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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp. When NASA conducts research beyond our world, scientists on Earth prepare as much as possible before sending instruments on extraterrestrial journeys. One way to prepare for these exploration missions is by using machine learning techniques to develop algorithms with data from commercial instruments or from flight instruments on planetary missions.
For example, NASA uses mass spectrometer instruments on Mars missions to analyze surface samples and identify organic molecules. Developing machine learning algorithms before missions can help make the process of analyzing planetary data faster and more efficient during time-limited space operations.
In 2022, Victoria Da Poian, a data scientist supporting machine learning research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, collaborated with NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation to run two machine learning-based open science challenges, which sought ideas and solutions from the public. Solvers worldwide were invited to analyze chemical data sampled from commercial instruments located at NASA centers and data from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) testbed, which is a replica of the instrument suite onboard the Curiosity rover. The challenges encouraged participants to be creative in their approaches and to provide detailed descriptions of their method and code.
Da Poian said her team decided to use public competitions for this project to gain new perspectives: “We were really interested in hearing from people who aren’t in our field and weren’t biased by the data’s meaning or our scientific rules.”
As a result, more than 1150 unique participants from all over the world participated in the competitions, and more than 600 solutions contributing models to analyze rock and soil samples relevant to planetary science were submitted. The challenges served as proof-of-concept projects to analyze the feasibility of combining data from multiple sources in a single machine learning application.
In addition to benefitting from the variety of perspectives offered by challenge participants, Da Poian says the challenges were both time- and cost-efficient methods for discovering solutions. At the same time, the challenges invited the global community to participate in NASA research in support of future space exploration missions, and winners received $60,000 in total prizes across the two opportunities.
Da Poian used lessons learned to develop a new challenge with Frontier Development Lab , an international research collaboration that brings together researchers and domain experts to tackle complex problems using machine learning technologies.
The competition, titled “Stay Curious: Leveraging Machine Learning to Analyze & Interpret the Measurements of Mars Planetary Instruments,” ran from June to August 2024. Results included cleaning SAM data collected on Mars, processing data for a consistent, machine learning-ready dataset combining commercial and flight instrument data, investigating data augmentation techniques to increase the limited data volume available for the challenge, and exploring machine learning techniques to help predict the chemical composition of Martian terrain.
“The machine learning challenges opened the door to how we can use laboratory data to train algorithms and then use that to train flight data,” said Da Poian. “Being able to use laboratory data that we’ve collected for many years is a huge opportunity for us, and the results so far are extremely encouraging.”
Find more opportunities: https://www.nasa.gov/get-involved/
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By NASA
4 Min Read NASA’s Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star
L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). The colors within this mid-infrared image reveal details about the central protostar’s behavior.
The cosmos seems to come alive with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), this fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process of becoming a star. A central protostar grows in the neck of the hourglass, accumulating material from a thin protoplanetary disk, seen edge-on as a dark line.
The protostar, a relatively young object of about 100,000 years, is still surrounded by its parent molecular cloud, or large region of gas and dust. Webb’s previous observation of L1527, with NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), allowed us to peer into this region and revealed this molecular cloud and protostar in opaque, vibrant colors.
Image A: L1527 – Webb/MIRI
L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), is a molecular cloud that harbors a protostar. It resides about 460 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The more diffuse blue light and the filamentary structures in the image come from organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), while the red at the center of this image is an energized, thick layer of gases and dust that surrounds the protostar. The region in between, which shows up in white, is a mixture of PAHs, ionized gas, and other molecules. This image includes filters representing 7.7 microns light as blue, 12.8 microns light as green, and 18 microns light as red.
Both NIRCam and MIRI show the effects of outflows, which are emitted in opposite directions along the protostar’s rotation axis as the object consumes gas and dust from the surrounding cloud. These outflows take the form of bow shocks to the surrounding molecular cloud, which appear as filamentary structures throughout. They are also responsible for carving the bright hourglass structure within the molecular cloud as they energize, or excite, the surrounding matter and cause the regions above and below it to glow. This creates an effect reminiscent of fireworks brightening a cloudy night sky. Unlike NIRCam, however, which mostly shows the light that is reflected off dust, MIRI provides a look into how these outflows affect the region’s thickest dust and gases.
