Amazing Science

How will Europa Clipper see through Europa's thick ice shell to study the moon's ocean?

Engineers test one of two high-frequency radar antennas for Europa Clipper’s REASON instrument on a hilltop at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. The antenna is the narrow copper rod, extending from either side of the tower at right and held straight by several cables and a crossbar. In Earth's gravity, the antenna requires support to keep it straight for testing. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Earth and Jupiter’s moon Europa have something in common: a liquid water ocean. Despite being one-fourth of Earth’s diameter, Europa likely has a subsurface ocean containing more than twice as much water as we have on Earth. But Europa’s ocean is hidden beneath a shell of ice thicker than any ice on Earth. How will Europa Clipper see through it to study Europa’s ocean?

Europa Clipper’s REASON instrument will peer through Europa’s ice with radar, seek the ocean below, and study the ice’s structure and thickness. Only a handful of spacecraft have visited the solar system’s outer planets, and none carried ice-penetrating radar to view oceans below the surface. In addition to Europa Clipper, the European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (or JUICE) spacecraft will carry an ice-penetrating radar called the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (or RIME) instrument. JUICE will launch in 2023 and arrive in 2031, and Europa Clipper will launch in 2024 and arrive in 2030.

While Europa Clipper and JUICE will be the first to carry this type of radar, it’s not a new technology. Ice-penetrating radar have been used by researchers to probe Earth’s ice sheets for over half a century. Researchers use ice-penetrating radar to study ice thickness, subglacial lakes, ice temperatures, the orientation of ice crystals within glaciers, and the topography and geology below ice.

“Ice and radar are an awesome combination,” says Gregor Steinbrügge, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and an investigation scientist for the REASON instrument. “Ice is very transparent to radar unless the radar hits something different. That is useful on Earth for measuring glacier and ice shelf thickness, and how they change over time.

Ice-penetrating radar is more important than ever for monitoring Earth. “It shows us how glaciers and ice sheets are responding to climate change,” said Dustin Schroeder, a radioglaciologist at Stanford University and a member of the REASON science team. A radioglaciologist is someone who studies glaciers, ice sheets, ice caps, and icy moons using radar.

Researchers routinely fly planes with ice-penetrating radar over Greenland and Antarctica, whose combined ice sheets contain more than 99 percent of Earth’s freshwater ice. Ice-penetrating radars allow scientists to calculate the ice’s volume and how much oceans will rise as the ice melts. The radar observations provide essential inputs for computer models, allowing scientists to estimate future sea level rise and produce assessments for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists have created an AI system capable of generating artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes worked as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences diverged significantly from any known natural protein.

The Very Large Telescope in Chile took images of its lightest exoplanet yet after data from two European sky-mapping missions indicated something was tugging at the orbit of a distant young star.

The star in question is called AF Leporis and is some 87.5 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lepus just south of the celestial equator. Two teams of astronomers have recently focused on this star after scouring through data gathered by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos and Gaia space telescopes. These two spacecraft focus on charting the positions and trajectories of stars in the sky. When the astronomers examined the telescopes' observations of AF Leporis, they found odd changes in the star's orbit, which suggested that a large planet might be present in its orbit. 

"Planets exert a gravitational tug on their host stars, perturbing their trajectory on the sky," the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and which released the images on Feb. 20, wrote in a statement(opens in new tab). "The two teams found that the star AF Leporis exhibited such a disturbed trajectory, a telltale sign that a planet could be hiding there."

Related: The 10 most Earth-like exoplanets

Until now, the ability to make electronic devices faster has come down to a simple principle: scaling down transistors and other components. But this approach is reaching its limit, as the benefits of shrinking are counterbalanced by detrimental effects like resistance and decreased output power.

Because terahertz frequencies are too fast for current electronics to manage, and too slow for optics applications, this range is often referred to as the ‘terahertz gap’. Using sub-wavelength metastructures to modulate terahertz waves is a technique that comes from the world of optics. But the POWERlab’s method allows for an unprecedented degree of electronic control, unlike the optics approach of shining an external beam of light onto an existing pattern.

