Space exploration thread

Wake up Rosetta: You have a date with a comet

London (CNN) -- Scientists are inviting you to take part in "waking up" a comet-chasing probe that has been in hibernation in space for nearly three years.

The spacecraft is due to reactivate itself from an internal alarm clock on Monday but to celebrate the event the European Space Agency (ESA) is asking people to film themselves shouting "Wake up, Rosetta!" and then share their video clips on a dedicated Facebook page.

Visitors to the page can vote for their favorites and the top 10 will be transmitted towards Rosetta and out into the universe beyond.

Behind the fun lies a ground-breaking mission, which, if successful, will notch up a series of notable firsts.

Wake up ESA's Rosetta space probe, you have a comet to meet - CNN.com
 
Milky Way may have formed 'inside-out': Gaia provides new insight into Galactic evolution

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its 'flying saucer' shape.

Read more at: Milky Way may have formed 'inside-out': Gaia provides new insight into Galactic evolution
 
Water plumes spotted on dwarf planet Ceres; makes it rare planet with conditions for supporting life

THE largest object in the asteroid belt just got more attractive: Scientists have confirmed signs of water on the dwarf planet Ceres, one of the few bodies in the solar system to hold that distinction.

Peering through the Herschel Space Observatory, a team led by the European Space Agency detected water plumes spewing from two regions on Ceres.

The observations, published in Nature, come as NASA's Dawn spacecraft is set to arrive at the Texas-sized dwarf planet next year.

It's long been suspected that Ceres is water-rich, but previous detections have been inconclusive. This is the first definitive evidence of water on Ceres and confirms that it has an icy surface, said lead author Michael Kuppers of the European Space Agency.

"It makes Ceres a more exciting target" for exploration, he said.

The latest finding puts Ceres in a special class of solar system objects with active plumes of water, a key ingredient for life.

The company includes Jupiter's moon Europa - where an underground ocean is believed to exist - and the Saturn moon Enceladus, where jets have been seen venting from the surface.

The source of the water plumes is still unclear. Scientists think there may be a layer of ice just below the surface that gets heated by the sun or the plumes could be spewed by ice volcanoes.

Water plumes spotted on dwarf planet Ceres; makes it rare planet with conditions for supporting life | News.com.au
 
Dream Chaser mini-shuttle given 2016 launch date
The Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has set 1 November, 2016, for the debut flight of its space shuttle replacement.

Known as the Dream Chaser, the winged vehicle will launch atop an Atlas V from Florida's Kennedy Space Centre.

Though smaller than Nasa's famous orbiters, the Dream Chaser has still been designed to carry up to seven astronauts into low-Earth orbit.

The maiden voyage, however, will be an unmanned, autonomous flight.

The re-usable "lifting body" will spend about a day in orbit before returning to a landing strip on the US West Coast.

If all goes well, SNC hopes to mount its first manned mission in 2017.

And, ultimately, the Dream Chaser will land back at Kennedy on the same runway as used by the shuttles, and be serviced in Kennedy's processing facilities.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25878042
 


NASA wants commercial lunar landers


NASA understands that the future of space exploration now means partnering with private companies. Not only has the agency signed large contracts with both Space X and Orbital Sciences to carry supplies (and eventually people) to the International Space Station, but it is also putting out a call for privately companies to get involved with the next missions to the Moon by designing and developing the next generation of robotic lunar landers.

The new program, called Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown (CATALYST), seeks out any interested parties that have great ideas for future lunar exploration. In return, NASA will provide its expertise, equipment, and facilities to assist future lunar lander projects. It’s a great solution for the agency, considering its ever-shrinking budget (NASA won’t supply funds for the project), and it will also give a big push for commercial space projects in the future.

NASA is planning to use Lunar CATALYST for new missions to the Moon. The idea is to get these robotic vehicles on the Moon’s surface to not only study it, but to also mine water. However, the concepts could also apply to future exploration farther away, like Mars. NASA is already working with Canada and other countries to develop a moon rover and lander, but it’s also interested in what’s available in the U.S. from potential commercial partners. Interested companies have until March 17th to submit their proposals.


