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Christina Koch has shared an incredible image of a Soyuz MS 15 rocket en route to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). The NASA flight engineer posted the photo on Twitter on Wednesday with the accompanying caption: “What it looks like from @Space_Station when your best friend achieves her lifelong dream to go to space.” The out-of-this-world image shows the Soyuz MS-15 rocket leaving Earth’s atmosphere towards the ISS.
The Expedition 61 rocket sent three people to the iconic space laboratory orbiting 250 miles (400km) over Earth.
Accompanying Jessica Meir, NASA astronaut and Ms Koch’s best friend, were Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, Hazzaa Ali Almansoori from the United Arab Emirates.
The NASA astronauts, who met during preparatory training, are now reunited in space where they will work together until February 2020.
Ms Koch added in another post: “Caught the second stage in progress! We can’t wait to welcome you on board, crew of Soyuz 61!”
READ MORE: Russian Soyuz rocket struck by LIGHTNING in shock footage
The Soyuz successfully docked to the ISS at 8.42pm BST (3.42pm ET) on the same day of the launch.
NASA has revealed how Expedition 61 will involve the ISS crew installing new lithium-ion batteries for two of the station’s solar array power channels in series of spacewalks.
Spacewalks are also scheduled for upgrading and repairing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).
This is an important scientific instrument housed outside the space station to study dark matter and the origins of the Universe.
When Christina Koch finally heads home, she will have completed 355 days in space, the longest single spaceflight by a woman.
The NASA astronaut frequently shares stunning images of her enviable view from space.
Earlier this year, the NASA astronaut shared a detailed image of the Earth transition from day into night.
She captioned the photo: “A couple times a year, the @Space_Station orbit happens to align over the day/night shadow line on Earth.
READ MORE: Royal Observatory reveals best space photos
“We are continuously in sunlight, never passing into Earth’s shadow from the Sun, and the Earth below us is always in dawn or dusk.
The NASA astronaut added: “Beautiful time to cloud watch. #nofilter.”
The International Space Station orbits roughly 220 miles above the Earth and completes one trip around our planet every 92 minutes.
ISS travels at an astonishing 17,200mph (27,600kmh), allowing astronauts to be able to see as many as 15 or 16 sunrises and sunsets every day.
READ MORE: Telescope captures multicolour photo of first-ever interstellar comet
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On Saturday night, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a presentation in Boca Chica, Texas, on the development of his company’s next generation rocket, called Starship. Starship is meant to fly hundreds of passengers to deep-space destinations like the Moon and Mars. Flanked by a giant prototype of the vehicle, Musk vowed that Starship could fly to orbit as soon as six months from now, and carry its first passengers sometime next year.
“This thing is going to take off, fly to 65,000 feet — about 20 kilometers — and come back and land in about one to two months,” Musk said, referring to the stainless steel prototype behind him. The giant test article stood next to a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket, the first vehicle the company put into orbit. The staging was symbolic, especially since the presentation occurred on the anniversary of SpaceX’s first flight to orbit with the Falcon 1.
The test rocket in Boca Chica towers over 165 feet (50 meters) tall and has three of SpaceX’s next generation Raptor engines attached to its base. Its goal is to test out the launch and landing capabilities that the final Starship vehicle will need to be a fully reusable system. The prototype will use its engines to fly to a high altitude and then lower itself back down, performing what’s known as a propulsive landing — the same technique SpaceX uses to land its currently operational rockets.
SpaceX still has a lot of work to do to get this thing flying on such a short timescale. The Starship prototype makes for an impressive sight on the ground. It’ll be even more of a spectacle when it finally takes to the skies.
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—Elon Musk spoke about his vision of a brighter future for humanity on Saturday evening, in South Texas.
Musk acknowledged that there are a lot of problems here on Earth, and it is important for those to get fixed. But it also is important to give people hope for the future, and sense of optimism. He believes the exploration of space, and human expansion into the Solar System, provides this kind of a hopeful vision.