Elison Matioli of the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL’s School of Engineering explains that further miniaturization is therefore not a viable solution to better electronics performance. “New papers come out describing smaller and smaller devices, but in the case of materials made from gallium nitride, the best devices in terms of frequency were already published a few years back,” he says. “After that, there is really nothing better, because as device size is reduced, we face fundamental limitations. This is true regardless of the material used.”

In response to this challenge, Matioli and PhD student Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo came up with a new approach to electronics that could overcome these limitations and enable a new class of terahertz devices. Instead of shrinking their device, they rearranged it, notably by etching patterned contacts called metastructures at sub-wavelength distances onto a semiconductor made of gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride. These metastructures allow the electrical fields inside the device to be controlled, yielding extraordinary properties that do not occur in nature.

Crucially, the device can operate at electromagnetic frequencies in the terahertz range (between 0.3-30 THz) – significantly faster than the gigahertz waves used in today’s electronics. They can therefore carry much greater quantities of information for a given signal or period, giving them great potential for applications in 6G communications and beyond. “We found that manipulating radiofrequency fields at microscopic scales can significantly boost the performance of electronic devices, without relying on aggressive downscaling,” explains Samizadeh Nikoo, who is the first author of an article on the breakthrough recently published in the journal Nature.

As Samizadeh Nikoo explains, modulating terahertz waves is crucial for the future of telecommunications, as the increasing data requirements of technologies like autonomous vehicles and 6G mobile communications are fast reaching the limits of today's devices. The electronic metadevices developed in the POWERlab could form the basis for integrated terahertz electronics by producing compact, high-frequency chips that can already be used with smartphones, for example.

"This new technology could change the future of ultra-high-speed communications, as it is compatible with existing processes in semiconductor manufacturing. We have demonstrated data transmission of up to 100 gigabits per second at terahertz frequencies, which is already 10 times higher than what we have today with 5G," Samizadeh Nikoo says.

OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in history. This is according to a UBS study (via CBS News(Opens in a new tab)), which claims that ChatGPT had 13 million unique visitors per day in January 2023, which is more than double the visitors it had in December 2022, just a month earlier. ChatGPT has only been around two months (can you believe it?), and it already has 100 million monthly users, the study concluded.

A new ultrasound-based sensor has been unveiled, offering real-time, on-the-go cardiac imaging. Designed by engineers from the University of California San Diego, the wearable device is roughly the size of a postage stamp and can be worn for up to 24 hours. Plus, it even functions during a workout.

The engineers say the goal is to make ultrasound capabilities more accessible. Currently, echocardiograms – ultrasound examinations for the heart – can only be done by trained professionals and requires bulky equipment.  “The technology enables anybody to use ultrasound imaging on the go,” said Sheng Xu, study lead.

The new device uses AI algorithms to measure the activity and structure of the wearer’s heart, monitoring blood flow and flagging any abnormal functions. Using ultrasound waves, the device generates a constant stream of images of the four chambers of the heart, enabling continuous, real-time data capture. “The increasing risk of heart diseases calls for more advanced and inclusive monitoring procedures,” said Xu. “By providing patients and doctors with more thorough details, continuous and real-time cardiac image monitoring is poised to fundamentally optimize and reshape the paradigm of cardiac diagnoses.”

In its current iteration, the patch can be connected through cables to a computer, which can download the data automatically while the patch is still on, though plans for a wireless design are underway. The patch is set for commercialization through Softsonics, a UC San Diego spinoff. 

So bright that it pushes the energy limits of physics.

Billions of light years away, there is a giant ball of hot gas that is brighter than hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to imagine something so bright. So what is it? Astronomers are not really sure, but they have a couple theories. They think it may be a very rare type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the most powerful supernova ever seen as of today. This object is so luminous that astronomers are having a really difficult time finding a way to describe it.

“If it really is a magnetar, it's as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11,” said Krzysztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and the team's co-principal investigator, comedically implying it is off the charts on a scale of 1 to 10.The object was first spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey of Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “assassin”), which is a small network of telescopes used to detect bright objects in the universe. Although this object is ridiculously bright, it still can’t be seen by the naked eye because it is 3.8 billion light years away.

ASAS-SN, since it began in 2014, has discovered nearly 250 supernovae, however this discovery, ASASSN-15lh, stands out because of its sheer magnitude. It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than the sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy combined. “We have to ask, how is that even possible?” said Stanek. “It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere.”

Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, has one possible explanation. The supernova could have generated an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar — a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a crazy strong magnetic field. This is how crazy magnetars are: to shine as bright as it does, this magnetar would have to spin at least 1,000 times a second, and convert all of that rotational energy to light with pretty much 100 percent efficiency — making it the most extreme example of a magnetar that is physically possible.

Given those constraints,” Thompson said, “will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is a magnetar, then the answer is basically no.” Over the coming months, the Hubble Space Telescope will try to solve this mystery by giving astronomers time to see the host galaxy surrounding this object. The team may find that this bright object lies in the very center of a large galaxy — meaning the object is not a magnetar at all — and the gas around it is actually evidence of a supermassive black hole.

If that is the case, then the bright light could be explained by a new kind of event, said study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. It would be something that has never, ever been seen before at the center of a galaxy.

Whether it is a magnetar, a supermassive black hole, or something else entirely (like a white hole), the results are probably going to lead to new thinking about how objects form in the universe.

Follow Stephen Wolfram's evolution of research on the 2nd Law from early interest as a 12-year-old to his current findings in the Wolfram Physics Project. View a large collection of images of early and published works.

When researchers gave a genetic molecule the ability to replicate, it evolved over time into a complex network of “hosts” and “parasites” that both competed and cooperated to survive.

After a lengthy experiment with tantalizing implications for origin-of-life studies, a research group in Japan has reported creating a test tube world of molecules that spontaneously evolved both complexity and, surprisingly, cooperation. Over hundreds of hours of replication, a single type of RNA evolved into five different molecular “species” or lineages of hosts and parasites that coexisted in harmony and cooperated to survive, like the beginning of a “molecular version of an ecosystem,” said Ryo Mizuuchi, the lead author of the study and a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo.

Their experiment, which confirmed previous theoretical findings, showed that molecules with the means to replicate could spontaneously develop complexity through Darwinian evolution, “a critical step for the emergence of life,” the researchers wrote.

“We can provide the direct evidence; we can see what can actually happen” when a replicating molecule complexifies in a test tube, Mizuuchi said.

This was the first and probably most important step toward evolving a complex network of replicators in the lab, said Sijbren Otto, a professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study. “With what is shown here, the path ahead becomes a lot clearer, and one becomes a lot more optimistic that this can actually work out.”

Black holes may be the origin of dark energy, according to a study by a team of researchers led by the University of Hawaii.

When astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, they theorized that some force must be pushing things farther apart and overcoming gravity, which should be slowing things down. That force was suggested to be dark energy, but no one has ever figured out from where it comes. But a team of 17 international researchers led by the University of Hawaii has discovered the first evidence for the origin point of dark energy: Black holes.

Black holes acquire mass in two ways: accretion of gas and mergers with other black holes. But in studying nine billion years of black hole evolution in dormant giant elliptical galaxies, the researchers discovered that the older black holes are much larger than they should be based on those two methods of growth. That means there must be another way these black holes are acquiring mass. Researchers suggest the answer is dark energy in the form of vacuum energy, "a kind of energy included in spacetime itself ... [that] pushes the universe further apart, accelerating the expansion," according to a statement.

"If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we've got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years," Dr. Chris Pearson of STFC RAL Space, a co-author of a study on the discovery, said in a statement.

A paper on the team's research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15th, 2023.

Punctuating the darkness at the end of the universe could be silent fireworks—explosions of the remnants of stars that were never supposed to explode. 

The end of the universe as we know it will not come with a bang. Most stars will very, very slowly fizzle as their temperatures fade to zero. Dr. Matt Caplan

“It will be a bit of a sad, lonely, cold place,” said theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, who added no one will be around to witness this long farewell happening in the far far future. Most believe all will be dark as the universe comes to an end. “It’s known as ‘heat death,’ where the universe will be mostly black holes and burned-out stars,” said Caplan, who imagined a slightly different picture when he calculated how some of these dead stars might change over the eons. 

New theoretical work by Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University, finds that many white dwarfs may explode in supernova in the distant far future, long after everything else in the universe has died and gone quiet.   In the universe now, the dramatic death of massive stars in supernova explosions comes when internal nuclear reactions produce iron in the core. Iron cannot be burned by stars—it accumulates like a poison, triggering the star’s collapse creating a supernova. But smaller stars tend to die with a bit more dignity, shrinking and becoming white dwarfs at the end of their lives.

