Good morning. It's February 2, and today's image concerns an emission nebula about 5,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation.

 

Discovered more than 230 years ago by William Herschel, astronomers believe the Crescent Nebula is formed by the combination of an energetic stellar wind from a Wolf-Rayet star at its core, colliding with slower-moving material ejected earlier in the star's lifetime. Ultimately, this should all go supernova, which will be quite spectacular.

 

Will you or I be alive to see it? Probably not.

 

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the nebula for what it is. This photo was captured by Ars reader 1Zach1 with an Astro-Tech AT80ED Refractor telescope. It was the product of 11 hours of integration, or 228 exposures each lasting three minutes. It was taken in rural southwestern Washington.

 

Have a great weekend, everyone.

 

Source: 1Zach1

 

 

Many people tend to think of clownfish, with their distinctive white bars against an orange, red, or black background, as a friendly sort of fish, perhaps influenced to some extent by the popular Pixar film Finding Nemo. But clownfish can be quite territorial when it comes to defending their host anemone from intrusion by others, particularly those from their own species. A new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology describes how clownfish determine if a fish approaching their home is friend or foe by "counting" the number of white bars or stripes on their bodies.

 

As previously reported, mathematical ability is often considered uniquely human, but in fact, scientists have found that many animal species—including lions, chimpanzees, birds, bees, ants, and fish—seem to possess at least a rudimentary counting ability or number sense. Crows can understand the concept of zero. So can bees, which can also add and subtract, as can both stingrays and cichlids—at least for a small number of objects (in the range of one to five). Some ants count their steps.

 

This so-called "numerosity" simply refers to the number of things in a set, according to cognitive psychologist Brian Butterworth, an emeritus professor at University College London and author of Can Fish Count? What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds. It has nothing to do with reasoning or logical mathematical intelligence. This is information that will be in the environment, and counting animals must have some mechanism for extracting this numerical information from the environment. But it nonetheless makes for a fascinating field of study.

 

In 2022, Kina Hayashi of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and several colleagues found that clownfish display more aggressive behavior (e.g., chasing or biting) toward fish (or fish toys) with vertical bar patterns compared with fish with horizontal stripe patterns and that this aggressive behavior lasted longer when directed at fish with vertical bars versus horizontal bars. This behavior appears to influence the position of fish species between host anemones and coral reefs: No fish with vertical bars sought shelter in host anemones, while several species with vertical bars were found in the surrounding coral reefs. But it wasn't clear how the fish recognized the color patterns or what basic rules controlled this signaling. The study results suggested that it wasn't based on the mere presence of white bars or how much white color was present on a given fish's body.

 

 

This new study builds on that earlier work. This time around, Kayashi and co-authors raised a school of young common clownfish (A. ocellaris) from eggs to ensure that the fish had never set eyes on other species of anemonefish. At six months old, the fish were introduced to several other clownfish species, including Clarke’s anemonefish (A. clarkii), orange skunk clownfish (A. sandaracinos), and saddleback clownfish (A. polymnus).

 

The researchers placed different species of clownfish, with different numbers of white bars, in small cases inside a tank with a clownfish colony and filmed their reaction. Because they were in a controlled tank environment, there was no chasing or biting. Rather, aggressive behavior was defined as staring aggressively at the other fish and circling the case in which the other fish were held.

 

They followed up with a second set of experiments in which they presented a colony of clownfish with different plastic models painted with accurate clownfish coloration, with differing numbers of white stripes. The researchers also filmed and measured the degree of aggressive behavior directed at the different plastic models.

 

The results: “The frequency and duration of aggressive behaviors in clown anemonefish was highest toward fish with three bars like themselves,” said Hayashi, “while they were lower with fish with one or two bars, and lowest toward those without vertical bars, which suggests that they are able to count the number of bars in order to recognize the species of the intruder.”

 

Hayashi et al. cautioned that one limitation of their study is that all the fish used in the experiments were hatched and raised in an environment where they had only encountered other fish of their own species. So, they could not conclusively determine whether the observed behavior was innate or learned. Other species of clownfish also use the same anemone species as hosts, so aggressive behavior toward those species might be more frequent in the wild than observed in the laboratory tank environment.

 

Journal of Experimental Biology, 2024. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.246357  (About DOIs).

 

File this one under "Studies We Wish Had Let Us Remain Ignorant." Scientists at the University of Arizona decided to investigate whether closing the toilet lid before flushing reduces cross-contamination of bathroom surfaces by airborne bacterial and viral particles via "toilet plumes." The bad news is that putting a lid on it doesn't result in any substantial reduction in contamination, according to their recent paper published in the American Journal of Infection Control. The good news: Adding a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and using disinfectant dispensers in the tank significantly reduce cross-contamination.

 

Regarding toilet plumes, we're not just talking about large water droplets that splatter when a toilet is flushed. Even smaller droplets can form and be spread into the surrounding air, potentially carrying bacteria like E. coli or a virus (e.g., norovirus) if an infected person has previously used said toilet. Pathogens can linger in the bowl even after repeated flushes, just waiting for their chance to launch into the air and spread disease. That's because larger droplets, in particular, can settle on surfaces before they dry, while smaller ones travel further on natural air currents.

 

The first experiments examining whether toilet plumes contained contaminated particles were done in the 1950s, and the notion that disease could be spread this way was popularized in a 1975 study. In 2022, physicists and engineers at the University of colourado, Boulder, managed to visualize toilet plumes of tiny airborne particles ejected from toilets during a flush using a combination of green lasers and cameras. It made for some pretty vivid video footage:

 

Colorado researchers managed to visualize toilet plumes in 2022 using green lasers and strategically placed cameras.

 

"If it's something you can't see, it's easy to represent it doesn't exist," study co-author John Grimaldi said at the time. They found that the ejected airborne particles could travel up to 6.6 feet per second, reaching heights of 4.9 feet above the toilet within 8 seconds. And if those particles were smaller (less than 5 microns), they could hang around in that air for over a minute.

 

More relevant to this latest paper, it's been suggested that closing the lid before flushing could substantially reduce the airborne spread of contaminants. For example, in 2019, researchers at University College Cork deployed bioaerosol sensors in a shared lavatory for a week to monitor the number and size of contaminant particles. They concluded that flushing with the toilet lid down reduced airborne droplets between 30 and 60 percent. But this scenario also increased the diameter of the droplets and bacteria concentration. Leaving the lid down also means the airborne microdroplets are still detectable 16 minutes after flushing, 11 minutes longer than if one flushed with the lid up.

 

 

"Unfortunately, the possible benefit toilet lid closure during flushing for reducing viral contamination has not been demonstrated empirically," the authors of this latest study wrote in their paper. "In addition, other activities in the restroom, such as cleaning the toilet bowl, may result in the generation of aerosols." So Stephanie Boone and co-authors decided to rectify this gap in the literature.

 

The scientists conducted their experiment with E. coli (as a host bacteria) and coliphage MS2; the latter is not a human or animal pathogen but serves as a useful model. The public toilet used in the experiment was located in a stall in the restroom of an office building. That toilet was tankless, relying on water line pressure for flushing, with no lid and a U-shaped seat with a gap in the front. The home toilet was a standard siphonic toilet with a tank and lid in a private residence; there was no gap on the center of the seat.

 

Toilet bowls were seeded with MS2 and flushed. After one minute, samples were taken from various restroom surfaces: the top and bottom of toilet seats, the bowl rim, three locations on the floor, and the right and left walls. The team also conducted a similar experiment involving cleaning the bowls with toilet brushes, both with and without Lysol toilet bowl cleaner. All those samples were then tested for MS2 contamination.

 

 

The results: both the tops and bottoms of the lidless public toilet seats had more contamination compared to household seats, but otherwise, there was no statistical significance in the degree of contamination between lidless public toilets and household toilets with lids. And the surface contamination did indeed persist even after repeated flushes. The toilet seat was the worst offender with the greatest degree of contamination, which the authors suggest "reflects the airflow that occurs during toilet flushing, i.e., largely around the top and bottom of the toilet seat." That same airflow is likely a factor in spreading the contamination to restroom floors and walls.

 

Perhaps the least surprising finding is that rigorous cleaning with a toilet bowl brush and Lysol reduced the contamination by 99.99 percent compared to cleaning with just a brush. Therefore, "The most effective strategy for reducing restroom cross-contamination associated with toilet flushing include the addition of a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and the use of disinfectant/detergent dispensers in the toilet tank," the authors concluded. They also recommend regularly disinfecting all restroom surfaces after flushing or cleaning with a toilet brush in health care facilities—which often have a lot of immunocompromised people—and if someone in your house has an active infection like norovirus.

 

Got it. Pardon us while we scrub our toilet bowls with Lysol and stock up on toilet tank disinfectant dispensers.

 

American Journal of Infection Control, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajic.2023.11.020  (About DOIs).

 

Ever since Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed his simulation argument in 2001, the nerdiverse has attempted to assess the possibility that reality is not really real, that what we experience as our Universe is instead the product of a computer simulation. Popular figures such as Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson have offered their own conclusions, but taking a firm stance was not the point of Bostrom’s argument. Instead, Bostrom’s position is nuanced and careful, and it doesn’t arrive at fixed answers.

 

I’ll take it for granted that the Ars readership is more sophisticated than the average geek, so let's take some time to dissect Bostrom’s simulation argument, exploring its construction, its implications, its strengths, and its weaknesses.

