- In Helldivers 2’s clearest ‘are we the baddies’ moment yet, players can remove safety systems protecting the community’s favorite character just to buff Stratagems Gamesradar
- Helldivers 2 Dev Warns Players Not to Buy ‘Rogue Item’ in Most Lore Friendly Way Possible IGN
- ‘Rogue item detected’: Helldivers 2 dev orders players to ignore a mysterious ship upgrade that promises ‘new stratagem permits’ PC Gamer
- What is the Catalog Expansion in Helldivers 2? Insider Gaming
- “We instruct all Helldivers to avoid this rogue item”: The Ministry of Truth Doesn’t Want You to Make This Helldivers 2 Purchase for Super Earth imdb
Tag Archives: clearest
Clearest images yet of Europa and Ganymede from Earth
Astronomers have revealed the most stunning and detailed images of two of Jupiter’s largest moons ever obtained from the surface of Earth.
The images show the icy surfaces and details of the processes that shape the chemical composition of Europa and Ganymede, two of Jupiter‘s four Galilean moons, which are named after the astronomer who first observed them. And scientists hope that the new images, captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, will lay the groundwork for future space missions focused on these worlds.
The highly detailed observations reveal geological features on the two frozen Jovian moons including a long, rift-like marking that cuts across the surface of Europa, a type of deformation referred to by planetary scientists as a “linae.”
Related: Juno photos reveal more stunning glimpses of Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa
Both the observations of Europa, which is around the size of Earth’s moon, and of Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon and larger than Mercury, record the amount of sunlight reflected from the moons’ icy surfaces. This observation produces what astronomers call a reflectance spectrum, which they can then analyze via a process called spectroscopy to reveal the chemical “fingerprints” of specific elements. These reflectance spectra allowed the scientists to determine the chemical composition of both Jovian moons.
The analysis of Europa showed that its crust is primarily composed of frozen water ice with non-ice materials, including a variety of different salts that reflectance spectroscopy couldn’t identify, across its surface.
“We mapped the distributions of the different materials on the surface, including sulfuric acid frost, which is mainly found on the side of Europa that is most heavily bombarded by the gasses surrounding Jupiter,” team leader and University of Leicester School of Physics and Astronomy Ph.D. student Oliver King, said in a statement. “The modeling found that there could be a variety of different salts present on the surface but suggested that infrared spectroscopy alone is generally unable to identify which specific types of salt are present.”
The team’s observations of Ganymede, meanwhile, revealed two types of terrain across the moon’s surface. Younger areas were marked by large amounts of water ice than much older regions, which are made up of a dark gray material that the team has not yet been able to identify.
Seen as blue-colored areas in the VLT image, the icy regions of Ganymede include its polar ice caps and craters where asteroid impacts have freshly exposed the ice that makes up the Galilean moon’s crust. King and his colleagues also used the images to map the size of ice grains across Ganymede’s surface and determine how different salts may be distributed over it.
“[The VLT] has allowed us to carry out detailed mapping of Europa and Ganymede, observing features on their surfaces smaller than 150 kilometers [90 miles] across — all at distances over 600 million kilometers [370 million miles] from the Earth,” King said. “Mapping at this fine scale was previously only possible by sending spacecraft all the way to Jupiter to observe the moons up close.”
This research doesn’t mean that future missions to these moons are off the table, however. On the contrary, this mapping of Europa and Ganymede makes the prospect of these spacecraft missions even more enticing.
Setting the scene for future exploration
Leigh Fletcher supervised the VLT investigation of Europa and Ganymede and is also a member of the science teams for ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, each set to explore these Jovian moons in the early 2030s.
The missions will begin when JUICE launches in 2023 to study Europa and Ganymede, as well as a third Jovian moon, Callisto, plus the gas giant’s atmosphere and magnetic field.
“These ground-based observations whet the appetite for our future exploration of Jupiter’s moons,” Fletcher said. “Planetary missions operate under tough operating constraints and we simply can’t cover all the terrain that we’d like to, so difficult decisions must be taken about which areas of the moons’ surfaces deserve the closest scrutiny.” Now, those decisions can incorporate additional context.
