- In April, the Parker Solar Probe passed through the sun’s corona, but the data took months to reach Earth. A NASA spacecraft has “kissed” the sun, plunging into the corona, an area of the solar atmosphere that remains unknown. During the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting on Tuesday, scientists made the revelation. “Our ParkerSolarProbe has touched the sun,” the space agency’s official account tweeted. “For the first time in history, a spacecraft has entered the corona, the sun’s atmosphere.”
In April, the Parker Solar Probe soared into the corona during its sixth close encounter with the sun. According to the experts, the data took a few months to arrive and even longer to confirm.
“It’s fascinatingly exciting,” said Nour Raouafi, a project scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Parker was 13 million kilometers from the sun’s center when he first went through the jagged, uneven border between the solar atmosphere and outward solar wind. Experts estimate that the spacecraft passed through the corona at least three times, each time with a smooth transition.
“The first and most spectacular occasion, we were down for about five hours…. ‘Five hours doesn’t seem like a long time,’ you may think,” University of Michigan’s Justin Kasper told reporters. On the other hand, Parker was traveling at such a fast speed that he covered a significant distance in that time, tearing away at about 100 kilometers per second.
The corona appeared dustier than expected, according to Raouafi. Future coronal excursions will help scientists better understand the origins of the solar wind and how it is heated and propelled into space, he added. Because the sun lacks a solid surface, the corona is where the action happens; studying this magnetically active zone up close could help scientists understand solar outbursts that may affect life on Earth.
According to early evidence, Parker may have entered the corona on its ninth close encounter in August, but astronomers believe further investigation is needed. It made its eighth comparative approach last month. Parker will continue to approach more comparable to the sun and dive deeper into the corona until its grand finale orbit in 2025.
According to Intel, metaverse vision needs 1000x more computer power:
According to Intel, building Metaverse at scale and making it available to billions of people in real-time will demand a 1,000-fold increase in computing efficiency over what we have currently. According to Raja Koduri, senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computer Systems and Graphics Group, our present computing, storage, and networking infrastructure is just insufficient to fulfill the Metaverse concept popularised by Meta (previously Facebook) and other organizations.
“We need many orders of magnitude more powerful computational capabilities, available at substantially lower latencies across a range of device form forms,” Koduri wrote in a blog post. He believes that significant enhancements to the internet’s infrastructure would be necessary to enable these capabilities at scale. In a science fiction novel written some 30 years ago, Neal Stephenson coined Metaverse.
In recent years, the Metaverse has come to represent an ideological convergence of digital experiences fueled by Moore’s Law – an aspiration to enable the rich. Real-time, globally-connected virtual- and augmented environments will allow billions of people to work, play, collaborate, and socialize in entirely new ways.
“The metaverse may be the next big computing platform after the web and smartphones,” Koduri continued. As a result of the once-in-a-lifetime disease, many individuals have been forced to rely on digital technology as their only method of communication, cooperation, learning, and survival.
According to the Intel executive, the rise of decentralized digital financial technology encourages business concepts that allow everyone to build these Meta-verses. Facebook has announced a $10 billion investment to achieve its Metaverse aim.
Facebook has announced the employment of 10,000 people to help with Metaverse’s development. According to the company, the next computing platform can help people get access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities.
We don’t have the computational power, according to Intel, to support an immersive metaverse:
According to Intel, we don’t have nearly the processing capacity necessary to provide such a virtual reality experience. This year, a lot of focus has been on how the internet’s next generation will be constructed and maintained.
Metaverse, the next networked virtual world that everyone wants a piece of, “maybe the next big platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” and “maybe the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” according to Intel. It did, however, caution that there is still a long way to go before we reach our perfect dream.
According to Intel, we don’t have nearly the processing capacity necessary to provide such a virtual reality experience. “In reality, we’re nowhere near there.” We need far more processing capacity, available at much lower latencies across a wide range of device form factors.
Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, writes in an editorial that “to offer these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet would need enormous adjustments.” According to Koduri, it’s even impossible to place two people in a plausible virtual world.
“Consider what it takes to put two people in a social situation in an entirely simulated world: persuasive and also detailed profile pictures with realistic clothing, hair, and skin tones – all delivered in real-time and obtained from sensing devices trying to capture real-world 3D objects, gestures, audio, and more; data transfer at super-high bandwidths and extremely low latencies; and a persistent model of the environment, which may contain both real and simulated eavesdroppers.”
Imagine tackling this problem on a massive scale for hundreds of millions of individuals at once.” “Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and available in real-time to billions of humans, would demand a 1,000-fold increase in computational efficiency over today’s state of the art,” says the author.
He warns that hardware improvements will not be enough to narrow the gap. Software and algorithm improvements will be necessary, and we may have enough in 5 years to offer an immersive metaverse experience. Of course, having enough processing power isn’t the only hurdle to overcome when constructing a significant metaverse. Another potentially critical component will be establishing standards to secure the decentralization of the Metaverse and, maybe, to limit Big Tech’s excursions.
Also Read: How A NASA Probe Beat The Heat To Become The First Spacecraft To Reach The Surface Of Sun