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Record Breaking Jorge Martin Bags the Australian GP Pole

Aditya Saikrishna
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Record Breaking Jorge Martin Bags the Australian GP Pole

AUSTRALIA: Jorge Lorenzo’s nine-year-old lap record at Phillip Island was broken by Jorge Martin, the Prima Pramac Racing rider who had never ridden a MotoGP bike before at the circuit before the Australian GP weekend.

Lorenzo’s All-Time Lap Record of 1:27.767s was set in 2013 on his Ducati Desmosedici.

The Repsol Honda Team’s Marc Marquez also set an under-lap-record pace as he claimed the second spot in Q2. Francesco Bagnaia of the Ducati Lenovo Team will start first among title contenders.

Jorge Martin had been quick from the start of Q2 as he set a benchmark of 1:28.112s, which was the fastest lap of the Australian GP weekend till that point.

Bagnaia went quicker in his next run to set a time of 1:28.054s. Fabio Quartararo was third fastest with a time of 1:28.174s, while Marc Marquez finished fifth with a time of 1:28.313s.

Once the second qualifying run started, Johann Zarco went fastest with a 1:28.007s before Jorge Martin went quicker than his teammate as he set the new all-time lap record.

Marc Marquez finished in second place with a time of 1:27.780 seconds.Francesco Bagnaia claimed third with a time of 1:27.953s.

Aleix Espargaro was fourth fastest with a time of 1:27.957s, followed by Fabio Quartararo in fifth with a time of 1:27.973s. Johann Zarco ended up in sixth at the end of the final Q2 laps.

Jorge Martin was barely inside the top 10 at the end of Friday’s practise sessions at the Australian GP.

In a post-qualification press session, Jorge Martin said, “For sure, yesterday I was quite lost, but I think the experience I had yesterday, trying to understand a lot of the references, is important to understand what time to go into the corners. So, I took a big step from yesterday.”

Jorge Martin struggled to understand the lines along the Phillip Island Circuit on his Ducati. He had previously set a lap record at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin.

Jorge Martin added, “Yeah, for sure always making a lap record, you don’t do it every day, […] I did it in Austin and here again. So, I’m super happy. I am enjoying the moment because it’s been a while since the last time”.

Also Read: India Set to Welcome MotoGP in 2023


Mercedes’ W13 Awaits Final Upgrade at Austin

Aditya Saikrishna
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Mercedes’ W13 Awaits Final Upgrade at Austin

UNITED STATES: Mercedes’ 2022 challenger W13 started the season as one of the heaviest cars on the grid. With their weight reduction progress hampered by the budget cap, the team will make the final major upgrade of the season at the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) in Austin next week.

Mercedes has traditionally found Austin to be a happy hunting ground, with the team winning five of the nine races held at the COTA.

The teams from Brackley and Brixworth have endured a painstaking season so far, where the British duo of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell have managed to snatch occasional podiums but never had the raw pace to win races.

If the winless run continues till the last race at Abu Dhabi, the 2022 championship will be their first winless season since 2011.

In their usual post-race debrief after the Japanese GP, Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin described the team’s plans going ahead.

Andrew Shovlin said, “It’s our final step of aero development and that will hopefully give us a bit more performance, but importantly, with every step, we are learning more and more and that learning we can carry into next year, […] Also, there are a few bits where we have taken some weight out of components that will hopefully get the car closer to the weight limit. It’s very difficult for us to predict where we will be.”

According to Mercedes, their basic problem is the W13’s single-lap pace or lack thereof. The car has pace over a race distance, but it is overshadowed by its inability to achieve the best starting positions for the race.

Shovlin admits the Austin GP will be tricky for Mercedes considering the bumpy nature of the circuit, a trait which has triggered major driveability issues with the W13, which bounces heavily due to porpoising, which has been a common feature among most teams, but the Mercedes car seems to struggle most.

