NASA to launch Cold Atom Lab in Space

Free falling: NASA is putting ultracold atoms in space

A laboratory for cooling an atomic gas to just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero will soon be sent up to the International Space Station (ISS) by physicists working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The goal of the Cold Atom Lab (CAL) mission is to create long-lived Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) that could lead to better sensors and atomic clocks for use on spacecraft. The BECs could even provide important insights into the nature of dark energy, according to the researchers.

First created in 1995, a BEC is made by trapping and cooling an atomic gas to an extremely low temperature so the atoms fall into the same low-energy quantum state. Instead of behaving like a collection of individual atoms, a BEC is essentially a large quantum object. This makes it very sensitive to disturbances such as stray magnetic fields and accelerations, and therefore BECs can be used to create extremely good sensors.

Falling down
Here on Earth, gravity puts an upper limit on the lifetime of a BEC – the atoms fall down and after a fraction of a second the BEC has dropped out of view of the experiment. In the microgravity environment of the ISS, however, NASA's Robert Thompson and colleagues reckon that their BECs should be observable for 5–10 s. As well as allowing physicists to make more precise measurements of the quantum properties of BECs, the longer lifetime should also make the BECs better sensors. With further development, the team believes that BECs in space could endure for hundreds of seconds.

Five scientific teams will do experiments using Cold Atom Lab, including one led by Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado – who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics for creating the first BECs.



As well as creating BECs, CAL will also cool fermionic atoms to create degenerative Fermi gases. These systems can be made to mimic the behaviour of electrons in solids and could provide important insights into phenomena such as superconductivity. Physicists will also study ultracold mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms. Other planned experiments include atom interferometry and very precise measurements of gravity itself.

Pervasive forces
"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," says Thompson. "The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy – some of the most pervasive forces in the universe."



CAL will be contained within a package about the size of an "ice box". This will contain a vacuum chamber, lasers and electronics. It will also include an electromagnetic "knife", which will be used to cool the atoms. The lab is currently in the final stages of assembly and will be launched in August on a SpaceX CRS-12 rocket.
Author
Hamish Johnston is editor of physicsworld.com

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Dwarf planet Ceres Hosts Home-grown Organic Material

Ceres is doing some home-brewing in the asteroid belt. Organic material has been found on the dwarf planet located between Mars and Jupiter – and it was produced in-house.

Using the Dawn space probe, which has been orbiting Ceres since early 2015, planetary scientists found pockets of carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of the space rock.

The identity of the tar-like minerals can’t be pinned down precisely, but their mineral fingerprints match the make-up of kerite or asphaltite. The constituents and concentrations of these organic materials suggest that it’s unlikely they came to Ceres from another planetary body.

First, they wouldn’t have survived the heat of an impact on the surface of Ceres. And if they had hitched a ride on another stellar object, they would be widely dispersed, rather than concentrated in pockets. That means they must have come from Ceres itself.



“Anything else, you would expect it to be more widespread,” says Michael Küppers at the European Space Agency.

Chris Russell at the University of California, Los Angeles, leads NASA’s Dawn science team and says this finding, along with recent discoveries of water ice and bright spots of mineral deposits on Ceres, points to a more complex picture of the dwarf planet than we once assumed.

“It’s not just an accumulation of rock, but in fact, it’s been doing things,” he says. What it’s doing on the inside is not entirely clear yet, but the organic material on the surface indicates that there are processes within Ceres regulated by heat and water.

All this might sound like the building blocks for life. But Russell is hesitant to go that far.

“This is a different type of material,” he says. “It’s prebiotic, which means that it’s something you would expect to make before you had biology. It’s sort of on the road to biology.”



Russell says that finding organic materials on Ceres makes it more likely that other asteroids may also harbour similar molecular building blocks.
Küppers agrees, adding that this changes our outlook on potential spots where we may look for life in the solar system.

