ARIEL (A European Exoplanet Telescope) Due to Launch in mid 2028 will study 1,000s of Exoplanets' Atmospheres to See What they Are Made of, Including, Clouds.

Exoplanet telescope selected as ESA's next space science mission

A mission to investigate the atmospheres of planets around other stars has been selected by the European Space Agency for launch in the late 2020s, officials announced this week. The space telescope will observe 1,000 exoplanets, using a spectrometer to measure the chemical make-up of their atmospheres.

From article, (ARIEL will launch in mid-2028 on an Ariane 62 rocket from the European-run spaceport in French Guiana, departing to the L2 Lagrange point, a gravitationally-stable location nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the direction away from the sun.

Equipped with a meter-class (1.3-foot) primary mirror, ARIEL’s telescope will observe planets as they pass in front of their host star. A near-infrared spectrometer on-board the observatory will break apart the starlight that passes through each planet’s atmosphere, allowing astronomers to determine how much of it is made up by life-supporting molecules like water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane.

ARIEL will also detect the presence of metallic compounds, ESA said, allowing scientists to tie each exoplanet’s composition to its parent star. With observations of a wide range of planets, ranging from gaseous Jupiter and Neptune-sized worlds to rocky super-Earths, researchers hope to build up a statistical catalog showing how different types of stars may determine the chemistry of their planetary companions.“ARIEL is a logical next step in exoplanet science, allowing us to progress on key science questions regarding their formation and evolution, while also helping us to understand Earth’s place in the Universe,” said Günther Hasinger, ESA director of science. “ARIEL will allow European scientists to maintain competitiveness in this dynamic field. It will build on the experiences and knowledge gained from previous exoplanet missions.”

The new European space telescope will focus on warm and hot planets in orbits hugging their parent stars. Heat energy keeps a planet’s atmosphere circulating and can pull out molecules from a planet’s interior, giving telescopes an accurate measurement of a faraway world’s bulk composition.

Another sensor in ARIEL’s science package will be capable of detecting the presence of clouds in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Planned for a four-year mission, ARIEL’s repeated observations of the same planet will allow astronomers, in some cases, to tease out daily and seasonal changes as the world rotates and revolves around its host star.

Some potentially habitable exoplanets could be probed by ARIEL, but the mission’s objectives focus on a broader set of targets.

 ESA’s cost cap for the mission is around 450 million euros, or $550 million at current exchange rates. That cost figure does not include financial contributions from ESA members, led by the UK Space Agency, which is set to provide a multimillion-dollar investment to support development of ARIEL’s telescope and science instruments.

The ARIEL science payload will be assembled and tested at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

France, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany and Portugal are also part of the ARIEL consortium. A U.S. contribution to the mission is being studied by NASA.

“It is thanks to the world-leading skills of our innovative space community that a UK-led consortium has been chosen to take forward the next ESA science mission. This demonstrates what a vital role we continue to play in European collaboration on research in space,” said Graham Turnock, chief executive of the UK Space Agency.

“The ARIEL mission is a prime example of the scientific innovation underpinning the wider economy. It relies on the UK’s science and engineering expertise, which are at the forefront of the government’s Industrial Strategy.”

ARIEL won in a competition against two other finalists to become ESA’s fourth medium-class Cosmic Vision missions: THOR, conceived to study fundamental processes in space plasma physics, and XIPE, an X-ray observatory designed to detect emissions from supernovas, galaxy jets, black holes and neutron stars.

ESA’s previous medium-class mission selections were:

• Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft that will study solar physics after launch on a NASA-provided Atlas 5 rocket in 2019
• Euclid, designed to explore the influence of dark energy and dark matter in the universe after launch in 2020 on a Soyuz rocket
• PLATO, an observatory to discovery and measure the mass, size and density of exoplanets after launch in 2026 on a Soyuz rocket)

For More Info

NASA Gets $20.736 Billion Budget for Fiscal Year 2018. Saves Four Earth Science Programs, NASA Education Program, and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Provides Money for James Webb Space Telescope, and Europa Clipper

NASA receives $20.7 billion in omnibus appropriations bill - SpaceNews.com

WASHINGTON - A final fiscal year 2018 spending bill released by House and Senate appropriators March 21 would give NASA more than $20.7 billion, far above the administration's original request.

 From article, (The appropriations bill gives NASA $20.736 billion for the 2018 fiscal year, which started more than five and a half months ago. That is more than $1.6 billion above the administration’s original request of $19.092 billion. A House appropriations bill offered NASA $19.872 billion and its Senate counterpart $19.529 billion. An overarching two-year budget deal reached earlier this year raised spending caps for both defense and non-defense programs, freeing up additional funding.