Shovlin added, “In Singapore, Lewis Hamilton was awfully close to pole position, yet in Suzuka, both cars had a big gap to the front, […] Until now, our race pace has been reasonably strong, so if we can make a step, hopefully, we can get into the fight with the Ferraris and Red Bulls. [… But qualifying for us is a really difficult one to predict at the moment.”

Also Read: Cost Cap Infringement Allegations Arise on a Potentially Historic F1 Weekend for Redbull


SpaceX Conducts Another Successful Launch: Puts Telecom Satellite in Orbit

Aditya Saikrishna
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SpaceX Conducts Another Successful Launch: Puts Telecom Satellite in Orbit

UNITED STATES: SpaceX added to its long list of successful lift-offs and autonomous landings as the Falcon 9 launched a communications satellite into orbit before successfully landing back on a ship at sea. The rocket carrying Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Station on early Saturday morning. 

The Falcon 9’s first stage returned back to the surface under nine minutes after it was launched, landing smoothly on SpaceX’s Just Read the Instructions droneship, which was positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida Coast.

Interestingly, the mission commenced just hours after Crew-4 Dragon capsule, nicknamed Freedom, had brought four astronauts home from the International Space Station. The SpaceX Crew-4 was an astronaut mission for NASA. 

According to SpaceX, this particular first-stage booster of the rocket was used for the third time. It was previously used during the launch of CRS-24 cargo mission, where it had delivered a payload to the International Space Station back in December 2021 and also delivered a batch of the company’s Starlink internet satellites.

The satellite was deployed 36 minutes after lift-off by the Falcon 9’s upper stage. It was built by Airbus Defence and Space and will be operated by France-based Eutelsat. Hotbird 13F was delivered at a geostationary orbit.

Hotbird 13F and a soon-to-be-launched satellite, Hotbird G, are set to replace three older Hotbird satellites that provide 1000 television channels across Europe, North America, and the Middle East.

The 70-metre-long Falcon 9 is a reusable, 2-stage rocket which is designed in such a way that the first stage of the rocket can be reused. It is the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket.

The reusability of the rocket allows SpaceX to reduce expenses on the critical parts of the rocket. Falcon 9 boasts 180 launches and an impressive 140 landings, along with 118 total reflights. 

Also Read: SpaceX Successfully Launches Another Group of Astronauts to the International Space Station

Red Bull’s Helmut Marko Confident amid Budget Cap Saga 

Aditya Saikrishna
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Red Bull’s Helmut Marko Confident amid Budget Cap Saga 

UNITED KINGDOM: FIA on Monday confirmed that Red Bull Racing was guilty of a “minor overspend breach” regarding last season’s budget.

According to the budget cap regulations introduced from 2021 onwards, a minor overspend means the team overspent by less than five percent of the $145 million cap, i.e., less than $7.25 million.

Red Bull quickly put out a statement expressing their “surprise and disappointment” while insisting that the team was below the budget cap limit.

The FIA and Red Bull were reported to be in talks about their findings soon after the team clinched the 2022 Drivers’ Championship title for Max Verstappen in a rain-affected race filled with drama.

Red Bull’s Chief Advisor, Dr. Helmut Marko, maintains that the team is innocent. In an interview with a media outlet, he said, “I don’t want to say too much, just this much. We still believe that we didn’t break the cost cap rule at all. […] Discussions with the FIA are ongoing. Let’s see what finally comes out of it.”

Red Bull will have two options ahead of them once the dialogue with the FIA concludes. They can either accept the ‘breach agreement’ and the sanctions that will accompany it, or they can appeal the findings by the FIA.

Among the many potential sanctions, one is a loss of Driver’s and Constructors’ Championship points, which can lead to Max Verstappen being stripped of his controversial 2021 title, which he had won after then-race director Michael Masi failed to follow safety car rules, thereby handing an unfair advantage and a win to Max Verstappen from Lewis Hamilton, who seemed to be set for a record-breaking 8th world title.

