NASA's Parker solar probe has become the first spacecraft to reach the Sun, after solar boffins announced the feat at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The event actually happened way back on April 28, but it took months before the data made its way back to Earth and a few more before scientists could confirm the event. But now NASA has said, yep, that definitely happened – one of humanity's instruments has touched our local star.
We’ve touched the Sun! ☀️ Announced today at #AGU21, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has officially become the first spacecraft to fly through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. Learn more: https://t.co/PuvczKHVxI pic.twitter.com/CuJQ2UMymi
The Parker probe has been hurtling towards – and looping around – the Sun since its launch in August 2018. When the spacecraft entered the star's corona in April, it was its eighth close approach to Sol.
The mission was launched with three main goals: to trace the flow of energy that heats the corona and accelerates solar wind, to learn about the structure and forces of the magnetic fields that create solar wind, and to determine what accelerates and transports energetic particles. To boldly go where no-one has gone before counts for extra credit.
Understanding solar winds is useful because occasional gouts of star stuff can disrupt satellites and other electronic technology. But determining how solar winds are created is hard, because the Sun doesn't have a solid surface – it's mostly hot plasma held together by its own gravity, and boundaries are hard to pin down.
Boffins have defined the "Alfvén Critical Surface" as the point separating the end of the solar atmosphere, or the corona, and the beginning of solar wind.
The corona is essentially the visible part in an eclipse. By dipping into it for over five hours, Parker taught scientists that the Sun's magnetic field changes there.
During the flyby, the spacecraft crossed the Alfvén Critical Surface several times. In doing so, it confirmed a prediction: the boundary isn't perfectly round. It has spikes and waves and wrinkles – no doubt these features have some secrets to tell about how Sun-related events affect the atmosphere.
The spacecraft has a special heat shield made of reinforced carbon composite foam that allows it to withstand the blasting heat and energy produced by our star. The inner plate that faces the Sun has a white ceramic paint that reflects heat. Amazingly, the instruments onboard stay at a mere 27° Celsius (81°F).
It takes eight minutes for radio communication to travel between Earth and the probe – more if it is actively making observations, as the probe is cut off from communication at that time. Also, having the heat shield continuously pointed at the sun sometimes means that it just can't be in a position that allows transmission to Earth.
All this means Parker must protect itself autonomously, which it does using light-direction-detecting sensors and reaction wheels that reposition it into shadows.
It's very likely that the eighth orbit is not the only one where Parker entered the corona during perihelion – the point in the orbit where the spacecraft is closest to the Sun – but scientists are not quite ready to confirm whether its ninth and tenth passes, which occurred just last month, qualify. They want to look more at the data.
The next flyby will occur in January 2022. Parker will continue to fly ever closer to the Sun until it goes down in a blaze of glory in 2025.
In a video posted by NASA, astrophysicist and senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Dr Nour Raouafi said the mission is important because our Sun is the only one known to harbor life. According to Dr Raouafi, Parker "will link directly into the question – are we alone in this universe?"
Well, so far we're the only ones who've built a thing just to launch it into the Sun, so we've got that. ®
Life on Super-Earths may have more time to develop and evolve, thanks to their long-lasting magnetic fields protecting them against harmful cosmic rays, according to new research published in Science.
Space is a hazardous environment. Streams of charged particles traveling at the speed of light, ejected from stars and distant galaxies, bombard planets. The intense radiation can strip atmospheres and cause oceans on planetary surfaces to dry up over time, leaving them arid and incapable of supporting habitable life. Cosmic rays, however, are deflected away from Earth, however, since it’s shielded by its magnetic field.
Now, a team of researchers led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) believe that Super-Earths - planets that are more massive than Earth but less than Neptune - may have magnetic fields too. Their defensive bubbles, in fact, are estimated to stay intact for longer than the one around Earth, meaning life on their surfaces will have more time to develop and survive.
ERP specialist SAP saw Q4 cloud revenue jump 28 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier to hit €2.61bn
In preliminary results, total revenue for calendar 2021 was up 6 per cent year-on-year to €7.98bn - a marked contrast to the car crash financials served up by SAP for 2020.
Customer migration to the vendor's latest in-memory ERP platform was sluggish prior to initiatives SAP put in place to convince customers to migrate. The prelims show those plans are working.
The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint filed in the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google.
Texas, 14 other US states, and the Commonwealths of Kentucky and Puerto Rico accused Google of unlawfully monopolizing the online ad market and rigging ad auctions in a December, 2020, lawsuit. The plaintiffs subsequently filed an amendment complaint in October, 2021, that includes details previously redacted.
On Friday, Texas et al. filed a third amended complaint [PDF] that fills in more blanks and expands the allegations by 69 more pages.
