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NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches record-breaking distance from Earth
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The Orion spacecraft, which is at the core of NASA’s historic Artemis I mission, reached its farthest distance from Earth Monday afternoon, shattering the record for the maximum distance a spacecraft designed to carry humans has ever traveled.
The space agency confirmed Monday evening that the Orion capsule had reached the midpoint of its uncrewed mission around the moon — about 270,000 miles (434,523 kilometers) from Earth. That’s more than 40,000 miles (64,374 kilometers) beyond the far side of the moon.
The previous record for the farthest a human-rated spacecraft has traveled was set during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. That mission, which did actually have humans on board, stretched out to 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from our home planet.
The goal of the Artemis I mission, which launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on November 16, is to test the Orion capsule to its limits, ensuring the vehicle is ready to safely host humans. The trial run is part of NASA’s broader Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the 1970s.
There have been several hiccups — or “funnies,” as Artemis I Mission Manager Michael Sarafin refers to them — on this mission.
One problem was related to Orion’s star tracker, a system that uses a map of the cosmos to tell engineers on the ground how the spacecraft is oriented. Some data readings weren’t coming back as expected, but NASA officials chalked that up to a learning curve that comes with operating a new spacecraft.
“We worked through that, and there was some great leadership by the Orion team,” Sarafin said at a November 18 press conference.
Overall, however, the spacecraft’s performance has been “outstanding,” Orion Program Manager Howard Hu told reporters Monday evening. The spacecraft is outperforming expectations in some respects, such as producing about 20% more power than it really needs, he noted.
Sarafin added that things are going so well that NASA is working to add seven additional mission objectives designed to gather more data about the spacecraft’s capabilities and performance.
The spacecraft is now expected to swoop back toward the moon before firing its engines on Thursday to exit its current trajectory and head back toward Earth. The Orion capsule is on track to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on December 11.
“Artemis I has had extraordinary success and has completed a series of history-making events,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Monday. “Since the launch, we have been receiving critical data back and there’s a lot more to come. … The biggest test after the launch is the reentry because we want to know that that heat shield works at about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius), almost half as hot as the sun, coming in at 32 times the speed of sound (nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour).”
Read more: A visual tour of the most powerful rocket ever built
Until the spacecraft is safely back on Earth, there is always risk in play, Sarafin added. He noted that the risk of hitting orbital debris is a constantly looming threat that won’t disappear until the capsule reenters the Earth’s atmosphere. And even after that, Orion must safely deploy parachutes to ensure a gentle ocean splashdown.
After landing, a NASA recovery ship will be waiting nearby to haul the Orion capsule to safety.
If the Artemis I mission is successful, NASA will then look to choose a crew to fly on the Artemis II mission, which could take off as soon as 2024. Artemis II will aim to send astronauts on a similar trajectory as Artemis I, flying around the moon but not landing on its surface. The Artemis III mission, currently slated for a 2025 launch, is expected to finally put boots back on the moon, and NASA officials have said it will include the first woman and the first person of color to achieve such a milestone.
NASA Artemis I – Orion Spacecraft Surpasses Apollo 13 Record Distance From Earth
On flight day 11, NASA’S Orion spacecraft captured imagery looking back at the Earth from a camera mounted on one of its solar arrays. The spacecraft is currently in a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. Credit: NASA
On day 11 of the Artemis I mission, Orion continues its journey beyond the Moon after entering a distant retrograde orbit on Friday, November 25, at 3:52 p.m. CST. Orion will remain in this orbit for six days before exiting lunar orbit to put the spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth for a Sunday, December 11, splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
At 7:42 a.m. on Saturday, November 26, Orion surpassed the distance record for a mission with a spacecraft designed to carry humans to deep space and back to Earth. The record was set during the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 miles (400,171 km) from our home planet. At its maximum distance from the Moon, Orion will be more than 270,000 miles (435,000 km) from Earth Monday, November 28.
Engineers also completed the first orbital maintenance burn by firing auxiliary thrusters on Orion’s service module at 3:52 p.m. for less than a second to propel the spacecraft at .47 feet per second. The planned orbital maintenance burns will fine-tune Orion’s trajectory as it continues its orbit around the Moon.
