Connect with us

Published

12 months ago

on

A four-person crew for SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission arrived in Florida on Monday ahead of their August 26 launch to space for a mission that includes the first privately managed spacewalk, a risky endeavor only government astronauts have done in the past.

The crew — a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees — neared the end of more than two years of training for the mission, in which they will venture out of their Crew Dragon capsule in Earth’s orbit for a tethered spacewalk.

The mission will be a major first test of SpaceX’s new astronaut spacesuits and marks the latest risky, high-stakes commercial milestone that Elon Musk’s space company is looking to clinch on the billionaire’s path to eventually building colonies on Mars.

“Whatever risk associated with it, it is worth it,” said mission commander Jared Isaacman, the CEO of electronic payment company Shift4 who is also the head of the SpaceX-affiliated Polaris program.

“We have no idea what it could do to really change the trajectory of humankind … there has to be some first steps in this direction,” Isaacman told reporters on Monday during a news conference.

Isaacman is bankrolling the mission and others under his Polaris program. He declined to say how much he has spent on the missions so far, but it’s a total that would be hundreds of millions of dollars.

The financial investments into development of SpaceX’s new spacesuits was “shared across the Polaris team along with SpaceX,” Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, told reporters.

The launch is scheduled for 3:38 a.m. ET (0738 GMT) on August 26 from SpaceX’s launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission is expected to last six days, with the spacewalk — formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA) — planned for the third day.

The rest of the Polaris Dawn crew includes mission pilot Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who was also on the Inspiration4 mission.

SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both Lead Space Operations Engineers at the company, will be mission specialists.

Crew Dragon has no airlock, so its entire cabin will be slowly depressurised ahead of the spacewalk, meaning all four astronauts will be testing out the new spacesuits. But only two, Isaacman and Gillis, will float outside the spacecraft.

Only government astronauts from the US, former Soviet Union and Russia, the European Space Agency, Canada and China have conducted spacewalks. Using American and Russian spacesuits, over 270 spacewalks have been conducted outside the International Space Station since its inception in 2000.

“EVA is a risky adventure. But again, we did all the work to really get ready for this,” said Gerstenmaier, who was NASA’s human spaceflight chief until 2020.

“We kind of built off of what NASA’s heritage was, but I think we’ve also extended NASA’s heritage a little bit further,” Gerstenmaier said.

While SpaceX uses its Crew Dragon capsule to send astronauts to and from the ISS for NASA, the company has sought to arrange privately funded spaceflights that feature new milestones with each mission.

The first mission led by Isaacman, Inspriration4 in 2021, was the first all-civilian, privately funded flight into Earth’s orbit. SpaceX this month said it plans to launch next year the first crew to ever orbit the Earth pole-to-pole, featuring a multinational crew.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

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

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Science

Gold Defies Physics: Remains Solid at 14x Its Melting Point in Superheating Experiment

Published

19 hours ago

on

August 2, 2025

By

Gold Defies Physics: Remains Solid at 14x Its Melting Point in Superheating Experiment

In a groundbreaking experiment, gold has defied the expectations that it was still solid even after being heated above the standard temperature. With the help of rapid laser bursts, the scientists could superheat gold beyond the entropy catastrophe, which is a theoretical boundary at which solids need to melt due to extreme heat. To the surprise, the gold was in the structure temporarily, and then it led to the rethinking of how matter behaves when provided with intense conditions. Such a rare phenomenon is known as superheating, where the heating happens so fast that atoms don’t get enough time to reorganise themselves into a liquid.

Gold Withstands the Entropy Catastrophe: What Is Superheating?

As per Science Alert, the atomic structure of gold resisted melting and absorbed the heat quickly, even faster than the response of its atoms. Scientists performed this study at 19,000 Kelvin, and gold remained solid for 2 picoseconds, which is enough to challenge the theory of physics.

Conventionally, the physicist believed that solids could not survive heat more than three times their melting point. This experiment, although pushed gold to 14 times the threshold, with the help of advanced techniques, which involved X-ray reflections to track the heat absorption accurately. The findings suggest that the materials can resist melting beyond the previously known boundaries; however, only for brief moments, which are difficult to even imagine.

Could Other Solids Resist Melting Like Gold? What This Means for Future Research

The results found by the scientists don’t change the law of thermodynamics. However, they suggest that such laws cannot be completely applied in ultra-fast reactions, and atoms cannot move or rearrange in this much time. Most importantly, gold had no place to go, and this let it remain solid even after heating to unexpected temperatures.