 

But I have to warn you: If you’re hoping for relief, one way or the other, from the existential crisis brought about by the possibility that we live in a simulation, you won’t find any comfort here. The firmest conclusion anyone can reach, after examining and re-examining the arguments for and against the simulation thesis, is a profound yet resigned "maybe."

The Universe in a box

Bostrom’s argument relies on a simple observation. We continue to develop ever more powerful and capable computers, and our abilities to simulate the Universe, from cosmic to microscopic scales, are becoming more comprehensive with time. As a theoretical cosmologist who specializes in computation, I’ve witnessed this firsthand in my own field. Decades ago, we could only simulate small portions of the Universe, representing individual galaxies as tiny dots of gravitational attraction. Now, our most sophisticated universes-in-a-box include star formation, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, radiation, and more, and they trace the evolution of millions of galaxies simultaneously through billions of years of cosmic evolution.

 

At the other end of the scale, we apply the known forces of nature to simulate the behavior of nuclear matter, the interaction of elements and molecules, and even the complex relationship among synapses.

 

Presumably, simulations will eventually become sophisticated enough that we could re-create our entire experience of the Universe within a computer, with simulated conscious brains experiencing a simulated reality. Crucially, Bostrom’s argument doesn’t depend on when this turning point will happen, only that it does. It could be in the next decade, via some revolution in computing that’s right around the corner. It could be a hundred-thousand years from now, where a post-human society wields a knowledge of physics currently unknown to us to build a planet-sized supercomputer that faithfully recreates our current experience of the Universe, complete with consciousness and exploding stars and the smell of a good camembert.

 

The second major piece of Bostrom’s argument relies on the nature of consciousness. Specifically, that consciousness is generic, whether it arises from wet, squishy biological synapses or clean, dry electronic hardware. For the simulation argument to work, consciousness has to arise within the simulated universes and be basically the same as the au natural version. It has to be aware and, well, act like we’re used to conscious human brains behaving: capable of self-awareness, independent action, and deep contemplation about the fundamental nature of reality.

 

Bostrom admits that this portion of his argument isn’t without controversy and is a matter of much debate within philosophical circles. But with these pieces in place, we can move on to Bostrom’s argument: Someday, our descendants, or some very eager alien civilization, will create simulated consciousness and place those digital brains in a simulated universe. Bostrom calls these “ancestor-simulations,” following the line that future cosmologists will want to recreate the entire history of their Universe down to the level of subatomic interactions. In our case, this would naturally include a simulated Solar System with a simulated Earth that evolves simulated people having simulated arguments on simulated Internet forums.

 

Once this starts, the number of simulated brains will vastly outnumber the organic brains. Think of all the digital creatures that have ever “lived” in all instances of all video games combined: how many NPCs, monsters, and avatars were born with the click of a button or the flip of a switch, followed their programming, and then were just as quickly shut off? With suitably powerful computers at their disposal, the simulation-builders wouldn’t just stop at one brain in one Universe; they would make a bunch of Universes, each containing a bunch of brains. At this point, the vast majority of conscious entities would be simulated rather than biologic.

The trilemma

That’s it. That’s Bostrom’s simulation argument: That once somebody, somewhere, at some time, develops the ability to create faithfully simulated brains, most brains in the Universe will be housed in some computational facility.

 

Crucially, this line of thinking does not immediately lead to the conclusion that we are living in a simulation. Instead, the argument ends in a trilemma, three possible conclusions that, absent any additional evidence or convincing argument, are all equally valid.

 

Conclusion #1: For some reason, our future descendants, or any other beings living in the Universe, will be unable to build such a simulation, either because of some limitation in computing that we can’t yet fathom or because all intelligent species manage to kill themselves off before embarking on the journey of building ancestor-simulations. While the idea is a little depressing, it’s not that far-fetched. We’re not even close to the necessary level of computational sophistication, and we’ve managed to develop globe-killing nuclear weapons and civilization-disrupting climate change.

 

Conclusion #2: For some reason, our future descendants, or any other beings living in the Universe, will be unwilling to build such a simulation. They totally could if they wanted to, but they don’t. Perhaps there’s an enormous amount of social pressure or self-policing that prevents every super-advanced society from building large numbers of simulated brains. I mean, I feel kind of bad when I kill pigs in Minecraft, so maybe as the eons go by, this distaste evolves into a universally consistent Butlerian-Jihad-style proscription against this class of sophisticated simulations. Or maybe we can’t fathom what post-humans want to spend their time on, and nobody in the far future even bothers running such a simulation because it’s not interesting to them.

 

Conclusion #3: Our future descendants, or any other beings in the Universe, totally can and totally want to build large numbers of simulated brains, in which case the vast majority of all conscious beings in the Universe are digital rather than biological, so the raw probability of us being simulated quickly approaches one. We are likely living in a simulation.

 

Trilemma laid out, we now get to the fun part of philosophical inquiry: the arguing. But I want to make one thing very clear. Despite the claims of some science popularizers, the simulation argument is not pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is the act of pretending to make scientific claims without the rigor that science requires. But Bostrom is a trained, professional philosopher going about his day job, which is to be philosophical. Bostrom is not making scientific claims or advancing testable hypotheses. He's making a philosophical argument based on clearly defined assumptions and a rational line of thinking. That’s not pseudoscience any more than carpentry or accounting is.

 

Indeed, Bostrom’s argument stops at the trilemma. His paper continues, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the three possible conclusions (with a strong preference for #3), but in the end, that’s as far as the assumptions can take you. So it’s up to us to decide where we land.

Task failed successfully

One option is to take the trilemma at face value and accept the uncertainty that comes with it. Our future descendants may or may not build a simulation. We may or may not live in one. That’s it. There are no answers, no big revelations. It's an interesting dinnertime conversation, but it ultimately leads to nowhere we weren’t before; there’s no new knowledge or perspective on reality to be gained here. Shrug your shoulders, have a drink of possibly simulated beer to take the edge off the existential crisis, and move on with your life.

 

While I won’t begrudge anyone for taking that position, Bostrom’s argument allows us to dig deeper into the nature of computation, consciousness, and even reality, and we can do that by poking and prodding at the assumptions and conclusions of the argument itself. And that’s a lot of fun, so we’ll keep going.

 

Another approach to the trilemma is to argue that one of the conclusions is more reasonable or more expected than the other. Note that this is not taking bets but advancing rational lines of thinking in favor of a position when there is no clear-cut evidence either way.

 

For example, perhaps it’s fundamentally impossible to recreate our Universe. We don’t even have complete access to all the laws of physics—the stuff going on down at the Planck scale is still a head-scratcher, after all. And there’s a plethora of mysteries and experimental inconsistencies that keep scientists of all stripes awake at night (but at least employed), so an authentic simulation of the Universe wouldn’t include just the physics we know about but all the physics we don’t. There may not be enough resources available to ever build a computer capable of the feat. And that’s not even including the most complex structure known to humanity: the human brain. We have no clue about the complexity and sophistication required to generate consciousness.

 

Bostrom argues that a simulation doesn’t have to be 100 percent comprehensive at all scales to work. Clever programmers could ignore many of the fine details (like, say, the majority of quantum interactions) until some simulated brain decides to run a particle physics experiment, in which case the programmers would need to devote some small amount of additional resources to cover the added complexity.

 

At first glance, this is a compelling argument. Does our awareness of the Universe really depend on what some random hydrogen atom is doing in the Andromeda galaxy? But it’s not necessarily correct. Because we don’t fully understand physics, especially the non-locality inherent in quantum mechanics, we don’t know what matters and when. And speaking from personal experience in developing high-fidelity simulations of the Universe, you can’t just wave away the small-scale stuff with low-resolution models. If you want to get it right, you have to be complete. Most, if not all, of the macroscopic processes we take for granted only arise from the combination of countless quantum operations.

 

At the very least, an accurate simulation of the Universe that hosts these simulations would need the necessary level of completeness to enable the creation of universe-simulators within the simulation. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be entirely faithful, threatening the assumption that conscious awareness inside the simulation is just as good as the biological kind. Note that a nested series of simulations-within-simulations isn’t necessary for Bostrom’s argument to work, but we have to consider the possibility as we gauge the complexity of building realistic mock universes.

 

On the other hand, who knows what future post-humans could be capable of? What we consider complex and difficult calculations today may be accomplished by the machinery of their toasters. They could be so sophisticated in their understanding of physics and computing that they could create mock universes with such granular detail that those mocks could create mocks within themselves—all without the computational hardware even breaking a sweat.

 

Another angle we can take when picking apart the trilemma is to investigate the construction of the argument itself, making sure that every link in the chain is sound. For example, probability weighs heavily in Bostrom’s reasoning. If our future descendants (or aliens—aliens could always do the same thing) build a simulated universe, then there might be 99 simulated brains for every one organic brain. So if you turn the question around and ask about the probabilities that you are a simulated brain, it’s a 99 percent chance, all else being equal.

 

But maybe everything isn’t equal. Maybe there is something ineffable about organic consciousness that cannot be completely captured in simulation—maybe true awareness requires meat brains in meat bodies. Maybe we could devise clever experiments regarding consciousness that can turn this into a scientific argument, allowing us to discover whether we do or don’t live in a simulation. Perhaps simulated consciousness doesn’t last long, or it isn’t stable, or there’s some other reason that prevents simulated brains from being truly equal to the organic ones. Any of these could change the calculation of the probabilities.