“A couple of decades ago, when talking about life in the solar system, we were focused on Mars. And now, we are more and more looking at other locations, like Saturn’s moon Titan and the subsurfaces of places like [Jupiter’s moon] Europa,” he says. “And now, also Ceres in the asteroid belt.”
Journal reference: Science

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Cryogenic test probes Einstein's equivalence principle, general relativity, and space-time 'foam'

Illustration of the experimental set-up in which, scientists attempted to detect any change in the length of a cryogenic silicon resonator. They detected no change, in support of the equivalence principle. Credit: Wiens et al. ©2016 American Physical Society.

Physicists have performed a test designed to investigate the effects of the expansion of the universe—hoping to answer questions such as "does the expansion of the universe affect laboratory experiments?", "might this expansion change the lengths of solid objects and the time measured by atomic clocks differently, in violation of Einstein's equivalence principle?", and "does space-time have a foam-like structure that slightly changes the speed of photons over time?", an idea that could shed light on the connection between general relativity and quantum gravity.



In their study published in Physical Review Letters, E. Wiens, A.Yu. Nevsky, and S. Schiller at ‘Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf’ in Germany, have used a cryogenic resonator to make some of the most precise measurements yet on the length stability of a solid object. Overall, the results provide further confirmation of Einstein's equivalence principle, which is the foundation on which the theory of general relativity is based on. And in agreement with previous experiments, the researchers found no evidence of space-time foam.

"It is not easy to imagine ways of testing for consequences of the expansion of the universe that occur in the laboratory (as opposed to studying distant galaxies)," Schiller told Phys.org. "Our approach is one way to perform such a test. That we have not observed any effect is consistent with the prediction of general relativity."

Over the course of five months, the researchers made daily measurements of the resonator's length by measuring the frequency of an electromagnetic wave trapped within it. In order to suppress all thermal motion, the researchers operated the resonator at cryogenic temperature (1.5 degrees above absolute zero). In addition, external disturbances, such as tilt, irradiation by laser light, and some other effects that might destabilize the device were kept as small as possible.

To measure the resonator's frequency, the researchers used an atomic clock. Any change in frequency would indicate that the change in length of the resonator differs from the change in time measured by the atomic clock.

The experiment detected virtually no change in frequency, or "zero drift"—more precisely, the mean fractional drift was measured to be about 10-20/second, corresponding to a decrease in length that the researchers describe as equivalent to depositing no more than one layer of molecules onto the mirrors of the resonator over a period of 3000 years. This drift is the smallest value measured so far for any resonator.



One of the most important implications of the null result is that it provides further support for the equivalence principle. Formulated by Einstein in the early 1900s, the equivalent principles is the idea that gravity and acceleration—such as the acceleration a person would feel in an upward-accelerating elevator in space—are equivalent.

This principle leads to several related concepts, one of which is local position invariance, which states that, the non-gravitational laws of physics (for example, electromagnetism) are the same everywhere. In the current experiment, any amount of resonance drift would have violated local position invariance. Along similar lines, any amount of resonance drift would also have violated general relativity, since general relativity prohibits changes to the length of solid objects caused by the expansion of the universe.
Finally, the experiment also attempted to detect the hypothetical existence of space-time foam. One of the effects of space-time foam would be that repeated measurements of a length would produce fluctuating results. The constant measurement results reported here therefore indicate that such fluctuations, if they exist at all, must be very small.



In the future, the researchers hope that the extremely precise measurement technique, using the cryogenic resonator could be used for other applications.

"One of the greatest outcomes of this work is that we have developed an approach to make and operate an optical resonator that has extremely little drift," Schiller said. "This could have applications to the field of atomic clocks and precision measurements—for example, for the radar tracking of spacecraft in deep space."
Journal reference: Physical Review Letters

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Recent UFO Sightings During the Super-moon

By: Alexandria Addesso

Is there anybody out there? Are we all alone in the universe? What about other universes we are already aware of as well as those we cannot even fathom? These are questions that extraterrestrial enthusiasts and alien excavators have long been asking, and those individuals who believe they have actually seen unidentified flying objects (UFOs), or had encounters with the third kind, have been confirming for them.

There are four to six super-moons a year. A super-moon happens when a full moon or a new moon coincides with the closest approach the moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit. The recent super-moon occurring, from November 13-15 2016, was said by NASA scientists to be the “brightest super-moon seen since 1948”. As sky gazers were peering at the heavens in droves more numerous than usual, many UFO sightings occurred.



