First powered flight on another planet !

Even as this pandemic ravages this planet, humans continue to make progress. On Monday the 19^th of April, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieved the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is a small, lightweight, drone-like helicopter that was carried on the Perseverance rover. They launched from Earth together in July 2020 and landed on Mars on Feb. 19, 2021. To me, this is one of those historic moments, when the entire civilization can be proud that humanity’s quest for searching life beyond our own shores is slowly bearing fruits. Even as a vast majority of us are fighting one of the worst pandemics in recent memory, our thirst for science and the discoveries it affords us has not been extinguished. And just like that, humans can now fly on other planets!

Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL. It had to be this way, because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundreds of millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, and hence Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was not observable from Earth in real-time. While this may sound very disappointing to sci-fi fans, this technological demonstration will help humans create new missions to Mars and other places in the solar system using not just rovers, but helicopters as well. We are informed that humans are already planning similar flying crafts to be deployed on one of the largest satellites of Saturn which is popularly called Titan. Achieving flight on another planet means that our approach to planetary exploration will change.

According to NASA Associate Administrator for Science (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-succeeds-in-historic-first-flight) “Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Zurbuchen said. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked. As an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration.”

Ingenuity’s sole mission is to demonstrate that flight on another planet is feasible. This first flight was full of unknowns. The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight. In the early morning of April 19, Ingenuity spun up its rotors, climbed to a height of three meters where it hovered for about 30 seconds, performing a rotation while doing so, and then safely landed back on the surface of Mars. The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf commercial parts that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission.

It’s incredible to see how much technology has changed in just over a century and a half. From coal-burning steam-powered engines and using whale oil to landing on other planets and flying through their thin atmosphere. What will the next century look like? Will we finally break the light speed barrier and visit nearby stars and hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

 

As we run around our humdrum lives, largely oblivious to the nature of reality around us, only observing a a minuscule portion of this version of reality called our universe, there are forces shaping all that we can see, touch, experience, and then everything else that we cannot.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) – “In physics, there are four observed fundamental interactions (also known as fundamental forces) that form the basis of all known interactions in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces.” So, all of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, and now some physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

The search for a fifth force has increased in recent decades due to two discoveries in cosmology that are not explained by current theories. It has been discovered that most of the mass of the universe is accounted for by an unknown form of matter called dark matter. Most physicists believe that dark matter consists of new, undiscovered subatomic particles, but some believe that it could be related to an unknown fundamental force. Second, it has also recently been discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which has been attributed to a form of energy called dark energy. Some physicists speculate that a form of dark energy called quintessence could be a fifth force.

The findings come from physicists at Fermilab, the US Department of Energy Office’s national laboratory.

According to Silicon Repulic – (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/force-of-nature-physics) – “In the Muon g-2 experiment, the scientists exposed muons to an intense magnetic field by sending them around a 50-foot-diameter magnetised ring at Fermilab. When doing this, the team found the muons wobbled in unpredictable ways, defying the fundamental theory of how particles interact.”

“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment.

We’re quite familiar with the first two forces. Gravity pins us to Earth and pulls us around the sun, while electromagnetism keeps the lights on. The other two forces are less obvious to us because they govern interactions at the tiniest scales. The strong force binds matter together, while the weak nuclear force describes the radioactive decay of atoms

The Fermilab experiment builds on a previous experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory around 20 years ago. Elsewhere, there have been other experiments hinting at a new kind of physics. Last month, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva found unstable particles that fail to decay as the standard model suggests.

However, we might find it difficult to measure this new force. Gravity, for example, is such a weak force that the gravitational interaction between two objects is only significant when one of them has a great mass. Therefore, it takes very sensitive equipment to measure gravitational interactions between objects that are small compared to a planet.

The existence of fifth and more forces, fundamental to nature, have been speculated for decades. The study of physics and the search a new force of nature, in many ways, is a search for who we are, why are we here and what is this reality all about, or even whether are other realities or planes of existence which we have been, hitherto, unaware of. Imagine, with our current standard model of cosmology, our understanding of the universe falls astonishingly short – we still don’t know all the laws of nature and furthermore, we still don’t know what constitutes almost 95% of our universe or stranger still – why is there such a massive imbalance between matter/ anti-matter. There have been false alarms of course. So we may have to wait a while before we know whether a new particle and its potential fifth force will revolutionize physics or take its place atop the dustbin of debunked and discarded discoveries such as the now-infamous cold fusion!