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Category: space – Page 275

NASA gears up for metal-rich asteroid exploration

NASA’s Psyche mission launches on October 5 to explore the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, offering insights into planet formation.

As October 5 inches closer on the calendar, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is buzzing with anticipation. Engineers and scientists are busy making final preparations for the groundbreaking Psyche mission, set to launch within less than a month. With its suite of high-end science instruments — a multispectral imager, magnetometer, and gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer — primed for action, the spacecraft aims to unlock the secrets of its namesake asteroid, Psyche.

Credits: NASA/Kim Shiflett.

All systems go.

A Microwave Shield Yields Ultracold Dipolar Molecules

Almost a century ago, physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted a theoretical state of matter in which individual particles would, at extremely cold temperatures and low densities, condense into an indistinguishable whole. These so-called Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) would offer a macroscopic view into the microscopic world of quantum mechanics. In 1995, theoretical BECs became an experimental reality, which garnered the physicists who created them a Nobel Prize. Labs around the world— and even in space —have been creating them ever since.

All of the BECs created so far to ask fundamental questions about quantum mechanics have been made from atoms. It has proven much harder to make molecules cold enough to approach a BEC state, which hover fractions of a degree above absolute zero, and to keep the molecules stable long enough to conduct experiments.

“For twenty years, there have been proposals about what you could do with stable ultracold molecules, but it has been tough on the experimental side because the lifetime of molecular samples has been short,” said Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose lab specializes in creating ultracold atoms and molecules.

Japan lunar lander begins journey to moon following India’s success

TOKYO — Japan launched a lunar lander on Thursday, aiming to become the fifth nation to achieve a soft landing on the moon’s surface early next year following India’s success in a similar mission last month.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) was sent to space on an H-IIA rocket, the first launch since a high-profile launch failure of the next-generation H3 rocket in March.

NASA’s MOXIE wraps mission with breath of fresh Martian air

Since the Perseverance rover’s landing in 2021, MOXIE has produced a cumulative 122 grams of oxygen.

NASA’s Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) successfully concluded its mission by producing oxygen on the Red Planet for the 16th and final time. Developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the machine exceeded the initial expectations of its creators and has set a strong precedent for future missions aimed at human exploration of Mars.

“MOXIE’s outstanding results validate the viability of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere—a crucial resource for both life-support and propellant for return missions,” stated NASA Deputy Administrator… More.

Source: NASA

Unlocking quantum potential: Harnessing high-dimensional quantum states with QDs and OAM

Quantum technology’s future rests on the exploitation of fascinating quantum mechanics concepts—such as high-dimensional quantum states. Think of these states as basic ingredients of quantum information science and quantum tech. To manipulate these states, scientists have turned to light, specifically a property called orbital angular momentum (OAM), which deals with how light twists and turns in space. Here’s a catch: making super bright single photons with OAM in a deterministic fashion has been a tough nut to crack.

Now, enter (QDs), tiny particles with big potential. A team of researchers from Sapienza University of Rome, Paris-Saclay University, and University of Naples Federico II combined the features of OAM with those of QDs to create a bridge between two cutting-edge technologies.

Their results are published in Advanced Photonics.