This high-resolution image captures the inside of the Orion crew module on flight day one of the Artemis I mission. At left is Commander Moonikin Campos, a purposeful passenger equipped with sensors to collect data that will help scientists and engineers understand the deep-space environment for future Artemis missions. At the center is the Callisto payload, a technology demonstration of voice-activated audio and video technology from Lockheed Martin in collaboration with Amazon and Cisco. Callisto could assist future astronauts on deep-space missions. Below and to the right of Callisto is the Artemis I zero-gravity indicator, astronaut Snoopy. Credit: NASA
Flying aboard Orion on the Artemis I mission is a suited manikin named after a key player in bringing Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Arturo Campos was an electrical engineer who developed a plan to provide the command module with enough electrical power to navigate home safely after an oxygen tank aboard the service module of the Apollo spacecraft ruptured. Commander Moonikin Campos is outfitted with sensors to provide data on what crew members may experience in flight, continuing Campos’ legacy of enabling human exploration in deep space.
Artemis builds on the experience of Apollo. With Artemis, humans will return to the lunar surface, and this time to stay. 
On Saturday, November 26, at 8:42 a.m. EST (13:42
NASA succeeds in putting Orion space capsule into lunar orbit, eclipsing Apollo 13’s distance
HOUSTON (CBS SF) — NASA engineers can exhale now.
Mission controllers with the Artemis program just wrapped up a critical maneuver to put the Orion space capsule into a record-breaking lunar orbit. It will now eclipse Apollo 13 to become the most distant human-capable craft ever launched from Earth.
“The goal here is to test techniques and procedures – and the spacecraft – that NASA wants to use to resume human exploration of the moon,” says CBS News Space Consultant Bill Harwood. “They want to operate it in deep space, so they can really put it through the wringer.”
Except, in this case, there are no humans aboard. That will come later.
“The main key here is to have a successful mission so that we can start looking forward to being able to fly astronauts out to the moon,” says NASA’s Jacob Bleacher.
As for when that might happen? NASA is optimistic it will be sooner than you might think.
“Late 2025 is what we’re aiming for Artemis-3 to land our astronauts on the moon,” says Bleacher, who added that he sees that target date as, “likely.”
ARTEMIS LINKS:
Orion enters lunar orbit that will let it set a distance record
Orion should surpass that at 7:42 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday. The spacecraft is expected to reach its maximum distance of more than 270,000 miles from Earth at 4:13 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, NASA said.
The distant orbit, which requires little fuel to maintain, will allow Orion to test its systems to see how the vehicle performs. The orbit is so vast, however, that the craft will complete only about half an orbit in six days before it begins its return flight to Earth.
The flight, without any astronauts on board, is the first step in NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Using cameras mounted on the outside of the spacecraft, Orion has been beaming back dramatic images and live video from its journey. including spectacular images of Earth, seen hanging in the distance, more than 200,000 miles away, in the vast, inky darkness of space.
If the current mission, known as Artemis I, goes well, NASA plans a second flight, this time with astronauts on board, as soon as 2024. That mission, known as Artemis II, would also orbit the moon, with a landing with humans to come afterward.
“The mission continues to proceed as we had planned, and the ground systems, our operations teams and the Orion spacecraft continue to exceed expectations,” Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis I mission manager, said this week. “And we continue to learn along the way about this new deep spacecraft.”
He said the Space Launch System rocket, even more powerful than the Apollo-era Saturn V, performed so well that the results were “eye-watering.” Its massive thrust, however, caused some damaged to its mobile launch tower, including blowing the doors off the tower’s elevator. But, on the whole, “the structure itself held up well,” Sarafin said.
After Orion completes half an orbit around the moon, it will slingshot itself around the moon toward home.
One of the main tests will come as the spacecraft re-renters Earth’s atmosphere, traveling at about 25,000 mph. The friction with the thickening air will produce temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The spacecraft is expected to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on Dec. 11.
While there are no real-life astronauts on board the Artemis I mission, there is a mannequin named Moonikin Campos that is riding in the commander’s seat of the Orion spacecraft. It’s outfitted with a suit and sensors to provide feedback on what the ride will be like for future astronauts.
The seat has two sensors to record acceleration and vibration. The spacesuit has sensors to record radiation levels.
The name “Moonikin” was chosen through a public contest. Campos was chosen in honor of Arturo Campos, a former NASA engineer who played a key role during the recovery of the Apollo 13 spacecraft after the mission went awry.
Two mannequin torsos are also riding along. Named Zohar and Helga, they are made from materials that NASA says “mimic human bones, soft tissues and organs of an adult female.” (Women are believed to be more sensitive to radiation exposure than men.)
They have sensors to measure radiation as well. Zohar has a radiation vest, but Helga doesn’t.