And so, beneath a big Texas sky full of stars, he offered hope in the form of a large spaceship. Mere hours after a team of SpaceX engineers, technicians, and contractors completed assembly of a prototype of the Starship vehicle, Musk revealed it to the world. He did so in an open-air shipyard, hard by the Rio Grande River, where he intends to build dozens if not hundreds of Starship spacecraft.
The prototype loomed behind Musk as he addressed a crowd of a few hundred people, including employees, local residents from Brownsville and surrounding towns, as well as members of the media. Earlier, as the Sun dipped below the horizon, reddish hues glinted off the Starship's surface. As night fell and Musk climbed onto a small dais, it rose tall, dark and imposing.
"This is the most inspiring thing that I have ever seen," said Musk, dressed in a black blazer, t-shirt, and jeans, of the towering spaceship. The crowd cheered. In the moment, Mars seemed a little closer than it had before.
Three years ago, Elon Musk took the stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, to share the full scope of his Mars ambitions for the first time. He spoke of building a large, interplanetary spaceship—it was not yet named Starship— and a large rocket booster with dozens of engines that would carry 100 people to Mars at a time.
At the time, it seemed audacious, mad, and brilliant at the same time. But mostly the vision seemed like science fiction. Standing in a field in South Texas on Saturday night, it felt a little more like science, and a little less like fiction.
Three years ago, the idea of flying 37 engines on a single rocket seemed fanciful. And then, in early 2018, the company launched with Falcon Heavy with 27 engines. Three years ago, the notion of landing and re-flying a large rocket multiple times seemed distant. But now SpaceX has done this dozens of times.
But most futuristic of all seemed the notion of a 50-meter tall spaceship that could launch into space, fly on to the Moon or Mars, and return to Earth. And yet this was what Musk put on display with the Starship Mk 1 vehicle. Soon, perhaps within one or two months, it will launch to an altitude of 20km. Simultaneously, the company is building a second prototype, Mk 2, in Cocoa, Florida. It will start work on a third version in Texas later this fall, and so on.
Each design will iterate on the last. Engineers will look for ways to shave mass—the Mk 1 prototype weighs 200 tons, and SpaceX would like to eventually cut the overall mass to 110 tons to maximize Starship's lift capacity. Ultimately, a slimmed-down Starship should be able to lift 150 tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, Musk said. Its first orbital flight, launched by a big booster named Super Heavy, could come next year.
This payload capacity is more than any other launch system built before, and would be especially remarkable given that SpaceX has designed both the booster and Starship to be fully reusable. "A rapidly reusable orbital rocket is only barely possible given the physics of Earth," Musk said.
During the presentation, Musk offered several updates on changes to Starship's design. However he spent the most time discussing the use of stainless steel as the skin of the vehicle. "Stainless steel is by far the best design decision we have made," he said.
Yes, Musk said, steel is heavier than carbon composite or aluminum-based materials used in most spacecraft, but it has exceptional thermal properties. At extremely cold temperatures, stainless steel 301 does not turn brittle; and at the very high temperatures of atmospheric reentry, it does not melt until reaching 1500 degrees Centigrade. Starship therefore requires only a modest heat shield of glass-like thermal tiles.
Another benefit is cost, which matters to a company building Starships on its own dime, with the intent to build many of them. Carbon fiber material costs about $130,000 a ton, he said. Stainless steel sells for $2,500 a ton.
"Steel is easy to weld, and weather resistant," Musk added. "The evidence being that we welded this outdoors, without a factory. Honestly, I'm in love with steel."
Listing image by Trevor Mahlmann for Ars
NASA has followed the progress of Starship from afar, investing almost nothing in a vehicle that has the potential to revolutionize human spaceflight—as well as to dramatically bring down the costs of launch.
On Friday, the eve of Musk's Starship presentation in Texas, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine even splashed some cold water on the proceedings. Bridenstine noted that SpaceX was one of NASA's partners in the commercial crew program, intended to launch astronauts to the International Space Station.
"NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer," Bridenstine said of SpaceX's apparent zeal for Starship. "It's time to deliver."
