Good afternoon, and welcome to this edition of Gimmick Command Periodically!
NASA’s general space probe just made a very close approach to the planet Jupiter, and this included getting a very close up and personal video and still shot footage of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
This storm is the largest storm in our Solar System, and has been active for at least several hundred known years. One reason for the endurance of this storm as opposed to a hurricane on earth is that there are no solid landmasses to defuse the energy source that the storm draws on. Hurricanes draw on heat and moisture from the ocean to keep going and strengthening, but once they hit land they quickly die.
At least one or more planet Earths could fit inside the storm. Jupiter also has several smaller versions of the storm at various latitudes.
For more information about Juno, and its mission, visit Wikipedia for more.
In other news, massive efforts are being made to make quantum computing available.
Quantum computing is far more advanced than the versions of computing that we have today. For example, it would allow more than one version of one computer operating at once. Basically, a quantum computer is like replicating itself by many millions of times to be able to find complex answers that just one version of itself could not find alone. Imagine you are asked to solve a complex calculus equation. But that equation could be different in various cultures, subcultures, and different scientific views. A quantum computer would be like you splitting yourself into as many versions of yourself as you can so you could approach each problem and solve it. Then, you would compare the results with each version of yourself to find the best version of the answer overall.
Current computers utilize Bits that binary 0’s or 1’s, but Quantum bits are called “Qubits”, and can be a 3D variation of the 1 or 0 bits. Obviously the more “versions of yourself” that you could produce to solve these problems, the higher the resolution of the answer. This has great implications for industries and projects such as spaceflight, weather forecasting, and airflow modeling on various new vehicles such as cars and aircraft among others.
For more related articles, visit Forbes and Wikipedia on Quantum computing.
The last piece of news today is that the first act of teleporting a photon from earth to space has been accomplished.
NOTE: The graphic above does not suggest that earth is able to teleport people yet. In the present reality, it’s simply photons and photonic information. Chinese scientist were able to accomplish the feat within the past couple weeks.
This is not akin to the version in Star Trek, but basically transmitting the information from one photon to another one on an orbiting satellite. At least in the near run, this would have implications of being able to transmit data another key piece of information that were “super encrypted” that current methods of decryption that hackers could not decrypt.
For The Great Galactic Space Gimmick, I’m Gimmick Commander Ben Faltinowski! 🙂
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