According to Helmut Marko, the possibility of Max losing his 2021 title is nonsense. He said, “As I said, we are still not aware of any guilt, which is why discussions with the FIA are still ongoing. But rumours that Max could lose his World title in 2021, for example, are complete nonsense.”

In a dig at the FIA, he added, “The past has shown that even extreme violations of the regulations are punished very mildly by the FIA,” referring to the violation of power unit regulations by Ferrari in 2019.

Ferrari might not share the same view as Helmut Marko, since they were reported to have had their 2020 engine power turned down as a punishment, resulting in a horrible season for the scarlet team from Italy, where they finished 6th in the constructors’ championship.

Also Read: Confusion and Chaos Reign Supreme at the Japanese GP as Max Verstappen Wins 2nd Title


Heavy Atmosphere: Traces of Barium Detected in Exoplanet Atmosphere

Aditya Saikrishna
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Heavy Atmosphere: Traces of Barium Detected in Exoplanet Atmosphere

UNITED STATES: Astronomers discovered an exoplanet atmosphere laden with the heaviest element known so far. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), they were stunned at the presence of barium at high altitudes in the atmospheres of ultra-hot gas giants WASP-76b and WASP-121b.

These two are classified as exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars outside our solar system. This profound discovery further puzzled the researchers about what these exotic atmospheres’ compositions could be like.

The Ph.D. student at the University of Porto and the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco in Portugal, who led the study, said: “The puzzling and counterintuitive part is: why is there such a heavy element in the upper layers of the atmosphere of these planets?”.

“This was in a way an accidental discovery. We were not expecting or looking for barium in particular and had to cross-check that this was actually coming from the planet since it had never been seen on any exoplanet before,” he further added.

WASP-76b and WASP-1212b are Jupiter-sized, super-hot exoplanets whose surface temperatures can go beyond 1000°C as they are close to their host stars. This close proximity to a star gives unique features to the exoplanets.

In one such feature, astronomers suspect that it rains iron in WASP-76b. Even so, the presence of barium in the exoplanet’s upper atmosphere was surprising given that barium is 2.5 times heavier than iron and the massive planets’ high gravity, which would normally cause heavy elements like barium to fall into the lower atmospheric layers.

The discovery sparks speculation that these exoplanets may be stranger than previously thought.The results hint that modern science has only scratched the surface of the mysterious nature of exoplanets.

The composition of an exoplanet’s atmosphere is determined by specialised equipment.

Also Read: Cosmic Bubble Wrap: NASA’S Hubble Telescope Clicks a Stunner

 

NASCAR Cup: Stewart-Haas Racing Team and Driver Cole Custer Penalised

Aditya Saikrishna
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NASCAR Cup: Stewart-Haas Racing Team and Driver Cole Custer Penalised

UNITED STATES: NASCAR Cup Series driver Cole Custer and his No. 41 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford team were penalised by NASCAR officials on Tuesday for their actions in the Cup Series Playoffs race at Charlotte Motor Speedway’s road course on Sunday.

The team was found guilty of trying to artificially alter the race’s finishing positions. The Stewart-Haas Racing Ford team was penalised under Section 5.5 of the NASCAR Rule Book, which requires the teams to race at 100% of their ability.

Other sections of the rule book were also cited in Tuesday’s report, which falls under the heading of member conduct. Cole Custer and No. 41 crew chief Michael Shiplett were each fined $100,000.

Additionally, Shiplett was suspended indefinitely. Cole Custer and the team were issued 50-point deductions in their respective driver and owner standings.

Stewart-Haas Racing indicated that the team would be appealing the penalty. Stewart-Haas Racing’s Chief Competition Officer, Greg Zipadelli, released a statement through the team’s various social media platforms saying, “Stewart-Haas Racing denies any wrongdoing and will vigorously defend its personnel against these allegations in its appeal with NASCAR” on Wednesday.