This unlocks the new possibilities fr understanding the extreme situations, from the impact of asteroids to the nuclear reactors. Scientists now wonder if other solids could also show the same tolerance, and rule out the current model of melting points, which need to be known altogether. Science must revisit the question asked by one scientist that how hot can you make something before melting?

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.


Switch 2 Has Sold 6 Million Units Since Launch, Nintendo Confirms



Elon Musk’s Neuralink to Test Brain Chips in Clinical Study in Great Britain

Continue Reading

Science

New Inelastic Dark Matter Model Could Bypass Current Limits of Particle Detection

Published

20 hours ago

on

August 2, 2025

By

New Inelastic Dark Matter Model Could Bypass Current Limits of Particle Detection

A group of physicists at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Physics has proposed a model of the behaviour of dark matter (DM) in the presence of dark energy (DE) that is compatible with current astronomical observations. A model of inelastic DM can be realised from light-weight particles, which are collectively interacting through the massive vector mediator, and the model is an alternative explanation for DM relics in the universe. Importantly, this framework may have the potential to circumvent the experimental hurdles for the detection of DM that have thus far kept it in the dark. The findings are published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, and its authors believe it has the potential to “revolutionise” how particle physics analyses are conducted in the future.

Light Mediator ZQ Offers New Clues to Elusive Dark Matter and Its Cosmic Origins

As per the users’ report, they have developed the following new model: a heavy, stable DM from a light, unstable one. This can be expressed as a heavy stable DM due to a heavy unstable one, which may give rise to the “thermal freeze-out” in the universe. It doesn’t just interact with visible matter but with dark matter as well, and that’s how you get the new observational windows.

To explain why the dark matter has not been observed until now, the model further involves a decay of the unstable dark matter χ2 to some species not disturbing the CBR, and thus also not presenting a visible/observable decay signal. The picture is consistent with current astrophysical and experimental constraints, avoiding simpler `vanilla’ DM scenarios.

ZQ-induced vector mediators are light portals connecting the two sectors and may mediate the direct interactions between the dark sector and the SM particles. The black line indicates the region in the parameter space where dark matter can be hiding unobserved — this is to be addressed in future experiments.

The study suggests the search for dark matter should pivot from the “discovery frontier”, in which exquisitely sensitive instruments scan for signals, to the “intensity frontier”, which seeks ever-finer measurements to tease out anomalies. Future experiments will seek to dig more deeply into these unexplained corners of particle physics with a new online tool.

Continue Reading

Science

Massive 200-Light-Year Cloud May Be Channeling Matter to the Milky Way’s Core

Published

21 hours ago

on

August 2, 2025

By

Massive 200-Light-Year Cloud May Be Channeling Matter to the Milky Way's Core

Astronomers have found a vast, never-before-noticed reservoir of stellar material, hundreds of light-years across, lurking in a cold, dark, starless swath of our galaxy. It’s dubbed the Midpoint Cloud and was identified using the Green Bank Telescope; it appears to channel dense clouds of material into the heart of our galaxy. It harbours active regions filled with dense dust lanes and star formation possibilities. These lanes could be bringing twisted matter into the galaxy’s central bar, shaping how stars form in this extreme environment and offering a rare snapshot of the first stages of a galaxy’s evolution.

Newly Found Midpoint Cloud May Be Key to Star Formation in the Milky Way’s Core

As per the study, researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory confirmed the size and shape of the GMC based on mass, density, and movement. The gassy chaos in the cloud mirrors the caustic turmoil at the galactic centre, yielding measurements from a faint object that says something about an energetic event 200 light-years distant. That could be a link from the field-like tranquillity of our own Milky Way’s disk to the mayhem of its core.

Perhaps analogously to gas channels, a thick dust lane in the Midpoint cloud could supply the central stellar bar fragment with fresh gas, again supporting an interpretation that star formation is inhibited in this region by the strong gravitational potential. But regions like the Midpoint could collect such thick gas, spurring the birth of new stars.

The team classified Knot E as a compact gas clump whose material has been eroded by both star radiation and a maser, or microwave emission, within a cloud. A shell-like feature suggests earlier supernova explosions, like those the deaths of massive stars in the region might have initiated.

The Midpoint cloud Larry Morgan, of the Green Bank Observatory, discovered is a valuable clue in our knowledge of how galaxies evolve and form stars near their centers. The finding could give scientists a way to learn how matter flows inward across the cosmos, one hidden cloud at a time.

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.


Xbox Game Pass Hit Nearly $5 Billion in Revenue for the First Time in FY 2025, Microsoft Says



Amazon Freedom Sale 2025 Highlights: Best Offers on Smart TVs, Apple Devices, Appliances and More on Day 2

Continue Reading

Trending