The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, located in the Mojave Desert in California, is one of three complexes which comprise NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). The DSN provides radio communications for all of NASA’s interplanetary spacecraft and is also utilized for radio astronomy and radar observations of the solar system and the universe. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Jet Propuls... More »
Precise brightness measurements over a broad spectrum of mid-infrared light, combined with 3D climate models and previous observations from other telescopes, suggest the presence of thick, high clouds covering the nightside, clear skies on the dayside, and equatorial winds upwards of 5,000 miles per hour mixing atmospheric gases around the planet. The investigation is just the latest demonstration... More »
Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, icy-cold Uranus. Over the next few hours, Voyager 2 flew within 50,600 miles (81,433 kilometers) of Uranus’ cloud tops, collecting data that revealed two new rings, 11 new moons and temperatures belo... More »
The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), Univision Communications Inc. (Univision) and Grupo Televisa S.A.B. (Televisa) today officially kick-off a partnership to develop programs designed to increase diversity in media and technology, where Latinos are still underrepresented. The announcement was made at an event in Los Angele... More »
Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet has joined Caltech from the Paranal Observatory in Chile, where he was a staff astronomer for the Very Large Telescope. After earning his PhD at the University of Liège, Belgium, in 2006, he was at JPL from 2007 to 2011—first as a NASA postdoctoral scholar and then as a research scientist. Q: What do you do? A: I study exoplanets, which are planets or... More »
Metacloud, Inc., a leader in deploying and operating private cloud solutions via their OpenStack as-a-service platform, is pleased to announce that Metacloud OpenStack will support VXLAN networking. Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network virtualization technology that eliminates the typical scalability problems associated with large cloud computing environments. By enabling a full Layer 3 top... More »
This year, social media channels were suddenly flush with artistic images generated by the Midjourney software, which builds artworks based on nothing more than a text prompt. Text-generating software such as ChatGPT, meanwhile, can write resumes, compose poetry, and even help doctors communicate with their patients. These kinds of generative artificial intelligence have produced headlines ranging... More »
A joint team of researchers led by Caltech and including collaborators from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, and Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) have established two test beds using off-the-shelf material and state-of-the-art quantum devices to accurately teleport quantum information for a sustained period across a distance of 44 kilometers. The... More »
A new instrument on the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star and, separately, a cool star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near to its companion star. The device, called the vortex coronagraph, was recently installed inside the Near Infrared Camera 2 (NIRC2), the workhorse infrared imaging camera at Keck. The vor... More »
Some five years ago, mathematician Sergei Gukov began teaching himself how to build the neural networks that are the foundation of artificial intelligence, simply to see whether they might be useful in the realm of pure mathematics. He was, he admits now, skeptical whether the supremely complicated and complex questions being asked by pure math would be within the reach of AI’s ability to process ... More »
