Boston Dynamics' latest video shows its Atlas humanoid robot has moves like Simone Biles

AUGUST 18, 2021, by Mike Snider, Usa Today

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-08-boston-dynamics-latest-video-atlas.html

Boston Dynamics, the company known for its robotic dogs, now has a humanoid robot capable of doing gymnastics.

The robotics company previously has shown how its robot dogs can go down stairs and open doors. Some police departments have begun using the robot dogs, typically called Spot, to help patrol. And Atlas, which the company dubbed "the world's most dynamic humanoid," showed in an earlier video how the robot can jog and jump over a log.

In a new video, Atlas now can do parkour—a sport of moving through obstacles—jumping and running along uneven platforms. Then, two humanoid robots do synchronized movements including turning, spinning and two flips, mirroring each other moves.

https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk

Having the robots perform parkour sequences including running along a balance beam, jumping and doing flips helps in the development of a robot capable of multiple tasks, "a go-anywhere, do-anything robot of the future," said Scott Kuindersma, leader of Boston Dynamics' Atlas team, in a blog post accompanying the new videos.

"The work that we are doing now is really just foundation building," he said. "We are building the core capabilities that we think any useful robot will need and in doing so we are really just defining the next set of challenges that we are going to be working on over the next two to five years."

Some facts the company dished up on Atlas: the robot is five feet tall, weighs 190 pounds, has an on-board battery, RGB cameras and depth sensors, as well as three built-in computers.

https://youtu.be/EezdinoG4mk

Boston Dynamics also released a new behind the scenes video showing that the robots don't always accomplish their skills in the first try. "It can be frustrating sometimes the robots crash a lot," said Atlas controls lead Benjamin Stephens, Atlas Controls Lead. "It's not the robot just magically deciding to do parkour. It's kind of a choreographed routine much like a skateboard video or a parkour video where it's an athlete who has practiced these moves dozens or hundreds of times even to get to that high level that exciting capability. So we are kind of doing the same thing here with Atlas, exploring how to push it to its limits."

This scientists at Boston Dynamics had just begun having the two robots do parkour simultaneously two weeks ago and this was the first time they had filmed them together, said Ben Stephens, the Atlas controls lead. "Every behavior here has a small chance of failure. It's almost 90 seconds of continuous jumping, jogging, turning, vaulting, and flipping, so those probabilities add up."

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Fast changes between the solar seasons resolved by new sun clock

AUGUST 17, 2021, by University of Warwick

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-fast-solar-seasons-sun-clock.html

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Violent activity on our Sun leads to some of the most extreme space weather events on Earth, impacting systems such as satellites, communications systems, power distribution and aviation.

 The roughly 11-year cycle of solar activity has three 'seasons', each of which affects the space weather felt at Earth differently: 

(i) solar maximum, the sun is active and disordered, when space weather is stormy and events are irregular

(ii) the declining phase, when the sun and solar wind becomes ordered, and space weather is more moderate and 

(iii) solar minimum, when activity is quiet.

In a new study led by the University of Warwick and published in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists found that the change from solar maximum to the declining phase is fast, happening within a few (27 day) solar rotations. They also showed that the declining phase is twice as long in even-numbered solar cycles as it is in odd-numbered cycles.

No two solar cycles are the same in amplitude or duration. To study the solar seasons, the scientists built a sun clock from the daily sunspot number record available since 1818. This maps the irregular solar cycles onto a regular clock. The magnetic polarity of the sun reverses after each roughly 11 year solar cycle giving a roughly 22 year magnetic cycle (named after George Ellery Hale) and to explore this, a 22 year clock was constructed. The effect on space weather at earth can be tracked back using the longest continuous records of geomagnetic activity over the past 150 years, and once the clock is constructed, it can be used to study multiple observations of seasonal solar activity which affect the earth.

With the greater detail afforded by the sun clock, the scientists could see that the switch from solar maximum to the declining phase is fast, occurring within a few (27 day) solar rotations. There was also a clear difference in the duration of the declining phase when the sun's magnetic polarity is 'up' compared to 'down': in even-numbered cycles it is around twice as long as odd-numbered cycles. As we are about to enter cycle 25, the scientists anticipate that the next declining phase will be short.

Lead author Professor Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick Department of Physics said that "by combining well known methods in a new way, our clock resolves changes in the Sun's climate to within a few solar rotations. Then you find the changes between some phases can be really sharp.

"If you know you've had a long cycle, you know the next one's going to be short, we can estimate how long it's going to last. Knowing the timing of the climate seasons helps to plan for space weather. Operationally it is useful to know when conditions will be active or quiet, for satellites, power grids, communications."

The results also provide a clue to understanding how the Sun reverses polarity after every cycle.

Professor Chapman adds that "I also think it is remarkable that something the size of the sun can flip its magnetic field every 11 years, and going down-up is different to going up-down. Somehow the sun 'knows which way up it is', and this is an intriguing problem, at the heart of how the sun generates its magnetic field."

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Europe's Vega rocket blasts off with Airbus observation satellite

AUGUST 17, 2021

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-europe-vega-rocket-blasts-airbus.html

An Airbus observation satellite has been launched into orbit by a European Vega rocket.