The areas colored here in blue, which encompass most of the hourglass, show mostly carbonaceous molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The protostar itself and the dense blanket of dust and a mixture of gases that surround it are represented in red. (The sparkler-like red extensions are an artifact of the telescopes’s optics). In between, MIRI reveals a white region directly above and below the protostar, which doesn’t show as strongly in the NIRCam view. This region is a mixture of hydrocarbons, ionized neon, and thick dust, which shows that the protostar propels this matter quite far away from it as it messily consumes material from its disk.
As the protostar continues to age and release energetic jets, it’ll consume, destroy, and push away much of this molecular cloud, and many of the structures we see here will begin to fade. Eventually, once it finishes gathering mass, this impressive display will end, and the star itself will become more apparent, even to our visible-light telescopes.
The combination of analyses from both the near-infrared and mid-infrared views reveal the overall behavior of this system, including how the central protostar is affecting the surrounding region. Other stars in Taurus, the star-forming region where L1527 resides, are forming just like this, which could lead to other molecular clouds being disrupted and either preventing new stars from forming or catalyzing their development.The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hanna Braun hbraun@stsci.edu Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
ARTICLE/IMAGE: Webb’s previous observation of L1527, with NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera)
VIDEO: Fly-through the star-forming Pillars of Creation
INTERACTIVE: Explore star formation via a multi-wavelength view of Herbig-Haro 46/47
POSTER: L1527 NIRCam poster
VIDEO: Science Snippets Video: Dust and the formation of Planetary Systems
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Last Updated Jul 02, 2024 Editor Stephen Sabia Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
Astrophysics James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Nebulae Protostars Science & Research Star-forming Nebulae Stars The Universe
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By NASA
NASA, STScI/AURA The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a stellar explosion throwing out sheets of debris in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy on July 7, 2003. Since its 1990 launch, Hubble has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe; with over 1.5 million observations and 20,000+ papers published on its discoveries, Hubble is the most productive science mission in the history of NASA.
See more stunning images from Hubble – and experience some of the images through sound.
Image Credit: NASA, STScI/AURA
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By USH
Peter Moon discusses a recent trip to Romania where he conducted research related to the Translyvania Rising book series. In the first part of the interview he focuses on what was discovered at a Cioclovina Cave, which he states has clear evidence of being a powerful time reactor. He believes the cave takes special significance during the 20 year planetary biorythm associated with the Montauk Project, which next occurs on 2023.
In the latter portion of the interview, Moon focuses on Book VI of the series: Forgotten Genesis where humanity's genetic origins is revealed. Moon covers how holographic records are accessed by the series protagonist Radu Cinamar who is helped in understanding humanity's origins by beings associated with an underground civilization called Apellos.
Moon elaborates on Cinamar's information about two human genotypes being created from which Sirians could incarnate on Earth, and a worker race would serve them.
The first genotype called E N L would possess more extraterrestrial genetics and thereby have greater psychic and mental abilities. In contrast, the second genotype, E N K would be more robust and better suited for living in Earth conditions. Moon discusses the Sirian geneticist Tenekau (aka Enki) responsible for creating the two human genotypes, which could be mixed to create a long lived hybrid species as discussed in ancient texts such as the King's List and Manetho's history of Egypt.
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The Davis Wilson Notes: Secret reverse-engineering program pertaining to extraterrestrial technologyBy USH
There has been renewed discussion lately regarding the Davis-Wilson notes, which detail a meeting held in 2002 that discussed a deeply secret reverse-engineering program pertaining to extraterrestrial technology.
Richard Dolan discusses the latest developments while also reviewing the notes themselves, his own personal connection to them, the arguments supporting their authenticity, and most importantly the implications.
Link to the Davis Wilson Notes: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114761/documents/HHRG-117-IG05-20220517-SD001.pdf
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