India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander barely kicked up any moon dust. Here’s why that matters

https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-3-lunar-lander-moon-dust

India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which aced its historic landing near the moon’s south pole last August, barely kicked up any moon dust during descent thanks to a unique configuration of engines, a new study reveals. As a result, its cameras got clear views of the landing region during the critical minutes prior to touchdown, therefore capturing images that helped the spacecraft avoid hazardous craters and ultimately land safely.

"When you’re heading [to the south pole], the scientifically interesting areas are always the hazardous regions," said Suresh K, a scientist with the Space Applications Centre (SAC), a research institution of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Gujarat, India.

Speaking on Monday (March 11) at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LSPC), which is being held this week in Texas, K shared with scientists pre- and post-landing images from the mission, which operated on the moon for two weeks before succumbing, as expected, to frigid lunar night temperatures

Related: India’s Chandrayaan-3 moon lander kicked up a ‘halo’ of dust visible from space

During descent, spacecraft fire their engines to reduce their speeds in preparation for a soft landing. The exhaust from these engines then strikes the moon’s surface, whose powder-like regolith typically blows into a large plume thanks to the moon’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere. 

Cameras onboard the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, however, detected the resultant dust plume beginning at just 59 feet (18 meters) above the moon’s surface. This marks the least amount of moon dust ever kicked up during a moon landing among missions including NASA’s Apollo ones and China’s Chang’e-3 endeavors, K said.

He and his colleagues analyzed pre- and post-landing images of the touchdown area clicked by the lander named Vikram (Sanskrit for "valor") as well as by a high-resolution camera onboard the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, which has continued to circle the moon since its lander-rover duo crashed during touchdown in 2019. The sprayed dust stemming from Vikram’s touchdown settled down into about 1,561 square feet (145 square meters) around the lander, as confirmed by a camera onboard the rover Pragyan (Sanskrit for "wisdom"). This is higher than previous estimates of 1,167 square feet (108 square meters), meaning the spacecraft would have displaced much more than 4,500 pounds (2 metric tons) of lunar regolith.

The first image of the lunar surface beamed back from ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 moon lander. (Image credit: ISRO via Twitter)

Presenting the new findings at LPSC on Monday, K attributed the intriguingly short dust plume to the lack of a central engine on the spacecraft, which resulted in a lower engine thrust during descent. Starting its “rough braking phase” at an orbit of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) above the lunar surface, when the spacecraft reached 0.4 miles (0.8 kilometers) above its targeted landing area, it switched off two of its four 800-newton engines such that two diagonal engines remained operational all the way until touchdown. The mission used the "least powerful engine till date," K said. "We’ve observed very less disturbance on the surface."

In addition to the diagonal positioning of the operating engines, the plume’s height was influenced by the spacecraft’s mass as well as local properties of the regolith. The Chandrayaan-3 mission team is still analyzing the data on that front and expects to make it public in two months, K told scientists at LPSC on Monday.

Vikram and Pragyan notched several milestones during their two operating weeks at the landing site, which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi named the Shiv Shakti Point (Sanskrit for "Shiva" and "power" respectively). The name is yet to be approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization responsible for officially naming celestial bodies and their features.

By lunar nightfall, the Pragyan rover had traversed 331 feet (101 meters) on the lunar surface, detected sulfur on the moon, rerouted after coming across a potentially deadly crater and sampled lunar regolith at seven or eight locations, said Pratim Das, the director of the science program office at ISRO in Bengaluru.

Chandrayaan-3’s landing site before landing (left) and after (right), with a composite showing the ejecta halo surrounding the Vikram lander. (Image credit: ISRO via Twitter)

The seismometer onboard Vikram also sensed several "naturally occurring events" on the moon, including moonquakes and micrometeorite impacts, whose analysis is ongoing, he said. An onboard thermal probe for the first time shallowly sank about 4 inches (10 centimeters) into the surface, capturing the temperature of lunar soil at different depths.

With the Chandrayaan-3 mission now in rearview, India is planning its next moon mission, Chandrayaan-4, which is tentatively scheduled to lift off in 2028 and aims to bring moon rocks to Earth. Modi previously said the country should aim to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040, but neither ISRO nor its partner institutions have shared details about how they plan to achieve that vision. 

via Space https://www.space.com

March 18, 2024 at 07:02AM

Microsoft Office 2024 will release as a one-time purchase

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2269136/microsoft-office-2024-release-subscription-and-one-off-purchase-windows-10-support-price.html

The rumors have now become facts. This follows speculation that Microsoft would offer the latest version of Office (officially Microsoft 365) not only as a subscription, but also as a one-off purchase again. Well, Microsoft has made it official!