A European Vega rocket lifted off Monday night from French Guiana carrying an Earth observation satellite and four miniature "cubesats".

It was the second launch this year of the Vega, a crucial component of European ambitions to compete with rivals such as Elon Musk's SpaceX in the booming commercial aerospace market.

The rocket blasted off from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou at 10:47 pm (0147 GMT), successfully delivering the satellites in just under two hours.

Its main cargo was a high-resolution satellite, the second of four for a new Earth observation constellation operated by Airbus. The first was put in orbit in April by a Vega rocket.

The Pleiades Neo constellation will offer high-resolution imaging of Earth for military or civilian uses such as disaster response, according to Airbus.

Vega's operator Arianespace is a subsidiary of the ArianeGroup, of which Airbus owns half.

The latest Vega also carried four miniature satellites known as "cubesats".

One of them will become part of a constellation of satellites being developed by French start-up Unseenlabs, which specialises in maritime traffic monitoring.

The remaining three cubesats are from the European Space Agency for scientific and technology demonstration purposes.

Monday's launch was the second Vega sent up by Arianespace this year, and the 19th since the rocket's first flight in 2012.

The two 2021 launches are a boost to the Vega programme—an effort involving 10 European countries—which suffered a setback in November last year when the rocket failed minutes after liftoff and disintegrated.

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Could Doomsday Come From a Reversal of the Magnetic Poles?

By Dirk Schulze-Makuch, AIRSPACEMAG.COM, FEBRUARY 24, 2021

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/could-doomsday-come-reversal-magnetic-poles-180977092/

The Earth’s magnetic field does more than just cause auroral light shows. Could it play a role in extinctions, too? 

(NASA Astronaut Jack Fischer, ISS Expedition 52)

Lessons from the Laschamps Excursion 42,000 years ago

After studying the reversal of Earth’s magnetic pole known to have occurred 42,000 years ago, a science team led by Alan Cooper from the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Australia concludes that the event had significant environmental repercussions, especially at lower and mid-latitudes. That time period, known as the Laschamps Excursion, had anomalously high radiocarbon concentrations in the atmosphere, which were linked to a higher influx of radiation. When the reversal occurred, within a span of about 1,000 years, Earth’s magnetic field weakened drastically and the magnetic North and South Poles flipped, temporarily leaving surface-dwelling organisms largely unprotected from high influxes of both ionic and ultraviolet radiation.

Previous studies had not found much of an environmental impact from the flip. But that conclusion was based primarily on ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which biased it toward higher latitudes. Cooper and his colleagues took more representative samples from all over the world, including from tree rings in New Zealand. They conclude that the magnetic reversal was in fact related to the extinction of a large fraction of large animals at the time, as well as the disappearance of the Neanderthals and even the appearance of cave art.

If the connection with mass extinctions is true, it’s a cause for concern. Earth’s magnetic field has weakened nearly 10 percent in the last 200 years, and the position of the magnetic North Pole has changed quite a bit. A magnetic reversal may be imminent. One can only imagine what trouble such an event could cause, with more solar and cosmic radiation hitting Earth’s surface. Potentially, we could see an increase in cancer rates, environmental disturbances, and the failure of power grids. Do we need to worry?

Yes and no. Yes, because our energy supply is increasingly fragile (see the recent effects of icy weather on Texas’s power grid), and much of our communication is based on satellites. If those are knocked out by solar storms, the effect on society could be substantial. No GPS, no social media, electrical power outages. Do I need to go on?

No, because a reversal may not necessarily have a big environmental impact after all. There have been other periods of magnetic weakening and reversals—the last one was 34,000 years ago—with apparently little effect, judging from the fossil record. During the Laschamps Excursion, or Adams Event as the authors call it, Earth was still in the grips of an ice age, with much of Europe and North America under glaciers. The Sun’s activity also was much lower at that time—a so-called Grand Solar Minimum, which happens periodically. So any extinction that occurred during that period may have been more due to the ice age than the magnetic reversal. Or maybe it was a combined effect. Humans may have retreated to caves because of both the cold and the higher radiation levels, with cold probably being a more important motivating factor.

I also don’t see how the Neanderthal extinction would be related to the environmental stress 42,000 years ago. If anything, Neanderthals, with their bulkier bodies, should have been more cold-adapted than Homo sapiens, who originated from East Africa. Not to mention that recent research shows that the Neanderthals did not actually go extinct during that time period.

There’s no doubt that higher radiation levels would impact the biosphere, but probably more on the individual rather than the species level. That’s true for humans, too. But our greatest vulnerability may lie in our technology, on which our society has become so dependent.

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Newly-synthesized AM-III carbon is hardest and strongest amorphous material to date

AUGUST 11, 2021 **REPORT** , by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-newly-synthesized-am-iii-carbon-hardest-strongest.html

Hardness of AM carbon materials, compared with other known amorphous materials, and scratches on diamond (001) face indented by AM-III. 

Credit: National Science Review (2021). DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwab140

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions across the globe has synthesized an AM-III carbon that is the hardest and strongest amorphous material created to date. In their paper published in the journal National Science Review, the group describes the process they used to create their new material and suggest possible uses for it.