This is the way the universe ends: not with a whimper, but a bang Science magazine explores Dr. Matt Caplan's work on black dwarf supernovas. “Stars less than about 10 times the mass of the sun do not have the gravity or density to produce iron in their cores the way massive stars do, so they can’t explode in a supernova right now,” said Caplan. “As white dwarfs cool down over the next few trillion years, they’ll grow dimmer, eventually freeze solid, and become ‘black dwarf’ stars that no longer shine.” Like white dwarfs today, they’ll be made mostly of light elements like carbon and oxygen and will be the size of the earth but contain about as much mass as the sun, their insides squeezed to densities millions of times greater than anything on earth. 

But just because they’re cold doesn’t mean nuclear reactions stop. “Stars shine because of thermonuclear fusion—they’re hot enough to smash small nuclei together to make larger nuclei, which releases energy. White dwarfs are ash, they’re burnt out, but fusion reactions can still happen because of quantum tunneling, only much slower, Caplan said. “Fusion happens, even at zero temperature, it just takes a really long time.” He noted this is the key for turning black dwarfs into iron and triggering a supernova. 

"It’s hard to imagine anything coming after that, black dwarf supernova might be the last interesting thing to happen in the universe", says Matt Caplan. Caplan’s new work, accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, calculates how long these nuclear reactions take to produce iron, and how much iron black dwarfs of different sizes need to explode. He calls his theoretical explosions “black dwarf supernova” and calculates that the first one will occur in about 10 to the 1100th years. “In years, it’s like saying the word ‘trillion’ almost a hundred times. If you wrote it out, it would take up most of a page. It’s mindbogglingly far in the future.”   

Of course, not all black dwarfs will explode. “Only the most massive black dwarfs, about 1.2 to 1.4 times the mass of the sun, will blow.” Still, that means as many as 1 percent of all stars that exist today, about a billion trillion stars, can expect to die this way. As for the rest, they’ll remain black dwarfs. “Even with very slow nuclear reactions, our sun still doesn’t have enough mass to ever explode in a supernova, even in the far far future. You could turn the whole sun to iron and it still wouldn’t pop.”  

Caplan calculates that the most massive black dwarfs will explode first, followed by progressively less massive stars, until there are no more left to go off after about 10^32000 years. At that point, the universe may truly be dead and silent. “It’s hard to imagine anything coming after that, black dwarf supernova might be the last interesting thing to happen in the universe. They may be the last supernova ever.” By the time the first black dwarfs explode, the universe will already be unrecognizable. “Galaxies will have dispersed, black holes will have evaporated, and the expansion of the universe will have pulled all remaining objects so far apart that none will ever see any of the others explode. It won’t even be physically possible for light to travel that far.”  

Scientists have identified 27 global warming accelerators known as amplifying feedback loops, including some that the researchers say may not be fully accounted for in climate models.

Amazon’s self-driving tech company Zoox is testing its purpose-built robotaxi on public roads in California, with employees as passengers. On a post on its website, Zoox confirmed it received approval from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to operate the vehicle autonomously, both empty and with staffers on board. And it hailed the tests as a landmark in the development of self-driving tech by declaring them: “The first time in history a purpose-built robotaxi – without any manual controls – drove autonomously with passengers.” Permission from the DMV followed Zoox’s self-certification of the vehicle with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) last July (2022).

As with the Origin, from General Motors’ rival robotaxi company Cruise, the Zoox vehicle has been built from the ground up as a dedicated autonomous vehicle (AV). This sets it apart from the robotaxis currently in operation in the likes of San Francisco and Phoenix, Cruise’s modified Chevrolet Bolts and Waymo’s Jaguar i-Pace models. But a key difference with the Origin concerns its status. The Cruise AV does not have FMVSS self-certification, with GM preferring instead to apply for an exemption from the National Highway Transport Safety Administration (NHTSA). This limits the number that can be manufactured.

The Zoox AV is known as the VH6 and has no steering wheel or pedals. It can change direction without having to reverse thanks to bidirectional driving and four-wheel steering, and automated functionality is delivered by cameras, radar and Lidar sensors. These provide 360-degree coverage, visibility up to 492 feet and the ability to see around corners in specific pre-mapped areas. Redundant back-ups are built in to enhance safety.