In Miami, Florida; Worcester, Massachusetts; Forest, Virginia and Turbot Ville, Pennsylvania there were reported sightings of UFOs under or near the moon on November 13, 2016 with pictures to cooperate some of the observances. In all the instances the UFOs were described as “blue orbs”. The next day, there were also several sightings of blue orbs around the moon in Los Angeles and Oceanside, California, Seattle, Washington; Ankara, Turkey and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Port-Au-Prince sighting was a recorded event, to watch the video click here.

Some have written off the video and even some of the other sightings as simple lenses flares, yet the movement in the video suggests otherwise. How could so many people in so many different parts of the world see the same thing? Could they all be technologically unsavies when using their cameras? What about the reported sightings from the super-moon nights by those who had no cameras and only the naked eye yet saw the same thing?, or Simple delusions? Does the eye only see what the mind wants it to or have we been long taught to write off all those who claim to have seen such things as delirious?
Stay curious, stay staring upward at the heavens, and keep checking the New Mind Journal, for UFO updates.

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Tangled Up in Space-time

Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called “It from Qubit” say space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information

“All the world’s a stage…,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to think that way, too. Space seems like a backdrop to the action of forces and fields that inhabit it but space itself is not made of anything—or is it? Lately scientists have begun to question this conventional thinking and speculate that space—and its extension according to general relativity, spacetime—is actually composed of tiny chunks of information. These chunks might interact to create spacetime and give rise to its properties, such as the concept that curvature in spacetime causes gravity. If so, the idea might not just explain spacetime but might help physicists achieve a long-sought goal: a quantum theory of gravity that can merge general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two grand theories of the universe that tend not to get along. Lately the excitement of this possibility has engrossed hundreds of physicists who have been meeting every three months or so under the banner of a project dubbed “It from Qubit.”

The “it” in this case is spacetime, and the qubit (pronounced “cue-bit,” from “quantum bit”) represents the smallest possible amount of information—a computer “bit” on a quantum scale. The idea suggests the universe is built up from some underlying code, and that by cracking this code, physicists will finally have a way to understand the quantum nature of large-scale events in the cosmos. The most recent It from Qubit (IfQ) meeting was held in July at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, where organizers were expecting about 90 registrants. Instead, they got so many applications they had to expand to take 200 and simultaneously run five satellite sessions at other universities where scientists could participate remotely. “I think this is one of the most, if not the most, promising avenues of research toward pursuing quantum gravity,” says Netta Engelhardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who is not officially involved in It from Qubit but who has attended some of its meetings. “It’s just taking off.”



Because the project involves both the science of quantum computers and the study of spacetime and general relativity, it brings together two groups of researchers who do not usually tend to collaborate: quantum information scientists on one hand and high-energy physicists and string theorists on the other. “It marries together two traditionally different fields: how information is stored in quantum things and how information is stored in space and time,” says Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who is an IfQ principal investigator.

About a year ago the Simons Foundation, a private organization that supports science and mathematics research, awarded a grant to found the It from Qubit collaboration and finance physicists to study and hold meetings on the subject. Since then excitement has grown and successive meetings have drawn in more and more researchers, some official members of the collaboration funded by Simons and many others simply interested in the topic.



“The project is addressing very important questions, but very difficult questions,” says IfQ collaborator Beni Yoshida, a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter. “Collaboration is necessary—it’s not like a single person can solve this problem.” Even scientists outside of the project have taken notice. “If the link with quantum information theory proves as successful as some anticipate, it could very well spark the next revolution in our understanding of space and time,” says string theorist Brian Greene of Columbia University, who is not involved in IfQ. “That’s a big deal and hugely exciting.”
Source: Clara Moskowitz

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Imagining Humans on Mars

Billionaire Elon Musk hopes to build self-sustaining human colonies on Mars. How have science fiction writers imagined the possible role of Mars in humanity’s future?

Last month in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk, a former graduate student in physics and founder of the space exploration company SpaceX, made headlines with a daring plan: to put human beings on Mars as early as 2024. Musk’s vision is not of a small handful of astronauts or astrotourists taking a short walk on Mars’s surface. Rather, he sees Mars as the future home of a self-sustaining human colony.