In this new effort, the researchers set out to create a new kind of glass that would be exceptionally strong. To that end, they subjected fullerenes to very high temperatures and enormous pressures and, in so doing, produced what they have called AM-III—a type of glass with crystals in it that measures higher on the Vickers hardness test than many diamonds.

When looking at a diamond under a microscope, the carbon atoms and molecules that make up its crystalline structure are lined up very neatly—glass on the other hand has very little order. This difference explains why diamonds are so hard and why glass is so easily shattered. Prior research has shown that diamonds can be made by exposing graphite to high temperatures and pressure—similar to the way they are created by nature. In this new work, the researchers instead used fullerenes—structures made of carbon in the form of hollow cages. They also slowed down the process, heating and squeezing their material for approximately 12 hours, a move to prevent the material from forming into diamond.

The resulting material, AM-III carbon, is yellowish, with no defined structure, and is very strong—it scored 113 gigapascals on the Vickers hardness test, higher than some diamonds, which average just 100 gigapascals. The researchers note that AM-III is approximately ten times as hard as steel and should be quite a bit better at stopping bullets than most vest technology. 

To prove its toughness, they used one sample to cut a deep scratch into a diamond. The researchers note that the toughness comes about from the material's makeup—it has micro-structures that are orderly like crystals, along with unordered glass, which makes it part glass and part crystal. It also makes the material a semiconductor with a bandgap range similar to silicon. Because of that, the researchers suggest their new material could prove useful in solar panel products.

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SPACE - S0 - 20210814 - Climate Goofs, Solar Storms, The Last Half Cycle (Noah Event)

SPACE - S0 - 20210814 - Climate Goofs, Solar Storms, The Last Half Cycle (Noah Event)

Good Morning, 0bservers!

    

     

Quick Note: Sorry I haven't been around this week, it's been busy as hell at work. And it'll be even busier, I've got On-Call duty for TWO weeks instead of one (filling in for one of the team who just got out of hospital/rehab yesterday after nearly a month). See you in September, folks!

We had a second coronal hole impact yesterday, but it was a pretty mild one. Solar wind speeds were around 340 KPS in the early morning hours, but it peaked around 1400 UTC just over 460 KPS. It stayed their for about four hours, and then it started to decline pretty steadily until it hit 340 KPS at 1000 UTC. The speed increase was precipitated by a peak then sharp drop in Particle Density around 0800 UTC, and stayed pretty much on the low side until it began another rise at 0800 UTC. Temperatures rose along with the wind speed, from a low of 4100°K at 0800 to about 5100°K for most of yesterday. There was a pair of spikes to 5400°K and 5300°K at 0200-0300 UTC but settling back down below 5000°K after that. There was a lot of scrambling in the Phi Angle chart for a good portion of yesterday. Bt/Bz readings were also pretty wild, with variations from large gaps to rapid polarity collisions.  KP-Index readings remained green throughout the period, but we did see a brief KP-3 reading at noon UTC. Magnetometer readings were nominal, as were the Proton Flux and Electron Flux charts. The X-Ray Flux charts were mostly steady, but we did see a lone and rather sharp flare up into the lower Class C range around 2100 UTC. Background radiation is in the upper third of Class A range. You can see the spark of the flare on the video loops at 304Å.

* * *

Two new videos from Suspicious0bservers, "EPIC FAILURE | 2021 IPCC Report" and "NASA Takes A Beating".

 

Enjoy!

  

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Canadian federal government invests $1.44 billion in Starlink competitor Telesat

By Brad Bennett, AUG 12, 2021

https://mobilesyrup.com/2021/08/12/canada-invests-1-44-billion-in-starlink-competitor-telesat/

The Canadian satellite internet company promises to connect 40,000 households with 5G and LTE

Telesat has secured almost all of the funding it needs to start launching its satellite network in 2024. 

The federal government has invested the remaining $1.44 billion that the company required to “position Telesat, and Canada, as global leaders in the highly competitive market for satellite services and the fast-growing new space economy,” reads a government press release. 

Telesat aims to launch a low-earth orbit satellite array over Canada to offer high-speed internet to more Canadians. This is the same method that StarLink uses to offer internet. Telesat’s advantage is that it plans to lease its network to the carriers in Canada and won’t sell internet plans directly. 

This new federal funding is split into two parts, including a $730 million loan and a $650 million preferred share equity investment. The government will also receive warrants that can be converted into common shares. This also includes a $600 million service provider agreement with the government that allows Canadian carriers to use Telesat satellites at a reduced rate. In the past, Telesat has stated that it required roughly $5 billion in funding to launch its satellite network. According to BetaKit, the company has secured roughly $4 billion so far, with the remainder expected to be raised soon.

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Protecting earth from space storms

AUGUST 11, 2021, by Aaron Dubrow, Texas Advanced Computing Center

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-earth-space-storms.html

Meridional cut from an advanced three-dimensional magnetosphere simulation. The Earth is at the center of the black circle that is the inner boundary at 2.5 Earth radii. The white lines are magnetic field lines. 

The colors show density. The blue rectangle indicates where the kinetic model is used, which is coupled with the global magnetohydrodynamic model.

