official science and technology thread

[Merkin]

Nothing mentioned in the article on this.

[84Cat]

[84Cat]

Mindblowing!

[ghostwhitehorse]

[CatsbyAZ]

Not sure which is the bigger advancement - Microsoft announcing a new quantum chip or Microsoft creating a new state of matter to do so:

"Harnessing a new type of material: All of today’s announcements build on our team’s recent breakthrough: the world’s first topoconductor. This revolutionary class of materials enables us to create topological superconductivity, a new state of matter that previously existed only in theory. The advance stems from Microsoft’s innovations in the design and fabrication of gate-defined devices that combine indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor). When cooled to near absolute zero and tuned with magnetic fields, these devices form topological superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at the wires’ ends."

[UAdevil]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00302-0

Peptides from abnormal RNA processing in cancer offer an immunotherapy target
Tumour cells often have problems processing messenger RNA. The finding that these splicing errors result in commonly expressed peptides that are recognized by immune cells offers a target for cancer treatments.

[84Cat]

'We're on the moon!' Private Blue Ghost moon lander aces historic lunar landing for NASA

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost moon lander just etched its name into the history books.

Blue Ghost aced its touchdown try early this morning (March 2), becoming just the second private spacecraft ever to soft-land on the moon. The lander hauled 10 science experiments to the lunar surface for NASA, which was understandably happy with today's result. The first photos from the probe showed Earth shining overhead.

"We're on the moon!" Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during the landing webcast. "I'm sorry — I'm just so excited right now."



https://www.space.com/the-universe/moon ... g-for-nasa

[Merkin]

[Merkin]

Amazing we were able to put a man on the moon with a computer less powerful than a digital watch.

Houston's Intuitive Machines lander is dead after landing sideways in crater near moon's south pole

https://abc7chicago.com/post/houstons-i ... w7gAZ5-Jqg

[dovecanyoncat]

Houston's Intuitive Machines lander is dead after landing sideways in crater near moon's south pole

DEI strikes again!

[UAEebs86]

This guy is a Wildcat. (MS/PhD). Looks like I overlapped one year with him in the College of Engineering.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oldest-servi ... 54759.html

Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday


America's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.

The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.

They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.

[pc in NM]

Don't Look Up!!!

A Half-Ton Spacecraft Lost by the Soviets in 1972 Is Coming Home

Kosmos-482, which was headed to Venus, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere by the end of this weekend. Experts don’t yet know where it may come down.

By Nadia Drake - May 7, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

A robotic Soviet spacecraft has been adrift in space for 53 years. It will return to Earth later this week.

Kosmos-482 launched in March 1972. If all had gone well, it would have landed on the sweltering surface of Venus and become the ninth of the uncrewed Soviet Venera missions to the planet. Instead, a rocket malfunction left it stranded in Earth orbit. Kosmos-482 has been slowly spiraling back toward our world ever since.

“It’s this artifact that was meant to go to Venus 50 years ago and was lost and forgotten for half a century,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who maintains a public catalog of objects in space. “And now it’s going to get its moment in atmospheric entry — albeit on the wrong planet.”

Cloaked in a protective heat shield, the spacecraft, weighing roughly 1,050 pounds, was designed to survive its plunge through the toxic Venusian atmosphere. That means there’s a good chance it will survive its dive through this one, and could make it to the surface at least partly intact.

Still, the risk of any injuries on the ground is low.

“I’m not worried — I’m not telling all my friends to go to the basement for this,” said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day. “Usually about once a week we have a large object re-enter Earth’s atmosphere where some remnants of it will survive to the ground.”
When will Kosmos-482 come back to Earth?

Estimates change daily, but the predicted days of re-entry are currently Friday or Saturday. The New York Times will provide updated estimates as they are revised.

One calculation of the window by the Aerospace Corporation, a federally supported nonprofit that tracks space debris, suggests 12:42 a.m. Eastern time on May 10, plus or minus 19 hours.

Marco Langbroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who has tracked Kosmos-482 for years, puts the estimate closer to 4:37 a.m. Eastern on May 10, plus or minus a day.

Where will it land?

No one knows. “And we won’t know until after the fact,” Dr. McDowell said.

That’s because Kosmos-482 is hurtling through space at more than 17,000 miles an hour, and it will be going that fast until atmospheric friction pumps the brakes. So getting the timing wrong by even a half-hour means the spacecraft re-enters more than half a world away, in a different spot.

What’s known is that Kosmos-482’s orbit places it between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude, which covers Africa, Australia, most of the Americas and much of south- and mid-latitude Europe and Asia.

“There are three things that can happen when something re-enters: a splash, a thud or an ouch,” Dr. McKnight said.

“A splash is really good,” he said, and may be most likely because so much of Earth is covered in oceans. He said the hope was to avoid the “thud” or the “ouch.”
Will the spacecraft survive impact?

Assuming Kosmos-482 survives re-entry — and it should, as long as its heat shield is intact — the spacecraft will be going around 150 miles an hour, when it smashes into whatever it smashes into, Dr. Langbroek calculated. “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot left afterward,” Dr. McDowell said. “Imagine putting your car into a wall at 150 miles an hour and seeing how much of it is left.”

The heat of re-entry should make Kosmos-482 visible as a bright streak through the sky if its return occurs over a populated area at night.

If pieces of the spacecraft survive and are recovered, they legally belong to Russia.

“Under the law, if you find something, you have an obligation to return it,” said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. “Russia is considered to be the registered owner and therefore continues to have jurisdiction and control over the object.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/scie ... entry.html