Connect with us

Planetary scientists estimate that each year, about 500 meteorites survive the fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere and fall to our planet’s surface. Most are quite small, and less than 2% of them are ever recovered. While the majority of rocks from space may not be recoverable due to ending up in oceans or remote, inaccessible areas, other meteorite falls are just not witnessed or known about.

But new technology has upped the number known falls in recent years. Doppler radar has detected meteorite falls, as well as all-sky camera networks specifically on the lookout for meteors. Additionally, increased use of dashcams and security cameras have allowed for more serendipitous sightings and data on fireballs and potential meteorite falls.

A team of researchers is now taking advantage of additional technology advances by testing out drones and machine learning for automated searches for small meteorites.  The drones are programmed to fly a grid search pattern in a projected ‘strewn field’ for a recent meteorite fall, taking systematic pictures of the ground over a large survey area. Artificial intelligence is then used to search through the pictures to identify potential meteorites.  

“Those images can be analyzed using a machine learning classifier to identify meteorites in the field among many other features,” said Robert Citron of the University of California, Davis, in a recent paper published in published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Citron and his colleagues have tested their conceptual drone setup several times, mostly recently in the area of a known 2019 meteorite fall near Walker Lake, Nevada. Their proof-of-concept meteorite classifier deploys a combination of “different convolution neural networks to recognize meteorites from images taken by drones in the field,” the team writes.

meteorite Citron 1024x769 2
Example image of two meteorites deployed during a field test near Walker Lake, Nevada. The meteorites are marked with orange flags. Note the dark shadow of the quadrictoper drone. Credit: Robert Citron et al.

While this specific test revealed a number of false positives for rocks previously unidentified, the software was able to correctly identify test meteorites placed by the researchers on the dry lake bed in Nevada. Citron and his team are very optimistic about the potential of their system, particularly in searching for small meteorites and finding them in remote regions.

Citron told Universe Today the main challenge for setting up the system was assembling a training dataset for the machine learning classifier.

“Since a future meteorite fall could occur on any terrain,” he said via email, “the system needed an object detection algorithm trained with examples of many types of meteorites on various terrain types. To create a properly trained object detection network, thousands of example images are required.”

Citron and colleagues assembled images of meteorites from the internet and added in “posed” photos of meteorites from their collection on various terrains. This allowed them to properly train the machine learning model to minimize the number of ordinary rocks flagged as false detections.

They then conducted ten test flights with a quadricopter drone in two locations of the projected Nevada strewn field, which is the area of expected meteorite falls based on trajectory data from four stations of the NASA Meteorite Tracking and Recovery Network, part of the Global Fireball Observatory.

Video from “Meteorite Men” which describes a strewn field.

“Fortunately, every field test we gain more data that we can incorporate into the dataset and use to retrain the object detection network and improve the accuracy,” Citron said. “So, we will continue to try and improve the detection accuracy. Currently we need a better drone with a higher resolution camera.”

Studying meteorites and knowing their origins helps scientists determine the composition of some 40 asteroid families in the asteroid belt, and also aids in understanding the early evolution of the solar system. The researchers said that the remote camera network information combined with being able to find and study freshly fallen

Total
0
Shares
Share 0
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Related Topics:
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Frontier Adventure

We Should Hit Peak Solar Activity Next Year

NASAs SDO Observes Largest Sunspot of the Solar Cycle 15430820129 jpeg

You may be familiar with the solar cycle that follows a 22 year process shifting from solar minimum to maximum and back again. It’s a cycle that has been observed for centuries yet predicting its peak has been somewhat challenging. The Sun’s current cycle is approaching maximum activity which brings with it higher numbers of sunspots on its surface, more flares and more coronal mass ejections. A team from India now believe they have discovered a new element of the Sun’s magnetic field allowing them to predict the peak will occur early in 2024.

The Sun is a gigantic sphere of plasma or electrically charged gas. One of the features of plasma is that if a magnetic field passes through it, the plasma moves with it. Conversely if the plasma moves, the magnetic field moves too. This magnetic field is just like Earth and is known as a dipole magnetic field. You can visualise it if you can remember your school science days with a bar magnet and iron filings.