 

Lastly, we have to be careful when counting brains. If we were to successfully develop a 100 percent faithful simulation of the Universe tomorrow, then we would know for sure that we weren’t the ones in that simulation. We could create a dozen, a million, a trillion simulated brains, and that still wouldn't answer the fundamental question of whether we are simulated or not. All we could say for certain is that we’re definitely not inside the simulations we create.

 

Our ability to create simulated universes doesn’t get us closer to the answer because we don’t know if we’re the first organic iteration of humanity to accomplish the feat of building these simulations or whether we’re just running a simulation-within-a-simulation originally created by organic humans. Alternatively, we could be the invention of some highly advanced, ingeniously clever, and profoundly bored aliens—and since we haven’t met any aliens yet, we don’t know what they’re capable of. In other words, we have no way to count the number of simulated versus organic brains, so we can’t assess probabilities.

The blue pill

So here we are. Possibly simulated, possibly organic, with no way to tell the difference and no clear argument one way or another. What are we supposed to do with that?

 

Upon the realization that we could be simulated, you might be tempted to throw away life—what good is it if it’s not real? But if you were predisposed to nihilism, I doubt you needed an Oxford philosopher to help you along. A simulated universe isn’t a fake universe; it’s just real in a different way than we expect. Simulated pain still hurts. Simulated love is still powerful. We can still strive to be good stewards of our planet and generous toward our neighbors; faithful simulations are miserable to live in if you have neither shelter nor food.

 

We could spend an entire book dissecting and examining the ins and outs of the simulation argument. Indeed, Bostrom’s conclusions sit in a storied philosophical tradition, a long line of skeptical arguments that question the very nature of existence. This is the joy of philosophy—to challenge our basic assumptions and interrogate this strange Universe that we find ourselves in. Science is a part of that journey, and it's a branch of philosophy in its own right (if you ever meet a scientist who disparages philosophy, ask what the “Ph” in their title stands for and watch them squirm).

 

Perhaps some of the arguments outlined in this article spoke to you; others may have been less convincing. So now it’s our job to do what philosophy teaches us to do, simulated or not: to explore, to question, to argue, and to learn.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 31, and today's image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. The image is actually a collage of many different photos.

 

NASA's new infrared telescope observed 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies in near- and mid-infrared light as part of its contributions to the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS program (PHANGS). This program also includes images and data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

 

Astronomers have combined all of this information to glean new insights into spiral galaxies, which share much in common with our Milky Way. One thing that almost immediately stood out to astronomers was that Webb’s images show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust. "These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded, carving out giant holes in the interstellar material," explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

 

The study of these structures will provide key insights into how galaxies build, maintain, and shut off star formation. If you click through the link, it is fascinating to see the differences between the infrared data from Webb, and Hubble's optical images.

 

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

 

In December 2013, a curator and archaeologist purchased an antique silk dress with an unusual feature: a hidden pocket that held two sheets of paper with mysterious coded text written on them. People have been trying to crack the code ever since, and someone finally succeeded: University of Manitoba data analyst Wayne Chan. He discovered that the text is actually coded telegraph messages describing the weather used by the US Army and (later) the weather bureau. Chan outlined all the details of his decryption in a paper published in the journal Cryptologia.

 

“When I first thought I cracked it, I did feel really excited,” Chan told the New York Times. “It is probably one of the most complex telegraphic codes that I’ve ever seen.”

 

Sara Rivers-Cofield purchasedthe bronze-coloured silk bustle dress with striped rust velvet accents for $100 at an antique shop in Maine, noting on her blog that it was in a style that was fashionable in the mid-1880s among middle-class or well-off women. There wasn't any fitted boning in the bodice, so the dress was meant to be worn with a corset. It had a draped skirt and bustle with metal buttons decorated with an "Ophelia motif." While the dress had been machine-stitched, the original buttons had been sewn by hand. A tag with the name "Bennett" was sewn into the bodice.

 

 

Rivers-Cofield also noted the ingenious structure of the bustle, which used built-in channels for flexible wires to achieve just the right amount of puff, combined with strategic tacking to keep "the bustle bunched in all the right places." One bustle pin was still in place, and Rivers-Cofield thought it was used to pull up a layer of the overskirt to expose a bit of the hem ruffle "for a little peek-a-boo with onlookers." Such pins often show up during excavations of 19th century sites, so she was delighted to find one in situ. "There is one Baltimore laundry site in particular where drainage pipes were found absolutely clogged with pins, buttons, and other clothing attachments—as if launderers put the clothes through a rough washing process ... even if removable pins were still on them," she wrote.

 

But an even more intriguing discovery awaited. When Rivers-Cofield turned the dress inside-out, she found a small hidden pocket. Many women's dresses of the era had pockets, but this one would only be accessible by hiking up the overskirt. She puzzled over why anyone would make a pocket so inaccessible and thought it might have been used to smuggle messages. Hidden inside, she found two sheets of wadded-up translucent paper measuring about 7.5 inches by 11 inches. The text on each sheet consisted of 12 lines of recognizable common English words—except they made no sense. "Bismark omit leafage buck bank"? "Paul Ramify loamy event false new event"?

 

No wonder Rivers-Cofield's blogged reaction was a simple "What the—?"  She thought it might be some kind of list or a writing exercise and posted all the details on her blog, hoping that "there's some decoding prodigy out there looking for a project." It became known as the "Silk Dress cryptogram." German cryptoblogger Klaus Schmeh noted in 2017 that he considered it to be among the top 50 such coded messages yet unsolved.

 

 

Schmeh first wrote about the Silk Dress cryptogram in 2014 and invited readers to weigh in. By 2017, he had concluded that the text was probably a telegram—possibly several telegrams—and that the words were chosen from an 1880s code book. There was a numeral at the start of most lines that seemed to indicate the number of words, and each sheet had what appeared to be the time of day written at the top.

 

Chan started working on the code in the summer of 2018 but didn't initially make much progress and abandoned the project a few months later. He picked up the challenge again toward the end of 2022 and thought it might be a telegraphic code. With the invention of the telegraph, "For the first time in history, observations from distant locations could be rapidly disseminated, collated, and analyzed to provide a synopsis of the state of weather across an entire nation," Chan wrote in his paper. But it was expensive to send telegrams since companies charged by the word, so codes were developed to condense as much information into as few words as possible.

 

 

The challenge was figuring out which code book had been used since, otherwise, it would be nearly impossible to decode the message. Chan perused some 170 telegraphic code books, finally coming across a section about signals used by the US Army Signal Corps that were similar to the pages found in the antique silk dress. Eventually, he realized that the words were codes used by weather stations in the US and Canada to condense telegraph messages about meteorological observations. He relied on old maps to narrow the date to May 27, 1888.

 

So, for example, "Bismark Omit leafage buck bank" indicates a meteorological reading taken at Bismark station in the Dakota territory. "Omit" means an air temperature of 56° F and pressure of 0.8 inches. "Leafage" translates to a dew point of 32°, recorded at 10 pm. "Buck" meant the weather was clear with no rain and a northerly wind, while "bank" indicates wind speed of 12 mph and a clear sunset.

 

 

The identity of the owner of the silk dress remains a question: Who was this mysterious "Bennett"? Over the years, people have suggested the woman was a spy, a trapeze artist, or part of the 19th century "Orphan Trains" that transported children from Eastern to Western cities. Cryptoblogger Nick Pelling speculated that the owner might be one Margaret J. Bennett, a "dowager grande dame of Baltimore society" who died in 1900.

 

Chan worked through his own reasoning on the topic. Enlisted men typically operated the regular Signal Service weather stations, but other supplementary stations were operated by civilian volunteers, including a number of women. One of those women is listed as Mary C. Bennett in Fairview, Fulton County, Illinois, who would have been 22 in 1888. But it's a tenuous link, especially since nobody knows when the name tag was attached to the dress. And why would Mary Bennett have sheets of coded meteorological reports in her dress pocket?

 

Chan considers whether she may have been a telegraph operator, which would explain the reports, but he could find no record that Mary Bennett was ever employed as a telegraph operator, and Fairview was not part of any telegraph circuit used by the Signal Service. Chan concludes that the dress's owner was possibly another woman who worked as a telegraph operator, probably at the central Signal Service office in Washington, DC—the final destination for such messages.

 

Cryptologia, 2023. DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2023.2223562 (About DOIs).

 

 

Much has been written about the plucky exploits of NASA's small Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. And all of the accolades are deserved. "The little mission that could" did, flying 72 sorties across the red planet and pushing out the frontier of exploration into the unknown.

 

Yet as impressive as Ingenuity's exploits were over the last three years, and though its carbon fibre blades will spin no more, its work has only just begun.

 

Ingenuity was groundbreaking in two significant ways that will ripple through the culture of NASA and its exploration efforts for decades to come. Although it is impossible to know the future, both of these impacts seem overwhelmingly positive for our efforts to divine the secrets of our Solar System.

 

First of all, and most obviously, NASA has now demonstrated that powered flight is possible on other worlds. This is an idea that's no longer theoretical; it's grounded in reality. "Engineering has absolutely shattered our paradigm of exploration by introducing this new dimension of aerial mobility," said Lori Glaze, NASA's overall director of planetary science.

 

In another, arguably more important way, Ingenuity may forever change the way NASA, other space agencies, and eventually private companies explore and settle the Solar System. The program did so by using commercial, off-the-shelf parts.