Asked about this, Musk replied that the company is only investing about 5 percent of its human resources into developing Starship. The bulk of the company's 6,000 employees are working on the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft to be used for the commercial crew program, he said.
After the event, as the hour approached 11pm local time, Musk offered some additional insight during an interview with Ars. Seated alongside the company's principal Mars development engineer, Paul Wooster, Musk expounded upon his timeline for going to the Moon and Mars.
"It depends on whether development remains exponential. If it remains exponential, it could be like two years," Musk said of landing on the Moon. A cargo trip to Mars could happen by 2022, due to the availability of launch windows, he added. "I mean these are just total guesses, as opposed to checking a train schedule."
SpaceX is funding the Starship project with its own money. Some of that comes from positive cash flow from satellite launches. The company has also raised nearly $1 billion from private investors in recent months, and it has also received an undisclosed payment from Japanese Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first customer for a mission to lunar orbit and back.
"I think we're able to see a path to getting the ship to orbit, and maybe even doing a loop around the Moon," Musk said. "Maybe we need to raise some more money to go to the Moon or landing on Mars. But at least getting the Starship to an operational level in low Earth orbit, or around the Moon, I feel like we're in good shape for that."
A common question about Starship is how the company plans to keep people alive on board the vehicle when it is flying crew instead of cargo missions. SpaceX has some experience with life support after developing the Crew Dragon spacecraft for NASA.
"We definitely have learnt a lot, and we would do it differently," Musk said. "The Dragon life support system is not really all that renewable. It's basically mostly expendable."
For example, Dragon uses lithium hydroxide as a "scrubber" to remove carbon dioxide exhaled by humans, producing lithium carbonate and water as byproducts. This is perfectly adequate for four people for four days, and perhaps could even be used for short missions around, and to the surface of the Moon.
But using Starship to go to Mars would require six months for a journey there, and up to 2.5 years for a roundtrip mission. With as many as 100 people on board the vehicle, that would require a regenerative life support system that will, Musk acknowledged, "take a bit of work."
Earlier this month, the senior Senator from Alabama, Richard Shelby, offered a congratulatory tweet to NASA. "Good news," Shelby wrote, noting agency technicians had joined five structures together that make up the core stage of the Space Launch System. "This is the first time since the Apollo program that a rocket of this size has been joined together—a milestone accomplishment," Shelby added.
Four rocket engines must still be attached to the core stage before it is complete. But then, finally, the key component of NASA's mammoth rocket should be ready to undergo ground-based testing. To be sure, NASA and the core stage contractor, Boeing, are to be commended for a technical achievement. However, one might reasonably ask what took so long to get to this point.
In the spring of 2014, I visited the Michoud Assembly Facility, based in southern Louisiana. Already, technicians were building barrels for the Space Launch System rocket's core stage. And NASA was investing tens of millions of dollars to modernize Michoud to produce the rocket. At the time, an aerospace analyst for the Rand Corporation, Peter Wilson, explained that, "They’re throwing the money into this program, into places like Michoud, to make it very expensive to change course."
NASA has not changed course. And after at least 5.5 years, during which time NASA has spent more than $10 billion on the SLS rocket, they are finally almost done assembling that first core stage, consisting of two large fuel tanks, four main engines, and all of a rocket's associated plumbing.
One answer to the question of why this has taken so long, and required so much money, is that there has been a lack of urgency. Large complex development programs—like, say, super heavy lift rockets—work best with low levels of funding during the design phase, a spike during development, and then diminished funding during flight production. Instead, after Congress created the SLS rocket program with a baseline of about $2 billion a year, it kept funding at more or less flat levels plus inflation. This is great strategy for creating and sustaining jobs, but a poor way to go about rocket development.
SpaceX's Starship prototype, fabricated in a field in South Texas in five months, offers a counter example to what a sense of urgency can accomplish.