A dipole magnetic field has two opposite but equal charges and at the start of the Sun’s cycle the field lines effectively run from the north pole to the south. As the Sun rotates, with the equator rotating faster than the polar regions, then the plasma drags the magnetic field lines with it, winding them tighter and tighter.

The field lines become stretched causing the magnetic field to loop up and through the visible surface of the Sun. This localised event prevents the convection of super heated gas from underneath and appears as a cooler area of the surface which appears dark. As the solar cycle starts, these sunspots appear around the polar regions and slowly migrate toward the equator as it progresses with peak activity occurring when the sunspots fade away as we head toward the start of another cycle. 

NASAs SDO Observes Largest Sunspot of the Solar Cycle 15430820129 1 jpeg
Image of sunspots (Credit : NASA Goddard Space Flight Center // SDO)

On occasions the magnetic field of sunspots are disrupted and we can experience flares or coronal mass ejections hurling vast amounts of charged particles out into space. If they reach us here on Earth they give rise to the beautiful aurora displays but they do also have a rather negative impact to satellites, power grids and telecommunications systems.

Deep inside the Sun, a dynamo mechanism is driving all this. It is created by the energy from the movement of plasma and it is this that is responsible for the flipping of the Sun’s magnetic poles where the north pole becomes south and the south pole becomes north which happens every 11 years or so. It’s another aspect of the solar cycle.

It’s been known since the 1930’s that the rate of rise the sunspot cycle relates to its strength with stronger cycles taking less time to reach peak. In the paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters; Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha and Dibyendu Nandy from the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research announced their findings. They discovered that the rate of decrease in the Sun’s dipole magnetic field also seems to relate to the rise of the present cycle.

The team have looked back through archives and have shown how the observation of the dipole decrease rate along with observations of sunspots can predict the peak of activity with better accuracy than before. They conclude the current cycle is expected to peak somewhere between early 2024 and September next year. Being able to better predict the peak of activity will help understand the likely intensity of space weather events here on Earth providing us more warning to be able to prepare.

Source : Solar activity likely to peak next year, new study suggests

The post We Should Hit Peak Solar Activity Next Year appeared first on Universe Today.

Continue Reading

Frontier Adventure

The Solar Radius Might Be Slightly Smaller Than We Thought

mdi010 prev jpg

Two astronomers use a pioneering method to suggest that the size of our Sun and the solar radius may be due revision.

Our host star is full of surprises. Studying our Sun is the most essential facet of modern astronomy: not only does Sol provide us with the only example of a star we can study up close, but the energy it provides fuels life on Earth, and the space weather it produces impacts our modern technological civilization.

Now, a new study, titled The Acoustic Size of the Sun suggests that a key parameter in modern astronomy and heliophysics—the diameter of the Sun—may need a slight tweak.

The study out of the University of Tokyo and the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge was done looking at data from the joint NASA/ESA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO’s) Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) imager. The method probes the solar interior via acoustics and a cutting edge field of solar physics known as helioseismology.

Interior of the Sun
A cutaway diagram of the Sun. NASA/ESA/SOHO

‘Hearing’ the Solar Interior

How can you ‘hear’ acoustic waves on the Sun? In 1962, astronomers discovered that patches on the surface of the Sun oscillate, or bubble up and down, like water boiling on a stove top. These create waves that ripple in periodic 5-minute oscillations across the roiling surface of the Sun.

SOHO SDO
A view of the Sun, courtesy of SOHO’s MDI instrument. Credit: NASA

What’s more, astronomers can use what we see happening on the surface of the Sun to model the solar interior, much like terrestrial astronomers use seismic waves traveling through the Earth to model its core. Thanks to helioseismology, we can even ‘see’ what’s going on on the solar farside, and alert observers of massive sunspots before they rotate into view.

Solar Ffarside
Solar farside modeling using helioseismology. Credit: NSF/GONG

The study looked at p-mode waves as they traversed the solar interior. Previous studies relied on less accurate f-mode waves, which are surface waves considerably shorter than the solar radius.