 

The scientists and engineers who built the helicopter had no choice. Flying on Mars is incredibly demanding. The air is so thin it is equivalent to flying at an elevation of 80,000 feet on Earth, or three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest. Helicopters on Earth can max out at an altitude of about 25,000 feet before the air is too thin to support the rotation of their blades. So to meet the demands of Mars, Ingenuity's designers had to be ruthless in their choices. They could not afford the mass of radiation-hardened components, like for batteries and computers.

 

So they bought commercially available parts and rolled the dice—with astonishing results. Many NASA missions will never be the same.

Let’s go flying

During a news conference on Thursday afternoon, Glaze and other NASA officials drew a comparison between Ingenuity and the 1903 Wright Flyer. Built by Orville and Wilbur Wright, this experimental aircraft made the first powered flight on Earth 120 years ago. It flew four times, achieving a distance of 852 feet (260 meters) on its final flight on December 17, 1903. After landing, high winds blew the airplane over and wrecked the vehicle.

 

On Mars, Ingenuity became the first vehicle to demonstrate powered flight on another planet. On its 72nd flight, one or more of its four blades was damaged during a hard landing on the red planet.

 

After the Wright Brothers demonstrated what was possible, designers in Europe and elsewhere continued to push the technology forward. By the time of World War I, aviation emerged as an important component of warfare and as a force in civilian transport a couple of decades later. Today, there are approximately 100,000 airplane flights that take off and land every day in the world. The transformation has been monumental.

 

Glaze and others envision a similar impact on human efforts to explore other worlds in the Solar System.

 

"As a Mars scientist, I dream of a helicopter exploring the canyons of Valles Marineris," said Laurie Leshin, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed the Ingenuity project. "This type of mobility can take us to places that we have never dreamed we'd be able to explore on Mars. And the possibilities are really endless."

 

Valles Marineris is the largest canyon in the Solar System, measuring 2,500 miles long (4,000 km) and running more than 4 miles (7 km) deep. Due to its uneven and riven terrain, it is essentially inaccessible to traditional rovers.

Pushing the technology further

NASA already has big plans for flying machines on other worlds. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the Dragonfly mission to the largest of Saturn's moons, Titan. The vehicle, which the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, will build and operate, is scheduled to launch in July 2028.

 

It's a bold and daring mission that seeks to fly an automobile-sized nuclear-powered drone over the organic-rich sands on Titan. There are some advantages to flying on Titan—its primarily nitrogen atmosphere is about 50 percent thicker than Earth's at the surface. But even so, developing and flying such a large vehicle in a relatively unknown environment represents a huge challenge.

 

But if Ingenuity worked, there's every reason to believe that Dragonfly can as well.

 

There are already plans in place to upgrade future Mars helicopters. The leader of the Ingenuity team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Teddy Tzanetos, explained in an interview that every one of the vehicle's flights on Mars provided valuable data. Before, engineers had theories about what to expect and how aircraft would perform, but now they have real-world data.

 

In an interview, Tzanetos said the next generation of Mars helicopters is already building on learnings from Ingenuity. As part of NASA's current plans to return rock samples from the surface of Mars—which remain in flux due to funding issues—the space agency may use one or more of these flying machines to retrieve samples for a return to Earth.

 

This will require increased performance, both in terms of flying further and carrying a heavier payload. Tzanetos said the new design increases the helicopter's rotor length from 3.9 feet to 4.6 feet (1.2 to 1.4 meters). The rotors on Ingenuity spun fast, with their tips moving at a speed of Mach 0.65, or 65 percent of the speed of sound on the surface of Mars. The next generation will spin up to Mach 0.95.

 

"We're really going to be running close to the speed of sound," Tzanetos said. "So we'll be pushing the limits."

What are the limits?

The success of Ingenuity will unlock more mission planners to Mars and elsewhere to think about using aerial vehicles as part of their designs. The helicopter's operators hope that Ingenuity opens the floodgates of what is possible, much as the Wright Flyer pushed enthusiasts and would-be aviators to broaden their imaginations more than a century ago.

 

"Now that we know this capability is possible, we will push the boundaries of what we can do," Glaze said.

 

Some planetary scientists have long dreamed of deploying and flying a balloon or similar vehicle in the Venusian atmosphere. Near the surface of the hellishly hot world, the atmosphere is crushing. But higher up, there are atmospheric pressures very much like those on Earth, which would make long-term exploration by a balloon-like vehicle fruitful.

 

Each world presents its own challenges and opportunities. The exceedingly thin atmosphere on Mars is offset, slightly, by the reduction of gravitation force. It is about one-third that of Earth, so it will make technologies like fixed-wing aircraft and other flying machines more possible.

 

Aerial mobility has implications for astronauts as well. Human missions to Mars are likely to use helicopters or drones to survey terrain before they venture out on foot or in a rover. If there are multiple base camps, fleets of small aircraft could deliver packages among them. And, one day, humans will be able to fly across the planet's surface.

Buying commercial works

As cool as Ingenuity's flight log may be, the better story may be how the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory did it. Due to the aforementioned thin atmosphere, the team was constrained to a mass of just 4 pounds (less than 2 kg) for the entire helicopter. That is the equivalent of approximately five cans of Campbell's soup.

 

Those five cans of soup include your helicopter blades, which are several feet long, the batteries, the computer, the sensors and camera, the legs, the solar panel—all of it.

 

So, how did the team do it? They ditched traditional, space-rated hardware. They just couldn't take the mass penalty. For example, the RAD750 computer that operates most modern spacecraft—including the Perseverance rover—weighs more than 1 pound. They couldn't blow that much mass on the computer, even if it was designed specifically for spaceflight and was resistant to radiation.

 

Instead, Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

 

The RAD750, introduced in 2001, is based on 1990s technology. The modern Qualcomm processor was designed for performance and has the benefit of 20 years of advancement in microprocessor technology. In addition to being orders of magnitudes cheaper—the RAD750 costs about a quarter of a million dollars, while the Qualcomm processor goes into inexpensive mobile phones—the newer chip has bucketloads of more performance.

 

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

 

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

 

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

 

"This is a massive victory for engineers," Tzanetos said.

 

Indeed it is. While NASA's most critical missions, where failure is not an option, will likely still use space-rated hardware, Ingenuity's success opens a new pathway for most science missions. They can be cheaper, lighter, and higher-performing in every way. This is almost unimaginably liberating for mission planners.

Ingenuity’s legacy

The concept of flying Ingenuity came along at just the right time, in the early 2010s, as NASA was finalizing the payloads that would fly on the Perseverance rover to Mars in 2020. When NASA had to make the call on whether or not to fly the technology demonstration mission, the right mix of technologies was coming online: high energy density batteries, high-performance processors for mobile devices, lightweight cameras, and MEMS accelerometers to measure acceleration.

 

These devices were pushed and perfected as part of the mobile phone revolution. If there had been no iPhone, there would have been no Ingenuity. It was the perfect confluence, and it resulted in the miracle on Mars.

 

As a middle-aged space reporter, I have naturally become a little jaded over time as I have watched NASA and other space agencies around the world take two steps forward and one step back. Space is hard. Battling through bureaucracy is hard. There is a lot of BS out there in the space industry.

 

But the launch, deployment, and astonishing performance of Ingenuity during the last three years has truly taken my breath away. It is a phenomenal engineering achievement and a real triumph of the engineers over some in NASA management who never wanted Ingenuity to fly. As Americans, as humans, we can all be proud to witness flight on another world.

 

It's a perilous exercise to judge history while being in the middle of history, of course. But I would rate Ingenuity among the three most innovative and important things that NASA has done during the 21st century. The other two are the James Webb Space Telescope and the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program.

 

 

Webb is an obvious choice, as it is the most complex and costly scientific instrument NASA has ever put into space. It represents the pinnacle of the classic NASA way of doing things: very costly and very delayed, but also very ambitious and very successful. In less than a full year of operations, Webb has already dazzled and enlightened us.

 

COTS may be less obvious, but it's important for other reasons. Ostensibly, it provided a few hundred million dollars to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to develop spacecraft to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. But more than that, COTS is undoubtedly responsible for SpaceX's early growth, and the program and its successors saved the company from bankruptcy. With NASA's new model for buying services and SpaceX's validation of this approach, this program launched the transformative commercial space era we're enjoying today.

 

By demonstrating flight on another planet and cracking the code on off-the-shelf components, Ingenuity easily stands alongside these two grand achievements.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 29, and today's image features a pair of galaxies.

 

Located in the middle of the image, Bode's galaxy is the beautiful spiral and is named after its discoverer, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode. To its right is the Cigar galaxy, also discovered by Bode. The origin of its colloquial name is rather obvious, I think.

 

Chris McGrew, who took this photo from central Texas last year, composed the image such that he was able to tease out interstellar gas. We are able to see it by the light of our own galaxy being reflected back to us. The effect is rather stunning.

 

"I’m mesmerized by this image because it shows how empty space really isn’t empty at all," McGrew told me. "And I think of the civilizations in those galaxies looking back at the Milky Way, wondering what else is out there."

 

Don't we all. Have a great week, everyone.

 

Source: Chris McGrew

 

There are many mysteries in life that we end up shrugging off. Why is urine yellow? It just is, right? Rather than flush that 125-year-old question down the toilet, scientists sought out the answer, discovering a previously unknown microbial enzyme was to blame.