The SLS rocket core stage, consisting of four space shuttle main engines, measures 64.6 meters tall, with a diameter of 8.4 meters. The Starship Mk1 vehicle is 50.0 meters tall, with a diameter of 9.1 meters. So they are roughly the same size. Neither is the complete rocket. On the launch pad, the SLS will have two very large side-mounted solid-rocket boosters, derived from the space shuttle. And Starship is actually the upper stage of SpaceX's next-generation rocket, Super Heavy.
By itself, the SLS core stage cannot get to orbit. In fact, according to physicist Scott Manley, without its side-mounted boosters a fully-fueled SLS core stage cannot even lift off the launch pad. The SpaceX Starship prototype, with three Raptor engines instead of a full complement of six, also cannot get to orbit. But it should be able to reach at least 25 to 30km, said Manley, who has a popular rocket science YouTube channel.
The SLS rocket remains a couple of years from its maiden flight. Starship, however, will likely make a 20km flight in November, Musk said.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two new rockets is the velocity of their development. The SLS core stage, which uses heritage technology from the space shuttle, including its main engines, has taken at least 5.5 years to build, and billions of dollars.
Starship Mk 1 didn't even exist until this spring, and it may leap off the pad before year's end. The appears to underscore the value of urgency and clarity of purpose. At SpaceX the urging comes from the top. As Musk said of schedules on Saturday night, "tight is right, long is wrong." And Starship has a clear exploration purpose as well, allowing humans to settle other worlds, and fuel optimism in humanity's future.
NASA announced agreements worth a combined $43.2 million with 14 commercial partners Friday — including Blue Origin and SpaceX — to fund experiments in propellant and power generation, in-space refueling, efficient propulsion systems, and lunar rover technology.
Each of the agreements, with NASA funding commitments ranging from $1.3 million to $10 million, will aid the development of key technologies for the space agency’s exploration initiatives aimed at the moon and Mars, officials said.
The 14 projects announced Friday are the fourth set of funding agreements in NASA’s series of “Tipping Point” solicitations, in which the space agency partners with companies to work on advanced space technologies. Each company is required to fund at least 25 percent of the program costs in the public-private Tipping Point agreements.
“These promising technologies are at a ‘tipping point’ in their development, meaning NASA’s investment is likely the extra push a company needs to significantly mature a capability,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s space technology mission directorate. “These are important technologies necessary for sustained exploration of the Moon and Mars. As the agency focuses on landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program, we continue to prepare for the next phase of lunar exploration that feeds forward to Mars.”
Previous Tipping Point agreements have funded cryogenic propellant storage technologies, the development of planetary landing systems, solar-electric propulsion, smallsat launch vehicles, and robotic in-space manufacturing.
The agreements announced Friday address six focus areas: Cryogenic propellant production and management; sustainable energy generation, storage and distribution; efficient and affordable propulsion systems; autonomous operations; rover mobility; and advanced avionics.
Blue Origin won the biggest share of funding in Friday’s announcements with a $10 million agreement, and NASA awarded SpaceX $3 million to test coupler prototypes for refueling spacecraft such as the company’s Starship vehicle.
Two providers selected by NASA through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program also received funding from NASA through the Tipping Point solicitation. Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are developing commercial robotic lunar landers to deliver NASA science instruments to the lunar surface.
Here is a list of the 14 agreements copied from a NASA’s press release:
Cryogenic Propellant Production and Management
• Blue Origin LLC of Kent, Washington, $10 million
A ground demonstration of hydrogen and oxygen liquefaction and storage, representing rocket and spacecraft propellant that could be produced on the Moon. The demonstration could help inform a large-scale propellant production plant suitable for the lunar surface.
• OxEon Energy LLC of North Salt Lake, Utah, $1.8 million
OxEon Energy will work with the Colorado School of Mines to integrate an electrolysis technology to process ice and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The molecules could then be cooled to produce fuel for cislunar transport. This technology could provide a flexible and scalable solution for future in-situ resource utilization operations on the Moon.