Cole Custer’s No. 41 Mustang seemed to slow down in the final lap of Sunday’s Bank of America Roval 400, thus impeding the path of Austin Dillon and Erik Jones while letting Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Chase Briscoe’s No. 14 Ford through at the entrance to the backstretch chicane.

Briscoe went on to advance to the next round of the playoffs by a margin of two points.

The final-lap data, video, and radio transmissions were reviewed by NASCAR officials, and it was determined that Chase Briscoe had qualified for the playoffs without the benefit of Cole Custer’s block.

The analysis of the No. 41 car’s data along with the suspicious nature of Michael Shiplett’s directives from the pit box forced NASCAR officials to step in.

During the final lap of the race, crew chief Michael Shiplett told driver Cole Custer, “I think you’ve got a flat (tire) Check up, check up, check up,”. At the time of this radio transmission, Shiplett was in no position to see the car or have any hint of the car’s having a flat tire.

Also Read: Cost Cap Infringement Allegations Arise on a Potentially Historic F1 Weekend for Redbull

 

Out with a Bang: Dying Star Spews Stardust into Space

Aditya Saikrishna
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Out with a Bang: Dying Star Spews Stardust into Space

UNITED STATES: The James Webb Telescope captured a rare cosmic phenomenon as it took images of intense light from a star ejecting numerous stardust clouds into space. The stardust was produced by a Wolf-Rayet star spewing its insides before it explodes.

Radiation pressure is the propulsive effect of starlight. It is one of the reasons why stars do not collapse under their own gravity. It also creates the bright tails of comets as they pass close to stars. The new image shows the phenomenon taking place around the star in great detail.

The image was released by scientist Judy Schmidt in July and it shows binary stars in WR140. Every eight years, the stars produce a ring of stardust as they pass each other in orbit. WR140 is located 5,600 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation.

The pair of stars is enclosed by concentric ripples, which resemble the layers of an onion. Even though the reason for the ripples shown in the image was the centre of speculation online, a team of researchers came up with the answers in a paper called Nature, published on October 12th.

The ripples are massive plumes of glowing stardust and soot ejected out as the pair of old and leaky stars swing closely past each other in an elliptical orbit with an orbital period of eight years.

The high-speed solar winds of the stars collide as they approach each other, resulting in a plume of solar material which is arced across space and slowly expands to form rings. The spacing of the rings is determined by the orbital period, as the plumes are ejected only when the stars are in proximity.

The cloud has 20 visible rings and, with the orbital period of the binary pair of stars being 8, the age of the outermost ripple amounted to 160 years of stardust.

Interestingly, the ripples are not expanding outwards at a constant speed. Instead, they are pushed outwards periodically by the starlight. This acceleration causes changes in the spacing of the gaps between the rings.

One of the stars is a Wolf-Rayet star, which is a rare and slowly-dying star that has lost its outer layer of hydrogen, as a result of which it spews gusts of ionised helium, carbon, and nitrogen from its insides.

The insides of these stars are stretched by the radiation pressure created by the light until they explode as supernovas eventually.

The ejected carbon is transformed into soot but still remains hot enough to glow brightly in the infrared spectrum.

The other star is an O-type supergiant, which is one of the most massive classes of stars. These stars reach their end in a supernova as well.

Also Read: NASA’s DART Crashes Successfully with Asteroid Dimorphos

 

England Held Their Nerve to Defeat Australia by 8 Runs in the 2nd T20I

Aditya Saikrishna
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0
England Held Their Nerve to Defeat Australia by 8 Runs in the 2nd T20I

AUSTRALIA: England dished out a clinical performance to thwart the hopes of Australia winning on home soil. Australia came close but wasn’t able to get past the English juggernaut.

After Australian skipper Aaron Finch won the toss and opted to field, English opener Jos Buttler (17 off 13 balls) started off the proceedings with a blazing cover drive which went for a boundary off the first ball of the innings.

Buttler perished in the 3rd over as he holed out to Adam Zampa, who managed to hold on to a skier. Alex Hales (4 off 7 balls) found it difficult to get going as his only scoring shot was a lofted drive over the covers, which got him a boundary.

