Space news and Exploration II

[ScienceRocks]

Spacex has twelfth successful launch and musings on reuse, refueling and geosynch orbits



Quote

SpaceX delivered another commercial communications satellite to orbit early Sunday, completing its second launch in just over a month for Hong Kong-based AsiaSat.

SpaceX confirmed the rocket deployed its payload as planned 32 minutes into the flight, earning the Falcon 9 a 12th successful flight in as many tries since 2010.

Because the launch was to a high orbit more than 20,000 miles up, the Falcon 9 booster did not have enough extra fuel for SpaceX to try flying it back to a soft ocean landing for recovery.

 

[rdean]

You are aware of course that Obama with support of the Democrats stripped NASA of anyway to reach orbit or space? We must hire private enterprise to deliver materials to the space station and must use Russia to send people into space.

We have no space vehicle and no plans to make another. Ohh did I mention that Obama and the democrats cut NASA's budget to the bone?

Oh, did I mention that you don't know anything?

Ah, where to start?

First, it's Republicans controlling the house that controls the purse strings.

Second, your idiocy is coming too late. There have already been private ships to the space station.

 

[rdean]

Humanity is the only species capable of insuring our survival in the long term. By spreading outwards we up our odds.

We built this country based on expansion, education and science.

Yea, who doesn't like education and science?

 

[Moonglow]

Humans are also the only species on the planet capable of destroying themselves and the planet...

 

[ScienceRocks]

'Meteorite' smashes into Nicaraguan capital

A mysterious explosion that rocked Nicaragua's crowded capital Managua, creating a large crater, appears to have been caused by a small meteorite, officials said Sunday.

Amazingly, in a sprawling city of 1.2 million people, the impact near the international airport did not cause any known injuries, but it did leave a crater measuring 12 meters (39 feet) across and was felt throughout the capital late on Saturday.

Nicaraguan authorities believe it was a piece of the small asteroid dubbed "2014 RC," which passed very close to Earth on Sunday and was estimated by astronomers to be about 20 meters big, or the size of a house.

http://news.yahoo.co....xUNwYAZ5fQtDMD

 

[ScienceRocks]

Stephen Hawking warns God particle has potential to 'end world'
timesofindia.indiatimes.com ^ | Sep 8, 2014, 12.32 PM IST | Staff

LONDON: Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the God particle or Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe.

The 72-year-old cosmologist said Higgs boson could become unstable at very high energy levels, which would lead to a "catastrophic vacuum decay" causing space and time to collapse and that there would not be any warning to the danger, the Daily Express reported.

Speaking in the preface to a new book called Starmus, the Cambridge-educated scientist said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become mega-stable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV).

However, Hawking did also mention that the likelihood of such a disaster was unlikely to happen in the near future, but the danger of the Higgs becoming destabilized at high energy was too great to be ignored.

The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by scientists at CERN, who operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have Plate Tectonics Just Like Earth
Jupiter s Moon Europa May Have Plate Tectonics Just Like Earth

Jupiter's icy moon Europa, regarded as perhaps the solar system's best bet to host alien life, keeps getting more and more interesting.

Big slabs of ice are sliding over and under each other within Europa's ice shell, a new study suggests. The Jovian satellite may thus be the only solar system body besides Earth to possess a system of plate tectonics.

"From a purely science or geological perspective, this is incredible," study lead author Simon Kattenhorn of the University of Idaho told Space.com. "Earth may not be alone. There may be another body out there that has plate tectonics. And not only that, it's ice!"

 

[william the wie]

lurk post

 

[ScienceRocks]

Europe readies 'space plane' for sub-orbital test flight
3 hours ago

The European Space Agency on Tuesday put the final touches to its first-ever "space plane" before blasting it into sub-orbit for tests aimed at eventually paving the way to the continent's first space shuttle.

Assembled in Italy, the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) is undergoing final ground tests at the ESA's headquarters in Noordwijk, north of The Hague, before being shipped to Kourou in French Guiana later this month.