Mind uploading is a hypothetical process of digitally emulating a brain, allowing for the transfer of an individual's consciousness into a computer system. This technology could potentially allow humans to live forever in digital form, as their memories and personalities would be stored on computers. While this concept has been explored in science fiction for decades, recent advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience have made it more plausible than ever before. However, there are still many ethical and technical issues that need to be addressed before mind uploading can become reality.

Top Facts about Mind Uploading:

1. Mind uploading is a hypothetical process of transferring a conscious mind from a biological brain to an artificial substrate.
2. It could potentially allow humans to achieve immortality by preserving their consciousness in digital form.
3. The concept has been explored in science fiction and philosophy since the 1970s, but no technology currently exists that can successfully upload a human mind into a computer system.
4. Scientists have made progress in understanding how the brain works and developing technologies that could enable mind uploading, such as neural networks and quantum computing, but these are still far from being able to replicate the complexity of the human brain. 5. Some experts believe that it may be possible to achieve mind uploading within the next few decades, while others think it is impossible or at least many centuries away from becoming reality.

Variety of singularity videos: http://tinyurl.com/7y6mb83

Astronomers have revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744).

Webb’s view displays three clusters of galaxies – already massive – coming together to form a megacluster. The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.

Only Pandora’s central core has previously been studied in detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. By combining Webb’s powerful infrared instruments with a broad mosaic view of the region’s multiple areas of lensing, astronomers aimed to achieve a balance of breadth and depth that will open up a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution.

“The ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that delineate the past from the future, which I think is a fitting connection to the new realms of the universe Webb is opening up, including this deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster,” said astronomer Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, co-principal investigator on the “Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program to study the region.

“When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star struck,” said Bezanson. “There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lensed galaxies, I found myself getting lost in the image. Webb exceeded our expectations.” The new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches four Webb snapshots together into one panoramic image, displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have attracted increasing attention in the biomedical domain, inspired by their great success in the general natural language domain. Among the two main branches of pre-trained language models in the general language domain, i.e. BERT (and its variants) and GPT (and its variants), the first one has been extensively studied in the biomedical domain, such as BioBERT and PubMedBERT. While they have achieved great success on a variety of discriminative downstream biomedical tasks, the lack of generation ability constrains their application scope. Computer scientists now propose BioGPT, a domain-specific generative Transformer language model pre-trained on large-scale biomedical literature. They evaluate BioGPT on six biomedical natural language processing tasks and demonstrate that this model outperforms previous models on most tasks. Especially, they get 44.98%, 38.42% and 40.76% F1 score on BC5CDR, KD-DTI and DDI end-to-end relation extraction tasks, respectively, and 78.2% accuracy on PubMedQA, creating thus a new record. This case study on text generation further demonstrates the advantage of BioGPT on biomedical literature to generate fluent descriptions for biomedical terms.

Text mining and knowledge discovery from biomedical literature play important roles in drug discovery, clinical therapy, pathology research, etc. Typical tasks include recognizing named entities in the articles, mining the interaction between drugs and proteins / diseases / drugs, answering questions given reference text, generating abstracts for given phrases / words, etc. People have accumulated large amounts of literature in many previous studies. For example, PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), one of the most popular biomedical search engines, covers more than 30 Million articles and the number still rapidly increases every day as new discoveries are continuously coming out. Therefore, automatically mining the knowledge from literature becomes an urgent demand. Pre-training models have demonstrated their powerful capability in natural language processing (NLP).

On the GLUE benchmark, a widely used benchmark for natural language understanding, pre-training-based methods outperform non-pre-training methods by a large margin  (https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard). There are two main kinds of pre-training models: (1) the BERT-like models [2–4], mainly for language understanding tasks; (2) the GPT-like models [5–7], mainly for language generation tasks. These models are first pre-trained on large-scale corpora collected from the Web via self-supervised learning task (e.g. masked language modeling for BERT, auto-regressive language modeling for GPT), and then fine-tuned on specific donwstream tasks. The BERT-like models are widely used in sequence classification and sequence labeling, where we need to encode the complete document. In comparison, the GPT-like models are often used in generation tasks (e.g. abstract generation, knowledge triplet generation).