Appropriators used that additional funding to, in part, restore programs slated for cancellation in the original request. Four of the five Earth science programs the administration sought to cancel — the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, the CLARREO Pathfinder and Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 instruments and the Earth observation instruments on the Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft — are explicitly funded in the request. A fifth program, the Radiation Budget Instrument, was already cancelled by NASA earlier this year because of technical and programmatic issues.

The budget also provides $100 million for NASA’s education program, which the administration had sought to close down. That proposal received wide bipartisan criticism in the House and Senate last year, whose appropriations bills restored funding. The Restore-L satellite servicing mission, which the administration sought to convert into a more general, and much smaller, technology development program, receives $130 million in the bill.

The White House once again seeks to shutter NASA’s education program in its fiscal year 2019 request, along with the same Earth science missions targeted for cancellation in the 2018 request.

NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), another mission slated for cancellation in the 2019 budget request, received $150 million in the 2018 omnibus bill. The report accompanying the bill makes no reference to the proposed cancellation but does direct NASA to provide to Congress a lifecycle cost estimate for the mission within 60 days, including any additions needed to make it consistent with a “class A” risk classification, as identified in an independent review of the program last fall.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope receives $533.7 million, the exact amount requested by the administration. As in past years, the bill includes language directing NASA to treat any increase as meeting a 30 percent under federal law. That law requires NASA to both provide a report on the size and cause of the overrun as well as prohibiting spending on it starting 18 months later unless authorized to continue by Congress. NASA officials said March 20 that a determination of any breach of the program’s $8 billion cost cap caused by further delays in its development could be announced as soon as next week.

The agency’s planetary science program received more than $2.2 billion in the bill, an increase of $300 million over the request. It includes $595 million to continue work on the Europa Clipper mission and follow-on lander, and retains provisions from prior bills calling on using the SLS for launching Europa Clipper by 2022 and the lander by 2024. The report also provides $23 million for a proposed helicopter NASA is considering including on the Mars 2020 rover mission.

NASA’s exploration programs also win additional funding in the bill, with the omnibus providing $2.15 billion for SLS and $1.35 billion for Orion, the same levels as in both the House and Senate bills but above the original request.)

For More Info

While Lithium Silicon Batteries may be on the market in 2 years. Lithium-Air Batteries (Which would be 5 to 10 times more powerful than Lithium Ion) Have Had its own Breakthrough

Energy Storage From Thin Air: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

A new research breakthrough from the University of Illinois at Chicago finally delivers some good news for fans of lithium-air technology, which energy storage researchers have been talking up as the next best thing to follow today's gold standard, lithium-ion.

 From article, (Lithium air energy storage happens when lithium combines with oxygen in the air to form lithium peroxide, and back again. In other words, lithium peroxide is created when the battery discharges, and then broken back down into lithium and oxygen when the battery is charged.

Until now, though, the term “lithium-air” has been a bit of a misnomer. That’s because lithium-air batteries as configured currently don’t really use oxygen from the air, they use pure oxygen.

That creates problems when you’re trying to design a better battery for an electric vehicle. Unless you have a medical condition requiring oxygen, who wants to drive around with oxygen tanks in the back seat?

Here’s the explainer from the UIC, which worked with Argonne National Laboratory on the new battery research:

Unfortunately, experimental designs of such lithium-air batteries have been unable to operate in a true natural-air environment due to the oxidation of the lithium anode and production of undesirable byproducts on the cathode that result from lithium ions combining with carbon dioxide and water vapor in the air.

I know, right? As air enters the battery, the byproducts collect on the cathode, eventually rendering it useless.

For their new battery, the researchers came up with a new formula. The lithium anode is coated with a layer of lithium carbonate, which enables lithium ions to pass through without allowing other “unwanted compounds” to make contact.

The team also modified the spongy, carbon-based material for the cathode (that’s where air enters the battery, remember):

…Salehi-Khojin and his colleagues coated the lattice structure with a molybdenum disulfate catalyst and used a unique hybrid electrolyte made of ionic liquid and dimethyl sulfoxide, a common component of battery electrolytes, that helped facilitate lithium-oxygen reactions, minimize lithium reactions with other elements in the air and boost the efficiency of the battery.

Got all that? Basically, instead of tweaking the battery here, the team performed a “complete architectural overhaul.”

You can get all the details in the journal Nature, under the title, “Lithium-Oxygen Batteries with Long Cycle Life in a Realistic Air Atmosphere,” after the publication date of March 22.

