WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Media accreditation is open for the launch of two NASA missions that will explore the mysteries of our universe and Sun.

The agency is targeting late February to launch its SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory, a space telescope that will create a 3D map of the entire sky to help scientists investigate the origins of our universe. NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which will study origins of the Sun’s outflow of material, or the solar wind, also will ride to space with the telescope.

NASA and SpaceX will launch the missions aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Accredited media will have the opportunity to participate in a series of prelaunch briefings and interviews with key mission personnel, including a science briefing the week of launch. NASA will communicate additional details regarding the media event schedule as the launch date approaches.

Media interested in covering the launch must apply for media accreditation. The application deadline for U.S. citizens is 11:59 p.m. EST, Thursday, Feb. 6, while international media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 11:59 p.m., Monday, Jan. 20.

NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. For questions about accreditation, please email: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov. For other mission questions, please contact the newsroom at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 321-867-2468.

Para obtener información sobre cobertura en español en el Centro Espacial Kennedy o si desea solicitar entrevistas en español, comuníquese con Antonia Jaramillo: 321-501-8425, o Messod Bendayan: 256-930-1371.

Updates about spacecraft launch preparations are available on the agency’s SPHEREx blog and PUNCH blog.

The SPHEREx mission will observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies in infrared light, a range of wavelengths not visible to the human eye. With this map, SPHEREx will enable scientists to study inflation, or the rapid expansion of the universe a fraction of a second after the big bang. The observatory also will measure the collective glow from galaxies near and far, including light from hidden galaxies that individually haven’t been observed, and look for reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide, and other key ingredients for life in our home galaxy.

Launching as a rideshare with SPHEREx, the agency’s PUNCH mission is made up of four suitcase-sized satellites that will spread out around Earth’s day-night line to observe the Sun and space with a combined field of view. Working together, the four satellites will map out the region where the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, transitions to the solar wind, or the constant outflow of material from the Sun.

The SPHEREx observatory is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the Astrophysics Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission principal investigator is based jointly at NASA JPL and Caltech. Formerly Ball Aerospace, BAE Systems built the telescope, supplied the spacecraft bus, and performed observatory integration. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx data set will be publicly available.

The agency’s PUNCH mission is led by Southwest Research Institute’s office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, manages the launch service for the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions.

For more details about the SPHEREx mission and updates on launch preparations, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/

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SOURCE NASA

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Ragie, the innovative leader in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, is proud to announce its first-ever Launch Week.  Beginning today, Ragie will unveil several highly anticipated features requested by its growing user base that are designed to make AI applications faster and easier to build.

Three key announcements are being made during this three-day event: Ragie Connect, Advanced Retrieval Mode and Base Chat.

Ragie Connect

Many of Ragie’s customers have asked for a way to use its robust RAG pipeline in their SaaS applications, which is why the team developed Ragie Connect. Ragie Connect connects your AI application with your users’ data with minimal code. It handles authentication and automatic user-data syncing from data sources like Google Drive, Salesforce, Notion, and more, so developers can easily embed RAG in their applications.

“Ragie Connect is a lot like Plaid for AI”, said Bob Remeika, CEO of Ragie.  “With just a little bit of code, you can sync your users’ data with your application.  It’s similar to other iPaaS systems in that it handles authentication and data syncing, except Ragie Connect is purpose built for AI applications which really sets it apart.”

Ragie Advanced Retrieval Mode

Ragie looks very simple by design, but there are a lot of advanced features like Hybrid Search and Reranking. These work in the background to help it achieve 99.4% precision on LegalBench-RAG and a 137% improvement on FinanceBench with semantic, hybrid, and hierarchical retrieval. Ragie’s new “recency bias” feature ensures that the most current data is prioritized during retrieval in use cases where live data is more important than historical knowledge bases.

“Our goal is to set the standard for retrieval accuracy and developer experience in the industry,” said Mohammed Rafiq, CTO of Ragie.

Ragie Base Chat

Ragie is releasing an open source multi-tenant chatbot called Ragie Base Chat, which is powered by Ragie Connect and connects to your company’s knowledge base. It’s like a self-hosted “Glean light” that allows companies to chat with their data from Google Drive, Salesforce, Notion, and more. The Base Chat release will also contain 5 new native connectors including Slack, Hubspot, Dropbox, GCS, and S3 to meet the needs of new and existing customers in multiple verticals. A fully hosted version of Base Chat is coming soon.

These updates are just the latest in Ragie’s ongoing evolution as the leading RAG-as-a-Service platform for developers. Visit www.ragie.ai to learn more about the Launch Week, Ragie Connect, and more.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ragie-launch-week-game-changing-rag-tooling-for-developers-302349590.html

SOURCE Ragie

MONTREAL, Jan. 13, 2025 /CNW/ – Hydro-Québec announces that it has negotiated on the Canadian domestic market the issue of CA$500,000,000 of Debentures, Series JU, maturing on February 15, 2065.

The Debentures, with a coupon of 4.00%, payable semi-annually, will be offered on the market at a price of 91,495 plus interest deemed to have accrued from August 15, 2024. The yield is 4.457%.

The lead manager for this issue is National Bank Financial Inc. with Scotia Capital Inc. and The Toronto-Dominion Bank acting as co-lead managers, BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., Casgrain & Company Limited, CIBC World Markets Inc., Desjardins Securities Inc., Laurentian Bank Securities Inc. and RBC Dominion Securities Inc. acting as other managers.

This is the third additional tranche of Debentures, Series JU, issued initially on September 19, 2024 and the total aggregate principal amount of Debentures outstanding under this Series now amounts to CA$2,000,000,000.

SOURCE Hydro-Québec