On November 18 the sneaker-shaped IXV will take off aboard ESA's Vega rocket to a height of 450 kilometres (280 miles) where it will go into sub-orbital flight.

Set to fly for 100 minutes, the IXV will then re-enter Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 28,000 km/h over the Pacific Ocean, plunge into the water and then be picked up by a ship.

Bristling with 300 sensors, the IXV will collect myriad data including on what scientists refer to as aerothermodynamics, the heat exchange in gasses and solid surfaces at very high speed, usually supersonic flight.

The data will tell ESA's scientists how the IXV's structure holds up, as well as how its shape performs aerodynamically under extreme conditions.

"The IXV is the starting point and the mission is of huge importance for the future of space shuttles for Europe," Giorgio Tumino, the craft's mission manager, told journalists.

"This mission's key objective is to acquire the capability to come back to earth from orbit," he said.

Read more at: Europe readies space plane for sub-orbital test flight

Europe is about ready to become more advance then we're. I wish the military would allow NASA to use a copy of their space plane to keep us in front.

 

[ScienceRocks]

First evidence for water ice clouds found outside solar system
6 hours ago

Credit: A. Fujii

A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System. Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now. Their findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Faherty, along with a team including Carnegie's Andrew Monson, used the FourStar near infrared camera to detect the coldest brown dwarf ever characterized. Their findings are the result of 151 images taken over three nights and combined. The object, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855, was first seen by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission and published earlier this year. But it was not known if it could be detected by Earth-based facilities.

"This was a battle at the telescope to get the detection," said Faherty.

Chris Tinney, an Astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, UNSW Australia and co-author on the result stated: "This is a great result. This object is so faint and it's exciting to be the first people to detect it with a telescope on the ground."

Brown dwarfs aren't quite very small stars, but they aren't quite giant planets either. They are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars. Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet, and their masses also range between star-like and giant planet-like. They are of particular interest to scientists because they offer clues to star-formation processes. They also overlap with the temperatures of planets, but are much easier to study since they are commonly found in isolation.

W0855 is the fourth-closest system to our own Sun, practically a next-door neighbor in astronomical distances. A comparison of the team's near-infrared images of W0855 with models for predicting the atmospheric content of brown dwarfs showed evidence of frozen clouds of sulfide and water.

"Ice clouds are predicted to be very important in the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System, but they've never been observed outside of it before now," Faherty said.

Read more at: First evidence for water ice clouds found outside solar system

 

[ScienceRocks]

Mars is about to have some company now. Two spacecrafts - one from India and another from the US are about to enter Mars orbit.

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The planet Mars is about to have some company. Two new spacecraft, one from the United States and the other from India, are closing in on the Red Planet and poised to begin orbiting Mars by the end of this month.

The U.S.-built probe, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, is expected to enter orbit around Mars on Sept. 21. Just days later, on Sept. 24, India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) orbiter is due to make its own Mars arrival when it enters orbit. Both MOM and MAVEN launched to space in 2013.

MAVEN is the first mission devoted to probing the Martian atmosphere, particularly to understand how it has changed during the planet's history.

Mars Probes from US and India Arrive at Red Planet This Month

 

[ScienceRocks]

Assembly Complete for NASA’s First Orion Crew Module Blasting off Dec. 2014
universetoday.com ^ | September 9, 2014 | Ken Kremer on

This past weekend, technicians completed assembly of NASA’s first Orion crew module at the agency’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout (O & C) Facility at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, signifying a major milestone in the vehicles transition from fabrication to full scale launch operations.

Orion is NASA’s next generation human rated vehicle and is scheduled to launch on its maiden uncrewed mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) in December 2014. It replaces the now retired space shuttle orbiters.

The black Orion crew module (CM) sits atop the white service module (SM) in the O & C high bay photos, shown above and below.

The black area is comprised of the thermal insulating back shell tiles. The back shell and heat shield protect the capsule from the scorching heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at excruciating temperatures reaching over 4000 degrees Fahrenheit (2200 C)

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The Orion EFT-1 test flight is slated to soar to space atop the mammoth, triple barreled United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Dec. 4, 2014 .