There’s still a way to go before the new battery passes from the lab to your new EV with the billion-mile range (slight exaggeration there — anything over 300 miles will do). So far, the battery has maintained its performance over 700 charging cycles, which is much better than previous attempts but still not quite up to snuff for road-ready purposes.)

For More Info

For you SUV Towing Fans: 125 tons!! Pulled by a Tesla Model X.

Tesla Model X pulls 250,000 pounds of muck from Boring Company tunnel

Tesla CEO Elon Musk just shared what could very well be the Model X's most impressive and most insane feat yet - pulling roughly 250,000-pounds (125 tons) worth of muck and rail cars out of a Boring Co. tunnel. Musk's video was a response to one of his followers who asked about the electric SUV's ...

 From article, (Tesla CEO Elon Musk just shared what could very well be the Model X’s most impressive and most insane feat yet — pulling roughly 250,000-pounds (125 tons) worth of muck and rail cars out of a Boring Co. tunnel. Musk’s video was a response to one of his followers who asked about the electric SUV’s towing limit. 

What’s particularly impressive about Musk’s clip was just how effortless it seemed for the Model X to tow the 250,000-pound cargo. Quite unlike the usual tug-of-war videos featuring the Model X battling against ICE heavyweights such as the Hummer H2, the all-electric SUV in Musk’s Twitter video was not spinning its tires or attempting to accelerate quickly. Instead, it was pulling the rail cars out of The Boring Co. tunnel in a very regulated speed, allowing its tires to gain enough traction.

While the Model X’s feats of strength involving vehicles and cargo that are far heavier than its rated 3,500-5,000-pound towing capacity are incredibly impressive, much of it is due to physics. Light vehicles, after all, are capable of pulling heavy cargo provided that they have enough traction and momentum. Nevertheless, the instant torque produced by the Model X’s two electric motors definitely helped the SUV in Musk’s video tow its 250,000-pound cargo from The Boring Company tunnel.)

For More Info

Electric Cars Closing in on 2024 as the Year they will be Cheaper Than Internal Combustion Engine Cars to Own

Electric Cars May Be Cheaper Than Gas Guzzlers in Seven Years

Parity with petroleum-fueled cars seen by 2024, BNEF says Battery costs and mass manufacturing seen driving price drop Electric cars may be cheaper than their petroleum counterparts by 2025 if the cost of lithium-ion batteries continues to fall.

 From article, (Electric cars may be cheaper than their petroleum counterparts by 2025 if the cost of lithium-ion batteries continues to fall.

Some models will cost the same as combustion engines as soon as 2024 and become cheaper the following year, according to a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. For that to happen, battery pack prices need to fall even as demand for the metals that go into the units continues to rise, the London-based researcher said on Thursday.

The clamor to roll out electric vehicles has grown louder as countries and companies race to clean up smog in their cities and hit ambitious climate goals set by the Paris Agreement. U.K. lawmakers started an inquiry into the market in September, probing the necessary infrastructure and trying to determine whether to bring forward the 2040 deadline to end the sale of gasoline and diesel cars.

With incentives, the U.K. could lower its automotive trade deficit by 5 billion pounds ($7 billion), the Green Alliance reported. The World Wildlife Fund said that phasing out diesel and petrol cars earlier could add an extra 14,000 jobs to the industry. In separate reports this week, both groups urged Britain to bring forward the ban on petroleum-fueled cars to 2030.

The expected increase in mass manufacturing of lithium-ion storage should help drive battery prices to as low as $70 a kilowatt hour by 2030, BNEF said. Battery packs averaged about $208 a kilowatt hour in 2017, squeezing profit margins and representing some two fifths of the total costs of electric vehicle.)

For More Info

AI is Not Scary to Researchers Discovering New Materials. In Fact it is Looked At As Beneficial.

How the Wild New Materials of the Future Will Be Discovered With AI

How materials for computer chips, solar panels, and batteries are developed looks to be in the early stages of a radical change. The same goes for research related to areas like superconductors and thermoelectrics. The reason? The new possibilities created by machine learning in materials science.

 From article, (The way I think about materials science is that it’s about stuff. That’s also how I think about parts of engineering and manufacturing. It’s about putting stuff together. The quality of your finished product relies on the quality and abilities of the stuff used to make it.

This is why materials science is critically important to technological progress. Want a better computer chip? You need the right materials. More efficient batteries for self-driving cars or solar panels? Same answer.

A concrete example of how machine learning can aid the development of new materials comes from Stanford University where a team led by Evan Reed, assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has been using it to develop better electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries.