 

The enzyme that has eluded us for so long is now known as bilirubin reductase. It was identified by researcher and assistant professor Brantley Hall of the University of Maryland, who was part of a team based at the university and the National Institutes of Health.

 

Bilirubinis an orange pigment released by red blood cells after they die. Gut microbes then use bilirubin reductase to break down bilirubin into colourless urobilinogen, which degrades into yellowish urobilin, giving urine that infamous hue. While urobilin previously had an association with the colour of urine, the enzyme that starts the process by producing urobilinogen was unknown until now.

 

“Though it was previously thought that multiple enzymes were involved in the reduction of bilirubin, our results support the finding that a single enzyme performs the reduction of bilirubin to urobilinogen,” the research team said in a study recently published in Nature Microbiology.

Gut feeling

Because some gut bacteria had been known to reduce bilirubin, Hall and his team knew where to start but wanted to fill in the unknowns by finding out which particular species actually do this—and how. This meant they had to find the gene responsible for encoding bilirubin reductase.

 

Previous studies had found that the species Clostridiodes difficile was capable of reducing bilirubin (though the mechanism it used was unknown). Using C. difficile as a basis for comparison, the team cultured different species of gut bacteria and exposed them to bilirubin to see whether that bacteria could produce urobilinogen, detecting its presence using a fluorescence assay.

 

The fluorescence assay told Hall and his colleagues that there were nine strains within the tested species that they thought were capable of reducing bilirubin, although how these bacteria were breaking it down was still unclear.  After the fluorescence assay, the genomes of the most closely related strains were analyzed,  and several turned out to share a gene that encoded an enzyme that could reduce bilirubin—bilirubin reductase.

 

Bacterial strains that metabolized bilirubin using bilirubin reductase all came from species that were found to belong to a single clade (the researchers informally referred to it as the bilirubin reductase clade). Within that clade, most of these species are from the class Clostridia in the phylum Firmicutes, a phylum of bacteria important to gut health.

More than … you know

The discovery of bilirubin reductase goes beyond the origin of urine colour. After identifying the enzyme, the researchers found out that, while bilirubin reductase is present in healthy adults, there is a deficit in newborns and adults with inflammatory bowel disease, which could eventually influence future treatments

 

By sequencing infant gut genomes, Hall and his team saw that bilirubin reductase was often missing during the first few months of life. Too much bilirubin building up in the blood turns the skin and the whites of the eyes yellow, a symptom known as jaundice. Most infants have some level of jaundice, but it usually goes away on its own.

 

The absence of bilirubin reductase is also associated with pigmented gallstones in adults with inflammatory bowel disease (inflammatory bowel disease or IBD is a general term that can refer to several different diagnoses). Sequencing adult gut genomes showed that there was a deficit of this enzyme in most patients with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis whose gut genomes were sequenced.

 

“With the knowledge of the species, genes, and enzymes involved in bilirubin reduction, future research can now focus on the extent to which gut microbial bilirubin metabolism affects…the role of bilirubin reduction in health and disease,” the researchers said in the same study.

 

There is still more research to be done on bilirubin reductase and the health implications it could have. The team thinks there may be a link between the amount of urobilin produced in the body and insulin resistance, obesity, heart disease, and even heart failure. Next to that, we finally know why urine is yellow.

 

Nature Microbiology, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01549-x

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is putting clinicians on alert about the growing risk of measles cases and outbreaks amid a global surge in transmission.

 

In an outreach message sent Thursday, the CDC told clinicians to look out for patients who have a rash accompanied by a fever and other symptoms of measles, as well as patients who have recently traveled to countries with ongoing measles outbreaks.

 

Between December 1, 2023, and January 23, 2024, there have been 23 confirmed measles cases in the US, including seven direct importations by international travelers and two outbreaks with more than five cases each, the CDC noted. Most of the cases were in unvaccinated children and teens.

 

Measles outbreaks in the US are typically sparked by unvaccinated or undervaccinated US residents who pick up the infection abroad and then, when they return, transmit the disease to pockets of their communities that are also unvaccinated or undervaccinated.

 

Globally and in the US, vaccination rates against measles—via the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR)—have fallen in recent years due to pandemic-related health care disruption and vaccine hesitancy fueled by misinformation.

 

"The increased number of measles importations seen in recent weeks is reflective of a rise in global measles cases and a growing global threat from the disease," the CDC's outreach message, titled "Stay Alert for Measles Cases," read.

 

According to data from the World Health Organization, the European region saw an over 40-fold rise in measles cases in 2023 as compared with 2022. The region tallied over 42,200 measles cases last year, compared with just 941 in 2022.

 

This week, the WHO reported a rapid escalation of measles cases in Kazakhstan (which the WHO considers part of the European region). Kazakhstan has recorded the highest incidence of measles cases in the region, with 13,677 cases in 2023. That corresponds to over 639 cases per million in the population. In the news release Tuesday, Kazakhstan's health minister reported that there are "currently 2,167 children in hospital with measles, 27 of them in a serious condition."

 

The outbreak is largely spurred by unvaccinated children who missed their routine immunizations during the pandemic. Sixty-five percent of the reported measles cases are in children under age 5, the WHO noted. The country is now trying to catch children up on their vaccines to curb the outbreak.

 

"Measles is highly infectious, but fortunately, can be effectively prevented through vaccination," WHO's Regional Director for Europe, Hans Henri P. Kluge, said in the news release. "I commend Kazakhstan for the urgent measures being taken to stop the spread of this dangerous disease."

 

Meanwhile, measles is flaring up in many other places. Last week, the UK Health Security Agency warned of the potential for an ongoing measles outbreak to spread. As of January 18, there were 216 confirmed cases and 103 probable cases in the West Midlands region since October 2023. Authorities warned that any areas with low MMR vaccination rates are at risk of an outbreak.

 

The vast majority of Americans have received their MMR vaccines on schedule. In this case, the two standard, recommended doses are considered 97 percent effective against measles, and the protection is considered for life. But anyone who is unvaccinated or undervaccinated is at high risk of infection in the event of an exposure. The virus can linger in air space for up to two hours after an infected person leaves the area, the CDC notes, and is highly infectious—up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed will fall ill. Once infected, people are infectious from four days before the telltale measles rash develops to four days afterward.

 

Welcome to Edition 6.28 of the Rocket Report! There's a lot going on in the world of launch as always, but this week I want to take this space for a personal message. I have just announced the forthcoming publication of my second book, REENTRY, on the Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon spacecraft, and development of reusable launch. Full details here. I worked very hard to get the inside story.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

 

 

Europe seeks to support small launch companies. The European Space Agency and European Commission have selected five launch companies to participate in a new program to provide flight opportunities for new technologies, a sign of a greater role the European Union intends to play in launch, Space News reports. The effort seeks to stimulate demand for European launch services by allowing companies to compete for missions in the European Union’s In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation technology program. Proposals for the program's first phase are due to ESA at the end of February.

 

Getting a golden ticket ... The agency expects to select up to three companies for initial contracts with a combined value of 75 million euros ($82 million) to begin design work on those vehicles. Four of the companies selected for the "Flight Ticket Initiative" are startups working on small launch vehicles: Isar Aerospace, Orbex, PLD Space, and Rocket Factory Augsburg. None of them has yet conducted an orbital launch, but they expect to do so within the next two years. The fifth company was Arianespace, which will offer rideshare launches on its Vega C and Ariane 6 rockets. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

Iran successfully launches Qaem 100 rocket. Iran said Saturday it had conducted a successful satellite launch into its highest orbit yet, the latest for a program the West fears improves Tehran’s ballistic missiles, the Associated Press reports. The Iranian Soraya satellite was placed in an orbit at some 750 kilometers (460 miles) above the Earth’s surface with its three-stage Qaem 100 rocket, the state-run IRNA news agency said. It did not immediately acknowledge what the satellite did, though telecommunications minister Isa Zarepour described the launch as having a 50-kilogram (110-pound) payload.

 

Qaem's first orbital flight ... The United States has previously said Iran’s satellite launches defy a UN Security Council resolution and called on Tehran to undertake no activity involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. UN sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile program expired last October. Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons and says its space program, like its nuclear activities, is for purely civilian purposes. This was the third launch of the Qaem rocket, which can loft up to 80 kg to low-Earth orbit. A suborbital test flight in 2022 was successful, but the first orbital attempt last March failed. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Chinese firm tests vertical landing. Chinese launch startup Landspace executed a first vertical takeoff and vertical landing with a test article Friday at a launch and recovery site at Jiuquan spaceport, Space News reports. The methane-liquid oxygen test article reached an altitude of around 350 meters during its roughly 60-second flight before setting down in a designated landing area. The landing had an accuracy of about 2.4 meters and a landing speed of less than 1 meter per second, the company said.

 

Part Starship, part Falcon 9 ... The test is part of the development of the stainless-steel Zhuque-3 rocket first announced in November 2023. The company is aiming for the first flight of Zhuque-3 next year. It is an ambitious project: The rocket is intended to have a payload capacity of 21 tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode, and 18.3 tons when the rocket is recovered downrange. If Zhuque-3 comes to pass—and these are promising early results—this would be the closest thing to a Falcon 9 rocket anyone has yet developed. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Alpha on-boarded for NRO missions. Firefly Aerospace announced Thursday that it was selected by the National Reconnaissance Office to serve as a launch provider with the Alpha rocket. The NRO on-ramped Alpha as part of its "streamlined" launch contract, which was created by the organization to tap into and support the commercial launch industry in the United States. The NRO has budgeted up to $700 million for these launches over a 10-year period.