(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...

 

[ScienceRocks]

New Horizons Makes its First Detection of Pluto’s Moon Hydra

September 12, 2014

Using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), New Horizons made its first detection of Pluto's small, faint, outermost known moon, Hydra. The images were taken to practice the long-exposure mosaics that the New Horizons team will use to search for additional moons and potentially hazardous debris near Pluto as the spacecraft approaches the Pluto system in May and June 2015.

Analysis of those images in September by Science Team members John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute, and Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, revealed Hydra —a moon the mission didn’t expect to detect until next January, when New Horizons will be about twice as close as it was in July.

http://pluto.jhuapl....ws/20140912.php

 

[ScienceRocks]

Martian meteorite yields more evidence of the possibility of life on Mars

The finding of a ‘cell-like’ structure, which investigators now know once held water, came about as a result of collaboration between scientists in the UK and Greece. Their findings are published in the latest edition of the journal Astrobiology.

While investigating the Martian meteorite, known as Nakhla, Dr Elias Chatzitheodoridis of the National Technical University of Athens found an unusual feature embedded deep within the rock. In a bid to understand what it might be, he teamed up with long-time friend and collaborator Professor Ian Lyon at the University of Manchester.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Boeing, SpaceX win contracts to build 'space taxis' for NASA
Boeing SpaceX win contracts to build space taxis for NASA Reuters

(Reuters) - NASA will partner with Boeing and SpaceX to build commercially owned and operated "space taxis" to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, ending U.S. dependence on Russia for rides, officials said on Tuesday.

The U.S. space agency also considered a bid by privately owned Sierra Nevada Corp, but opted to award long-time aerospace contractor Boeing and California's SpaceX with contracts valued at a combined $6.8 billion to develop, certify and fly their seven-person capsules.

Boeing was awarded $4.2 billion to SpaceX's $2.6 billion. SpaceX is run by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, also the CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors.

“SpaceX is deeply honored by the trust NASA has placed in us," said Musk, a South Africa-born, Canadian American billionaire. "It is a vital step in a journey that will ultimately take us to the stars and make humanity a multi-planet species."

 

[ScienceRocks]

Astronomers Found a Star Inside a Star, 40 Years After It Was First Theorized

The universe is massive, and we can’t see nearly all of it. That's the most exciting thing about space: The potential to find something completely unknown, something that brings fiction into fact, is ever-present.

Case in point: A rather strange celestial body called a Thorne–Żytkow object (TZO). Originally predicted in the 1970s, the first non-theoretical TZO was likely found earlier this year, based on calculations presented in a paper forthcoming in MNRAS.

 

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

Smallest known galaxy with a supermassive black hole found
3 hours ago

A University of Utah astronomer and his colleagues discovered that an ultracompact dwarf galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object. The finding suggests huge black holes may be more common than previously believed.

Read more at: Smallest known galaxy with a supermassive black hole found

 

[ScienceRocks]

Next Generation Spacesuit like Second Skin
Next Generation Spacesuit like Second Skin Space Nature World News

Scientists from MIT have designed a next-generation spacesuit that acts practically as a second skin, and could revolutionize the way future astronauts travel into space.

Astronauts are used to climbing into conventional bulky, gas-pressurized spacesuits, but this new design could allow them to travel in style. Soon they may don a lightweight, skintight and stretchy garment lined with tiny, muscle-like coils. Essentially the new suit acts like a giant piece of shrink-wrap, in which the coils contract and tighten when plugged into a power supply, thereby creating a "second skin."

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft prepares for orbital insertion

NASA s MAVEN spacecraft prepares for orbital insertion

Mission operators working from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are undergoing final adjustments for orbital insertion of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, due to take place September 21. Achieving a stable orbit around the Red Planet would be the culmination of a 10-month voyage, during which the robotic explorer traveled 442 million miles (711 million km) after having ridden into space in November 2013 atop an Atlas V rocket.