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A seat on a spaceship ride with billionaire Jeff Bezos went for $28 million (roughly Rs. 205 crores) during a live auction on Saturday, concluding the month-long bidding process for the sightseeing trip on the Blue Origin’s maiden voyage next month.

Within four minutes of the open of Saturday’s live phone auction, bids reached beyond $20 million (roughly Rs. 150 crores). The bidding closed seven minutes after the auction began. The identity of the winner – presumably an ultra-wealthy space aficionado – was not immediately disclosed.

The July 20 launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster from West Texas would be a landmark moment as US firms strive toward a new era of private commercial space travel.

Blue Origin’s founder and Amazon executive Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man and a lifelong space enthusiast, has been racing against fellow aspiring billionaire aeronauts Richard Branson and Elon Musk to be the first of the three to travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

“To see the earth from space, changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity,” Bezos said in a video before the final bidding took place, adding that his brother Mark will join him on the trip.

As the month-long bidding process leading up to the live auction closed on Thursday, the winning figure stood at $4.8 million (roughly Rs. 38 crores), fueled by entries from more than 6,000 people from at least 143 countries, Blue Origin said.

“Putting the world’s richest man and one of the most recognised figures in business into space is a massive advertisement for space as a domain for exploration, industrialisation, and investment,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas told clients earlier this month.

While the funds raised from the event are earmarked for charity, Blue Origin is hoping to galvanise enthusiasm for its nascent suborbital tourism business.

However, Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic, may attempt to steal Bezos’ thunder by joining a possible test flight to the edge of space over the July 4 weekend aboard Virgin’s VSS Unity spaceplane, one person familiar with the matter said.

The race is fueled by optimism that space travel will become mainstream as nascent technology is proven and costs fall, fueling what UBS estimates could be a $3 billion (roughly Rs. 21,950 crores) annual tourism market by 2030.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, have also discussed using their rockets to link far-flung global cities. UBS says that long-haul travel market could be worth more than $20 billion (roughly Rs. 150 crores), though several barriers such as air-safety certification could derail the plans.

Blue Origin has not divulged its pricing strategy for future trips.

Reuters reported in 2018 that Blue Origin was planning to charge passengers at least $200,000 (roughly Rs. 1.5 crores) for the ride, based on a market study and other considerations, though its thinking may have changed.

© Thomson Reuters 2021


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New Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to Create Videos of Black Holes

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New Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to Create Videos of Black Holes

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, stunning the world.

Now, scientists are taking it further. The next generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration aims to create high-quality videos of black holes.

But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It’s the first large physics collaboration bringing together perspectives from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

For a virtual telescope spanning the planet, the larger a telescope, the better it is at seeing things that look tiny from far away. To produce black hole images, we need a telescope almost the size of Earth itself. That’s why the EHT uses many telescopes and telescope arrays scattered across the globe to form a single, virtual Earth-sized telescope. This is known as very long baseline interferometry.

Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman, the founding director of the EHT, has likened this kind of astronomy to using a broken mirror. Imagine shattering a mirror and scattering the pieces across the world. Then you record the light caught by each of these pieces while keeping track of the timing, and collect those data in a supercomputer to virtually reconstruct an Earth-sized detector.

The 2019 first-ever image of a black hole was made by borrowing existing telescopes at six sites. Now, new telescopes at new sites are being built to better fill in the gaps of the broken mirror. The collaboration is currently in the process of selecting optimal places across the world, to increase the number of sites to approximately 20.

This ambitious endeavour needs over 300 experts organised into three technical working groups and eight science working groups. The history, philosophy and culture working group has just published a landmark report outlining how humanities and social science scholars can work with astrophysicists and engineers from the first stages of a project.

The report has four focus areas: collaborative knowledge formation, philosophical foundations, algorithms and visualisation, and responsible telescope siting.

How can we all collaborate? If you’ve ever tried to write a paper (or anything!) with someone else, you know how difficult it can be. Now imagine trying to write a scientific paper with over 300 people.

Should one expect each author to believe and be willing to defend every part of the paper and its conclusions? How should we all determine what will be included? If everyone has to agree with what is included, will this result in only publishing conservative, watered-down results? And how do you allow for individual creativity and boundary-pushing science (especially when you are attempting to be the first to capture something)? To resolve such questions, it’s important to balance collaborative approaches and structure everyone’s involvement in a way that promotes consensus, but also allows people to express dissent. Diversity of beliefs and practices among collaboration members can be beneficial to science.

How do we visualise the data? The aesthetic choices regarding the final black hole images and videos take place in a broader context of visual culture.

In reality, blue flames are hotter than flames appearing orange or yellow. But in the above false-colour image of Sagittarius A* – the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way – the colour palette of orange-red hues was chosen as it was believed orange would communicate to wider audiences just how hot the glowing material around the black hole is.

