All posts tagged: Psyche

Mars shines in ethereal photo from Psyche space probe

Mars shines in ethereal photo from Psyche space probe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletterđź’ˇ Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to a small, metal-rich asteroid near Jupiter. However, the barely 3,600-pound probe recently required a little help from Mars to complete its lengthy 2.2-billion-mile mission. Despite its complex gravity assist earlier this month, the groundbreaking spacecraft still found time to snap some travel photos showcasing its Red Planet flyby. NASA released the latest image from Psyche’s trip on May 20, which offers a gorgeous view of Mars just hours before Earth’s neighbor temporarily eclipsed the cosmic traveller. According to NASA, the image was taken on May 15 at about 8:03 a.m. EDT by the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument. The thin crescent view of Mars is due to the spacecraft’s approach at what’s known as a high phase angle. The fingernail slice of Red Planet actually looks brighter and wider than mission specialists anticipated, thanks to a large level of sunlight scattering through the dusty Martian atmosphere. Interestingly, the instrument’s original unfiltered image …

NASA’s Psyche probe nears Mars for gravity boost en route to metal-rich asteroid

NASA’s Psyche probe nears Mars for gravity boost en route to metal-rich asteroid

Published by Sam Flores

LOS ANGELES, May 14 : NASA’s Psyche probe was headed for a close encounter with Mars on Friday and a planned gravity boost to set the spacecraft on its final course to the solar system’s largest known metallic asteroid, thought to be the remnant core of an ancient protoplanet. The Psyche probe, named for the asteroid it was designed to explore, was launched in October 2023 on a planned voyage of 2.2 billion miles and is expected to reach its destination on the outer fringes of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in about three years. On Friday, the spacecraft is expected to pass within 2,800 miles (4,500 km) of Mars at 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph) as it harnesses the gravitational pull of the Red Planet to speed up and adjust the probe’s trajectory en route to its asteroid target, according to NASA. The Mars slingshot flyby was built into the Psyche flight plan as a way of conserving its supply of xenon gas propellant in the vehicle’s solar-electric ion thruster …

AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns

AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who earn a wage for a living, it can be hard to stay positive in the wake of recent headlines. Jack Dorsey’s Block just cut 4,000 roles citing AI, which came on the heels of Amazon’s rolling layoffs, which sent some 16,000 office workers packing. Oracle, meanwhile, just announced it’s culling at least 20,000 workers from its ranks. In an interview with the Psychiatric Times, psychiatrist Andrew Brown argued that the economic distress associated with this kind of unemployment also carries clinical side effects. A psych professional primarily focusing on the mental health of the unemployed, Brown has previously warned about how AI-driven job loss fuels anxiety and self-doubt. Now, those warnings are becoming all too real. “What we can expect to see” with the AI jobs onslaught, he suggests, “is an amplification” of the anxieties that typically come with a loss of income. This is obvious enough: …

Star Trek and the Psyche

Star Trek and the Psyche

Published by Jenni Sidey

Gene Roddenberry (the television writer who created Star Trek in 1966) once explained that he “took the perfect person and divided him into three: the administrative courageous part in the Captain, the logical part in the Science Officer, and the humanist part in the Doctor” (Edward Gross, 1995). That description has shaped how fans and philosophers read the show ever since. But Roddenberry miscounted. His show has four distinct psychological functions on the bridge, but he left the fourth one out when he described them. He is in good company. People have been doing this to Plato for over two thousand years. Four in the Text, Three in the Reading Plato’s Politeia (the work we call The Republic thanks to Cicero’s Latin mistranslation) describes the soul as having three parts: reason (logistikon), spirit (thumos), and appetite (epithumia). But throughout the dialogue, Plato also describes a fourth element… repeatedly, and by name. He calls it the auto politeia (self-constitution): the governing principle that determines how the three parts relate. Plato has it in the text. His …