The study defines the solar radius (half the diameter) as 695,780 kilometers… only slightly smaller than the generally accepted radius of 696,000 kilometers obtained by direct optical measurement. This is only smaller by a few hundredths of a percent, or 100-200 kilometers.

SOHO
An artist’s conception of SOHO in space. Credit: ESA/SOHO

The solar radius is a deceptively simple but crucial factor in astronomy. The Sun is a glowing ball of hydrogen and helium plasma without a distinct surface boundary. The photosphere—the glowing visible layer we see shining down on us on a sunny day—is what we generally refer to as the surface of the Sun.

The Solar Radius: A Brief
Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/if-warp-drives-are-impossible-maybe-faster-than-light-communication-is-still-on-the-table/

Continue Reading

Frontier Adventure

If Warp Drives are Impossible, Maybe Faster Than Light Communication is Still on the Table?

350px Alcubierre

I’m sure many readers of Universe Today are like me, fans of the science fiction genre. From the light sabres of Star Wars to the neuralyzer of Men in Black, science fiction has crazy inventions aplenty and once science fiction writers dream it, scientists and engineers try and create it. Perhaps the holy grail of science fiction creations is the warp drive from Star Trek and it is fair to say that many have tried to work out if it is even possible to travel faster than the speed of light. To date, alas, to no avail but if the warp drive eludes us, what about faster than light communication! 

Let’s start with the warp drive.  The concept is a drive that can propel a spacecraft at speeds in excess of the speed of light. According to the Star Trek writers, the speed was described in factors of warp speed where they are converted to multiples of the speed of light by multiplication with the cubic function of the warp factor itself! Got it! Don’t worry, it’s not crucial to this article. Essentially ‘warp 1’ is equivalent to the speed of light, ‘warp 2’ is eight times speed of light and ‘warp 3’ is 27 times the speed of light and so it goes on! Therein lies the problem; achieving faster than light travel. 

In attempts to try to understand this, numerous experiments have been undertaken, of note Bill Bertozzi at MIT accelerated electrons and observed them becoming heavier and heavier until they couldn’t be accelerated any more! Once at the speed of light, it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object further! The maximum speed he achieved was the speed of light. In other experiments, synchronised atomic clocks were taken on board airliners and found that, after travelling at high speed relative to a reference clock on Earth, time had run slower! The upshot is that the faster you go, the slower time passes and at the speed of light, time stops! If time stops, so does speed! hmmmm this is tricky. 

The science of faster than light travel aside, In a number of potential warp drive designs have surfaced like the Alcubierre Drive proposed in 1994. However, the common factor to provide the faster than light travel is something called negative energy which is required in copious amounts. The study of quantum mechanics shows that even empty space has energy and anything that has less energy than empty space has ‘negative energy’.  The problem (among many) is that no-one knows how to get negative energy in huge amounts to power the warp drives.

Two-dimensional visualization of an Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region (Credit : AllenMcC)
Two-dimensional visualization of an Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region (Credit : AllenMcC)

It seems the warp drive is some time away yet but what about faster than light communication, could that work? Accelerating macroscopic objects, like spacecraft requires high amounts of negative energy but communication, as a recent paper explains, which operates at much smaller scale requires less energy. Quite a bit less in fact, less than is contained inside a lightning bolt.  Perhaps more tantalising is that we may just be able to create small amounts of negative energy using today’s technology.

One of the ways this can be achieved is to ensure the proper configuration and distribution of negative energy to channel communication.  The paper proposes a tubular distribution of negative energy in so called hypertubes to enable the acceleration and deceleration of warp bubbles for superluminal communication.  Achieving this for long distance communication will require special devices to be designed and built but as the papers author Lorenzo Pieri concludes “it is tantalising to consider the fabrication of microchips capable of superluminal computing”.  Yes, that is an exciting proposition but the thought of firing messages out to the cosmos at speeds faster than that of light.. Just wow!

Source : Hyperwave: Hyper-Fast Communication within General Relativity

The post If Warp Drives are Impossible, Maybe Faster Than Light Communication is Still on the Table? appeared first on Universe Today.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/reader-appreciation-sale-join-the-big-outside-for-30-off/

Continue Reading

Trending