At times Musk’s presentation to the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) felt like the opening scene of a science fiction movie—a comparison that he would probably not dislike. Indeed, SpaceX’s work has been littered with references to science fiction. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket is a nod to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. And at the IAC, Musk suggested that the first SpaceX ship to Mars might be named Heart of Gold, after the ship in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Those works, however, imagine travel between stars and planets far from the Milky Way. How has science fiction envisioned space exploration closer to home, especially as advances in spaceflight have made human travel to Mars seem almost within our reach?



Mars as utopia and refuge
In the late 19th century, astronomical observations of Mars led to intense speculation about whether its surface might harbor life. American astronomer Percival Lowell even built an observatory in Arizona to get a closer look at what he believed were artificially constructed Martian canals. Although most astronomers agreed that there was little evidence for life on Mars, the idea of a Martian race quickly took hold in fiction.

Many of the first science fiction novels about Mars described travelers to the Red Planet who encountered not merely life forms, but utopian civilizations. In A Plunge into Space (1890), Irishman Robert Cromie envisions a Martian society in which air travel is common and society has evolved beyond the need for politicians. In their novel Unveiling a Parallel (1893), Iowa feminists Alice Jones and Ella Merchant send their protagonist to two egalitarian societies on Mars—one in which women and men are equally promiscuous and violent and another in which equality of the sexes has resulted in a scientifically and philosophically advanced utopia.

A spherical steel spacecraft transports people to a Red Planet utopia in A Plunge into Space (1890). War-waging Martians attack Earth in The War of the Worlds (1898).



The most famous English-language science fiction novel of the late 19th century, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), imagines a significantly less peaceful encounter between humans and Martians. The book’s unnamed English narrator first reads about possible activity on Mars in Nature. Weeks later, he finds himself fleeing for his life as tentacled Martians kill or imprison his fellow humans. Only a humble bacterial infection saves humanity from total defeat. At the end of the novel, the narrator muses that humans, too, might travel beyond their planet one day—but they will have to contend with the surviving Martians if they do:

If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out. . . . It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.

Wells’s vision of humans traveling to other planets to escape a crisis on Earth became a staple of mid-20th-century science fiction. Once again, Mars proved a popular destination. In several novels, including Red Planet (1949), avowedly libertarian author Robert Heinlein imagines political discontent as a motivation for Martian settlement—and for eventual rebellion from Earth authorities.



Ray Bradbury’s celebrated short story collection The Martian Chronicles (1950) describes humanity fleeing a coming nuclear war and encountering telepathic Martians. The collection also deals with life on war-torn Earth; perhaps the most famous story in The Martian Chronicles is “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which tells of a mechanized California house carrying on its work after its occupants die in a nuclear blast. Nuclear disaster also prompts the creation of Martian colonies in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). However, the colonists—and the androids they build—find Mars so desolate that many sneak back to Earth illegally.

The scientific challenges of Mars
Advances in space science during and after the Cold War have seemed to bring a human landing on Mars closer and closer to reality. In the 1960s NASA’s Mariner program successfully executed a series of Mars flybys that garnered the agency increasingly clear images of the planet. In 1975 NASA successfully landed Viking 1 and Viking 2 on Mars’s surface. Further missions to Mars have only become more ambitious. The celebrated Mars rovers, including Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, have mapped Mars’s surface, sampled its soil and rocks, and helped scientists assess whether the planet was habitable in the past.

Viking 1 and Curiosity have provided scientists and sci-fi writers with striking views of the real Red Planet.

As scientists learn more about Mars’s geology and atmosphere, novelists have increasingly focused on the scientific and technological requirements for putting humans on the planet. Some of the most celebrated contemporary authors of Martian fiction have backgrounds in science or engineering. The most popular example is The Martian (2011), the debut novel by computer engineer Andy Weir, which chronicles the struggles and adventures of an astronaut accidentally left for dead on Mars’s surface.