NASA wants commercial lunar landers | DVICE
 
Russian Space Agency Plans World’s Biggest Rocket

Russian Space Agency Plans World?s Biggest Rocket | Russia | RIA Novosti

MOSCOW, January 28 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s Roscosmos space agency is to seek government approval to build the world’s largest rocket, its head said Tuesday.

“I think that in the near future, within a month, we will make our suggestions to the Military-Industrial Commission,” Oleg Ostapenko said at an annual space conference in Moscow.

Ostapenko, who was appointed head of the agency in October, said the planned launcher would be able to lift 80 metric tons into low Earth orbit.
 
"Kepler Object of Interest" --A Major Step in the Search for a Twin Solar System

This past December, a team of European astrophysicists discovered the most extensive planetary system to date, orbiting star KOI-351. The star system has seven planets, more than in other known planetary systems arranged in a similar fashion to the eight planets in the Solar System, with small rocky planets close to the parent star and gas giant planets at greater distances.

Although the planetary system around KOI-351 is packed together more tightly, “We cannot stress just how important this discovery is. It is a big step in the search for a ‘twin’ to the Solar System, and thus also in finding a second Earth,” said Juan Cabrera, an astrophysicist at the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof.
KOI is the abbreviation for ‘Kepler Object of Interest’, which means the star was observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, between 2008 and 2013, and classified as a candidate for the existence of exoplanets. At present, KOI-351 is the star with the most extrasolar planets, or exoplanets for short. The star is 2500 light years away from Earth.

Astrophysicists around the world have been searching for a star system similar to our own for a long time. Now, the team led by Cabrera has taken a major step in this direction. Three of the seven planets in orbit around the star KOI-351 were discovered in recent years, and have periods of 331, 211 and 60 days, similar to those of Earth, Venus and Mercury.
"Kepler Object of Interest" --A Major Step in the Search for a Twin Solar System (Today's Most Popular)
 
BBC News - China's Jade Rabbit rover explores Moon soil

Space is crowded with activity now I heard China is going to construct its own space station and become entirely independent from other space faring countries. Of course, building such an enormous structure and then putting it into orbit costs billions of dollars and is a mammoth undertaking but they realise that big scientific projects generate knowledge, expirience, thousands of fully fledged scientists and engineers - it helps create an ecosystem of science if you will. So I'm sure that they'll pull it off. Hope that your country is gonna keep up with China and one day we'll see humans stepping down on Mars )
 
Scientists Home In On Earth-Sized Exoplanet

Mar 20, 2014 04:29 AM ET // by Irene Klotz

Scientists are close to announcing the first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone around its parent star.

Astronomer Thomas Barclay, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, culled data collected by the Kepler space telescope to ferret out a five-planet system, the outermost of which circles toward the outer edge of its star’s habitable zone, according to reports posted Wednesday on Twitter by astronomers attending the Search for Life Beyond the Solar System conference in Tucson, Ariz.

The Most Horrific Alien Planets In Our Galaxy

The outermost planet has a radius that is estimated to be 1.1 times as big as Earth’s, Nick Ballering, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona, and scientist Jessie Christiansen, with the Ames Research Center, wrote in separate posts on Twitter.


Scientists Home In On Earth-Sized Exoplanet : Discovery News

Please post in the other thread for now on!
 
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Lost NASA satellite found...
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NASA Finds ‘Lost’ Space Probe
August 23, 2016 - After losing communication with a space probe two years ago, NASA says it has reestablished contact.
NASA said it lost contact with the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories, known as the STEREO-B spacecraft, on Oct. 1, 2014, but that on Aug. 21, the Deep Space Network (DSN) established a link with the craft. Contact with the probe was lost after a maneuver to try to prevent overheating of the ship’s antenna.

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Two similar space probes are orbting the sun gathering information on solar weather.​

STEREO-B is the sister craft to STEREO-A, both of which were launched in 2006 to study the sun and space weather. The spacecraft have contributed greatly to the understanding of coronal mass ejections, a bubble of super-heated gas and charged particles blasted into space from the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona.

STEREO-A is reportedly working normally. NASA said it will now have to test STEREO-B to see how instrumentation and other sensors are operating after two years. Both spacecraft are located on the other side of the sun from earth.

NASA Finds ‘Lost’ Space Probe
 

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