Category Uncategorized

NASA’s Treasure Map for Water Ice on Mars

This rainbow-colored map shows underground water ice on Mars. Cool colors represent less than one foot (30 centimeters) below the surface; warm colors are over two feet (60 centimeters) deep. Sprawling black zones on the map represent areas where a landing spacecraft would sink into fine dust. The outlined box represents the ideal region to send astronauts for them to be able to dig up water ice.

NASA has big plans for returning astronauts to the Moon in 2024, a stepping stone on the path to sending humans to Mars. But where should the first people on the Red Planet land?

A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters will help by providing a map of water ice believed to be as little as an inch (2.5 centimeters) below the surface.

Water ice will be a key consideration fo...

Read More

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission explains Asteroid Bennu’s mysterious particle events

This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on January 6 was created by combining two images taken by the NavCam 1 imager onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: a short exposure image (1.4 ms), which shows the asteroid clearly, and a long exposure image (5 sec), which shows the particles clearly. Other image processing techniques were also applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each layer.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin

Shortly after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu, an unexpected discovery by the mission’s science team revealed that the asteroid could be active, or consistently discharging particles into space...

Read More

200 Times Faster than ever before: The Speediest Quantum Operation yet

 Two-qubit SWAP gate with truth table.

A group of scientists led by 2018 Australian of the Year Professor Michelle Simmons has achieved the first two-qubit gate between atom qubits in silicon – a major milestone on the team’s quest to build an atom-scale quantum computer. The pivotal piece of research was published today in the journal Nature.

A two-qubit gate is the central building block of any quantum computer – and the UNSW team’s version of it is the fastest that’s ever been demonstrated in silicon, completing an operation in 0.8 nanoseconds, which is ~200 times faster than other existing spin-based two-qubit gates.

In the Simmons’ group approach, a two-qubit gate is an operation between two electron spins – comparable to the role that classical logic gates play in con...

Read More

Device Channels Heat into Light

A Rice University simulation shows an array of cavities patterned into a film of aligned carbon nanotubes. When optimized, the film absorbs thermal photons and emits light in a narrow bandwidth that can be recycled as electricity. (Credit: Chloe Doiron/Rice University)
A Rice University simulation shows an array of cavities patterned into a film of aligned carbon nanotubes. When optimized, the film absorbs thermal photons and emits light in a narrow bandwidth that can be recycled as electricity. Illustration by Chloe Doiron

Carbon nanotube films enable method to recycle waste heat. Engineers have shown how their carbon nanotube films can be used to create a device to recycle waste heat. The device could enhance solar cell output and increase the efficiency of industrial waste-heat recovery.

The ever-more-humble carbon nanotube may be just the device to make solar panels – and anything else that loses energy through heat – far more efficient.

Rice University scientists are designing arrays of aligned single-wall carbon nanotubes to channel mi...

Read More