Electrolytes are often composed of a range of materials. Finding the optimal combination and composition of said materials can be difficult.

“We have developed a machine learning model that has been outperforming experts’ intuition when predicting which materials to use,” Reed says.

Valentin Stanev, a research scientist at University of Maryland, has been using machine learning in superconductor research.

“We have a list of all superconductors that we know of, but we still don’t have a good way of figuring out if something is going to be a superconductor. I applied machine learning to the process to help find ways to develop such a framework,” he explains.

Stanev sees big potential for machine learning in other areas too, such as the development of thermoelectric materials, which absorb heat and turn it into electricity.

“A huge percentage of our energy production is wasted as heat. Being able to catch just a small percentage of that will have an enormous impact,” he says.

Beyond superconductors and thermoelectric materials, scientists think machine learning could lead to advances in hydrogen storage units for fuel cells. In healthcare, it could help make new materials that better control how drugs dissolve a stint. It could also lead to new metallic glasses, a subset of metals without a crystalline structure, which have many possible applications, including nanotube construction.

Machine learning might even have applications in scientific processes themselves.

“Many processes in materials science rely on some sort of classification or fitting. Traditionally, this has been done by hand or some simple linear model after significant data processing,” explains Shyam Dwaraknath, computational chemist postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Lab. “Machine learning makes these tasks much easier while improving the quality, speed, and amount of data that can be extracted. This has yielded automated methods for constructing phase diagrams, predicting structures for new compositions, and even analyzing micrographs in place of humans.”

There is still some way to go, though. The machine learning and materials science revolution is very much nascent. One area of development is sorting out where machine learning does and doesn’t make sense.

“The materials science community is actively seeking to identify the areas where ideas from machine learning could have an impact, with ongoing work ranging from materials selection problems to faster and more efficient data collection and analysis,” Evan Reed says.

Shyam Dwaraknath adds, “We’re just now entering the age of big data in materials science with large databases of well-curated and directly comparable data, but the true complexity of materials is far larger than that. For comparison, all the data on the internet, about a sextillion bytes, is just now reaching the number of atoms in a grain of sand.”

Another unsolved challenge? How to turn new, theoretical materials science insights into actual materials and solutions—especially on an industrial scale.

“It is like the difference in knowing the ingredients and knowing the exact recipe for, say, a soufflé. You need to know the exact process. That is the difference between ending up with a nice, light soufflé or a brick,” James Warren says.

according to Evan Reed, machine learning might even be used for a kind of reverse engineering.

“Imagine that you need a battery that has a certain set of properties. You feed those into the machine learning model that then automatically runs through all available, known materials and suggests a range of batteries consisting of different materials that meet your specifications.”

James Warren sees potential uses coming sooner rather than later.

“Many of these advances are not nearly as far off as people think—in many cases we are talking a few years, tops. A lot of people in the community have a sense of, ‘What the hell just happened?’ Hopefully, others will too,” he says with a semi-laugh.)

For More Info

You Always Here About How Congressmen Pass Bills they Hardly Read Because it is Too Many Pages. Here is a Solution.

4h

Senator Rand Paul

✔@RandPaul

Replying to @RandPaul

FYI- The 2200+ page, budget-busting Omnibus has been printing for two hours in my office and still isn’t done.

Senator Rand Paul

✔@RandPaul

Well here it is, all 2,232 budget-busting pages. The House already started votes on it. The Senate is expected to soon. No one has read it. Congress is broken... pic.twitter.com/izvJlUEgUM

11:02 AM - Mar 22, 2018

• 6,394
• 4,774 people are talking about this

From wikipedia, (In 2000, every Representative hired 14 staff members, while the average Senator hired 34.)

From Google, (435 House of Representatives Members of Congress, and 100 Senators.) 


Me, "Each House of Representatives Congressmen have a certain number of staff. In 2000 it was 14. There are 435 Members of Congress. . You take 435 x 14 and you have 6,090 total staff members for House of Representatives Congressmen. You have 100 senators in the senate. For Senators it was 34 average staff members. You take 100 x 34 and you get 3,400 staff members. Total personal staff in Congress is 9,490. Figure some are busy running their elected officials offices. But some may not have anything to do.

You give each one a couple of pages of the Tax Bill to read and summarize what is in the bill. And then you no longer have to read it all yourself. If you need a particular part of the bill explained to you, you track down the staff member that has read that part of the bill and get an answer. With 9,490 staff members creating basically, verbal summaries, you no longer have to read the entire bill. You collect the people who have the answers and have a nice long lunch discussing the bill.  If you choose to read the whole thing, that is your problem. It's time to delegate!"