This approach connects to historical practices of technology-assisted scientific images, such as those by Galileo, Robert Hooke, and Johannes Hevelius. These scientists combined their early telescopic and microscopic images with artistic techniques so they would be legible to non-specialist audiences (particularly those who did not have access to the relevant instruments).

How philosophy can help Videos of black holes would be of significant interest to theoretical physicists. However, there is a bridge between formal mathematical theory and the messy world of experiment where idealised assumptions often do not hold up.

Philosophers can help to bridge this gap with considerations of epistemic risk – such as the risk of missing the truth, or making an error. Philosophy also helps to investigate the underlying assumptions physicists might have about a phenomenon.

For example, one approach to describing black holes is called the “no-hair theorem”. It’s the idea that an isolated black hole can be simplified down to just a few properties, and there’s nothing complex (hairy) about it. But the no-hair theorem applies to stable black holes. It relies on an assumption that black holes eventually settle down to a stationary state.

Responsible telescope siting The choice of locations for telescopes, or telescope siting, has historically been determined by technical and economic considerations – including weather, atmospheric clarity, accessibility and costs. There has been a historic lack of consideration for local communities, including First Nations peoples.

As the struggle at Mauna Kea in Hawai’i highlights, scientific collaborations are obligated to address ethical, social and environmental considerations when siting.

The ngEHT aims to advance responsible siting practices. It draws together experts in philosophy, history, sociology, community advocacy, science, and engineering to contribute to the decision-making process in ways that include cultural, social and environmental factors when choosing a new telescope location.

Overall, this collaboration is an exciting example of how ambitious plans demand innovative approaches – and how sciences are evolving in the 21st century.


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US Air Force Hands Over NISAR Satellite to ISRO in Bengaluru

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US Air Force Hands Over NISAR Satellite to ISRO in Bengaluru

The US Air Force on Wednesday handed over NISAR, an earth observation satellite jointly developed by NASA and ISRO, to the Indian space agency. A US Air Force C-17 aircraft carrying the NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar (NISAR) has landed in Bengaluru, the US Consulate in Chennai said.

The satellite is an outcome of a collaboration between the American space agency NASA and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

“Touchdown in Bengaluru! @ISRO receives NISAR (@NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) on a @USAirforce C-17 from @NASAJPL in California, setting the stage for final integration of the Earth observation satellite, a true symbol of #USIndia civil space collaboration. #USIndiaTogether,” the US Consulate General, Chennai tweeted.

NISAR will be used by ISRO for a variety of purposes including agricultural mapping, and landslide-prone areas.

The satellite is expected to be launched in 2024 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh, into a near-polar orbit.

Meanwhile, ISRO also announced that it successfully carried out an “extremely challenging” controlled re-entry experiment of the decommissioned orbiting Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1) satellite. “The satellite re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and would have disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean”, the Bengaluru-headquartered national space agency said on Twitter on Tuesday.

The final impact region estimated is in the deep Pacific Ocean within the expected latitude and longitude boundaries, an ISRO statement said.

The low Earth satellite was launched on October 12, 2011, as a joint satellite venture of ISRO and the French space agency, CNES for tropical weather and climate studies.


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NASA Confirms Plans to Launch Its Artemis 2 Crewed Moon Mission: See Date

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NASA Confirms Plans to Launch Its Artemis 2 Crewed Moon Mission: See Date

NASA is on track to launch a crewed mission around the Moon in November of next year after a successful unmanned test flight, the US space agency said Tuesday.

NASA officials provided an update on the Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the historic Apollo missions ended in 1972.

The first Artemis mission wrapped up in December with an uncrewed Orion capsule returning safely to Earth after a more than 25-day journey around the Moon.

Artemis 2, scheduled to take place in late November 2024, will take a four-person crew around the Moon but without landing on it.

“We’re looking forward to that crew flying on Artemis 2,” NASA associate administrator Jim Free told reporters. “Right now there’s nothing holding us up based on what we learned on Artemis 1.”

NASA is to reveal the members of the Artemis 2 crew later this year. All that is known so far is that one of them will be a Canadian.

Artemis 3, scheduled for about 12 months after Artemis 2, will see astronauts land for the first time on the south pole of the Moon.

“Our plan has always been 12 months, but there are significant developments that have to occur,” Free cautioned.

“We’re still sticking with that 12 months, but we’re always looking at the development of all the hardware that has to come together for that.”

Among the items still in development are a lunar lander being built by SpaceX and spacesuits, Free said.

NASA hopes to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon and later launch a years-long trip to Mars.

As part of the Artemis missions, NASA is planning to send a woman and a person of colour to the Moon for the first time.

Only 12 people — all of them white men — have set foot on the Moon.

During the trip around Earth’s orbiting satellite and back, Orion logged well over a million miles and went farther from Earth than any previous habitable spacecraft.


From smartphones with rollable displays or liquid cooling, to compact AR glasses and handsets that can be repaired easily by their owners, we discuss the best devices we’ve seen at MWC 2023 on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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