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will follow JUICE to the launch pad in 2024 and will focus on determining whether the ocean hiding below the moon’s icy surface has conditions favorable to life. Unlike JUICE, Europa Clipper will keep its focus firmly on Europa, analyzing both the internal ocean and the dynamics of the ice shell.
The team’s work is published in two separate papers; the Europa research is detailed in The Planetary Science Journal and the team’s Ganymede findings are discussed in a paper accepted for publication in the journal JGR: Planets and currently available on preprint server ArXiv.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
The clearest ever image of Saturn has been captured
An astrophotographer has taken his clearest ever picture of Saturn while it made its closest approach to Earth this year.
Our planet moved almost directly between Saturn and the sun on Sunday, in an annual celestial event known as ‘opposition’.
This is the moment when the gas giant is closest to us and is in its full phase, so can make for a great view even with the naked eye.
Andrew McCarthy dodged the monsoon weather of Arizona in search of clearer skies to catch a glimpse of the ringed planet above Los Angeles, US, on Sunday.
From the roof of a multi-storey car park, he used two cameras to take more than 100,000 images of Saturn, before layering them together to create the spectacular shot.
The result is out of this world, as the iconic rings illuminate the planet against the dark sky, with some of the many moons of Saturn appearing like stars around it.
Our planet moved almost directly between Saturn and the sun on Sunday, in an annual celestial event known as ‘opposition’. This is the moment when the gas giant is closest to us and is in its full phase, so can make for a great view even with the naked eye
Andrew McCarthy dodged the monsoon weather of Arizona in search of clearer skies to catch a glimpse of the ringed planet above Los Angeles, US, on Sunday
On Sunday, Saturn was 750 million miles (1.3 billion km) away from Earth – the closest possible point. It was travelling at an average speed of 6.02 miles (9.69 km) a second
‘This was captured using an 11′ telescope and two cameras, one for colour and one for detail,’ McCarthy said.
‘It is created from over 100,000 individual image frames captured over a period of about 30 minutes in the wee hours of the morning.
‘I used a parking garage to elevate myself over the air currents that distort things closer to the ground, and the lights didn’t affect the image since the planet was so bright.’
On Sunday, Saturn was 750 million miles (1.3 billion km) away from Earth, travelling at an average speed of 6.02 miles (9.69 km) a second.
It reached its point of opposition at 18:00 BST (13:00 EDT) shining at a stellar magnitude of 0.3.
This event occurs every 54 weeks because it takes our solar system’s second-largest planet roughly 29.5 years to complete a single orbit of the sun.
As a result, each year we have to travel slightly further in orbit to catch up to, and pass, Saturn.
Moving almost three times as quickly, Earth undertakes Saturn every 378 days, passing directly between it and the sun.
In 2023 Saturn will be at opposition on 27 August, and in 2024 it will be on 8 September.
McCarthy was forced to drive from Arizona to capture the crystal-clear images, due to the incoming monsoon season.
‘The Southwest has been getting a lot of clouds and rain at night,’ he said.
‘With planetary photography, it’s very different than a lot of other types of celestial photography because the planets themselves are just so small.
‘The air currents will basically just fold over the image of Saturn and Jupiter or whatever and completely obscure details.
‘So it’s very important that you get the calmest skies possible, and it goes all the way up to the upper atmosphere.’
McCarthy headed for Los Angeles after the forecast called for five out of five clear skies above the city, where he used an infrared light filter to capture the shape of the planet and its rings.
Andrew (pictured) headed for Los Angeles after clear skies were forecasted, and he used an infrared light filter to capture the shape of Saturn and its rings
He said: ‘It narrows the amount of light that’s coming through and passes it down to the infrared, which is going to scatter significantly less than those the shorter wavelengths, like blue.
‘And that allowed me to get really crisp details on the planet, really defined ring edges and, of course, just the beautiful, beautiful shape of the planet.
‘By blending these images together, I was able to get the best of both worlds where I had to use the infrared, which really sharpened things up, had the individual colour filters, which gave me a lot of colour depth, which is why I like the cloud bands on scatter has like distinctly different colours.’
