Telescope

• Inside is likely to be the largest ever sample of dust and rock returned from an asteroid.
• Extracted and brought back with great technical ingenuity from an asteroid called Bennu, scientists will now study in search of clues about the origins of the Solar System and life itself.

The origins of the Solar System – and life

• Most asteroids are the rocky leftovers of failed planets and destructive collisions in the early Solar System, orbiting in a belt between Mars and Jupiter.
• These primitive bodies – some more than 4.5 billion years old – can also shed light on the origins of life, because they tell us about the distribution of water, minerals and other elements such as carbon.
• There is also an element of self-interest in studying these asteroids, to understand the risk they may pose if they are heading Earth’s way.
• There are more than 70,000 meteorites in collections around the world, but we know the origins of less than 0.1% of them.

Bringing pieces of space back to Earth

• They can bring pieces from a different planet or asteroid back to Earth to study.
• The first such mission was to the Moon, bringing back lunar samples for analysis.
• The Hayabusa mission, launched in 2003 by the Japanese space agency, JAXA, returned less than 1 milligram from asteroid Itokawa.
• We will know for sure once the sample is carefully examined at Johnson Space Centre over the coming days.

The sound of fireballs

• There are six OSIRIS-REx mission scientists from Curtin (including one of us – Nick Timms), and they will be among those receiving the first wave of samples in the coming weeks.
• Read more:
  The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is about to drop a chunk of asteroid in the Australian outback

  Fireballs, or really bright shooting stars from large space rocks, are quite rare and impossible to predict.

• When objects from outer space enter the atmosphere, travelling much faster than the speed of sound, they ignite the air to create a fireball and also trigger other less-studied phenomena such as shockwaves – which can be hazardous.

What’s next?

• Both of these spacecraft dropped their precious samples to Earth and have continued on with the aim of future asteroid fly-bys.
• The mission, now renamed “OSIRIS-APEX”, has already begun to redirect itself towards an asteroid called Apophis, which it will intercept not long after the asteroid zooms past Earth in April 2029.

• Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — has been very successful for more than a century.
• This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes — and the Big Bang itself.

Deviations and quantum mechanics

• These signal that Einstein’s theory is failing there and must be replaced with a more fundamental one.
• Naively, spacetime singularities should be resolved by quantum mechanics, which apply at very small scales.
• This is enough to understand that a theory that embraces both general relativity and quantum physics should be free of such pathologies.
• However, all attempts to blend general relativity and quantum physics necessarily introduce deviations from Einstein’s theory.

Cosmology matters

• A century of research has given us the standard model of cosmology known as the Λ-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model.
• Here, Λ stands for either Einstein’s famous cosmological constant or a mysterious dark energy with similar properties.
• Dark energy was introduced ad hoc by astronomers to explain the acceleration of the cosmic expansion.
• Despite fitting cosmological data extremely well until recently, the ΛCDM model is spectacularly incomplete and unsatisfactory from the theoretical point of view.

Alternatives to Einstein’s theory

• That we are observing the first deviations from general relativity while the mysterious dark energy simply does not exist?
• This idea, first proposed by researchers at the University of Naples, has gained tremendous popularity while the contending dark energy camp remains vigorous.
• A very popular class of alternatives is the so-called scalar-tensor gravity.

The current situation

• Theorists have spent the last decade extracting physical consequences from these theories.
• The recent detections of gravitational waves have provided a way to constrain the physical class of modifications of Einstein gravity allowed.

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• One of the primary drivers behind the growth of the global adaptive optics market is its ability to provide high-speed imaging.
• Moreover, the increasing adoption of adaptive optics in both clinical applications and research is having a positive impact on market expansion.
• Consequently, these factors are expected to boost the growth of the global adaptive optics market between 2022 to 2027.
• Challenges of the Adaptive Optics Market:
  One of the key challenges for the global adaptive optics market is the technical issues while using the AO system.