Home — Tekh Decoded

Hear and Feel BepiColombo Spacecraft’s First Tastes of Mercury Science

Artist impression of BepiColombo flying by Mercury. The spacecraft makes nine gravity assist maneuvers (one of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury) before entering orbit around the innermost planet of the Solar System in 2025. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab The magnetic and particle environment around Mercury was sampled by BepiColombo for the first time during the mission’s close flyby of the planet at 199 km on 1-2 October 2021, while the huge gravitational pull of the planet was felt by its accelerometers. The magnetic and accelerometer data have been converted into sound files and presented here for the first…

Methane Observatory Launched To Boost Action on Powerful Climate-Warming Greenhouse Gas

Lead Image: The International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) is releasing its first annual report on Sunday, October 31, 2021. The release coincides with the G20 Summit in Rome and takes place just a few days ahead of the beginning of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. This report describes how state actors can take action to curb methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, and what progress has been made as part of the decarbonization process, particularly in the energy sector. IMEO’s annual report seeks to provide decision-makers with a framework of action to track and monitor…

Mysteries Abound: NASA Studying the Edge of the Sun’s Magnetic Bubble

An illustration of the heliosphere being pelted with cosmic rays from outside our solar system. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab Our corner of the universe, the solar system, is nestled inside the Milky Way galaxy, home to more than 100 billion stars. The solar system is encased in a bubble called the heliosphere, which separates us from the vast galaxy beyond – and some of its harsh space radiation. We’re protected from that radiation by the heliosphere, which itself is created by another source of radiation: the Sun. The Sun constantly spews charged particles, called the solar…

Student Cracks the High-Dimensional Quantum Code – Reveals Hidden Structures of Quantum Entangled States

Lead Image: Wits PhD student Isaac Nape cracks the high-dimensional quantum code. Credit: University of The Witwatersrand A new and fast tool for quantum computing and communication. Isaac Nape, an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications. Nape is pursuing his PhD at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structured patterns of light for high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use in…

Using Microbes To Make Martian Rocket BioFuel on Mars

A new study outlines a biotechnology process to produce rocket fuel on red planet. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a concept that would make Martian rocket fuel, on Mars, that could be used to launch future astronauts back to Earth. The bioproduction process would use three resources native to the red planet: carbon dioxide, sunlight, and frozen water. It would also include transporting two microbes to Mars. The first would be cyanobacteria (algae), which would take CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and use sunlight to create sugars. An engineered E. coli, which would be shipped from…