 Credit: Chen, Yuxi & Toth, Gabor & Hietala, Heli & Vines, Sarah & Zou, Ying & Nishimura, Yukitoshi & Silveira, Marcos & Guo, Zhifang & Lin, Yu & Markidis, Stefano

"There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire U.S.," according to Gabor Toth, professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. "One is a pandemic and the other is an extreme space weather event."

We're currently seeing the effects of the first in real-time.

The last major space weather event struck the Earth in 1859. Smaller, but still significant, space weather events occur regularly. These fry electronics and power grids, disrupt global positioning systems, cause shifts in the range of the Aurora Borealis, and raise the risk of radiation to astronauts or passengers on planes crossing over the poles.

"We have all these technological assets that are at risk," Toth said. "If an extreme event like the one in 1859 happened again, it would completely destroy the power grid and satellite and communications systems—the stakes are much higher."

Motivated by the White House National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan and the National Strategic Computing Initiative, in 2020 the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA created the Space Weather with Quantified Uncertainties (SWQU) program. It brings together research teams from across scientific disciplines to advance the latest statistical analysis and high performance computing methods within the field of space weather modeling.

"We are very proud to have launched the SWQU projects by bringing together expertise and supports across multiple scientific domains in a joint effort between NSF and NASA," said Vyacheslav (Slava) Lukin, the Program Director for Plasma Physics at NSF. "The need has been recognized for some time, and the portfolio of six projects, Gabor Toth's among them, engages not only the leading university groups, but also NASA Centers, Department of Defense and Department of Energy National Laboratories, as well as the private sector."

Toth helped develop today's preeminent space weather prediction model, which is used for operational forecasting by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). On February 3, 2021, NOAA began using the Geospace Model Version 2.0, which is part of the University of Michigan's Space Weather Modeling Framework, to predict geomagnetic disturbances.

"We're constantly improving our models," Toth said. The new model replaces version 1.5, which has been in operations since November 2017. "The main change in version 2 was the refinement of the numerical grid in the magnetosphere, several improvements in the algorithms, and a recalibration of the empirical parameters."

The Geospace Model is based on a global representation of Earth's geospace environment that includes magnetohydrodynamics—the properties and behavior of electrically conducting fluids like plasma interacting with magnetic fields, which plays a key role in the dynamics of space weather.

The Geospace Model predicts magnetic disturbances on the ground resulting from geospace interactions with solar wind. Such magnetic disturbances induce a geoelectric field that can damage large-scale electrical conductors, such as the power grid.

Short-term advanced warning from the model provides forecasters and power grid operators with situational awareness about harmful currents and allows time to mitigate the problem and maintain the integrity of the electric power grid, NOAA announced at the time of the launch.

As advanced as the Geospace Model is, it provides only about 30 minutes of advanced warning. Toth's team is one of several groups working to increase lead time to one to three days. Doing so means understanding how activity on the surface of the Sun leads to events that can impact the Earth.

"We're currently using data from a satellite measuring plasma parameters one million miles away from the Earth," Toth explained. Researchers hope to start from the Sun, using remote observation of the Sun's surface—in particular, coronal mass ejections that produce flares that are visible in X-rays and UV light. "That happens early on the Sun. From that point, we can run a model and predict the arrival time and impact of magnetic events."

Space weather modeling framework simulation of the Sept 10, 2014 coronal mass ejection during solar maximum. 

The radial magnetic field is shown on the surface of the Sun in gray scale. The magnetic field lines on the flux rope are colored with the velocity. The background is colored with the electron number density. 

Credit: Gabor Toth, University of Michigan

Improving the lead time of space weather forecasts requires new methods and algorithms that can compute far faster than those used today and can be deployed efficiently on high performance computers. Toth uses the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center—the fastest academic system in the world and the 10th most powerful overall—to develop and test these new methods.

"I consider myself really good at developing new algorithms," Toth said. "I apply these to space physics, but many of the algorithms I develop are more general and not restricted to one application."

A key algorithmic improvement made by Toth involved finding a novel way to combine the kinetic and fluid aspects of plasmas in one simulation model. "People tried it before and failed. But we made it work. We go a million times faster than brute-force simulations by inventing smart approximations and algorithms," Toth said.

The new algorithm dynamically adapts the location covered by the kinetic model based on the simulation results. The model identifies the regions of interests and places the kinetic model and the computational resources to focus on them. This can result in a 10 to 100 time speed-up for space weather models.

As part of the NSF SWQU project, Toth and his team have been working on making the Space Weather Modeling Framework run efficiently on future supercomputers that rely heavily on graphical processing units (GPUs). As a first goal, they set out to port the Geospace Model to GPUs using the NVIDIA Fortran compiler with OpenACC directives.

They recently managed to run the full Geospace Model faster than real-time on a single GPU. They used TACC's GPU-enabled Longhorn machine to reach this milestone. To run the model with the same speed on traditional supercomputer requires at least 100 CPU cores.

"It took a whole year of code development to make this happen, Toth said. "The goal is to run an ensemble of simulations fast and efficiently to provide a probabilistic space weather forecast."

This type of probabilistic forecasting is important for another aspect of Toth's research: Localizing predictions in terms of the impact on the surface of Earth.