Andrew’s love of the universe began when he was just nine years old when he peered through his dad’s telescope in his backyard and caught his first glimpse of Saturn.
He added: ‘By a stroke of luck, the ‘star’ I was pointed at wasn’t a star at all. It was a whole other planet. Saturn, complete with rings, and moons, was right there in my eyepiece.
‘I experienced what I can only describe as a life-changing perspective shirt. I realised that while I lived my day-to-day life, there was a whole universe out there that I was completely ignoring.’
Back in May, Andrew captured a 286-megapixel image of the sun during the most intense period of solar activity in decades.
The picture shows huge fireballs circling on the surface of the sun, and can be zoomed in to see the full fiery mass in extreme detail.
He took the pictures through his telescope, being careful not to be blinded by the harsh rays.
The high-definition image is a mosaic of about 50 tiles, each made up of 600 layered photos.
US astrophotographer, Andrew McCarthy, chose 30,000 photos to create a mosaic image that captured the sun in high definition from Florence, Arizona, USA
The image captures the dark spots, known as active regions, on the sun’s surface as well as bright sunspots that burst from the fireball
Tim Cook gives clearest hint yet that Apple’s building a headset
Apple CEO Tim Cook poses for a portrait next to a line of new MacBook Airs as he enters the Steve Jobs Theater during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California on June 6, 2022 .
Chris Tuite | AFP | Getty Images
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently gave the closest thing to a confirmation that Apple’s building a headset.
Cook was asked in a recent interview with China Daily USA what he thinks the key factors are for augmented reality, or AR, to succeed in the consumer market.
“I am incredibly excited about AR as you might know. And the critical thing to any technology, including AR, is putting humanity at the center of it,” he said, echoing comments he’s made in the past about how important AR is to the company.
He then described Apple’s work in the space so far, which has been focused on AR apps on the iPhone and iPad, before adding, “But I think we’re still in the very early innings of how this technology will evolve. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities we’ve seen in this space, and sort of stay tuned and you’ll see what we have to offer.”
AR or “mixed reality” describes technology that superimposes computer-generated images over views of the real world, contrasted with virtual reality, or VR, which completely immerses the viewer in a computer-generated world.
It’s one of the clearest examples yet of Cook acknowledging that Apple has something bigger in the works. While the current apps can be useful for things like mapping a room or seeing if a new piece of furniture might fit, it seems more likely that Apple has been building the library and tools for developers to build apps for something like a headset.
Bloomberg said in May that Apple recently showed its AR/VR headset to the Apple board and that the company plans to announce it as early as the end of this year, although it could slip into next year. The same report said Apple plans to sell the headset in 2023.
Apple would be playing catch-up with a number of other big tech companies, particularly Meta, which changed its name from Facebook last year to signify its revamped focus on immersing users in virtual worlds known as the “metaverse,” and Microsoft, which first introduced its Hololens AR glasses in 2016.
Pelosi says Hong Kong’s arrest of cardinal ‘one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slammed the arrest of a Catholic cardinal in Hong Kong, calling it “one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown” in an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Post.
Cardinal Joseph Zen and four other people were arrested earlier this week by national security police in Hong Kong but were later released on bail amid continuing arrest operations, the Post reported.
The four had been involved in the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, now disbanded, which paid for the medical and legal fees of those were detained during pro-democracy protests in 2019 as well as offering other financial assistance, according to the newspaper.
The five people arrested were trustees of the fund, and their work on the fund was cited in their arrest. They were accused of foreign collusion and detained under Hong Kong’s national security law.
“Zen’s arrest is one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown as Hong Kong fights for its freedoms — and of Beijing’s growing desperation and fear that it is losing this fight. Indeed, this act of persecution is a sign of weakness, not a show of strength,” Pelosi wrote.
Pelosi urged others to condemn the arrests, which she said were “an affront to religious freedom, political freedoms and human rights.”
“As I have said before, if we do not speak out for human rights in China because of commercial interests, we lose all moral authority to speak out on human rights anywhere in the world,” she added.
Imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in 2020, the national security law gives more control to China over punishing activists and demonstrators and offers less judicial authority to Hong Kong on cases.
The U.S. has been among several countries to criticize the law.
Pelosi says Hong Kong’s arrest of cardinal ‘one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slammed the arrest of a Catholic cardinal in Hong Kong, calling it “one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown” in an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Post.
Cardinal Joseph Zen and four other people were arrested earlier this week by national security police in Hong Kong but were later released on bail amid continuing arrest operations, the Post reported.
The four had been involved in the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, now disbanded, which paid for the medical and legal fees of those were detained during pro-democracy protests in 2019 as well as offering other financial assistance, according to the newspaper.
The five people arrested were trustees of the fund, and their work on the fund was cited in their arrest. They were accused of foreign collusion and detained under Hong Kong’s national security law.
“Zen’s arrest is one of the clearest signs yet of Beijing’s worsening crackdown as Hong Kong fights for its freedoms — and of Beijing’s growing desperation and fear that it is losing this fight. Indeed, this act of persecution is a sign of weakness, not a show of strength,” Pelosi wrote.
Pelosi urged others to condemn the arrests, which she said were “an affront to religious freedom, political freedoms and human rights.”
“As I have said before, if we do not speak out for human rights in China because of commercial interests, we lose all moral authority to speak out on human rights anywhere in the world,” she added.
Imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in 2020, the national security law gives more control to China over punishing activists and demonstrators and offers less judicial authority to Hong Kong on cases.
The U.S. has been among several countries to criticize the law.
A European-Japanese spacecraft snapped the clearest photo of Mercury in 6 years as it flew past the planet
Mercury is finally back in the spotlight, with a space probe zooming past its cratered surface for the first time in six years.
As it flew past Mercury on Friday, the BepiColombo spacecraft snapped the above photo from 1,500 miles (2,418 kilometers) away, about 10 minutes after skimming past the planet. The image shows ancient lava fields in Mercury’s northern hemisphere.
This is BepiColombo’s first good look at its target planet since it launched in 2018. The spacecraft is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It’s on track to fall into orbit around Mercury in 2025, when it will map the planet’s surface, analyze its composition, and sense its magnetic field. Scientists hope all this data will reveal the history of the closest planet to the sun.
But first, BepiColombo has to swing past Earth, Venus, and Mercury, leveraging the planets’ gravity to pull itself toward its ultimate orbital path. The spacecraft has already flown past Earth and Venus. Friday marked the first of six Mercury flybys.
“The flyby was flawless from the spacecraft point of view, and it’s incredible to finally see our target planet,” Elsa Montagnon, the mission’s spacecraft operations manager, said in a press release.
The last time a spacecraft flew this close to Mercury was in 2015, when NASA’s Messenger probe took one last look at the planet’s craters before crashing into its surface.
BepiColombo’s footage shows Mercury fading into the distance
BepiColombo’s Mercury photos are so detailed that scientists can identify particular craters, named Rudaki, Lemontov, and Calvino.
But BepiColombo isn’t even using its best lens yet. The images from Friday’s flyby come from its black-and-white monitoring cameras, but the spacecraft also has a high-resolution camera suite that it will deploy once it finally achieves Mercury orbit.
The ESA assembled 53 images from BepiColombo’s flyby into a video, below, to show the planet fading into the distance as the spacecraft zipped away.
At its closest approach, the spacecraft was just 124 miles (199 kilometers) above Mercury’s surface – but it was on the side of the planet farthest from the sun, engulfed in nighttime darkness.
BepiColombo didn’t get a good look at Mercury until it had already zipped past and the planet’s sunny side came into view. The closest image in this sequence is about 620 miles (1,000 km) from Mercury.
“It was very exciting to see BepiColombo’s first images of Mercury, and to work out what we were seeing,” David Rothery, who leads the ESA’s Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group, said in the release. “It has made me even more enthusiastic to study the top quality science data that we should get when we are in orbit around Mercury, because this is a planet that we really do not yet fully understand.”
Read the original article on Business Insider