• Skyre Inc. of East Hartford, Connecticut, $2.6 million
Skyre, also known as Sustainable Innovations, along with partner Meta Vista USA LLC, will develop a system to make propellant from permanently frozen water located at the Moon’s poles, including processes to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, keep the product extremely cold and use hydrogen as a refrigerant to liquefy oxygen.
• SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $3 million
SpaceX will collaborate with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to develop and test coupler prototypes – or nozzles – for refueling spacecraft such as the company’s Starship vehicle. A cryogenic fluid coupler for large-scale in-space propellant transfer is an important technology to aid sustained exploration efforts on the Moon and Mars.
Sustainable Energy Generation, Storage and Distribution
• Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Inc. of Windsor, Connecticut, $4 million
The company will collaborate with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to develop a scalable, modular and flexible power and energy product that utilizes new manufacturing methods to reduce cost and improve reliability. The technology could be used for lunar rovers, surface equipment and habitats.
• Paragon Space Development Corporation of Houston, $2 million
Paragon Space Development Corporation will work with Johnson and NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland to develop an environmental control and life support system as well as a thermal control system for lunar missions that maintain acceptable operating temperatures throughout the Moon’s day and night cycle. The design of these systems could be adapted for crewed missions to Mars.
• TallannQuest LLC of Sachse, Texas, $2 million
Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the company, also known as Apogee Semiconductor, will develop a flexible, radiation-hardened switching power controller capable of being configured based on a mission’s power needs. This technology could be used for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and other destinations.
Efficient and Affordable Propulsion Systems
• Accion Systems Inc. of Boston, $3.9 million
The first interplanetary CubeSats, NASA’s MarCO-A and B, used a set of cold gas thrusters for attitude control and course corrections during their cruise to Mars, alongside the Mars InSight lander. Accion and JPL will partner to mature a propulsion system to demonstrate the same capabilities as those required for the MarCO mission, but with a smaller and lighter system that uses less power. The propulsion system could enable more science opportunities with these small, flexible platforms.
• CU Aerospace LLC of Champaign, Illinois, $1.7 million
CU Aerospace, NearSpace Launch and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will build and test a 6-unit CubeSat equipped with two different propulsion systems. These systems were developed with NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding and offer high performance, low cost and safe pre-launch processing. The company plans to deliver the flight-ready CubeSat to NanoRacks for launch and deployment.
• ExoTerra Resource LLC of Littleton, Colorado, $2 million
ExoTerra will build, test and launch a 12-unit CubeSat with a compact, high impulse solar electric propulsion module. Once flight-ready, the system will be demonstrated in-space as the CubeSat moves from low-Earth orbit to the radiation belts surrounding Earth. This small electric propulsion system could open up the inner solar system for targeted science exploration missions, using affordable spacecraft that range from 44 to 440 pounds.
Autonomous Operations
• Blue Canyon Technologies Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, $4.9 million
As access to space increases, so does the need for ground resources, such as tracking stations. With an in-space demonstration, Blue Canyon Technologies will mature an autonomous navigation software solution for SmallSats and CubeSats so they can traverse space without “talking” to Earth.
Rover Mobility
• Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, $2 million
Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon University will work with JPL and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to develop small rover “scouts” that can host payloads and interface with multiple large landers. This project received previous NASA funding through SBIR awards. The new partnership will develop more mature payload interfaces and increase rover capabilities.
Advanced Avionics
• Intuitive Machines LLC of Houston, $1.3 million
Development of a spacecraft vision processing computer and software to reduce the cost and schedule required for deploying optical, or laser, navigation capabilities on government and commercial missions.
• Luna Innovations of Blacksburg, Virginia, $2 million
Luna Innovations is partnering with Sierra Nevada Corporation, ILC Dover and Johnson to prove the viability of sensors that monitor the structural health and safety of inflatable space habitats located in orbit or on the surface of other worlds.
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How Many Humans Could the Moon Support? Livescience.com
NASA has given us another historic glimpse into the wonders of space after releasing a video that shows a star-shredding black hole in a galaxy millions of light-years away.
The amazing footage of the "cataclysmic phenomenon" was taken by NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.
