Theisinger graduated with a physics degree from Caltech in Pasadena. A summer job at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, in 1967 sparked a lifetime spent at the research and development center.

Theisinger contributed to the 1967 Mariner mission to Venus, the 1971 Mariner orbiter mission to Mars, the 1977 Voyager mission to outer planets of the solar system, and the 1989 Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Before retiring in 2013, he managed JPL’s engineering and science directorate and its spacecraft systems engineering section. He also helped start the Mars 2020 Project that built the rover Perseverance.

Accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., Theisinger joked about how he came by his full head of gray hair.

“I’ve seen missions to planets, I’ve seen missions to primitive bodies, flybys, orbiters, landers, I’ve seen a lot,” he said. But he said his biggest achievement wasn’t the “great bits” about landing Mars explorer rovers and leading the charge to explore our solar system.

“Any time you do a job well, when you feel like you accomplished something, you go home that day and say, ‘I made a difference,’ I think that’s a high point in your career,” Theisinger said.

A celebration of life is planned in August.

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New quantum computer smashes 'quantum supremacy' record by a factor of 100 — and it consumes 30,000 times less power

July 21, 2024

A new quantum computer has broken a world record in "quantum supremacy," topping the performance of benchmarking set by Google's Sycamore machine by 100-fold.

Using the new 56-qubit H2-1 computer, scientists at quantum computing company Quantinuum ran various experiments to benchmark the machine's performance levels and the quality of the qubits used.

They published their results June 4 in a study uploaded to the preprint database arXiv. The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.

To demonstrate the potential of the quantum computer, the scientists at Quantinuum used a well-known algorithm to measure how noisy, or error-prone, qubits were.

Quantum computers can perform calculations in parallel thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics and entanglement between qubits, meaning the fates of different qubits can instantly change each other.

Classical computers, by contrast, can work only in sequence.

Adding more qubits to a system also scales up the power of a machine exponentially; scientists predict that quantum computers will one day perform complex calculations in seconds that a classical supercomputer would have taken thousands of years to solve.

The point where quantum computers overtake classical ones is known as "quantum supremacy," but achieving this milestone in a practical way would need a quantum computer with millions of qubits.

The largest machine today has only about 1,000 qubits.

The reason we would need so many qubits for "quantum supremacy" is that they are inherently prone to error, so many would be needed to correct those errors.

That's why many researchers are now focusing on building more reliable qubits, rather than simply adding more qubits to machines.

The team tested the fidelity of H2-1's output using what's known as the linear cross entropy benchmark (XEB).

XEB spits out results between 0 (none of the output is error-free) and 1 (completely error-free), Quantinuum representatives said in a statement.

Scientists at Google first tested the company's Sycamore quantum computer using XEB in 2019, demonstrating that it could complete a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer at the time 10,000 years to finish.

They registered an XEB result of approximately 0.002 with the 53 superconducting qubits built into Sycamore.

But in the new study, Quantinuum scientists — in partnership with JPMorgan, Caltech and Argonne National Laboratory — achieved an XEB score of approximately 0.35.

This means the H2 quantum computer can produce results without producing an error 35% of the time.

"We are entirely focused on the path to universal fault tolerant quantum computers," Ilyas Khan, chief product officer at Quantinuum and founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing, said in the statement.

"This objective has not changed, but what has changed in the past few months is clear evidence of the advances that have been made possible due to the work and the investment that has been made over many, many years."

Quantinuum previously collaborated with Microsoft to demonstrate "logical qubits" that had an error rate 800 times lower than physical qubits.

In the study, published in April, scientists demonstrated they could run experiments with the logical qubits with an error rate of just 1 in 100,000 — which is much stronger than the 1-in-100 error rate of physical qubits, Microsoft representatives said.

"These results show that whilst the full benefits of fault tolerant quantum computers have not changed in nature, they may be reachable earlier than was originally expected," added Khan.

https://www.space.com/new-quantum-computer-smashes-quantum-supremacy-record

International Moon Day, July 20, 2024

The Moon Village Association submitted an application during the UN-COPUOS 64th Session, for the proclamation of the International Moon Day on July 20, the anniversary of the 1969 first human landing, from the United States of America, with the Apollo 11 mission.

The proclamation has been approved on December 9 2021, by the UN General Assembly

Because MVA has been an early advocate of the concept of the International Moon Day celebration, MVA is taking the initiative to organize its implementation by setting up the IMD-G within its organization.

The IMD-G is the body which leads the management of the celebration of the International Moon Day.

Moon Exploration has started when Luna 2, a spacecraft launched by the Soviet Union, made an impact on the surface of the Moon on September 14, 1959.

Many more spacecrafts have been launched in the last 62 years from different countries such as the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, China, India and Israel, in order to better understand the Moon and its relationship to Earth.

However, the first human landing on the Moon, on 20 July 1969 by the Apollo 11 mission of the United States, represents the pinnacle of these efforts.