The next version of Microsoft 365 (aka Microsoft Office) will be released later in 2024. In addition to Microsoft offering it as a one-off purchase, there will also be a Mac version of the program and it will support both 32- and 64-bit versions. Here’s what we know about it:

iDrive adds unlimited cloud-to-cloud backup of Microsoft 365

Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium ESD

In a blog post about the upcoming preview of Microsoft Office LTSC 2024, the company emphasizes that you can buy Microsoft Office 365 2024 and use it permanently. Of course, this only makes sense until the end of support after five years. Once support ends, you will no longer receive any security updates for Microsoft Office 2024, making it unsafe to use.

This statement only applies to Office LTSC, i.e. a variant of Microsoft Office that is intended for commercial customers and public authorities. For private users, however, the question of whether Microsoft will release Office 2024 as a non-subscription version is much more exciting. And the blog post does indeed address this:

“We also plan to release a new version of Office for home users later this year, Office 2024, which will also be supported for five years with the traditional ‘one-time purchase’ model. We have no plans to change the price of these products at the time of release. We will provide more details on the new features in Office 2024 shortly before general availability.”

Here’s what you can expect from the latest Microsoft Office 364:

  • The next version of Microsoft Office 364 for home users will launch in 2024 as Office 2024
  • Microsoft will provide updates for the next five years
  • You can purchase Microsoft Office 365 as a one-off payment
  • Office 2024 will also be released for macOS
  • Office 2024 supports Windows 10, except on ARM devices
  • Office 2024 supports 32-bit
  • The price remains unchanged

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2021, price comparison

If you’re in favor of the subscription model with annual costs or the variant with a one-off payment and no follow-up cost, the new functions are only available for the subscription model, the one-off payment version only receives security and repair updates.

The preview of Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 will be available for testers in April 2024. Microsoft is discontinuing Microsoft Publisher and Teams is missing because the company is making Teams available for download separately.

This article first appeared on PCWelt and has been translated from German to English.

via PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com

March 18, 2024 at 01:31PM

From anxiety to cancer, the evidence against ultra-processed food piles up

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/18/1238939706/ultra-processed-food-junk-food-disease-cancer-anxiety-depression-diet

Ultra-processed foods contain substances you wouldn

Americans consume more than half their daily calories from ultra-processed food. A new study finds consuming lots of this food is linked to a higher risk of many diseases.

(Image credit: Dan Kitwood)

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March 18, 2024 at 04:49AM

Watch SpaceX’s Starship reenter Earth’s atmosphere in this fiery video

https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-third-test-flight-reentry-video

SpaceX’s third Starship megarocket made sure its epic demise would be remembered.

Starship launched today (March 14) for the third time ever, soaring into space from SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas. The giant vehicle notched a number of important milestones, including opening its payload door in space and conducting a propellant-transfer demonstration away from Earth.

Starship‘s upper stage didn’t stick its planned water landing in the Indian Ocean, going dark partway through its fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere. But the ship kept its cameras on during reentry, showing us just how harrowing the ordeal was. 

Related: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in breathtaking photos

SpaceX’s Flight 3 Starship upper stage glows orange as it heats up during reentry during a test flight on March 14, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX)

The upper stage reached orbital velocity and attained a maximum altitude of 145 miles (234 kilometers) today, according to the telemetry data that SpaceX provided during its launch webcast.

The 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft sent home amazing views from this lofty perch. We saw fluffy white clouds floating above glassy seas, for example, and got peaceful looks at Earth’s curving limb against the blackness of space. 

But the tone shifted about 46 minutes after launch, when Starship had descended to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km) — low enough for the atmosphere to start making its presence felt. 

The vehicle’s onboard cameras showed clouds of orange blooming against Starship’s fins and belly. A few seconds later, these clouds blazed into a wall of superheated plasma that intensified as Starship got lower and lower, experiencing temperatures of up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,430 degrees Celsius).

It’s tough to send data home through such plasma fields. But Starship managed to do so, using SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites to communicate with its handlers here on Earth, company representatives said.

"Reliable high-speed, low-latency internet around the world — even while traveling at 27,000 km/h through a plasma field," Starlink’s official X account wrote shortly after today’s flight, in a post that featured a video of Starship’s reentry. 

Starship kept sending imagery until about 48.5 minutes after launch, when it had descended to an altitude of 48 miles (77 km). All telemetry ceased shortly thereafter, likely indicating when Starship gave up the ghost, breaking apart under extreme frictional forces.

