Connect with us

Published

on

Two NASA astronauts who flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in June aboard Boeing’s faulty Starliner capsule will need to return to Earth on a SpaceX vehicle early next year, NASA officials said on Saturday, deeming issues with Starliner’s propulsion system too risky to carry its first crew home as planned.

Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, both former military test pilots, became the first crew to ride Starliner on June 5 when they were launched to the ISS for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.

But Starliner’s propulsion system suffered a series of glitches in the first 24 hours of its flight to the ISS that has so far kept the astronauts on the station for 79 days as Boeing scrambled to investigate the issues.

NASA officials told reporters during a news conference in Houston that Wilmore and Williams, both former military test pilots, are safe and prepared to stay even longer. They will use their extra time to conduct science experiments alongside the station’s other seven astronauts, NASA said.

In a rare reshuffling of NASA’s astronaut operations, the two astronauts are now expected to return in February 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft due to launch next month as part of a routine astronaut rotation mission. Two of the Crew Dragon’s four astronaut seats will be kept empty for Wilmore and Williams.

The agency’s decision, tapping Boeing’s top space rival to return the astronauts, is one of NASA’s most consequential in years. Boeing had hoped its Starliner test mission would redeem the troubled program after years of development problems and over $1.6 billion in budget overruns since 2016.

Five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed during flight and it sprang several leaks of helium, which is used to pressurize the thrusters. It was still able to dock with the station, a football field-sized laboratory that has housed rotating crews of astronauts for over two decades.

NASA said in a statement Starliner will undock from the ISS without a crew in “early September.” The spacecraft will attempt to return to Earth autonomously, forgoing a core test objective of having a crew present and in control for the return trip.

“I know this is not the decision we had hoped for, but we stand ready to carry out the action’s necessary to support NASA’s decision,” Boeing’s Starliner chief Mark Nappi told employees in an email.

“The focus remains first and foremost on ensuring the safety of the crew and spacecraft,” Nappi said.

Several senior NASA officials and Boeing representatives made the decision during a Saturday morning meeting in Houston.

NASA’s space operations chief Ken Bowersox said agency officials unanimously voted for Crew Dragon to bring the astronauts home. Boeing voted for Starliner, which it said was safe.

Nelson told reporters at a news conference in Houston that he discussed the agency’s decision with Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg and was confident Boeing would continue its Starliner program. Nelson said he was “100 percent” certain the spacecraft would fly another crew in the future.

“He expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely,” Nelson said of Ortberg.

Boeing struggled for years to develop Starliner, a gumdrop-shaped capsule designed to compete with Crew Dragon as a second US option for sending astronaut crews to and from Earth’s orbit. The company is also struggling with quality issues on production of commercial planes, its most important products.

Starliner failed a 2019 test to launch to the ISS uncrewed, but mostly succeeded in a 2022 do-over attempt where it also encountered thruster problems. Its June mission with its first crew was required before NASA can certify the capsule for routine flights, but now Starliner’s crew certification path is uncertain.

The drawn-out mission has cost Boeing $125 million (roughly Rs. 1,048 crore), securities filings show. The company arranged tests and simulations on Earth to gather data that it has used to try and convince NASA officials that Starliner is safe to fly the crew back home.

But results from that testing raised more difficult engineering questions and ultimately failed to quell NASA officials’ concerns about Starliner’s thrusters and its ability to make a crewed return trip, the most daunting and complex part of the test mission.

“There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” NASA’s commercial crew program chief Steve Stich told reporters.

Starliner’s now-uncertain path to receiving a long-sought NASA certification will add to the crises faced by Ortberg, who started this month with the goal to rebuild the planemaker’s reputation after a door panel dramatically blew off a 737 MAX passenger jet in midair in January.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Continue Reading

Science

Quantum Tech Could Finally Let Astronomers Snap Direct Images of Earth-Like Exoplanets

Published

on

By

Quantum Tech Could Finally Let Astronomers Snap Direct Images of Earth-Like Exoplanets

A team of U.S.-based astronomers is building a new kind of coronagraph — one powered by quantum mechanics — that could enable direct imaging of Earth-like exoplanets previously considered too faint or too close to their host stars to detect. Traditional telescopes have advanced since Galileo’s time, with instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now capable of analysing distant planetary atmospheres. But even these devices generally are not able to capture images of planets and asteroids that orbit nearby bright stars, as their light is frequently drowned out. Now, a breakthrough could be in sight.

Quantum-Sensitive Coronagraph May Revolutionize Exoplanet Imaging With Sub-Diffraction Precision

As per a recent Space.com report, researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Maryland have developed a “quantum-sensitive” coronagraph that filters starlight before it reaches the telescope’s detector. By exploiting differences in the spatial modes of photons — how light waves behave in space — the device physically separates planetary light from overwhelming stellar glare. “This method routes photons to different regions before they even hit the sensor,” one co-author explained, emphasising its superiority to digital image processing.

This experimental device uses a “spatial mode sorter”, a series of precision-crafted optical phase masks that redirect light waves from exoplanets, allowing astronomers to view them below the diffraction limit. Normally, achieving this resolution would require telescopes too massive for current spaceflight capabilities. But quantum engineering may bypass that need altogether, provided that light purity — known as mode fidelity — reaches the stringent 1-in-a-billion requirement needed to block star photons while preserving exoplanet signals.