The International Moon Day is an annual event, held for the general public and celebrated across the world.

The International Moon Day is a good opportunity to educate the public, promote and raise awareness on the status and prospects for humanity.

Sustainable Moon Exploration and Utilization of the Moon is the goal, and the need to collaborate and regulate activities on and around the Moon.

This celebration fosters increased global cooperation between stakeholders all around the world, as well as promote participation for future generations.

The IMD celebration is comprised of two parts, an IMD Main Event and multiple IMD Global Events.

>>21258777

https://internationalmoonday.org/

Massive, Mysterious Objects Detected Floating Through Deep Space

JUL 20, 10:00 AM EDT

Mass Effect

For years, astronomers have been using the extremely steady flashes of light emanating from pulsars, the highly magnetized remains of dead stars that spin like cosmic lighthouses, to keep time on an atomic level of accuracy and observe gravitational waves.

But there are fleeting moments when these highly regular pulses aren't exactly on time.

As IFLScience reports, researchers are now suggesting that huge invisible masses may be passing in front of the pulsars, causing barely perceptible delays in the signals on the microsecond level.

What exactly these masses are — or whether they even exist at all — remains a heated debate.

"I have been warned not to call them planets, not to call them dark matter, just call them mass concentrations because, just by looking in the radio, you can’t determine what they are," University of Notre Dame professor John LoSecco, who has been studying the phenomenon and presented his findings at this week's national Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull, told IFLScience.

"They could be a brown dwarf [star] or some sort of a white dwarf or something else."

Fleeting Shadows

LoSecco and his colleagues have been creating a catalog of these mysterious masses using arrival time data from seven radio telescopes spread across the globe.

"There were 12 candidates and they come from eight independent pulsars," he told IFLScience.

The research might even shed light on dark matter, the hypothetical stuff that scientists believe makes up 85 percent of the total matter in the universe, but has yet to be observed directly.

"We take advantage of the fact that the Earth is moving, the Sun is moving, the pulsar is moving, and even the dark matter is moving,"

LoSecco explained in a press release. "We observe the deviations in the arrival time caused by the change in distance between the mass we are observing and the line of sight to our 'clock' pulsar."

One of these invisible masses measured just one-fifth of the Sun's mass, which LoSecco argued "could be a candidate for dark matter."

But a lot more research has to be done before we can tell for sure what is causing these minute discrepancies in the cosmic beats of pulsars.

"The true nature of dark matter is a mystery," LoSecco admitted. "This research sheds new light on the nature of dark matter and its distribution in the Milky Way and may also improve the accuracy of the precision pulsar data."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/massive-objects-pulsars-dark-matter

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-intelligence-will-let-humanity-talk-to-alien-civilizations/

Artificial Intelligence Will Let Humanity Talk to Alien Civilizations

JULY 20, 2024

Artificial intelligence mania has overtaken our economy and will soon expand beyond Earth to become omnipresent in spacecraft as well. It’s worth asking, what does this mean for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

Just like on Earth, AI promises a rethinking of long-cherished hopes for space exploration, such as finding that we are not alone in the universe.

AI’s advances explain this ambition. Introduced in 2017, the “transformer” neural network architecture has become the cornerstone of today’s large language models (LLMs).

Trained on Internet-scale datasets, these models contain vast human knowledge and are changing our world. They will affect nearly 40 percent of global employment, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Could this technology help us communicate with hypothetical advanced civilizations elsewhere? SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been around as long as METI, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, the aim of which is to attempt to find and communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.

But after 40 years of serious search we have not found such ET intelligence, and our messages remain unanswered. We cannot conclude that we are alone in the galaxy, given its vastness and our nascent search efforts. It may be time to radically rethink our approach, however.

As alien-curious scientists, we propose advancing METI by transmitting not just music, math or brief descriptions of ourselves but something more meaningful: a well-curated large language model that encapsulates the diverse essence of humanity and the world we live in.

This would enable extraterrestrial civilizations to indirectly converse with us and learn about us without being hindered by the vast distances of space and its corresponding human lifetime delays in communication.

Aliens could learn one of our languages, ask the LLM questions about us and receive replies that are representative of humanity.

This is a radical and potentially risky idea because unfriendly aliens could misuse this information. Nevertheless, it’s a discussion worth starting, given recent discoveries.

Space telescopes such as Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have revealed that our galaxy is full of exoplanets, and it’s estimated that at least 300 million are similar to Earth and potentially harbor liquid water.

We believe that several of these worlds could host technological civilizations curious to meet us and learn about us.

Astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI and METI, understood that our galaxy could host other technological civilizations. He initiated Project Ozma in the 1960s, listening to two nearby stars, and later led the development of the Arecibo message in 1974.

This message included basic mathematical and chemical data, a depiction of DNA and information about the human population, our solar system and our technology.

Comprising only 1,679 binary digits, the message was inspired by the pixelated screens of early personal computers.