Today’s test flight was a big leap forward for Starship, the 400-foot-tall (122 meters) vehicle that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars. Starship’s first two test flights, in April 2023 and November 2023, lasted just four minutes and eight minutes, respectively. 

SpaceX will try to make even more Starship progress soon; the company has already built four more of the giant stainless-steel rockets.

"These vehicles are slated for future flight tests just like today’s," Siva Bharadvaj, a space operations engineer at SpaceX, said during the launch webcast. 

"And, in fact, just this week, we static-fired our next ship that’s planning to fly and expect to test the booster as soon as the launch mount is free from today’s flight test," he added. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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March 14, 2024 at 04:07PM

SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Reached Record Heights before It Was Lost

https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-third-test-flight-launch

SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Reached Record Heights before It Was Lost

SpaceX lost both the booster and vehicle in a test launch of its massive Starship rocket. But the third try was the charm for Starship, which smoothly separated in its most successful flight to date

By Josh Dinner & SPACE.com

SpaceX Starship spacecraft lifts off.

The SpaceX Starship spacecraft lifts off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on March 14, 2024.

Credit:

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time Thursday in a historic third test flight from South Texas.

Hundreds of Spring Break spectators, rocket launch chasers and SpaceX fans gathered along the southern shores of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the biggest rocket ever built. About 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of the crowds, SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle lifted off this morning (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT) from the company’s manufacturing and test launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach.

"Starship reached orbital velocity," SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter) after liftoff. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!" The launch occurred on the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding in 2002, the company said.


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Neither the Starship vehicle nor its Super Heavy booster survived all the way through to their intended splashdown, but SpaceX officials said the test flight achieved several of its key goals during the flight.

Cheers erupted from the South Padre crowd as the dim morning sky was illuminated by the ignition of Starship’s 33 first-stage Raptor engines, which quickly shrouded nearly the entire vehicle in a plume of dust and smoke. Seconds later, the 400-foot tall (122 meters) rocket rose from the plume, quickly increasing its climb skyward.

"This flight pretty much just started, but we’re farther than we’ve ever been before," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said just after liftoff in a livestream. "We’ve got a starship, not just in space, but on its coast phase into space."

Today’s launch, designated Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked Starship. The first and second Starship launches both ended explosively last year, with the vehicles detonating before the completion of each flight’s mission objectives. However, data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers get Starship ready for success down the road.

Improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year included the implementation of a "hot staging" technique, in which the upper stage engines begin firing before Starship’s first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, fully separates. IFT-2’s hot staging maneuver was a success, as it was today as well.

High in the sky, Starship’s two stages separated about 2 minutes 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper-stage spacecraft onward to space while Super Heavy began preparations for a boostback burn to redirect its trajectory. That post-staging burn reversed Super Heavy’s velocity, and was intended to be followed minutes later by a landing burn above the Gulf of Mexico. However, it appears the Super Heavy’s engines did not relight as planned, leading to the loss of the booster.

"It didn’t light all the engines that we expected and we did lose the booster," Huot said. "We’ll have to go through the data to figure out exactly what happened, obviously."

Starship is designed to be fully reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch its Super Heavy boosters, as it does with its Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two "chopstick" arms on Starship’s launch tower will catch the Super Heavy booster as it returns for landing, but IFT-3’s Super Heavy was always expected to splash down in the Gulf.

Starship’s upper stage continued flying after separation, but didn’t attempt to go into a full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered a suborbital coast phase as it soared above Earth, during which SpaceX hoped to demonstrate two of the spacecraft’s flight systems toward vehicle qualification — the reignition of Starship’s Raptor engines and the transfer of cryogenic fuel between tanks. Following these demonstrations, the spacecraft was expected to splash down in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, but SpaceX lost contact with the Ship during reentry.

"We are making the call now that we have lost Ship 28," Huot said, referring to the Starship vehicle number, after an extended period without telemetry of contact with the vehicle. "We haven’t heard from the ship up until this point and so the team has made the call that Ship has been lost. So, no splashdown today."

Rapid progress is needed for Starship, which is on the critical path for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission. Artemis 3 aims to land the first humans on the moon since the end of the Apollo era in the early 1970s. Artemis 3 is currently scheduled for 2026, giving Starship less than two years to meet NASA vehicle qualifications for landing astronauts on the lunar surface.