"Should we worry in Michigan or only in Canada? What is the maximum induced current particular transformers will experience? How long will generators need to be shut off? To do this accurately, you need a model you believe in," he said. "Whatever we predict, there's always some uncertainty. We want to give predictions with precise probabilities, similar to terrestrial weather forecasts."

Toth and his team run their code in parallel on thousands of cores on Frontera for each simulation. They plan to run thousands of simulations over the coming years to see how model parameters affect the results to find the best model parameters and to be able to attach probabilities to simulation results.

"Without Frontera, I don't think we could do this research," Toth said. "When you put together smart people and big computers, great things can happen."

The Michigan Sun-to-Earth Model, including the SWMF Geospace and the new GPU port, is available as open-source at https://github.com/MSTEM-QUDA.

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'Cool' stars may not be so unique

AUGUST 9, 2021, by Rice University

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-cool-stars-unique.html

Rice University scientists have shown that "cool" stars like the sun share dynamic surface behaviors that influence their energetic and magnetic environments. Stellar magnetic activity is key to whether a given star can host planets that support life. 

Credit: NASA

Stars scattered throughout the cosmos look different, but they may be more alike than once thought, according to Rice University researchers.

New modeling work by Rice scientists shows that "cool" stars like the sun share the dynamic surface behaviors that influence their energetic and magnetic environments. This stellar magnetic activity is key to whether a given star hosts planets that could support life.

The work by Rice postdoctoral researcher Alison Farrish and astrophysicists David Alexander and Christopher Johns-Krull appears in a published study in The Astrophysical Journal. The research links the rotation of cool stars with the behavior of their surface magnetic flux, which in turn drives the star's coronal X-ray luminosity, in a way that could help predict how magnetic activity affects any exoplanets in their systems.

The study follows another led by Farrish and Alexander that showed a star's space "weather" may make planets in their "Goldilocks zone" uninhabitable.

"All stars spin down over their lifetimes as they shed angular momentum, and they get less active as a result," Farrish said. "We think the sun in the past was more active and that might have affected the early atmospheric chemistry of Earth. So thinking about how the higher energy emissions from stars change over long timescales is pretty important to exoplanet studies."

"More broadly, we're taking models that were developed for the sun and seeing how well they adapt to stars," said Johns-Krull.

The researchers set out to model what far-flung stars are like based on the limited data available. The spin and flux of some stars have been determined, along with their classification—types F, G, K and M—which gave information about their sizes and temperatures.

They compared the properties of the sun, a G-type star, through its Rossby number, a measure of stellar activity that combines its speed of rotation with its subsurface fluid flows that influence the distribution of magnetic flux on a star's surface, with what they knew of other cool stars. Their models suggest that each star's "space weather" works in much the same way, influencing conditions on their respective planets.


"The study suggests that stars—at least cool stars—are not too dissimilar from each other," Alexander said. "From our perspective, Alison's model can be applied without fear or favor when we look at exoplanets around M or F or K stars, as well, of course, as other G stars.

"It also suggests something much more interesting for established stellar physics, that the process by which a magnetic field is generated may be quite similar in all cool stars. That's a bit of a surprise," he said. This could include stars that, unlike the sun, are convective down to their cores.

"All stars like the sun fuse hydrogen and helium in their cores and that energy is first carried in the radiation of photons toward the surface," Johns-Krull said. "But it hits a zone about 60% to 70% of the way that's just too opaque, so it starts to undergo convection. Hot matter moves from below, the energy radiates away, and the cooler matter falls back down.

"But stars with less than a third of the mass of the sun don't have a radiative zone; they're convective everywhere," he said. "A lot of ideas about how stars generate a magnetic field rely on there being a boundary between the radiative and the convection zones, so you would expect stars that don't have that boundary to behave differently. This paper shows that in many ways, they behave just like the sun, once you adjust for their own peculiarities."

Farrish, who recently earned her doctorate at Rice and begins a postdoctoral research assignment at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center soon, noted the model applies only to unsaturated stars.

"The most magnetically active stars are the ones we call 'saturated,'" Farrish said. "At a certain point, an increase in magnetic activity stops showing the associated increase in high energy X-ray emission. The reason that dumping more magnetism onto the star's surface doesn't give you more emission is still a mystery.

"Conversely, the sun is in the unsaturated regime, where we do see a correlation between magnetic activity and energetic emission," she said. "That happens at a more moderate activity level, and those stars are of interest because they might provide more hospitable environments for planets."

"The bottom line is the observations, which span four spectral types including both fully and partially convective stars, can be reasonably well represented by a model generated from the sun," Alexander said. "It also reinforces the idea that even though a star that is 30 times more active than the sun may not be a G-class star, it's still captured by the analysis that Alison has done".

"We do have to be clear that we're not simulating any specific star or system," he said. "We are saying that statistically, the magnetic behavior of a typical M star with a typical Rossby number behaves in a similar fashion to that of the sun which allows us to assess its potential impact on its planets."

A critical wild card is a star's activity cycle, which can't be incorporated into the models without years of observation. (The sun's cycle is 11 years, evidenced by sunspot activity when its magnetic field lines are most distorted.)

Johns-Krull said the model will still be useful in many ways. "One of my areas of interest is studying very young stars, many of which are, like low-mass stars, fully convective," he said. "Many of these have disc material around them and are still forming planets. How they interact is mediated, we think, by the stellar magnetic field.