 

Scaling up to meet demand ... Firefly is now eligible to compete for these mission task orders with Alpha, which can lift more than 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit. Firefly’s next Alpha launch for NASA is on track for early 2024, the company said. "In order to support the increased demand for Alpha launches, we’ve doubled the size of our facilities, implemented automated carbon composite technologies, and fine-tuned our operations to rapidly produce, test, and launch in response to our customers’ urgent mission needs," said Bill Weber, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

 

French launch company raises $30 million. Latitude said this week that it had closed a $30 million Series B funding round to support the development of its Zephyr launch vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. Zephyr is a two-stage rocket designed to deploy payloads of up to 100 kilograms into low-Earth orbit. The company is targeting a 2025 debut flight for the rocket.

 

A little goes a long way ... The funding will be used to manufacture the first Zephyr rocket, establish the vehicle’s assembly line, complete electrical, propulsion, and fluidic systems and structural tests, bring the company’s test center online, and recruit new talent. (If $30 million really goes that far, good on them.) "Our investors’ continued support is a recognition of our 18 months of hard work, significant accomplishments, and expansion to become a market leader by the end of the decade," explained Latitude co-founder Stanislas Maximin. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

 

European venture capital firm raises 100 million euros. Expansion Ventures announced the capital raise this week for a fund to support European New Space and New Air Mobility companies from seed rounds up to Series A and B funding rounds, European Spaceflight reports. Previously, the venture firm had invested 30 million euros into 13 startups, including launch startups Latitude and HyPrSpace.

 

Tracking lots of initiatives ... Expansion is targeting a final closing of 300 million euros by 2026 and plans to build a portfolio of around 40 companies. With the first tranche of funding secured, the fund will begin to invest in new companies and reinvest in its current portfolio of companies in subsequent funding rounds. The fund has a database of over 480 startups and actively follows 280. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

 

Starliner on track for an April launch. NASA said it is working with Boeing toward a flight test no earlier than mid-April in which the Starliner spacecraft will carry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. "Teams have made significant progress in resolving technical issues identified during the agency’s flight certification process," the space agency said in a blog post. "Following a successful drop test earlier this month in which recent modifications to Starliner’s parachute system were validated, NASA and Boeing are working to perform final analysis of the test data and complete overall system certification ahead of Starliner’s first crewed flight."

 

That's a lot of tape ...  Boeing also completed the removal of the P213 tape that may have posed a flammability risk in certain environmental conditions. There were roughly 4,300 feet of the tape in the spacecraft. The mission will launch on an Atlas V rocket and is the first crewed mission on board Starliner. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will fly to the International Space Station and stay for one or two weeks. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

ArianeGroup preparing to ship Ariane 6 hardware. ArianeGroup is preparing to ship the Ariane 6 core stage and upper stage that will be used for the vehicle’s first flight to the launch site in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. Sometime next month, the hardware should be loaded onto the transport vessel Canopée for its 10-day transatlantic crossing to the port of Pariacabo in French Guiana.

 

A summer launch, maybe? ... The core and upper stages are expected to arrive in French Guiana in mid-February, after which integration activities can commence. The debut flight of Ariane 6 is currently expected to take place between mid-June and the end of July. While preparations do appear to be continuing smoothly, ArianeGroup has still not announced the results of its investigation into why an Ariane 6 upper stage test conducted in December was aborted early.

 

 

Why Space Shuttle commanders sometimes locked the hatch. In a feature, Ars explores the hush-hush program that NASA had that allowed shuttle commanders, at their discretion, to lock the vehicle's main hatch after reaching orbit. The article dives deep into the origins of the program, which dates to a 1985 space shuttle mission and a payload specialist—Taylor Wang—who grew distraught after his science experiment failed to activate. "Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back," Wang said.

 

It's an older story, but it checks out ... Though this is an old story, it still reverberates today, four decades on, with lasting consequences into the era of commercial spaceflight as more and more people fly into orbit. The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander's lock is an option for NASA's crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions. As more people fly into orbit, this is probably an issue worth discussing in the spaceflight community.

 

Blue Origin mates New Glenn stages. On Wednesday, the launch company shared a photograph on its social media channels, including LinkedIn, showing both stages of the large New Glenn rocket. "The first and second stages of New Glenn’s test vehicle mate for the first time, enabling us to exercise our tooling and stage interfaces in preparation for our first launch later this year," the company stated.

 

To fly, or not to fly ... Obviously, it's awesome to see flight hardware out in the real world. Unfortunately, Blue Origin's postings did not state whether this "test vehicle" was intended simply for ground testing as a pathfinder or if it's hardware for the first test flight. The vehicle also doesn't have its seven BE-4 main engines, either. It would be great if Blue could specify these details, as many of us in the spaceflight community are eager for more information about this promising heavy-lift rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

January 27: Electron | Four Spire SSA Satellites | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 06:15 UTC

January 28: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-38 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 23:05 UTC

January 29: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-12 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 02:10 UTC

 

 

Something has gone wrong with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this article was published, NASA confirmed the end of Ingenuity's mission).

 

When it launched to Mars more than three years ago, the small Ingenuity helicopter was an experimental mission, a challenge to NASA engineers to see if they could devise and build a vehicle that could make a powered flight on another world.

 

This was especially difficulty on Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, with a pressure of less than 1 percent that of Earth's. The solution they landed on was a very light 4-lb helicopter with four blades. It was hoped that Ingenuity would make a handful of flights and provide NASA with some valuable testing data.

 

But it turns out that Ingenuity had other ideas. Since its deployment from the Perseverance rover in April 2021, the helicopter has flown a staggering 72 flights. It has spent more than two hours—128.3 minutes, to be precise—flying through the thin Martian air. Over that time, it flew 11 miles, or 17 km, performing invaluable scouting and scientific investigations. It has been a huge win for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the greatest spaceflight stories of this decade.

Getting on in Martian years

The vehicle has been showing signs of aging recently, however. And that's not surprising. The fragile little flying machine has been exposed to the harsh Martian atmosphere for more than two and a half years, including bruising radiation, dust storms, and wide swings in temperature from very, very cold to sort of warm.

 

One week ago, during a simple hover test flight, NASA lost contact with Ingenuity for several hours. This is when it apparently broke one of its four blades. Later, mission operators restored communications by asking the Perseverance rover to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal.

 

Before that flight, on the helicopter's 71st flight in early January, the helicopter was supposed to traverse a long distance of nearly 1,200 feet (358 meters), reaching an altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and spending nearly 125 seconds airborne. NASA had sought to reposition the helicopter for future flights to survey new areas of the Martian surface. However, during that flight, Ingenuity made an unplanned early landing.

 

Now, the ingenious Ingenuity helicopter will fly no more. But just as the 1903 Wright Flyer is remembered for its first sustained, powered flight on Earth, Ingenuity will be long remembered for its contributions as humans sought to fly on worlds beyond our own.

 

 

Japan's first lunar lander made an unsteady touchdown on the Moon last week, moments after one of its two main engines inexplicably lost power and apparently fell off the spacecraft, officials said Thursday.

 

About the size of a small car, the Small Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on Friday, making Japan the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface. Shortly after landing, ground teams in Japan realized the spacecraft was not recharging its battery with its solar panels. The evidence at the time suggested that SLIM likely ended up in an unexpected orientation on the Moon, with its solar cells facing away from the Sun.

 

With the benefit of six days of data crunching and analysis, officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) briefed reporters Thursday on what they have learned about SLIM's landing. Indeed, the spacecraft toppled over after touching down, with its nose planted into the lunar regolith and its rear propulsion section pointed toward space.

 

It turns out that SLIM overcame a lot to get to that point. In the final minute of Friday's descent, one of SLIM's two engines failed, leaving the craft's sole remaining engine to bring the spacecraft in for an off-balance landing. Still, JAXA officials said the spacecraft achieved nearly all of its primary objectives. The roughly $120 million robotic mission made the most pinpoint landing on the Moon in history, just as it set out to do.

 

"From the spacecraft, we were able to acquire all the technical data related to navigation guidance leading to landing, which will be necessary for future pinpoint landing technology, as well as navigation camera image data during descent and on the lunar surface," JAXA said in a statement.

 

One of two tiny robots released by SLIM just before landing relayed a remarkable image of the lander standing upside down a short distance away. This might be the first close-up view of a crash landing, however gentle, on another world.

One plucky bird

Based on the update JAXA released Thursday, it's extraordinary that SLIM made it to the surface in one piece.

 

After launching in September and arriving at the Moon in December, SLIM lined up for a final descent to the lunar surface on Friday. Around 20 minutes before landing, the spacecraft ignited its two hydrazine-fueled rocket engines for a braking maneuver to drop out of lunar orbit.

 

JAXA officials said everything went according to plan in the initial phases of the descent. The spacecraft pitched over from a horizontal orientation to begin a final vertical descent to the surface. SLIM's guidance computer was preloaded with a map of the landing zone, and an onboard navigation camera took pictures of the Moon's surface throughout the landing sequence. The spacecraft's computer used these images to compare to the map, allowing SLIM to autonomously correct its course along the way.

