Monday 7 May 2018

Mission to study how Mars was made

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NASA's Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission is on a 300-million-mile (483-million-kilometer) trip to Mars to study for the first time what lies deep beneath the surface of the Red Planet. InSight is scheduled to land on the Red Planet around 3 p.m. EST (noon PST) Nov. 26, where it will conduct science operations until Nov. 24, 2020, which equates to one year and 40 days on Mars, or nearly two Earth years.
via Science Daily
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Astronomers find exoplanet atmosphere free of clouds

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Scientists have detected an exoplanet atmosphere that is free of clouds, marking a pivotal breakthrough in the quest for greater understanding of the planets beyond our solar system.
via Science Daily
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Mars growth was stunted by early giant planetary instability

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An astrophysics team explains why the growth of Mars was stunted by an orbital instability among the outer solar system's giant planets in a new study on the evolution of the young solar system. The study builds on the widely accepted Nice Model, which invokes a planetary instability to explain many peculiar observed aspects of the outer solar system. The research shows how planet accretion (growth) is halted by the outer solar system instability.
via Science Daily
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Are you up for the TrackML challenge?

10,000 tracks grouping 100,000 points in a future LHC detector as simulated for the TrackML challenge (Image: TrackML Challenge Team/CERN)

Physicists from the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations have just launched the TrackML challenge – your chance to develop new machine-learning solutions for the next generation of particles detectors.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces hundreds of millions of collisions every second, generating tens of petabytes of data a year. Handling this flood of data is a major challenge for the physicists, who have developed tools to process and filter the events online within a fraction of a second and select the most promising collision events.

Managing the amount of data will become even more challenging in the near future: a major upgrade foreseen for 2026, the planned start of the High-Luminosity LHC, will increase the collision rate up to a factor of five. Innovative new software solutions will be needed to promptly reconstruct the tracks produced by these collisions with the available computing resources.

To help address this issue, a team of machine-learning experts and LHC physicists has partnered with Kaggle to probe the question: can machine learning assist high-energy physics in discovering and characterising new particles?

Specifically, in this competition, you’re challenged to build an algorithm that quickly and efficiently reconstructs particle tracks from 3D points left in the silicon detectors. The challenge consists of two phases:

  • The “Accuracy Phase” is now running on Kaggle from May to July 2018. Here the focus is on the highest score, irrespective of the evaluation time. This phase is an official IEEE WCCI competition (Rio de Janeiro, July 2018).

  • The “Throughput Phase” will run on Codalab from July to October 2018. Participants will submit their software to be evaluated by the platform. Incentive is on the throughput (or speed) of the evaluation while reaching a good score. This phase is an official NIPS competition (Montreal, December 2018).

Sign up for the TrackML challenge today. The top three scorers will receive cash prizes. Selected winners may be awarded a top-notch NVIDIA v100 GPU, or get the chance to visit CERN or attend the 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Montreal (Canada).

For more information and the participation conditions, visit the Kaggle challenge website and the official TrackML twitter account.


via CERN: Updates for the general public
https://home.cern/about/updates/2018/05/are-you-trackml-challenge

ESA selects three new mission concepts for study

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A high-energy survey of the early Universe, an infrared observatory to study the formation of stars, planets and galaxies, and a Venus orbiter are to be considered for ESA’s fifth medium class mission in its Cosmic Vision science programme, with a planned launch date in 2032.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ESA_selects_three_new_mission_concepts_for_study

Impossible intersection

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Space Science Image of the Week: Saturn’s rings give the illusion they are intersecting themselves in an impossible way
via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/05/Crisscrossed_rings