"So, Alison's modeling work can be used to learn about the large-scale structure of very magnetically active stars, and that can then allow us to test some ideas about how these young stars and their disks interact."

Minjing Li, a visiting undergraduate from the University of Science and Technology of China, is a co-author of the paper. Alexander is a professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Rice Space Institute. Johns-Krull is a professor of physics and astronomy.

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SPACE - S0 - 20210810 - Defiant Nova, Earthquake Signals, Special Video Tonight

SPACE - S0 - 20210810 - Defiant Nova, Earthquake Signals, Special Video Tonight

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Solar winds were mostly steady yesterday, staying in the 350-380 KPS range, but they took a pretty strong uptick around 0900 and peaked out at 445 KPS at 1000 UTC. Looks like a combination of a Particle Density drop after 0300 UTC along with some minor Phi Angle and Bt/Bz perturbations. Several polarity collisions in the latter, but not near as much disruption in the former as you'd expect. Temperatures stayed mostly in the 4200°K-4700°K range, but jumped above 5000°K just after 0200 UTC. KP-Index remains calm with a pretty even spread of KP-1s and KP-2s. The Magnetometer is building again for a high/low sine wave, peaking at around 130 nT yesterday afternoon with a nadir of 60 nT (well above the alert line). Proton Flux and Electron Flux levels remain nominal. X-Ray Flux also looks good, with some small spikes above the Class B line (one of them reaching the middle) and a lowering of the background radiation. The Southern coronal hole grew yesterday and connected with the polar region, and it's passing through the midpoint now along with the sunspot group just North of it. The latter seems to be weakening. The new sunspot group up North is now in full view and covers a wide area, but doesn't seem to be as active (yet) as first feared. It has a wide magnetic signature but it has actually become a bit less complex compared to yesterday. Let's hope it keeps doing that.

  

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Major Milestone As NASA’s X-59 QueSST Quiet SuperSonic Technology Aircraft Comes Together

By NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER AUGUST 8, 2021

https://scitechdaily.com/major-milestone-as-nasas-x-59-quesst-quiet-supersonic-technology-aircraft-comes-together/

Artist illustration of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology aircraft, which will soon take skies as NASA’s first purpose-built, supersonic experimental plane in decades.

 Credit: Lockheed Martin

A heavy chorus of bolting and machinery filled the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology, or QueSST, assembly building as engineers, system technicians, and aircraft fabricators worked to merge the major aircraft sections together, making it look like an actual aircraft for the first time since the initial cut of metal in 2018.

“We’ve now transitioned from being a bunch of separate parts sitting around on different parts of the production floor to an airplane,” said Jay Brandon, NASA chief engineer for the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) project.

NASA’s X-59 QueSST is under construction at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, and is designed to fly at supersonic speeds – approximately 660 mph at sea level — without producing a startling sonic boom for people on the ground.

NASA will work with U.S. communities to understand their response to the aircraft’s sound and provide that data to regulators, which could change the rules that currently ban supersonic flight over land, cutting travel time in half for air travelers in the near future.

The Merger

With great precision and accuracy, the team used features on the structure to precisely self-locate the aircraft’s wing, tail assembly, and fuselage or forward section, then employed a series of laser projections to verify the precise fit.

“The extensive use of features and pre-drilled, full-size fastener holes has significantly reduced the time it takes to locate and fit parts, especially mating large assemblies like this,” said David Richardson, Lockheed Martin program director. “It is sort of like how Legos go together. We used the laser tracker to make sure it is all aligned per the engineering specs before we permanently bolted it all together.”

https://youtu.be/LcvYjkCBY28

This time-lapse represents manufacturing of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology, or QueSST, aircraft from May 2019 to June 2021 and includes the merger of its main sections — the wing, tail assembly, and fuselage or forward section. The first flight of the X-59 QueSST is planned for 2022. 

Credit: Lockheed Martin

The mating of these major hardware components was a breath of fresh air for the team.

“A milestone like this — seeing the airplane coming together as a single unit — really reinvigorates and motivates the team,” said Dave Richwine, NASA’s LBFD deputy project manager for technology.

Fuselage

The aircraft’s fuselage contains the cockpit and helps define the shape of the X-59. Eventually the 30-foot-long nose of the aircraft will be mounted to the fuselage.

Part of the cockpit is something you might see in an office. The pilot will see the sky ahead through a 4K computer monitor, which will display complex computer-processed imagery from two cameras mounted above and below the X-59’s nose. NASA calls this forward-facing “window” the eXternal Vision System or XVS.

The XVS serves as an additional safety aid to help the pilot maneuver safely through the skies. This cutting-edge vision system is necessary because the desired shape and long nose of the X-59 won’t allow for a protruding cockpit canopy.

The X-59’s unique shape controls the way the air moves away from the plane, ultimately preventing a sonic boom from disturbing communities on the ground.

Wing

The most recognizable part of the airplane – the wing – was “the most complicated section and first section of the X-59 that was fabricated by Lockheed Martin,” explained Richwine. Housed within the 29.5-foot-wide wing are the aircraft’s fuel systems and a large portion of its control systems.