He soon followed his fellow opener back to the pavilion when he was caught by a brilliant effort from David Warner while trying to smash a loose ball from Marcus Stoinis. Ben Stokes (7 off 11 balls) and Harry Brook (1 of 2 balls) departed early without much resistance.

Top-scorer Dawid Malan (82 off 49 balls) toyed with the Aussie bowling attack as he smashed them all around Canberra Park as he and Moeen Ali (44 off 27 balls) put together a 92-run stand for the 5th wicket. Adam Zampa finally gave Australia the breakthrough as Moeen Ali was caught at long off by Tim David.

Moeen Ali’s knock consisted of four hits to the fence and two over it. Both Moeen Ali and Dawid Malan were dropped in the 9th and 15th overs, respectively, which proved costly as Australia had England by the scruff of their neck at 54/4.

Sam Curran (8 off 6 balls) and Chris Jordan (7 off 3 balls) chipped in with a sixer each. Dawid Malan was out in the final over of the England innings as he tried to pull a slower short ball from Marcus Stoinis.

Marcus Stoinis was the pick of the bowlers as he picked up 3 wickets for 34 runs. Adam Zampa claimed two scalps, but he bled 26 runs in his three overs. England’s batting was held to 178/7 in their allotted 20 overs by the bowling pack.

Australia were off to a slow start in their response to the 179-run target as openers David 

Warner (4 off 11 balls) and Aaron Finch (13 off 13 balls) looked out of sorts against a disciplined opening spell from the English bowlers. The powerplay overs yielded only 3 boundaries and a six, while both openers lost their wickets.

Finch smashed David Willey (21/1) for boundaries in consecutive overs and perished in the 5th over as he tried to smash another big one. David Warner was caught by Harry Brook off Reece Topley in the very next over.

Mitchell Marsh (45 off 29 balls) started with a bang by hitting Topley for a six and a four off consecutive balls off the third ball he faced in the inning. Glenn Maxwell (8 off 11 balls) was dismissed cheaply by Sam Curran (25/3).

Marcus Stoinis (22 off 13 balls) and Mitchell Marsh upped the scoring rate with some explosive batting. Chris Jordan bled runs as he was taken apart by Stoinis in the 10th over when he smashed the pacer for two boundaries. Sam Curran struck again by having Marcus Stoinis caught by Harry Brook in the 12th over.

Ben Stokes finally got the prized scalp of Mitchell Marsh in the first ball of the 15th over, who was threatening to take the match away from the visiting team. The new man in, Tim David (40 off 23 balls), joined forces with Marcus Stoinis as they kept the momentum going with some extravagant shots.

Sam Curran castled Tim David in the 18th over, who departed after hitting five boundaries and a six. Reece Topley bowled a disciplined 19th over as he gave away only 3 runs, which swung the match in England’s favour.

Matthew Wade (10 off 10 balls) and Pat Cummins (18 off 11 balls) tried to drag Australia across the line but fell short by 8 runs.

Dawid Malan was adjudged player of the match for his crucial innings, which helped England post a competitive total, which proved to be too much for the Aussies.

Also Read: Australia vs England In-depth Match Preview 

Astro Photographer Captures Stunning Images of 1-million-mile-long Plasma Plume Out of the Sun

Aditya Saikrishna
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Astro Photographer Captures Stunning Images of 1-million-mile-long Plasma Plume Out of the Sun

UNITED STATES: An Arizona professional astro-photographer, Andrew McCarthy, took a stunning ‘time-lapse’ image consisting of stacks of thousands of images. It revealed a mesmerising and massive plume of plasma shooting out of the sun.

The ethereal ejection, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), extended into space and away from Earth for a distance of over 1 million miles from the solar surface.

McCarthy shared the captivating view on the social media platform Reddit on September 25 in the subreddit r/space. The CME was a G-1 class minor solar storm, according to SpaceWeather.com.