The Martian focuses on living on Mars as it is. In contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars Trilogy imagines a centuries-long scientific effort to terraform the planet to support human life. Red Mars/i> (1993), the first book in the trilogy, focuses on the scientific challenges of remaking an entire planet, from the geological to the psychological. Scientific problems are not the only ones Robinson’s characters face: Conflict soon arises over whether Mars should be terraformed at all or whether it should be preserved in its natural desert state.



Science fiction has the unique ability to pose “what-if” questions about scientific and technological developments and to reflect on how those developments might affect human society. Each wave of Mars fiction has evolved alongside new knowledge of the Red Planet and has also raised questions related to the social concerns and political controversies of the day. Nineteenth-century Martian novels also served as commentaries on Victorian culture. In 20th-century fiction, colonies on Mars function as both a bastion of hope for humanity’s future and a sign that something has gone terribly wrong on Earth. Dick and Bradbury were implicitly condemning the casual use of nuclear weapons when they imagined humans fleeing to another planet. Robinson’s work explores the possible effect humans might have on Mars while reminding the reader that, humans are already altering Earth.

Musk’s plan for colonizing Mars within the next century is reminiscent of many of the novels about humans living on the Red Planet. In a recent interview, Robinson suggested that Musk modernize his sci-fi-inspired vision: “Musk’s science fiction story needs some updating, some real imagination using current findings from biology and ecology.” Perhaps as SpaceX hones its Mars settlement plan Musk should reread the Mars Trilogy along with The Martian, which depicted a human living on Mars with 21st-century technology.



If Musk’s ambitious plan succeeds, new takes on Mars in science fiction novels and movies will likely arise—along with new questions about what the achievement will mean for humanity.
Source: Melinda Baldwin is the Books editor at Physics Today.

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Life could be made on ice in the space

Are we all “aliens”, after all?

The search for life in space might have just gotten a little bit sweeter. In the early stages of our solar system, ice grains that were hit by sunlight may have formed sugar molecules onto their surfaces. According to this new experiment, those sugars include Ribose (the backbone of RNA), which is implicated into the origin of life.

All known forms of life make at least some use of RNA as a genetic material. Also, the “R” (Ribose) in RNA, holds up the compounds that encode genetic messages. However, it has been difficult to fully comprehend how ribose could be made in the absence of living organisms, and be part of a precursor for life.

Other components of living cells, such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, have shown up in experiments and various samples from meteorites for years. Molecules that resemble cell membranes have also appeared alongside with these other components. Subsequently, if those components and ribose had all existed at the same time, then it could have set the stage for life to rapidly evolve.

But sugars, like Ribose, are hard to come by because often, the substance sticks together in a way that makes it almost impossible to extract. “Sugars like to react with each other,” says Cornelia Meinert at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France. “In the end, everything is brown, like caramel.”



Now, Meinert’s team was able to produce Ribose by shining an ultraviolet light into a frozen blend of water, methanol, and ammonia. This mixture represents our solar system in its infancy; way before tiny grains of dust and ice collapsed into planets.

Lego castle of life

“It’s another example of how the universe seems to be hardwired to produce a lot of the kinds of compounds you would like to be around if you want to get life going.” says Scott Sandford of NASA Ames Research Center in California. Sandford’s own team is reporting similar results in a research paper that is now appearing in the press, he previously stated.

Whether or not sugars are made on real interstellar ice grains is still an open question. Because these grains are preserved, if they gently settle on small bodies far from the sun, subsequently checking the surfaces of comets or meteorites may help resolve the issue. ESA’s Rosetta mission and radio astronomers have both picked up simple sugars on comets before, but may have struggled to find something complex like Ribose, Meinert believes.

Finding these sugars on comets could potentially tell us that amino acids, molecules in cell membranes, and Ribose could all have been made in space, and dropped on Earth just in time for the genesis of life.

We certainly are far from assimilating what could be happening next, though. “Just because now you have all the molecules doesn’t mean you have life.” Meinert says.



Still, it doesn’t hurt. “If you think of all these little molecules we’re making as Lego blocks, and life as a kind of very complex, organized Lego castle, the fact that Lego blocks are falling out of the sky can’t be a bad thing.” Sandford says.

Reference: Science Journal
Wikipedia
NMJ Library

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