The Lockheed Martin team used robotic machines with names that sound like pilot call signs – Mongoose and COBRA – to manufacture the wing before its mate to the tail assembly and fuselage.

Mongoose is a tool with the ability to weave together composite wing skins using ultraviolet light to bind the composite material. COBRA — Combined Operation: Bolting and Robotic AutoDrill – efficiently created holes that allowed the team to attach the wing skins to the wing frame.

Tail Assembly

The tail assembly contains the engine compartment. This section is built with heat resistant materials that protect the aircraft from the heat given off by the X-59’s GE F414 engine.

The team at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, merged the major sections of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology aircraft, which includes the wing, tail assembly, and fuselage or forward section. This marks the first time the X-59 resembles an actual aircraft. 

Credit: Lockheed Martin

The engine is in the upper section of the X-59. Similar to the XVS, it is one of many purposeful design elements that ensure the aircraft is shaped as desired to produce a quieter noise to people below.

What’s the point of the X-59 – apart from it just being ‘plane’ cool?

The X-59 – the visual centerpiece of the mission — definitely brings in the cool factor, but the data part of NASA’s mission — the nerdy part – is what will revolutionize speedy commercial air travel over land.

NASA’s quiet supersonic mission involves building the X-59 (happening now) and conducting initial flight tests starting in 2022.

In 2023, NASA will fly the X-59 over the test range at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California to prove it can produce a quieter sonic thump and is safe to operate in the National Airspace System. More than 175 ground recording systems will measure the sound coming from the X-59.

In 2024, NASA will fly the X-59 over several communities around the nation to gauge people’s response to the sonic thump sound produced by the aircraft – if they hear anything at all. The data collected will be given to the Federal Aviation Administration and the International Civil Aviation Organization for their consideration in changing the existing bans on supersonic flight over land.

That ban went into effect in 1973 and has plagued commercial supersonic ventures ever since, restricting faster-than-sound travel only to flights over the ocean. British Airways and Air France flying the Concorde were two airlines that offered such service between 1976 and 2003.

If rules change because of NASA’s data, a new fleet of commercial supersonic aircraft become viable, allowing passengers to hop on a plane and arrive from distant destinations in half the time. Though the single-piloted X-59 will never carry passengers, aircraft manufacturers may choose to incorporate its technology into their own designs.

The Future Awaits

With an eye to the future, the team is rigorously working on final assembly of the X-59, which will mark the end of manufacturing.

In late 2021, Lockheed Martin will ship the X-59 to a sister facility in Ft. Worth, Texas, where ground testing will be done to ensure the aircraft can withstand the loads and stresses that typically occur during flight. There, the team also will calibrate and test the fuel systems before the X-59 makes the journey back to California for more tests.

Though seemingly a long way away, community overflights, data collection and a possible new commercial market for supersonic flight over land is just around the corner.

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SPACE - S0 - 20210809 - Animal Anomalies, LLSVPs, Coronal Holes

SPACE - S0 - 20210809 - Animal Anomalies, LLSVPs, Coronal Holes

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Solar winds peaked on Saturday at 500 KPS around 1700 UTC, but since then they've been in a pretty steady decline. It dropped as low as 330 KPS at 0400 UTC, but it's in the 360-370 KPS range as of 1000 UTC. While wind speeds were on a downward slope, the opposite is true for Particle Density. It had risen until it reached a stability point around noon UTC yesterday, but did a bit of a steep climb starting at 0100 UTC before returning to its previous level by 0700 UTC. Temperatures, on the other hand, got pretty weird for a while yesterday. For most of Saturday evening and Sunday morning they were riding the 5000°K line pretty closely, but around 0730 they briefly spiked up to 5600°K, then dropped back down, then sustained 5600°K about two hours after that for a good 90 minutes. After that, they dropped into the 4100°K range before jumping back to its current 4300°K-4400°K range as of 1000 UTC. Phi Angle readings were pretty steady since late Saturday night, with a bit of a scramble for about three hours starting around noon UTC yesterday, and then another scrambler which started at 0230 for another three hours before the polarity shifted yet again. The latter items look like the results of polarity collisions on the Bt/Bz chart. As to the KP-Index, I will admit both surprise and error on my part. Really thought we'd see at least a minor geomagnetic storm over the weekend, but the charts for the last 36 hours never got out of the green, never exceeding KP-2. The Magnetometer sine wave has been shallowing for the past two days and I think it will do that for another day at least. The Electron Flux levels did get pretty close to the Alert Threshold on Saturday afternoon, but since then they've remained in a more nominal state. Proton Flux, as all(most) always, remained steady and strong and quite nominal. The X-Ray Flux showed a flare in the upper Class B range around 1600 UTC on Saturday before returning to normal background radiation for about 32 hours. Then at midnight UTC we had a strong flare hop up into lower Class C, with a few minor perturbations after that before again returning to background levels. The latter flare was most visible on 193Å and 304Å, with the latter showing a strong spark and the former exhibiting signs of a CME - one (hopefully) directed behind our orbit. The ENLIL Spiral is again showing an ejection ahead of our orbit, with perhaps a glancing blow to Earth later this week, but the Spiral projection over on NOAA does not corroborate this (again). LASCO C3 isn't showing anything headed our way, so I think we're good for now. The Magnetogram is showing the Southern sunspot group passing the midpoint, with very little magnetic cohesion and a lot more separation. The newer sunspot group in the North, however, where the Class C flare occurred, is definitely large and definitely complex, at least a Beta-Delta if not Beta-Gamma-Delta. This is the one to watch for the remainder of the work week.

