Space news and Exploration II

[ScienceRocks]

Great news longknife!!! The only way humans can expand into space is for their to be a economic interest in doing so. Space mining and so much more that have to do with the economic side of things is very important.

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Curiosity Rover Headed to Dark Sand Dunes on Mars http://oak.ctx.ly/r/40hnv

US Air Force Seeks New Space Situational Awareness Data to Track Threats http://oak.ctx.ly/r/40fki

Why NASA Europa Probe Will Study Jupiter Moon's Dust http://oak.ctx.ly/r/40d1x

Could Liquid Lakes Form on Mars Today?

Despite its frigid temperatures, Mars might be able to host lakes of water on its surface today, a new study suggests.

Although extremely small amounts of water would quickly evaporate in Mars' low-pressure atmosphere, water from sources such as aquifers could last long enough to pool, with larger pools remaining liquid for at least a year, researchers said.

"Nobody's doubting that liquid water was on Marsat some point," Jules Goldspiel, of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, told Space.com. "The question I was interested in is, given today's conditions, which are hostile to liquid water, could you [still] get it."

He created a simulation to determine if liquid water could puddle and form pools to remain liquid today.

"You could get it for a little while, potentially," said Goldspiel, who presented his results Nov. 12 at the 47th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland.

Flow, water, flow!
Billions of years ago, Mars had a thick atmosphere and a relatively warm surface with lots of liquid water. But the Red Planet lost most of its air to space billions of years ago and, as a result, is very cold and dry today.

For example, surface temperatures on present-day Mars can dip below minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius). And the planet has low surface pressures, so small amounts of liquid water quickly turn to gas.

"If you put water on the surface, either it evaporates or [it] freezes," Goldspiel said.

A planet as big as earth like Kepler 186f, bigger then earth like Kepler 62f or 296f is in about the same area as mars. They'd probably have the atmosphere to have oceans and favorable temperatures if they didn't have a run away snowball earth event.

 

[ScienceRocks]

If you were to download the entire catalog of photos taken at Saturn to date by Cassini and then animate them like a flipbook, how long would it take to watch them all pass by? The Wall Street Journal's Visual Correspondent Jon Keegan has your answer: nearly four hours.


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China is making progress on the construction of their radio telescope. The just installed the "retina" of the telescope. It is where all the signals from the panels are collected. The telescope itself is still on schedule to be completed by September 2016.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20..._134840638.htm

Chinese scientists on Saturday tested the installation of the "retina" of the world's largest ever radio telescope to be completed in September next year.

Technicians lifted a 30-tonne feed cabin of the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope - or FAST - above a half-finished dish-like reflector measuring 500 meters in diameter and 1.6 kilometers in perimeter.

Once completed, the cabin, home to a feed source which collects signals from the universe, will be suspended 140 to 160 meters above the reflector made up of 4,450 panels.

I wish China would build a reflective telescope with a 100 meter mirror or a whole bunch adding up to it.. List of largest optical reflecting telescopes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[ScienceRocks]

SpaceX will have its first manned mission in 2017 http://pops.ci/tK6Mh7

Even better news!

 

[ScienceRocks]

The DEdicated MONitor of EXotransits (DEMONEX): Seven Transits of XO-4b

[1511.06402] The DEdicated MONitor of EXotransits (DEMONEX): Seven Transits of XO-4b
S. Villanueva Jr., J. D. Eastman, B. S. Gaudi
(Submitted on 19 Nov 2015)
The DEdicated MONitor of EXotransits (DEMONEX) was a 20 inch robotic and automated telescope to monitor bright stars hosting transiting exoplanets to discover new planets and improve constraints on the properties of known transiting planetary systems. We present results for the misaligned hot Jupiter XO-4b containing 7 new transits from the DEMONEX telescope, including 3 full and 4 partial transits. We combine these data with archival light curves and archival radial velocity measurements to derive the host star mass M∗=1.293+0.030−0.029M⊙ and radius R∗=1.554+0.042−0.030R⊙ as well as the planet mass MP=1.615+0.10−0.099MJ and radius RP=1.317+0.040−0.029RJ and a refined ephemeris of P=4.1250687±0.0000024 days and T0=2454758.18978±0.00024BJDTDB. We include archival Rossiter-McLaughlin measurements of XO-4 to infer the stellar spin-planetary orbit alignment λ=−40.0+8.8−7.5 degrees.
We test the effects of including various detrend parameters, theoretical and empirical mass-radius relations, and Rossiter-McLaughlin models. We infer that detrending against CCD position and time or airmass can improve data quality, but can have significant effects on the inferred values of many parameters --- most significantly RP/R∗ and the observed central transit times TC. In the case of RP/R∗ we find that the systematic uncertainty due to detrending can be three times that of the quoted statistical uncertainties. The choice of mass-radius relation has little effect on our inferred values of the system parameters. The choice of Rossiter-McLaughlin models can have significant effects of the inferred values of vsinI∗ and the stellar spin-planet orbit angle λ.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Mars will get ring like Saturn, scientists predict