The G-1 class is the lowest category on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geomagnetic Storm Scale.

McCarthy revealed on Reddit that it was “the largest CME” he had ever witnessed. He added that the plasma was initially contained in a large loop connected to the Sun’s surface, known as prominence, and then broke off and streamed into space at around 100,000 mph (161,000 km/h).

McCarthy believes the plasma plumes are likely to get progressively larger and more common as the sun heads into a stage of solar maximum that lasts around seven years.

The original images were almost fully white because the exposure time of each image was very short. In the digitally altered photo, the sun’s surface and CME appear orange as McCarthy added the orange while compositing the image to provide contrast between individual structures on the sun’s surface and highlight the plasma plume.

In reality, the sun’s surface and CME have a pinkish-red hue, which is known as hydrogen-alpha or H-alpha light.

The photo is a false-colour composite time-lapse image that was stacked from hundreds of thousands of images captured over a period of six hours.

Thirty to eighty individual images were captured every second and were stored in a file that was almost 800 Gigabytes, or 0.8 Terabytes in size. The combined images showed the CME in extreme detail.

Also Read: Cosmic Bubble Wrap: NASA’S Hubble Telescope Clicks a Stunner

India Wins the 3rd ODI against South Africa by 7 wickets

Aditya Saikrishna
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India Wins the 3rd ODI against South Africa by 7 wickets

INDIA: The young Indian team displayed a clinical display of cricket as they wrapped up the 3-match ODI series 2-1 by winning the title decider by 7 wickets. India had previously won the 3-match T20I series by the same margin.

Earlier, Indian skipper Shikhar Dhawan won the toss and put the South African team to bat. Siraj (2/17) struck early to remove opener Malan (15 of 27 balls) and number 3 batsman Hendricks (3 of 21 balls) cheaply after Washington Sundar provided the initial breakthrough by removing de Kock (6 of 10 balls).

The Indian spin trio of Washington Sundar (2/15), Shahbaz Ahmed (2/32) and Kuldeep Yadav kept chipping away at the South African batting order at regular intervals as wickets kept falling like nine pins. Kuldeep Yadav (4/18) was at his restrictive best as he claimed 4 wickets at a measly economy of 4.30 runs per over.

The top scorer of the South African innings, Klassen (34 of 42 balls), put up a brief resistance but ultimately was cleaned up by the guile of Shahbaz Ahmed as South Africa was left tottering at 93-7.

The tail-end batsmen didn’t put up much of a resistance as they got quickly cleaned up by Kuldeep Yadav as the Proteas were all out for 99 within 28 overs, setting India a target of 100 to chase. Only three batsmen were able to score in double digits in the face of disciplined bowling by the bowlers.

India started by scoring at a brisk rate as the openers went about their business. Shubman Gill displayed cautious aggression while Shikhar Dhawan (8 off 14 balls) played an uncharacteristic slow inning. The first Indian wicket to fall was Dhawan, who was run out by the duo of Jensen and wicket-keeper de Kock.

The new man, Ishan Kishan, who missed out on a well-deserved century in the previous match, failed to get going as he nudged one behind the stumps, which was safely pouched by de Kock.

Shreyas Iyer joined forces with Shubman Gill as the duo took India toward the target. Iyer soon found his groove and played some cracking shots en route to his unbeaten knock of 28, which contained three hits to the fence and two sixes.

Just three runs away from winning the match, Shubman Gill (49 of 57 balls) was caught plumb in front by Lungi Ngidi. Shreyas Iyer finished off the match by slamming the first ball of the 20th over from Jensen down the ground for a six.

Kuldeep Yadav was adjudged Player of the Match, while Mohammed Siraj took Player of the Series. With the T20 World Cup starting soon, the Indian team will be in high spirits while South Africa might need to pick themselves up for an improved display Down Under.

Also Read: Shreyas Iyer’s Ton and Ishan Kishan’s 93 Helps India Beat South Africa by 7 Wickets 

 

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