  

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New material offers ecofriendly solution to converting waste heat into energy

AUGUST 2, 2021, by Northwestern University

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-material-ecofriendly-solution-energy.html

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Perseverance, NASA's 2020 Mars rover, is powered by something very desirable here on Earth: a thermoelectric device, which converts heat to useful electricity.

On Mars, the heat source is the radioactive decay of plutonium, and the device's conversion efficiency is 4-5%. That's good enough to power Perseverance and its operations but not quite good enough for applications on Earth.

A team of scientists from Northwestern University and Seoul National University in Korea now has demonstrated a high-performing thermoelectric material in a practical form that can be used in device development. The material—purified tin selenide in polycrystalline form—outperforms the single-crystal form in converting heat to electricity, making it the most efficient thermoelectric system on record. The researchers were able to achieve the high conversion rate after identifying and removing an oxidation problem that had degraded performance in earlier studies.

The polycrystalline tin selenide could be developed for use in solid-state thermoelectric devices in a variety of industries, with potentially enormous energy savings. A key application target is capturing industrial waste heat—such as from power plants, the automobile industry and glass- and brick-making factories—and converting it to electricity. More than 65% of the energy produced globally from fossil fuels is lost as waste heat.

"Thermoelectric devices are in use, but only in niche applications, such as in the Mars rover," said Northwestern's Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemist who specializes in the design of new materials. "These devices have not caught on like solar cells, and there are significant challenges to making good ones. We are focusing on developing a material that would be low cost and high performance and propel thermoelectric devices into more widespread application."

Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is a co-corresponding author of the study. He has a joint appointment with ArgonneNational Laboratory.

Details of the thermoelectric material and its record-high performance will be published Aug. 2 in the journal Nature Materials.

In Chung of Seoul National University is the paper's other co-corresponding author. Vinayak Dravid,the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering,is one of the study's senior authors. Dravid is a long-time collaborator of Kanatzidis'.

Thermoelectric devices are already well defined, says Kanatzidis, but what makes them work well or not is the thermoelectric material inside. One side of the device is hot and the other side cold. The thermoelectric material lies in the middle. Heat flows through the material, and some of the heat is converted to electricity, which leaves the device via wires.

The material needs to have extremely low thermal conductivity while still retaining good electrical conductivity to be efficient at waste heat conversion. And because the heat source could be as high as 400-500 degrees Celsius, the material needs to be stable at very high temperatures. These challenges and others make thermoelectric devices more difficult to produce than solar cells.

'Something diabolical was happening'

In 2014, Kanatzidis and his team reported the discovery of a surprising material that was the best in the world at converting waste heat to useful electricity: the crystal form of the chemical compound tin selenide. While an important discovery, the single-crystal form is impractical for mass production because of its fragility and tendency to flake.

Tin selenide in polycrystalline form, which is stronger and can be cut and shaped for applications, was needed, so the researchers turned to studying the material in that form. In an unpleasant surprise, they found the material's thermal conductivity was high, not the desirable low level found in the single-crystal form.

"We realized something diabolical was happening," Kanatzidis said. "The expectation was that tin selenide in polycrystalline form would not have high thermal conductivity, but it did. We had a problem."

Upon closer examination, the researchers discovered a skin of oxidized tin on the material. Heat flowed through the conductive skin, increasing the thermal conductivity, which is undesirable in a thermoelectric device.

A solution is found, opening doors

After learning that the oxidation came from both the process itself and the starting materials, the Korean team found a way to remove the oxygen. The researchers then could produce tin selenide pellets with no oxygen, which they then tested.

The true thermal conductivity of the polycrystalline form was measured and found to be lower, as originally expected. Its performance as a thermoelectric device, converting heat to electricity, exceeded that of the single crystal form, making it the most efficient on record.

The efficiency of waste heat conversion in thermoelectrics is reflected by its "figure of merit," a number called ZT. The higher the number, the better the conversion rate. The ZT of single-crystal tin selenide earlier was found to be approximately 2.2 to 2.6 at 913 Kelvin. In this new study, the researchers found the purified tin selenide in polycrystalline form had a ZT of approximately 3.1 at 783 Kelvin. (509c. CC) Its thermal conductivity was ultralow, lower than the single-crystals.

"This opens the door for new devices to be built from polycrystalline tin selenide pellets and their applications explored," Kanatzidis said.

Northwestern owns the intellectual property for the tin selenide material. Potential areas of application for the thermoelectric material include the automobile industry (a significant amount of gasoline's potential energy goes out of a vehicle's tailpipe), heavy manufacturing industries (such as glass and brick making, refineries, coal- and gas-fired power plants) and places where large combustion engines operate continuously (such as in large ships and tankers).

The title of the paper is "Polycrystalline SnSe with a thermoelectric figure of merit greater than the single-crystal."

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