If Drake were alive today, he would no doubt recognize AI’s potential to enhance communication with extraterrestrial intelligences.

For interplanetary communication, smaller, open-source language models, such as Meta’s Llama-3-70B and Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8x22B, would allow for training with curated datasets.

Typically Llama-3-70B is around 130 gigabytes in size, which is a bit hefty to transmit across light-years without errors.

With a technique called quantization, however, we could squeeze it into a few gigabytes while maintaining its performance.

Crucially for interstellar communication, it would allow the AI to run on its own without an Internet connection.

Assuming we want to send these LLMs to extraterrestrials, we have two primary technologies: radio communication, which is broad and slow, and laser communication, which is directional and fast. By radio, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter achieves data-transmission rates of up to 100 megabytes per second (Mbps) for downlink.

That means it would take about half hour to transmit the entire full-size Llama-3-70B model to the moon.

The Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration has achieved data rates of 622 Mbps, which would reduce the transmission time to about five minutes.

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Reaching advanced civilizations beyond the moon involves addressing the immense distances between stars, signal attenuation and current technological limits.

For instance, NASA’s Psyche mission, which launched last year toward a metal-rich asteroid, is equipped with a prototype laser interplanetary communication device.

That laser technology has achieved a data rate of a few hundred Mbps.

Interstellar communication with current technology would likely drop to 100 bits per second, however, resulting in a transmission time of hundreds of years to send an AI to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system, lying a little more than four light-years from Earth.

We could instead transmit a well-curated and smaller model, as discussed above, of only a few gigabytes in size in less than 20 years, making it a feasible project for humanity.

It would not only generate text but also images and sounds. Its content, personality and tone should be determined by researchers, philosophers, historians and other experts to represent humanity at large.

Using more powerful lasers to increase transmission rates is another approach. By combining multiple 10-kilowatt lasers to achieve a 100-gigawatt-strength transmitter, as proposed by one of the Breakthrough Initiatives, we could transmit large amounts of data across several light-years. Another advanced project suggests using the sun as a gravitational lens to amplify signals and create a superfast interstellar communication system. We’d need a probe equipped with a laser at 550 astronomical units, or 82 billion kilometers, from the sun, beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Another, albeit more antiquated, solution is to equip every space mission with a simple ruggedized onboard computer containing a well-curated LLM and an interface for communicating with it.

This digital time-capsule approach will both pay tribute to, and naturally extend the legacy of, the analog Voyager golden record.

That gold-plated copper disk included carefully selected images, sounds, music and messages intended to communicate the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

In the distant future, an intelligent civilization may encounter a spacecraft equipped with an ancient computer or receive a signal containing instructions to rebuild our AIs.

This indirect communication with us could reveal our past, our ambitions and our essence as a technological species, showing these life-forms that they were not alone and that a civilization of humans once existed—perhaps not so different from their own and perhaps still around.

The time has come to leverage our AI advancements for a new era of interstellar communication.

By sending well-curated large language models into the cosmos, we will open the door to unprecedented exchanges with extraterrestrial intelligences, ensuring that our legacy endures, even when we might not.

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Final countdown begins: "Alien: Romulus" trailer ignites anticipation

July 20, 2024

Fans of science fiction thrillers have mixed feelings. On the one hand, they are excited to see soon a new movie from the "Alien" universe.

Still, on the other hand, they are worried that "Alien: Romulus" will be just a mediocre imitation of the previous instalments.

The film's quality is assured by Ridley Scott (as a producer), who, out of respect for the work he created in the late '70s and later developed, should not release a weak film.

The main burden of the film, however, rests on the shoulders of the director and the lead actress.

Fede Alvarez has proven several times that he can find his way in alien franchises, delivering an outstanding remake of "Evil Dead," the series "From Dusk Till Dawn," and "The Girl in the Spider's Web."

Cailee Spaeny ("Priscilla," "Civil War") is a young actress with the potential to become a worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver.

The story of "Alien: Romulus" will be set between the events of the first ("Alien" by Ridley Scott) and the second ("Aliens" by James Cameron) parts of "Alien."

It will not be connected plot-wise to the previous films in any way (Sigourney Weaver’s character could not appear in it since her character spent all this time on her ship in hibernation).

The titular Romulus is a drifting wreck of a Weyland-Yutani Corporation research station.

It becomes an attractive piece of salvage for a group specialising in "recovering" valuable items from abandoned stations and spacecraft.

As one might guess, Romulus has at least one stowaway.

Let us recall that the "Alien" franchise, which started in 1979, is one of the most recognisable.

This is, thanks to the titular extraterrestrial lifeform, probably the best conceptually designed creature in horror film history (designed by H.R. Giger).

"Alien" is also a series that has given us one of the best heroines in the film world.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/movies/final-countdown-begins-alien-romulus-trailer-ignites-anticipation/ar-BB1qhTAm