Artemis I Passes 81 Miles Above Moon’s Surface Before Heading for Record-Breaking Distance from Earth
Much like the James Webb Space Telescope, it took scientists and engineers years and multiple launch attempts to get the Artemis I SLS rocket and its Orion spacecraft up in the air. After four launch attempts over two months, the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA successfully launched just last week. Good things are now coming to those who waited: The mission is going swimmingly, and soon the spacecraft will be farther from Earth than any other vehicle meant to carry human beings has ever reached.
On Monday, Orion passed just 81 miles above the Moon’s surface while traveling at 2,128 mph. So close, yet so far away. A burn pushed that speed up to 5,102 mph as the spacecraft made its way over the previous landing sites of Apollo 11, 12 and 14, according to NASA. Here are a few more facts and figures to completely blow your mind:
Read more
Orion will travel about 57,287 miles beyond the Moon at its farthest point from the Moon on Nov. 25, pass the record set by Apollo 13 for the farthest distance traveled by a spacecraft designed for humans at 248,655 miles from Earth on Saturday, Nov. 26, and reach its maximum distance from Earth of 268,552 miles Monday, Nov. 28.
As of Monday, Nov. 21, a total of 3,715.7 pounds of propellant has been used, 76.2 pounds less than prelaunch expected values. There are 2,112.2 pounds of margin available over what is planned for use during the mission, an increase of 201.7 pounds from prelaunch expected values.
Just after 2:45 p.m. CST on Nov. 21, Orion had traveled 216,842 miles from Earth and was 13,444 miles from the Moon, cruising at 3,489 miles per hour.
The Artemis I mission is the unmanned first step back to the moon for the U.S. It’ll spend about 25 days doing a few loops around the moon before returning to Earth. The Orion spacecraft and new spacesuits onboard will be pushed to the very limits while over a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. The next step, Artemis II, is slated from sometime in 2025 and will involve a four-person crewed flight around the moon and will take human beings the farthest into space ever. By 2026, we could have boots on the as yet unexplored lunar South Pole.
The goal of the Artemis missions aren’t just a chance revisit the Moon, but to set up a permanent lunar base in orbit which will allow astronauts to spend weeks or even months exploring the Moon as well as serve as a launch point for further exploration of our solar system.
Despite early SNAFUs which delayed launches in August, September and October Orion program manager Howard Hu told reporters Monday that the Artemis 1 flight “…continues to operate exceptionally,” from the New York Times:
Except for minor glitches — Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager, called them “funnies” — the Artemis I flight has proceeded smoothly. The funnies included Orion’s star trackers being momentarily confused when the spacecraft’s thrusters fired.
“We are on flight day six of a 26-day mission,” Mr. Sarafin said on Monday, “so I would give it a cautiously optimistic A+.”
The flyby exercised the major piece of Artemis that is not American. The parts of the Space Launch rocket were built by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance while the Orion capsule itself was built by Lockheed Martin.
However, the service module — the part of Orion below the capsule that houses the thrusters, solar arrays, communications equipment and other supplies — was built by Airbus, and was one of the contributions by the European Space Agency to the Artemis program. The module will not return to Earth, but instead will be jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere shortly before the capsule splashes down.
The Orion spacecraft is expected to return to Earth Dec. 11 by splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.
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New technique for decoding people’s thoughts can now be done from a distance : ScienceAlert
Scientists can now “decode” people’s thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported.
Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
fMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information provides an indirect measure of brain activity.
By its nature, this scanning method cannot capture real-time brain activity, since the electrical signals released by brain cells move much more quickly than blood moves through the brain.
But remarkably, the study authors found that they could still use this imperfect proxy measure to decode the semantic meaning of people’s thoughts, although they couldn’t produce word-for-word translations.
“If you had asked any cognitive neuroscientist in the world 20 years ago if this was doable, they would have laughed you out of the room,” senior author Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Scientist.
Related: ‘Universal language network’ identified in the brain
For the new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team scanned the brains of one woman and two men in their 20s and 30s. Each participant listened to 16 total hours of different podcasts and radio shows over several sessions in the scanner.
The team then fed these scans to a computer algorithm that they called a “decoder,” which compared patterns in the audio to patterns in the recorded brain activity.
The algorithm could then take an fMRI recording and generate a story based on its content, and that story would match the original plot of the podcast or radio show “pretty well,” Huth told The Scientist.
In other words, the decoder could infer what story each participant had heard based on their brain activity.
That said, the algorithm did make some mistakes, like switching up characters’ pronouns and the use of the first and third person. It “knows what’s happening pretty accurately, but not who is doing the things,” Huth said.
