
Copernical Team
When testing Einstein's theory of general relativity, small modeling errors add up fast

How a supermassive black hole originates

SpaceML.org aims to accelerate AI application in space science and exploration

Researchers discover orbital patterns of trans-Neptunian objects

Study of young chaotic star system reveals planet formation secrets

Orchids in orbit: Seeds tested in space

Turkey invites Russia to take part in construction of country's spaceport

Scientists detect signatures of life remotely

It could be a milestone on the path to detecting life on other planets: Scientists under the leadership of the University of Bern and of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS detect a key molecular property of all living organisms from a helicopter flying several kilometers above ground. The measurement technology could also open up opportunities for remote sensing of the Earth.
Left hands and right hands are almost perfect mirror images of each other. But whatever way they are twisted and turned, they cannot be superimposed onto each other. This is why the left glove simply won't fit the right hand as well as it fits the left. In science, this property is referred to as chirality.
Just like hands are chiral, molecules can be chiral, too. In fact, most molecules in the cells of living organisms, such as DNA, are chiral. Unlike hands, however, that usually come in pairs of left and right, the molecules of life almost exclusively occur in either their "left-handed" or their "right-handed" version.
SpaceML.org: A new resource to accelerate AI application in space science and exploration
"SpaceML helped accelerate impact by bringing in a team of citizen scientists who deployed an interpretable Active Learning and AI-powered meteor classifier to automate insights, allowing the astronomers focused research for the SETI CAMS project," said Siddha Ganju, Self Driving and Medical Instruments AI Architect, Nvidia (founding member of SpaceML's CAMS and Worldview Search Initiatives). "During SpaceML we (1) standardized the processing pipeline to process the decade long meteor dataset collected by CAMS, and, established the state of the art meteor classifier with a unique augmentation strategy; (2) enabled active learning in the CAMS pipeline to automate insights; and, (3) updated the NASA CAMS Meteor Shower Portal which now includes celestial reference points and a scientific communication tool. And the best thing is that future citizen scientists can partake in the CAMS project by building on the publicly accessible trained models, scripts, and web tools.
Student experiments to blast off from NASA Wallops

After being developed via a virtual learning experience, more than 70 experiments built by university students across the United States are ready for flight on NASA suborbital flight vehicles.
The launch of a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket carrying some of the students' experiments will be conducted at 8 a.m. EDT, Thursday, June 24, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket launch is expected to be seen from the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland and southern Delaware.
"One of the great attributes of the NASA suborbital flight vehicles is the ability to support educational flight activities," said Giovanni Rosanova, chief of the NASA Sounding Rockets Program Office at Wallops. "Despite the challenges that dealing with COVID 19 presented, everyone came together to make this launch happen this year after having to postpone the project in 2020.