On 17 December, in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, representatives from the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and governmental authorities gathered to celebrate the official groundbreaking of the CTAO’s southern site, CTAO-South. After years of successful site preparations, the event marked the beginning of construction on the telescope foundations, paving the way for the first telescopes of the first and largest gamma-ray observatory in the southern hemisphere.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Juan Jose Mendoza Arenas and Pennsylvania State University’s Xiang Yang have received a highly competitive New Initiative Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation to design algorithms and model turbulence using quantum computers. The collaborative, two-year project titled “Small-Scale Turbulence as a Quantum System” seeks to advance understanding of turbulence and the potential of quantum computers to model complex systems. 

TU Delft develops new method for large-scale health monitoring via wastewater

Wastewater contains a hidden wealth of information about the communities that produce it. During the Covid-19 pandemic, sewage monitoring for viral RNA became a key tool for tracking outbreaks. TU Delft researcher Martin Pabst and his team are now expanding this concept with a new method that enables large-scale monitoring of human health and microbial activity through wastewater.

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) the gateway station is tightly coupled with the user beam clusters are tightly coupled to complete 2-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.