In additional tests, the algorithm could fairly accurately explain the plot of a silent movie that the participants watched in the scanner. It could even retell a story that the participants imagined telling in their heads.
In the long term, the research team aims to develop this technology so that it can be used in brain-computer interfaces designed for people who cannot speak or type.
Read more about the new decoder algorithm in The Scientist.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
‘Spooky action at a distance’ can lead to a multiverse. Here’s how.
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics propose that our entire universe is described by a single universal wave function that constantly splits and multiplies, producing a new reality for every possible quantum interaction. That’s quite a bold statement. So how do we get there?
One of the earliest realizations in the history of quantum mechanics is that matter has a wave-like property. The first to propose this was French physicist Louis de Broglie, who argued that every subatomic particle has a wave associated with it, just like light can behave like both a particle and a wave.
Other physicists soon confirmed this radical idea, especially in experiments where electrons scattered off a thin foil before landing on a target. The way the electrons scattered was more characteristic of a wave than a particle. But then, a question came up: What, exactly, is a wave of matter? What does it look like?
Related: Do We Live in a Quantum World?
Early quantum theorists such as Erwin Schrödinger believed that particles themselves were smeared out over space in the shape of a wave. He developed his famous equation to describe the behavior of those waves, which is still used today. But Schrödinger’s idea flew in the face of more experimental tests. For example, even though an electron acted like a wave midflight, when it reached a target, it landed as a single, compact particle, so it couldn’t be physically extended in space.
Instead, an alternative interpretation began to gain ground. Today, we call it the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is by far the most popular interpretation among physicists. In this model, the wave function — the name physicists give to the wave-like property of matter — doesn’t really exist. Instead, it’s a mathematical convenience that we use to describe a cloud of quantum mechanical probabilities for where we might find a subatomic particle the next time we go looking for it.
Chains of entanglement
The Copenhagen interpretation has several problems, however. As Schrödinger himself pointed out, it’s unclear how the wave function goes from a cloud of probabilities before measurement to simply not existing the moment we make an observation.
So perhaps there’s something more meaningful to the wave function. Perhaps it’s as real as all of the particles themselves. De Broglie was first to propose this idea, but he eventually joined the Copenhagen camp. Later physicists, like Hugh Everett, looked at the problem again and came to the same conclusions.
Making the wave function be a real thing solves this measurement problem in the Copenhagen interpretation, because it stops measurement from being this super-special process that destroys the wave function. Instead, what we call a measurement is really just a long series of quantum particles and wave functions interacting with other quantum particles and wave functions.
If you build a detector and shoot electrons at it, for example, at the subatomic level, the electron doesn’t know it’s being measured. It just hits the atoms on the screen, which sends an electrical signal (made of more electrons) down a wire, which interacts with a display, which emits photons that hit the molecules in your eyes, and so on.
In this picture, every single particle gets its own wave function, and that’s it. All of the particles and all of the wave functions just interact as they normally do, and we can use the tools of quantum mechanics (like Schrödinger’s equation) to make predictions for how they’ll behave.
The universal wave function
But quantum particles have a really interesting property because of their wave function. When two particles interact, they don’t just bump into each other; for a brief time, their wave functions overlap. When that happens, you can’t have two separate wave functions anymore. Instead, you must have a single wave function that describes both particles simultaneously.
When the particles go their separate ways, they still maintain this united wave function. Physicists call this process quantum entanglement — what Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.”
When we retrace all the steps of a measurement, what comes out is a series of entanglements from overlapping wave functions. The electron entangles with the atoms in the screen, which entangle with the electrons in the wire, and so on. Even the particles in our brains entangle with Earth, with all the light coming and going from our planet, all the way up to every particle in the universe entangling with every other particle in the universe.
With every new entanglement, you have a single wave function that describes all of the combined particles. So the obvious conclusion from making the wave function real is that there is a single wave function that describes the entire universe.
This is called the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. It gets this name when we ask what happens during the process of observation. In quantum mechanics, we’re never sure what a particle will do — sometimes it may go up, sometimes it may go down, and so on. In this interpretation, every time a quantum particle interacts with another quantum particle, the universal wave function splits into multiple sections, with different universes containing each of the different possible results.
And this is how you get a multiverse. Through the mere act of quantum particles entangling with each other, you get multiple copies of the universe created over and over again all the time. Each one is identical, save for the tiny difference in some random quantum process. That means there are multiple copies of you reading this article right now, all exactly the same except for some tiny quantum detail.