If you ever needed artificial intelligence's help to plan a friend's baby shower, your time has come, as Google officially unveiled an AI program it's calling Bard.

On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched a Tesla roadster and a spacesuit-clad mannequin into space onboard its Falcon Heavy rocket. Presuming that the harshness of space hasn't decimated the duo, the question is, where is the payload five years since its launch? The answer will blow your mind.

Back in 2018, SpaceX had just begun to demonstrate its reliability as a launch provider shoring up newly awarded contracts. However, its Falcon Heavy rocket was still in the works, and SpaceX needed a dummy payload to test it. This became the genesis of Starman, a mannequin in a space suit, who occupied the driver's seat on the red Tesla roadster.

But where is the vehicle now? The current location is 203,029,386 miles (326,744,225 km, 2.184 AU, 18.17 light minutes) from Earth, moving toward Earth at a speed of 7,105 mi/h (11,435 km/h, 3.18 km/s).

The car is 280,838,746 miles (451,966,291 km, 3.021 AU, 25.13 light minutes) from Mars, moving away from the planet at a speed of 16,314 mi/h (26,254 km/h, 7.29 km/s).

The car is 137,142,121 miles (220,708,917 km, 1.475 AU, 12.27 light minutes) from the Sun, moving away from the star at a speed of 12,014 mi/h (19,335 km/h, 5.37 km/s).

The car has exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty 70,125.8 times while driving around the Sun, (2,524,528,836 miles, 4,062,836,592 km, 27.16 AU) moving at a speed of 51,712 mi/h (83,222 km/h, 23.12 km/s). The orbital period is about 557 days.

It has achieved a fuel economy of 20,035.9 miles per gallon (8,518.2 km/liter, 0.01174 liters/100 km), assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel.

If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity 496,721 times since he launched in one ear, and to Is there Life On Mars? 669,310 times in his other ear.

Starman has completed about 3.2823 orbits around the Sun since launch. A telescope about 47,954 ft (14,616 m) in diameter would be required to resolve the Upper stage from Earth. A smaller one could see him as an unresolved dot, about 92.2 ft (28.1 m) in diameter, in ideal conditions.

The vehicle has traveled far enough to drive all of the world’s roads 63.2 times. It has been 5 years, 1 day and 21 hours since launch.

NASA is asking for the public's help in learning more about exoplanets in a citizen science program called Exoplanet Watch.

With new tools like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we are discovering more exoplanets than ever before and even peering into their atmospheres. Now, NASA is asking for the public’s help in learning more about some of the exoplanets that have already been detected in a citizen science program called Exoplanet Watch.

“With Exoplanet Watch you can learn how to observe exoplanets and do data analysis using software that actual NASA scientists use,” said Rob Zellem, the creator of Exoplanet Watch and an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “We are very excited to show more people how exoplanet science is really done.”

The Exoplanet Watch project has two parts, one involving observing for those who have access to a telescope, and one involving identifying exoplanets in existing data. Even if you don’t have access to equipment other than a computer or a smartphone, you can still help in learning about exoplanets by requesting access to data collected by robotic telescopes and assisting with data analysis. That’s needed because observing exoplanets passing in front of their host stars — in events called 'transits' — is only half of the challenge of finding a new planet. These transits result in dips in the star’s brightness, but these dips are very small at typically less than 1% of the star’s brightness.

Additionally, these transits need to be observed multiple times to work out a planet’s orbit, so that is the primary task of the project — getting members of the public to help refine data on already known exoplanets. By having humans do tasks that computers are still quite poor at, like recognizing patterns, more data can be analyzed and the pace of exoplanet discovery and characterization can be improved.

You can follow the instructions on the Exoplanet Watch website for how to perform the data analysis, which walks you through the steps researchers would use to do this work. It’s a little more involved than other citizen science projects like Galaxy Zoo, but that makes it a great introduction to this type of research if you fancy going deep.

The Exoplanet Watch program has been running since 2018 but was only available to a limited number of people. Recently, it has been opened up to be completely accessible to the public, aiming to engage new people in astronomy as well as to collect more data. “I hope this program lowers barriers to science for a lot of people and inspires the next generation of astronomers to join our field,” said Zellem.