In lab tests, researchers successfully simulated star-planet systems and demonstrated that their system could resolve a dim, Earth-like planet even when positioned one-tenth the distance modern coronagraphs can handle. At higher star-to-planet contrast ratios — up to 1,000:1 — the device maintained accuracy within a few percentage points of theoretical limits, showcasing its potential for space-based observatories.

The technology could augment missions like NASA’s upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed to detect biosignatures on exoplanets. While scientists caution that the method isn’t a standalone solution, they believe it could dramatically expand the toolkit for planetary discovery. The findings were published on April 22 in Optica.

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who’sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.


iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15, MacBook Air (M4) and More Get Discounts During Vijay Sales Apple Days Sale



Trump Threatens 25 Percent Tariffs on Apple If iPhones Not Made in US

Continue Reading

Science

New Homo Erectus Fossils Reveal Ancient Migration Across Drowned Sundaland

Published

on

By

New Homo Erectus Fossils Reveal Ancient Migration Across Drowned Sundaland

Homo erectus, an extinct human ancestor is an important part of our evolutionary history. Emerging at least 2 million years ago, it was the first species to develop human-like body proportions and the first human species to migrate out of Africa, eventually finding its way to Southeast Asia. Homo erectus was first discovered in Java and was known as “Java Man” until the species was officially renamed. Long thought to have been isolated on the island of Java, two fossil fragments of a Homo erectus skull—which surfaced with recent ocean dredging in preparation for the construction of an artificial island—revealed that this hominin species migrated and spread throughout the islands when they could still walk over bridges of land.

The drowned Sundaland

According to four studies published in Quaternary Environments and Human, by archaeologist Harold Berghuis and his team, these lost lands, called drowned Sundaland, were once vast open plains interspersed with rivers around 140,000 years ago.

During the glacial period that chilled the Earth 140,000 years ago, sea levels in the Indonesian region of Sundaland were low enough for present-day islands to tower like mountain ranges with a lowland savannah stretching between them. It was an expanse of mostly dry grasslands with strips of forest edging the rivers, and animals like crocodiles, river sharks, elephants, hippos, rhinos, and Komodo dragons flourished in the region.

Hunting and Cultural exchanges

Berghuis and his team argue that these ancient rivers provided not just water, but sustenance through fruit-bearing trees, fish, shellfish, and edible plants. Tool marks on bones Fossils show that Homo erectus hunted river turtles and large terrestrial animals.

The hunting techniques observed, such as targeting animals in their prime, are typically associated with more modern humans, raising questions about whether this H. erectus group developed such strategies independently or learned them through cultural exchange with other human relatives like Denisovans or Neanderthals. H. erectus is believed to have survived on Java until about 117,000 years ago, well after it disappeared elsewhere in Asia.

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who’sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.


WhatsApp Rolls Out Voice Chat Feature for All Group Chats With End-to-End Encryption



Landman Season 1 Now Available on JioHotstar: What You Need to Know About American Political Drama Series

Continue Reading

Science

Einstein Probe Detects Mysterious X-ray Flare with Record-Long Emission

Published

on

By

Einstein Probe Detects Mysterious X-ray Flare with Record-Long Emission

Fast Evolving X-ray Transients (FEXTs) are intense bursts of soft X-ray emissions that can last for minutes to hours with a wide range of luminosities. Due to their enigmatic nature, FEXTs have been a importance for scientists. Einstein Probe (EP) is one of the crucial space telescopes for the search and investigation of FEXTs. An international team of astronomers using the Einstein Probe reports the discovery of a new peculiar fast-evolving X-transient. The newfound transient exhibits an unprecedentedly long-lasting X-ray emission.

A Puzzling Long-Lived X-ray Transient

The finding was detailed in a paper published May 12 on the arXiv preprint server. According to the published paper, the newfound peculiar FEXT, dubbed EP241021a, was detected on Oct 21, 2024, with the help of EP’s wide-field X-ray telescope (WXT). EP241021a was identified by WXT as an intense flare, which lasted for approximately 92 seconds and reached a luminosity of about one quindecillion erg/s. The X-ray spectrum of the flare was found to be relatively hard with a photon index of 1.8.

The team of astronomers, led by Xinwen Shu of the Anhui Normal University in China, has concluded that EP241021a is an extremely unusual transient mainly due to its extended emission period. Follow-up observations of the flare up to 79 days after its detection revealed that its X-ray light curve shows a nearly plateau phase for the first 7 days, which is followed by a steep decline during the period of about 30 days. Afterward, the X-ray emission rapidly drops under the detection level.

The researchers also detected significant multiwavelength signals associated with EP241021a. About 1.8 days after the initial X-ray detection, optical emissions were also detected. This emission is likely connected to the flare’s afterglow.

Possible origins

The origin of FEXTs is puzzling. Astronomers try to explain their origin take into account several scenarios; for instance, stellar flares, supernova shock breakouts, or long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).
Trying to explain the origin of EP241021a, the authors of the paper favor two scenarios. These are: a magnetar engine, involving a highly magnetized neutron star, or a jetted tidal disruption event (TDE), where a star is consumed by a black hole.

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who’sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.


What is US’ Stablecoin-Focussed GENIUS Act: Everything to Know



WhatsApp Rolls Out Voice Chat Feature for All Group Chats With End-to-End Encryption

Continue Reading

Trending