 

 

But at an altitude of around 160 feet (50 meters), something went wrong with the spacecraft's propulsion system. Less than a minute before touchdown, one of the engines suddenly lost thrust, and moments later, a down-facing navigation camera caught a glimpse of what appeared to be one of the engine nozzles falling away from the spacecraft. JAXA said engineers believe the engine failure was likely caused by "some external factor other than the main engine itself." Officials are still investigating to determine the root cause.

 

The spacecraft continued descending on the power of its remaining engine, but it became more difficult to control the lander. The thrust from the single engine imparted a sideways motion to the spacecraft. Normally, SLIM would have used thrusters to tilt itself from the vertical orientation necessary for the final descent and into a position to plop itself on the lunar surface along the spacecraft's long axis. SLIM had five crushable landing legs to absorb the force of the gentle impact.

 

While this two-stage landing sequence was the plan, JAXA said Thursday that the spacecraft "touched the ground in an almost straight standing position with lateral velocity." The vertical speed at touchdown was about 3.1 mph (1.4 meters per second), slightly slower than the expected descent rate.

 

"Because the ground contact conditions such as lateral speed and attitude exceeded the specification range, a large attitude change occurred after touchdown, and the aircraft settled in a different attitude than expected," JAXA said.

 

In other words, the squirrelly landing caused the spacecraft to tip over. SLIM settled in a bottoms-up position on a shallow slope rather than on its side. Its solar panel wasn't facing up but was instead pointed toward the west, away from the Sun's position in the eastern morning sky at the landing site.

 

 

Engineers at JAXA's control center in Sagamihara, a suburb of Tokyo, immediately noticed that the spacecraft was not recharging its battery. With its solar panel facing away from the Sun, the battery quickly drained, forcing ground controllers to act quickly to capture imagery and data from SLIM. The spacecraft powered down less than three hours after arriving on the Moon.

 

Japan's space agency developed the SLIM mission as a technology demonstration. Its primary purpose was to prove out technologies necessary for precision landings. By all accounts, SLIM exceeded expectations in that regard. JAXA's goal was to have SLIM touch down within about 330 feet (100 meters) of its target, located next to a crater named Shioli in a region called the Sea of Nectar on the near side of the Moon.

 

"It used to be that we were landing where we could; now we are trying to land where we want," Hiroshi Yamakawa, JAXA's president, said shortly after SLIM landed last week. "That is the slogan of the project, so if 100-meter precision has been successful, then as a result of this approach, this technology has been established. This is the very first time in the world that this was achieved."

 

In order to access more intriguing locations on the Moon, future landers must be able to navigate themselves to safe touchdown zones near craters, ridges, or mountains. Many previous lunar landing missions have targeted locations far away from these rugged features to ensure they had a wide expanse to safely settle onto the surface.

 

Despite the propulsion problem, JAXA said Thursday that the spacecraft ended up about 180 feet (55 meters) from its aim point. Before the engine failure and a final correction to avoid obstacles on the surface, SLIM was "highly likely" to be on track to touch down within 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of its target, JAXA officials concluded after evaluating all the data downlinked from the spacecraft. All systems other than the failed engine and the solar panel worked as expected.

 

 

"Although detailed data evaluation needs to be continued, SLIM is considered to have successfully demonstrated the landing technologies for all of the planned engineering experiments except for the two-stage landing dynamics," JAXA said.

 

For comparison, the most precise landing of NASA's Apollo program was Apollo 12. On that mission, commander Pete Conrad manually guided his lunar module to a location about 535 feet (163 meters) from the robotic Surveyor 3 lander, which the Apollo 12 astronauts visited during their exploration of the Moon.

 

Had it landed as planned, SLIM was designed to operate for nearly two weeks until sunset at the end of the lunar day. JAXA said there is still a chance for SLIM to automatically wake up if its solar panels start generating power as the Sun crosses the western sky in the next few days.

Thank the toy company

Japan has a reputation for robotics, so of course, SLIM carried a pair of tiny gadgets—JAXA calls them Lunar Excursion Vehicles (LEVs)—designed to test mobility mechanisms on the Moon. Just before landing, the spacecraft released the two robots to drop to the surface.

 

The smaller of the two robots, a spherical craft measuring just 3 inches (80 millimeters) across, delivered in a big way. This device, known as LEV-2 or SORA-Q, took a picture of the SLIM spacecraft moments after landing. JAXA partnered with Takara Tomy, creator of the Transformers brand of toys, in the design of this little vehicle.

 

"As the smallest and Japan's first lunar robot, we were able to successfully capture SLIM images, a major accomplishment," said Kazuyuki Funaki, director of JAXA's space exploration innovation hub.

 

 

Like the Transformers toys, LEV-2 was designed to change its shape to move across the Moon's surface. "We were also able to confirm that it was successfully deployed and driven on the lunar surface after being released from SLIM," Japan's space agency said.

 

"In this commemorative year, which marks the 100th anniversary of our founding, we are proud that our toy technology, which is our business, has played a part in this great achievement," said Kintaro Toyama, chairman and representative director of Takara Tomy, in a statement.

 

Processing technology from Sony allowed LEV-2 to autonomously select the highest-quality imagery it took of SLIM, then relay the images back to Earth via a communications link with LEV-1, the larger of the two robots. Less than 5 pounds (2.1 kilograms) in mass, LEV-1 became the smallest and lightest device to directly transmit data from the distance of the Moon, according to JAXA.

 

 

On Thursday, the European Space Agency's Science Programme Committee gave the go-ahead to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA project. This would mean the construction of the mission's three spacecraft could begin as early as a year from now. While the interferometer would follow the same basic principles as the ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) experiment that first detected gravitational waves, the hardware would be placed 2.5 million kilometers apart, making it sensitive to an entirely new range of astronomical phenomena.

Proven tech

Existing gravitational wave detectors rely on bouncing lasers back and forth between distant mirrors before recombining them to produce an interference pattern. Anything that alters the position of the mirrors—from the rumble of a large truck to the passing of gravitational waves—will change the interference pattern. Having detectors at distant sites helps us eliminate cases of local noise, allowing us to detect astronomical events.

 

The detectors we've built on Earth have successfully picked up gravitational waves generated by the mergers of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes. But their relatively compact size means that they can only capture high-frequency gravitational waves, which are only produced in the last few seconds before a merger takes place.

 

To capture more of the process, we need to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. And that means a much larger distance between the interferometer's mirrors and an escape from the seismic noise of Earth. It means going to space.

 

The LISA design consists of an outer shell of a spacecraft that absorbs the jostling of the dust and cosmic rays that tear through our Solar System and powers a laser strong enough to reach 2.5 million kilometers. It will also house a telescope to focus incoming laser light, which will spread from its normal tight beam over these distances. Floating freely within is a mass that, isolated from the rest of the Universe, should provide a stable platform to pick up any changes in the laser. Three spacecraft trail the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, each sending lasers to two others in a triangular configuration.

 

That may sound like science fiction, but ESA has already sent a pathfinder mission to space to test the technology. And it performed 20 times better than planned, providing three times the sensitivity needed for LISA to work. So there's no obvious sticking point.

Going supermassive

Once it gets to space, it should immediately pick up the impending collisions that have resulted in LIGO detections. But it will spot them as much as a full year in advance and allow us to track where the event horizons touch. This would allow us to track the physics of their interactions over time and to potentially point optical telescopes in the right direction ahead of collisions so that we can determine whether any of these events produce radiation. (This may allow us to assign causes to some classes of events we've already detected via the photons.)

 

But that's only part of the benefit. Due to their far larger size, supermassive black hole mergers are only detectable at lower frequencies. Since these are expected to happen following many galaxy mergers, it's hoped we'll be able to capture them.

 

Perhaps the most exciting prospect is that LISA could pick up the early gravitational fluctuations formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. That has the potential to provide a new view into the earliest history of the Universe, one that's completely independent of the cosmic microwave background.

 

Now that I have you all as excited as I am, I regret to inform you that the launch date isn't planned until 2034. So, hang in there for a decade—I promise it will be worth it.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 25, and today's image is nothing short of amazing and inspirational.

 

Courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, this image features a nebula, N79, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby small galaxy. (Can we call galaxies small?) This is a massive, super-active star-forming region that spans more than 1,600 light-years. So what's with that bright spot in the middle of the image? It's a bright young star.

 

"The distinct ‘starburst’ pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes," explains the European Space Agency. "All telescopes which use a mirror to collect light, as Webb does, have this form of artifact which arises from the design of the telescope. In Webb's case, the six largest starburst spikes appear because of the hexagonal symmetry of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. Patterns like these are only noticeable around very bright, compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place. Most galaxies, even though they appear very small to our eyes, are darker and more spread out than a single star, and therefore do not show this pattern."

 

Webb is looking at this active region to help astronomers understand what star-forming areas may have looked like in the early Universe.

 

Source: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

 

 

Inspections of Alaska Airlines' fleet of Boeing 737 Max 9s has turned up "many" loose bolts, according to CEO Ben Minicucci. "I'm more than frustrated and disappointed," he told NBC News, "I am angry. This happened to Alaska Airlines. It happened to our guests and happened to our people."

 

The inspections follow a near-disaster on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on January 5 of this year, when a blanking plate blew off the 737 Max 9 aircraft mid-flight. The loss of the blanking plate resulted in a rapid decompression of the plane, but fortunately did not result in loss of control of the aircraft or any physical injuries to passengers or crew.