This interpretation has difficulties as well — for example, how does this splitting actually unfold? But it’s a radical way to view the universe and a demonstration of just how powerful quantum mechanics is as a theory — what started as a way to understand the behavior of subatomic particles may govern the properties of the entire cosmos.
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Chinese team syncs clocks over record distance using lasers
Physicists have devised a way to synchronize the ticking of two clocks through the air with extreme precision, across a record distance of 113 kilometres.
The feat is a step towards redefining the second using optical clocks — timekeepers that are 100 times more precise than the atomic clocks on which coordinated universal time (UTC) is currently based.
Metrologists hope to use optical clocks to redefine the second in 2030. But a hurdle standing in their way is the need to find a reliable way to transmit signals between optical clocks in laboratories on different continents, to compare their outputs. In practice, this will probably mean transmitting the clocks’ time through air and space, to satellites. But this is a challenge because the atmosphere interferes with signals.
A team led by Jian-Wei Pan, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, succeeded in sending precise pulses of laser light between clocks at stations 113 kilometres apart in China’s Xinjiang province1. This is seven times the previous record2 of 16 kilometres.
The result, published in Nature1 on 5 October, is “outstanding”, says David Gozzard, an experimental physicist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Achieving such a high level of synchronization over that distance of air represents “significant progress in being able to do this between a satellite and the ground”, he adds.
Synchronizing hyper-precise clocks in hard-to-reach places could also have advantages elsewhere in research, says Tetsuya Ido, director of the Space-Time Standards Laboratory at the Radio Research Institute in Tokyo. For instance, the clocks could be used to test the general theory of relativity, which says that time should pass more slowly in places where gravity is stronger, such as at low altitudes. Comparing the ticking of two optical clocks could even reveal subtle changes in gravitational fields caused by the movement of masses — for example by shifting tectonic plates — he says.
Next-generation clocks
Since 1967, the second has been defined by atomic clocks using caesium-33 atoms: a second is the time it takes to cycle through 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the microwave radiation the atoms absorb and emit when they switch between certain states. Today, optical clocks use the higher-frequency ‘ticking’ of elements such as strontium and ytterbium, which allows them to slice time into even finer fractions.
However, official time can’t be generated using just one clock. Metrologists must average the output of hundreds of timepieces across the world. For caesium clocks, the time can be transmitted through microwave signals, but microwave radiation is too low-frequency to convey the high-frequency tick of optical clocks.
Sending signals through the air at optical wavelengths is not as easy as sending microwaves, because molecules in the air readily absorb the light, drastically reducing the strength of the signal. Furthermore, turbulence can send a laser beam off target. To compare optical clocks, physicists have so far relied mostly on transmitting signals through fibre-optic cables, or transporting the bulky, complex timepieces themselves, to compare them side by side. But these methods are impractical for creating the kind of global network needed to define the second.
Pan’s team succeeded by combining several minor developments, says Gozzard. To create their signal, the researchers used optical frequency combs — devices that produce extremely stable and precise pulses of laser light — and boosted their output using high-powered amplifiers, to minimize the signal lost when the pulses travelled through the air. The team also tuned and optimized receivers so that they could pick up low-powered signals and automatically track the direction of the incoming laser.
The group sent out time intervals using two wavelengths of visible light, and transmitted another through a fibre-optic link. By comparing the tiny differences between signals picked up at the receivers, the researchers showed that, when measured over hours, they could disseminate the ticking with a stability high enough to lose or gain only a second roughly every 80 billion years. The level of accuracy was on a par with that of optical clocks.
Not there yet
Although this transfer method is the most stable humanity has so far, it will need to be improved further to match the stability of the best optical clocks, says Gozzard.
Another limitation is that the experiment was done in a remote region with optimal atmospheric conditions, says Ido. “The humidity is quite low and air turbulence could be more quiet than in conventional urban areas,” he says. Future studies will need to check how well the method works in other locations.
But the experiment seems to be a good proxy for sending such signals into space, says Helen Margolis, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK. The amount of turbulence expected over 113 kilometres on the ground is comparable to that on the way from the ground to a satellite, she says.
Satellite-based transmission will face a further hurdle — the clocks will be orbiting at high speed, which shifts the frequency of their signals, says Gozzard.
Pan says this is one of the challenges his team will take on next. The team previously developed technologies for a quantum-communications satellite, and is now using those to develop ways to transmit between optical clocks in geostationary orbit and on the ground.
Using optical clocks in space, it would also be “possible to provide new probes for fundamental physics, such as hunting for dark matter and detecting gravitational waves”, Pan adds.