China's cold war with the US on chips isn't slowing down the country's rapid growth in semiconductors, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week.
The US sanctions on Chinese companies didn't have the intended effect of restricting China's semiconductor industry. In fact, the saber-rattling is only serving for China to get its act together on semiconductors, the industry body warned.
China's semiconductor industry sales totaled $39.8bn in 2020, a growth rate of 30.6 per cent from 2019, the SIA said. In 2015, China chip sales were just $13bn, or a 3.8 per cent market share.
Alibaba has published a report detailing a number of technology trends the China-based megacorp believes will make an impact across the economy and society at large over the next several years. This includes the use of AI in scientific research, adoption of silicon photonics, the integration of terrestrial, and satellite data networks among others.
The Top Ten Technology Trends report was produced by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, set up by the firm in 2017 as a blue-sky scientific and technological research outfit. DAMO hit the headlines recently with hints of a novel chip architecture that merges processing and memory.
Among the trends listed in the DAMO report, AI features more than once. In science, DAMO believes that AI-based approaches will make new scientific paradigms possible, thanks to the ability of machine learning to process massive amounts of multi-dimensional and multi-modal data, and solve complex scientific problems. The report states that AI will not only accelerate the speed of scientific research, but also help discover new laws of science, and is set to be used as a production tool in some basic sciences.
Almost no one bothers to read the Terms of Service agreements on websites so a group of US lawmakers on Thursday proposed a bill to require that commercial websites and mobile apps translate their legalese into summaries that can be more easily read by people and by machines.
The bill, titled the Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability (TLDR) Act [PDF], was introduced by Lori Trahan (D-MA-03), Senator Bill Cassidy, (R-LA), and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), making it technically a bipartisan effort – something of a rarity at a time when the two major US political parties can't agree on basic facts like who was lawfully elected President in 2020.
"For far too long, blanket terms of service agreements have forced consumers to either ‘agree’ to all of a company’s conditions or lose access to a website or app entirely," said Congresswoman Trahan, a member of the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, in a statement. "No negotiation, no alternative, and no real choice."
Russia's internal security agency said today it had dismantled the REvil ransomware gang's networks and raided its operators' homes following arrests yesterday in Ukraine.
In a statement the FSB (Federal Security Service) said "based on the appeal of the US competent authorities" it had raided 25 addresses apparently belonging to "14 members of an organised criminal community."
That "community" is called REvil, said the Russian law enforcement agency. A translation of the FSB statement reveals that the 14 were charged under Article 187 of the Russian criminal code, which deals with "illegal turnover of means of payments."
A US court has found Oracle support specialist Rimini Street in contempt of court and ordered it to pay $630,000 in sanctions – peanuts for the $40bn-revenue Big Red software company.
In a dispute dragging on for more than a decade, the District Court of Nevada also imposed reasonable attorneys' fees and costs against Rimini, to be decided at a later date.
District Judge Larry Hicks found Rimini in contempt of court on only five of the 10 issues presented at the hearing. "The Court's finding of willfulness on the majority of these issues clearly supports the award," the ruling said.
Virgin Orbit has managed a third successful mission as the company deployed seven satellites into orbit from its LauncherOne rocket.
Describing itself as "the responsive launch and space solutions company," Virgin Orbit achieved two missions last year. Yesterday's launch was just a few days shy of the company's first successful mission on 17 January 2021. Its first effort, in 2020, ended in failure.
This week's launch included repeat business from the US Department of Defense and Polish company SatRevolution. The payload included experiments in space-based communications, debris detection, navigation, and propulsion. All in all, Virgin Orbit has managed to launch 26 satellites. Still, it's a far cry from the 109 of fellow small-sat upstart Rocket Lab and just a quarter of the payloads launched by SpaceX on its Transporter-3 mission, also on 13 January.
5G mobile phone emissions won't harm airliners, Britain's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has said, dampening down excitement in the US about mobile masts interfering with airliners' altimeters.
In December the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) issued warnings about the 5G C-band frequencies used for mobile phones, saying the 3.7-3.98GHz band used by phone masts clashed with airliner radio altimeters.
Warnings duly went out telling airlines to watch out for problems, followed by two prominent US mobile network operators delaying the rollout of the C-band.
Google is splashing the cash in the UK with a billion-dollar purchase of a London property as the ad biz looks to the office as "a place for in-person collaboration and connection."
The UK arm of the Chocolate Factory, which paid £50.4m in taxes for the year ended 30 June 2020, is spread over a number of sites and currently has over 6,400 employees. It is planning to expand its capacity for 10,000 staffers.
The commitment to getting people back into offices stands a little in contrast to other employers, and the frequent surveys showing that many workers are quite happy working remotely. For Google, the keyword is flexibility.
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