Copyright 2024 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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March 14, 2024 at 01:34PM

OpenAI’s Figure 01 Humanoid Robot Will AMAZE and TERRIFY You

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2024/03/14/openais-figure-01-humanoid-robot-will-amaze-and-terrify-you/

Hold onto your seats, geeks, because the future just got a lot closer—and it’s brought a humanoid robot named Figure 01 along for the ride. In a jaw-dropping display of artificial intelligence and robotics, Figure, in collaboration with OpenAI, has unveiled a video that’ll leave you equal parts amazed and slightly unnerved.

Picture this: a human engaging in a natural conversation with Figure 01, prompting the robot to identify objects in its surroundings with eerie precision. From a red apple on a plate to dishes in a drying rack, Figure 01’s responses are not only accurate but delivered in a remarkably human-like tone.

And it gets even more mind-blowing. When asked for something to eat, Figure 01 effortlessly hands over the apple, showcasing not just intelligence but a surprising level of dexterity. And when tasked with cleaning up a mess, the robot not only complies but offers explanations for its actions.

Perhaps the most chilling moment comes when Figure 01 predicts the next move based on the arrangement of objects on the table, demonstrating a level of foresight that’s nothing short of astonishing.

But with great advancements come great existential questions—watch the video and see for yourself. It’s a glimpse into a future that’s simultaneously thrilling and unnerving.

Click This Link for the Full Post > OpenAI’s Figure 01 Humanoid Robot Will AMAZE and TERRIFY You

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March 14, 2024 at 09:21AM

An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step towards more useful AI

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/13/1089764/an-ai-that-can-play-goat-simulator-is-a-step-towards-more-useful-ai/

Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D research environments. It’s a step towards more generalized AI that can transfer skills across multiple environments.  

Google Deepmind has had huge success developing game-playing AI systems. Its system AlphaGo, which beat top professional player Lee Sedol at the game Go in 2016, was a major milestone that showed the power of deep learning. But unlike earlier game-playing AI systems, which mastered only one game, or could only follow single goals or commands, this new agent is able to play in a variety of different games, including Valheim and No Man’s Sky.

Training AI systems in games is a good proxy for real-world tasks. “A general game-playing agent could, in principle, learn a lot more about how to navigate our world than anything in a single environment ever could,” says Michael Bernstein, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, who was not part of the research. 

“One could imagine one day rather than having superhuman agents which you play against, we could have agents like SIMA playing alongside you in games with you and with your friends,” says Tim Harley, a research engineer at Google DeepMind who was part of the team that developed the agent, called SIMA (Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent). 

The Google DeepMind team trained SIMA on lots of examples of humans playing video games, both individually and collaboratively, alongside keyboard and mouse input and annotations of what the players did in the game, says Frederic Besse, a research engineer at Google DeepMind.  

They then used an AI technique called imitation learning to teach the agent to play games as humans would. SIMA can follow 600 basic instructions, such as “turn left,” “climb the ladder” and “open the map” which can be completed in less than approximately 10 seconds.

The team found that a SIMA agent that was trained on many games was better than an agent that learned how to play just one. This is because it was able to take advantage of the shared concepts between games to learn better skills and to be better at carrying out instructions, says Besse. 

“This is again a really exciting key property as we have an agent that can play games it has never seen before essentially,” says Besse. 

Seeing this sort of knowledge transfer between games is a significant milestone for AI research, says Paulo Rauber, a lecturer in artificial Intelligence at Queen Mary University of London. 

The basic idea of learning to execute instructions based on examples provided by humans could lead to more powerful systems in the future, especially with bigger datasets, Rauber says. SIMA’s relatively limited dataset is what is holding back its performance, he says. 

Although the number of game environments it’s been trained on is still small, SIMA is on the right track for scaling up, says Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA who runs its  AI Agents Initiative. 

But the AI system is still not close to human-level, says Harley from Google DeepMind. For example, in the game No Man’s Sky, the AI agent could do just 60% of the tasks humans could do. And when the researchers removed the ability for humans to give SIMA instructions, they found the agent performed much worse than before. 

Next, Besse says the team is working on improving the agent’s performance. They want to get the AI system to work in as many environments as possible and learn new skills, and allow people to be able to chat and get a response from the AI agent. The team also wants SIMA to have more generalized skills, allowing it to pick up games it has never seen before quickly, much like a human can. 

Humans “can generalize very well to unseen environments and unseen situations. And we want our agents to be just the same,” says Besse. 

SIMA inches us closer towards a “ChatGPT moment” for autonomous agents, says Roy Fox, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine.  

But this is a long way away from actual autonomous AI. That would be “a whole different ball game,” he says. 

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March 13, 2024 at 09:17AM