Far-side radio quiet, a 12-hour sunspot lead and a radiation vest on Artemis I
CosmoCube would use the Moon's far side as a radio shield, COFFIES flags sunspots up to 12 hours early, and AstroRad matches Orion shelter doses in storm models.
Science··Night
A lunar shield for the cosmic dark ages
A small satellite called CosmoCube aims to look for the 21-centimetre hydrogen signal from the cosmic dark ages, before the first stars formed. The signal is so faint that radio noise from Earth drowns it, so a design led by Eloy de Lera Acedo of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory proposes using the Moon's far side as a screen. The craft carries a small radiometer working between 10 and 50 megahertz alongside a deployable radio antenna, built on radio-frequency system-on-chip hardware. The period it targets is roughly 150 million years after the Big Bang. The launch window given is the next five years; funding comes from the UK Space Agency, and partners include STFC RAL Space, the University of Portsmouth and Surrey Space Technology Limited. This is a mission proposal; nothing has launched, and the design appears in Nature Astronomy. Expectations about dark matter's role in early structure formation are claims that cannot be tested until the measurement exists.[1]
A 12-hour lead in the Sun's acoustic rhythm
A machine-learning model developed at NASA's COFFIES centre flags active regions emerging on the Sun's surface up to 12 hours ahead and gives their approximate locations. The model reads changes in acoustic power in Solar Dynamics Observatory data. The marker Alexander Kosovichev of the New Jersey Institute of Technology describes is a small change in acoustic waves and magnetic field beneath the surface, like a slight shift of rhythm inside a very noisy orchestra. The model processes long data sequences with a sliding-window transformer architecture, weighting recent observations while holding on to the overall pattern. COFFIES is a NASA DRIVE science centre bringing together researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Princeton University and NASA's Ames Research Center. The results appear in Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation. NASA's own statement says the model is not ready for operational real-time forecasting, needs validation across more events, and cannot yet predict events on the Sun's far side consistently.[2]
A wearable shelter on the way to the Moon
StemRad flew its AstroRad vest around the Moon on the uncrewed Artemis I mission, fitted to one of two identical torso phantoms. The team used the dose data to model performance in a solar particle storm; the calculation puts the vest roughly level with the heavily shielded shelter inside Orion that a crew would otherwise retreat to. The vest does not cover the whole body: it protects the hips, breasts, stomach, colon and reproductive organs, because bone marrow is far more radiation-sensitive than brain tissue and roughly half of it sits around the hips. Oren Milstein says the design cuts effective dose by 60 per cent while leaving the head, arms and legs uncovered. The material is high-density polyethylene; Jordan Houri says the panels were divided into thousands of hexagonal rods, 9 to 60 millimetres long, so the garment flexes. No solar storm occurred during Artemis I, so the team used the spacecraft's passage through the inner Van Allen belt as a proton proxy and extrapolated with Monte Carlo simulation. The storm figure is therefore a model estimate. CosmoCube's radio quiet, COFFIES' 12-hour lead and AstroRad's dose model answer separate limits of noise, timing and protection in space measurement.[3], [1], [2]