Astronomers think the supermassive black hole weighs around six million times the sun’s mass and is located about 375 million light-years away in a galaxy of similar size to the Milky Way, NASA said.
The incredible event, called a tidal disruption, is very rare and occurs once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in galaxies like the Milky Way.
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When a star gets too close, the intense tides of a black hole break apart the star into a stream of gas, according to NASA. As shown in the video, the tail of that stream breaks away from the black hole while other parts of it swing back around and create a halo of debris.
Scientists believe the star in the video may have been about the same size as our sun.
The event, named ASASSN-19bt, was first discovered on Jan. 29 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae telescope network, a worldwide network of 24 robotic telescopes headquartered at Ohio State University.
NASA says that scientists have only been able to observe about 40 tidal disruptions in history and TESS was able to capture one after launching in April 2018.
“For TESS to observe (the event) so early in its tenure, and in the continuous viewing zone where we could watch it for so long, is really quite extraordinary,” said Padi Boyd, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Future collaborations with observatories around the world and in orbit will help us learn even more about the different outbursts that light up the cosmos.”
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
India's Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram made a "hard landing" on the Moon, but the precise location of the spacecraft is still unknown, the US space agency, NASA said.
Vikram was scheduled to land on September 7 at the Lunar South Pole more than a month after it took off. The lander's descent was normal until it was 2.1km (1.3 miles) from the lunar surface when it veered from the planned path and communications with the lander were lost.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - India's equivalent of NASA - is still trying to find why it lost contact with the lander.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) passed over the landing site on September 17 and took images from the area, but the team has not yet been able to locate or obtain an image of the lander, NASA said in a statement released on Thursday.
"It was dusk when the landing area was imaged and thus large shadows covered much of the terrain, it is possible that the lander is hiding in a shadow," the statement read.
More images are expected to be taken in October.
Our @LRO_NASA mission imaged the targeted landing site of India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram. The images were taken at dusk, and the team was not able to locate the lander. More images will be taken in October during a flyby in favorable lighting. More: https://t.co/1bMVGRKslp pic.twitter.com/kqTp3GkwuM
— NASA (@NASA) September 26, 2019
After Vikram lost contact, scientists only had until September 21 to establish communications with the lander before the area entered into a lunar night, according to local reports.
ISRO said the length of Vikram's mission was one lunar day, which is equal to 14 Earth days.
Despite the hard landing, ISRO Chairman K Sivan said a plan was being worked out for a moon mission in the future.
"We are working out a detailed future plan," he said on Thursday.
"A national-level committee has been formed to find out what went wrong with the lander. Once the committee submits its report, we will work on what to do in future," he added.
Vikram aimed to conduct "detailed topographical studies, [and] comprehensive mineralogical analyses ... such as the presence of water molecules on the moon".
This was the third time an attempt was made to land the spacecraft on the moon this year.
In January, China made an historic soft landing on the "dark side" of the moon in the South Pole-Aitken Basin area. It was the first spacecraft in history to reach this area. Since then its rover and lander have been operating in that area.
Israel also sent a spacecraft in April, but the landing was problematic and communications were lost when it was about 149 meters (489 feet) above the moon's surface. The attempt ended in a hard landing.
A quasi-particle that travels along the interface of a metal and dielectric material may be the solution to problems caused by shrinking electronic components, according to an international team of engineers.
"Microelectronic chips are ubiquitous today," said Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Penn State. "Delay time for signal propagation in metal-wire interconnects, electrical loss in metals leading to temperature rise, and cross-talk between neighboring interconnects arising from miniaturization and densification limits the speed of these chips."
These electronic components are in our smartphones, tablets, computers and security systems and they are used in hospital equipment, defense installations and our transportation infrastructure.
Researchers have explored a variety of ways to solve the problem of connecting various miniaturized components in a world of ever shrinking circuits. While photonics, the use of light to transport information, is attractive because of its speed, this approach is problematic because the waveguides for light are bigger than current microelectronic circuits, which makes connections difficult.