 

The following day, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that has grounded all 737 Max 9s fitted with mid-cabin door plugs—other specifications of the plane use actual doors at that location in order to allow for more passengers in the cabin.

 

In addition to owners and operators of the Max 9 having to inspect their aircraft, the FAA also announced an audit of Boeing's production line for the jet, "to evaluate Boeing’s compliance with its approved quality procedures." In addition to investigating Boeing's manufacturing processes and its production line, the FAA is also turning its attention to Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing's subcontractor. Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation into the incident.

 

Alaska, which has had to ground 65 aircraft, is not the only airline that's angry with Boeing. United Airlines is now reconsidering an order it placed for 277 737 Max 10s, which it ordered in 2017 with the expectation that the aircraft would be delivered in 2020. "The reality is that with the Max grounding, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back with believing that the Max 10 will deliver on the schedule we had hoped for," said Michael Leskinen, United's CFO.

 

Boeing once had a stellar reputation in the aviation industry—pilots and aviation enthusiasts would even buy merchandise bearing the slogan "if it ain't Boeing, I'm not going." But those days are long gone.

 

The cause? A new culture of management that took hold after Boeing merged with the failing McDonnell-Douglas company in 1997. Rather than engineering excellence, the new leadership was focused on cost-cutting and growing Boeing's share price.

 

Tragically, this was evidenced by a pair of fatal crashes of 737 Max aircraft, one flown by Indonesia's Lion Air in 2018, then a second operated by Ethiopian Airlines in 2019. As detailed at length by Maureen Tkacik in The New Republic, Boeing redesigned the 737 with larger engines and a new center of gravity to create the 737 Max.

 

But after pressure from one of its larger customers, Southwest Airlines, which didn't want its pilots to have to spend time retraining, Boeing chose to essentially hide the fact that the new planes featured a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System that, due to faulty sensor input, could crash the plane.

 

With regard to this latest 737 Max scandal, in a statement, Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Stan Deal said, "We have let down our airline customers and are deeply sorry for the significant disruption to them, their employees and their passengers. We are taking action on a comprehensive plan to bring these airplanes safely back to service and to improve our quality and delivery performance. We will follow the lead of the FAA and support our customers every step of the way."

 

A more frank explanation of what might have been going wrong on the 737 Max production line in Renton, Washington, can be found in the comments of an alleged whistleblower at Leeham News and Analysis. The whistleblower, who claims to be a current Boeing employee, alleges that the bolts were not installed at the factory and that it was a case of quality control failure.

 

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will travel to Washington, DC, this week to answer questions about the 737 Max 9 for Congress.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 24, and today's image features an astronomical sight of another sort.

 

The image was taken by Steve Erskine a few years ago in Antarctica. Astronomers use lidar to measure the temperature of Earth's atmosphere to calibrate their observations. In this photo, the lidar is being shot nearly straight up from an observatory at McMurdo Station.

 

"This image was taken in the winter season," Erskine told me. "The green lidar is measuring atmospheric temperatures and is normally just barely visible to the naked eye. The camera is looking roughly south across McMurdo Sound and the Ross Ice Shelf."

 

I like this photo because it gives us some small insight into all the work that goes into making the gorgeous images that populate the Daily Telescope and other astronomy pages.

 

Source: Steve Erskine

 

 

When Don Lemon, a physicist at Bethel College in Kansas, encountered an 18th-century fire engine designed by English Inventor Richard Newsham on display at the Hall of Flame museum in Phoenix, he was intrigued by its pump mechanism. That curiosity inspired him to team up with fellow physicist Trevor Lipscombe of Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, to examine the underlying fluid mechanics and come up with a simple analytical model. Their analysis, described in a new paper published in the American Journal of Physics, yielded insight into Newsham's innovative design, which incorporated a device known as a "windkessel."

 

A quick Google search on the "windkessel effect" yields an entry on a physiological term to describe heart-aorta blood delivery, dating back to the man who coined it in 1899: German physiologist Otto Frank. "Windkessel" is German for "wind chamber," but the human circulatory system doesn't have a literal wind chamber, so Frank's use was clearly metaphorical. However, there are earlier English uses of the wind chamber terminology that refer to an airtight chamber attached to a piston-driven water pump to smooth the outflow of water in fire engines like those designed by Newsham, per Lemon and Newsham.

 

Rudimentary firefighting devices have been around since at least 2 BCE, when Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the first fire pump; it was re-invented in 16th-century Europe. Following the 1666 fire that destroyed much of London, there was a pressing need for more efficient firefighting strategies. This eventually led to the invention of so-called "sucking worm engines": leather hoses attached to manually operated pumps. John Lofting is usually credited with inventing, patenting, and marketing these devices, which pulled water from a reservoir while the hose ("worm") enabled users to pump that water in a supposedly continuous stream, the better to combat fires. But nothing is known of his sucking worms after 1696.

 

In 1721 and 1725, Newsham patented designs for a "water engine for the quenching and extinguishing of fires," with a cistern that could hold as much as 170 gallons of water. Newsham's designs dominated the market for fire engines well into the 1770s, even extending overseas. New York City was using his engines in 1731. And when the Williamsburg Capitol building burned down in 1747, the colony imported one of Newsham's fire engines to better combat future fires; it's still on display in a Colonial Williamsburg museum.

 

“There are many fascinating physics problems hiding in plain sight within books and papers written centuries ago," said Lipscombe. “Recently we’ve been working on applying elementary fluid mechanics to biological systems, and came across a common description in medical journals: that the heart acts as a windkessel. That begs the question of what, precisely, is a windkessel? Following the trail, we found descriptions of Lofting’s ‘sucking worm’ device and, in Newsham’s fire engine, a lifesaving application.”

 

 

To find out more, they collected data from early documents (patents, advertisements, photographs, and so forth) and current videos of the fire engines in operation and were able to personally inspect one surviving windkessel at the Phoenix Hall of Flame. For instance, the marketing materials for Lofting's sucking worm claimed it was able to pump "a continuous stream" of water "400 feet high."

 

The authors believe both of these claims are likely exaggerations, based on their examination of the fluid mechanics. While a manually operated pump could produce a stream with the required ground level speed of 22 meters/second, "without the addition of some device to regulate and smooth the stream of water, a piston-driven pump would produce water in spurts, rather than, as advertised, continuously," they wrote. "But no such regulating device is mentioned in Lofting's sucking-worm patent of 1690 or illustrated in his advertisements."

 

There is mention of such a regulating device to produce a continuous stream of water in a 1690 Dutch treatise by Jan van der Heyden, but van der Heyden never provided any specifics of the "internal parts," per Lemon and Lipscombe, perhaps to avoid patent infringement. Fortunately, there are several surviving Newsham fire engines that incorporate a stream-regulating device. (It's unclear who invented the regulating device, but apparently it wasn't Newsham or Lofting.) Two men usually pulled the fire engine to the scene of a fire, while a bucket brigade kept its coffin-shaped open container filled with water.

 

Manually operated pistons pulled the water from the reservoir and pumped it through the windkessel. Pumped water would enter the windkessel initially at a high-injection rate, trapping and compressing the air in the upper part of the chamber. When the injection rate decreased, the compressed air expanded and expelled water through a metal pipe or hose toward the fire. The two pumps each had leather flaps so that one could draw water up from the reservoir while the other pumped water into the windkessel, producing a mostly continuous stream except when the pistons reversed their directions. "Even so, the output of a two-piston pump varies with time," the authors wrote.

 

 

For their analytical model, Lemon and Lipscombe made a couple of simplifying assumptions: the trapped air in the windkessel compresses and expands isothermally, and there is no flow resistance in the pipe. The authors noted that their model relies partly on the ideal gas equation of state, which was not fully formalized until the early 19th century, so this kind of analysis could not have been done before then.

 

Although they were unable to perform hands-on experiments with an actual Newsham windkessel, the results of their analysis proved to be consistent with both historical and modern descriptions of how the device functioned in the inventor's fire engines. They calculated that the windkessel helped reduce variations in the stream of water produced from as much as 80 percent to as low as 16 percent, resulting in a far more efficient firefighting machine.

 

It's still not a perfect model, and the authors would like to remove their modeling assumptions. “Knowledge of Bernoulli’s law, the ideal gas law, and isothermal expansion are the three ingredients we baked into a model to explore how this device worked,” Lipscombe said. “But if we understand this system better, we could look at the parameters that are important and see how changing them might improve the device.”

 

American Journal of Physics, 2024. DOI: 10.1119/5.0147573  (About DOIs).

 

Listing image by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

 

 

Good morning. It's January 23, and today's image showcases the night sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It's a simple image of the Milky Way from a mobile phone, but it manages to capture so much grandeur.

 

Erin Mikan said she was inspired to send in this photo after our recent image from Playa Grande, Mexico, showcasing the Milky Way Galaxy above a bioluminescent bay.

 

"This image was taken in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales in Australia between Sydney and Canberra," she said. "It was taken using my mobile phone, a Google Pixel 7 Pro, in September 2023."

 

I'd say that's quite a night sky you've got there Down Under, Erin.

 

Now some readers of the Daily Telescope may be saying, "Eric, you sure are biased toward the Milky Way Galaxy." The Milky Way has now appeared in something like half a dozen featured photos. And you know what, you're correct! I am biased toward the Milky Way because it's the best one. My kids live here.

 

Source: Erin Mikan