A pulse-modulated SPP wave moving right, guided by the interface of a dielectric material (above) and a metal (below), suddenly encounters the replacement of the dielectric material by air. Most of the energy is transmitted to the air/metal interface but some is reflected to the dielectric/metal interface. The video spans 120 femtoseconds.
The researchers report in a recent issue of Scientific Reports that "The signal can travel long distances without significant loss of fidelity," and that "signals can possibly be transferred by SPP waves over several tens of micrometers (of air) in microelectronic chips."
They also note that calculations indicate that SPP waves can transfer information around a concave corner—a situation, along with air gaps, that is common in microcircuitry.
SPPs are a group phenomenon. These quasi-particles travel along the interface of a conducting metal and a dielectric—a non-conducting material that can support an electromagnetic field—and on a macroscopic level, appear as a wave.
According to Lakhtakia, SPPs are what give gold its particular shimmery shine. A surface effect, under certain conditions electrons in the metal and polarized charges in the dielectric material can act together and form an SPP wave. This wave, guided by the interface of the two materials can continue propagating even if the metal wire has a break or the metal dielectric interface terminates abruptly. The SPP wave can travel in air for a few 10s of micrometers or the equivalent of 600 transistors laid end to end in a 14 nanometer technology chips.
SPP waves also only travel when in close proximity to the interface, so they do not produce crosstalk.
The problem with using SPP waves in designing circuits is that while researchers know experimentally that they exist, the theoretical underpinnings of the phenomenon were less defined. The Maxwell equations that govern SPP waves cover continuum of frequencies and are complicated.
"Instead of solving the Maxwell equations frequency by frequency, which is impractical and prone to debilitating computational errors, we took multiple snapshots of the electromagnetic fields," said Lakhtakia.
These snapshots, strung together, become a movie that shows the propagation of the pulse-modulated SPP wave.
"We are studying tough problems," said Lakhtakia. "We are studying problems that were unsolvable 10 years ago. Improved computational components changed our way of thinking about these problems, but we still need more memory."
Citation: Jumping the gap may make electronics faster (2019, September 27) retrieved 27 September 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-09-gap-electronics-faster.html
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The violent black hole was spotted by NASA’s planet-hunting TESS space probe and confirmed by ground-based observatories. Astronomers were alerted to the event when a star monitored by TESS unexpectedly grew brighter. The event, known as a tidal disruption, causes black holes to consume entire stars or stretch them out like spaghetti dough. Stars fall prey to these destructive tidal disruptions when they venture too close to a black hole.
In this particular case, the event was dubbed ASASSN-19bt after the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae.
ASAS-SN is a global network of 20 robotic telescope observatories with headquarters at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
The telescope network, together with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and observatories in Chile validated TESS’ discovery.
Dr Thomas Holoien, from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, said: “TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do before.
READ MORE: The sound of a black hole REVEALED and it sings in B Flat
“Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multiwavelength follow-up observations in the first few days.
“The early data will be incredibly helpful for modelling the physics of these outbursts.”
Dr Holoien and his team found the tidal disruption caused the star’s temperatures to drop from 71,500F to just 35,500F degrees (40,000 to 20,000 degrees Celsius).
Events like this are incredibly rare and only occur once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way.
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Supernova eruptions, by comparison, are much more frequent at one every 100 years or so.
To date, astronomers have only observed about 40 tidal disruptions.
NASA’s TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) watches swathes of the night sky to detect stars briefly dipping in brightness.
The dips are caused by planets passing in front of stars and is NASA’s main way of discovering exoplanets in distant solar systems.
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But for the first time in TESS’ mission, the space telescope observed the opposite of that.
The discovery was published on September 27 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Patrick Vallely, the study’s co-author from Ohio State University, said: “The early TESS data allow us to see light very close to the black hole, much closer than we’ve been able to see before.
“They also show us that ASSASN-19bt’s rise in brightness was very smooth, which helps us tell that the event was a tidal disruption and not another type of outburst, like from the centre of a galaxy of a supernova.”