Source: CBC News

Mars will get ring like Saturn, scientists predict

Moon Phobos is making a death spiral that will result in it getting torn to pieces, study suggests

CBC News Posted: Nov 23, 2015 2:14 PM ET Last Updated: Nov 23, 2015 3:31 PM ET

The Red Planet could find itself wearing a stylish new accessory in tens of millions of years.

A ring like Saturn's will likely form from the shattered remains of Mars's moon Phobos when that moon breaks apart in about 20 to 40 million years, predict planetary scientists in a new paper published Monday.

The ring is expected to last for up to 100 million years.

Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, is gradually spiralling towards Mars. As it gets closer, Mars's gravity is pulling harder on the side closest to the planet, producing forces known as "tidal stresses."

-snip-

Read more: Mars will get ring like Saturn, scientists predict

 

[ScienceRocks]

2017 and 2018 will mean a lot more exoplanet discoveries and mearsuring their atmospheres

New space telescopes will be put up over the next few years to help with the search for planets outside our solar system. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000...

 

[ScienceRocks]

The initial physical conditions of Kepler-36 b & c

[1511.07385] The initial physical conditions of Kepler-36 b & c
James E. Owen, Timothy D. Morton
(Submitted on 23 Nov 2015)
The Kepler-36 planetary system consists of two exoplanets at similar separations (0.115 & 0.128 AU), which have dramatically different densities. The inner planet has a density consistent with an Earth-like composition, while the outer planet is extremely low-density, such that it must contain a voluminous H/He envelope. Such a density difference would pose a problem for any formation mechanism if their current densities were representative of their composition at formation. However, both planets are at close enough separations to have undergone significant evaporation in the past. We constrain the core mass, core composition, initial envelope mass, and initial cooling time of each planet using evaporation models conditioned on their present-day masses and radii, as inferred from Kepler photometry and transit timing analysis. The inner planet is consistent with being an evaporatively stripped core, while the outer planet has retained some of its initial envelope due to its higher core mass. Therefore, both planets could have had a similar formation pathway, with the inner planet having an initial envelope mass fraction of ≲10% and core mass of ∼4.4 M⊕, while the outer had an initial envelope mass fraction of order 15−30% and core mass ∼7.3 M⊕. Finally, our results indicate that the outer planet had a long (≳30 Myr) initial cooling time, much longer than would naively be predicted from simple time-scale arguments. The long initial cooling time could be evidence for a dramatic early cooling episode such as the recently proposed "boil-off" process.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Jeff Bezos' rocket lands safely after space flight
Jeff Bezos' rocket lands safely after space flight

Jeff Bezos' rocket ship achieved a breakthrough Monday by traveling 329,839 feet into outer space and then landing upright upon its return to earth.
In the past, rockets were disposed of after launching space craft into outer space. Reusable rockets would substantially reduce the cost of space flight.

Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) founder Bezos started his space company, Blue Origin, in the hopes of using his New Shepard rocket to carry tourists into space.

"Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts -- a used rocket," Bezos said. "Full reuse is a game changer, and we can't wait to fuel up and fly again."

Wow!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

Planetary Candidates from the First Year of the K2 Mission
[1511.07820] Planetary Candidates from the First Year of the K2 Mission

The Kepler Space Telescope is currently searching for planets transiting stars along the ecliptic plane as part of its extended K2 mission. We processed the publicly released data from the first year of K2 observations (Campaigns 0, 1, 2, and 3) and searched for periodic eclipse signals consistent with planetary transits. Out of 59,174 targets we searched, we detect 234 planetary candidates around 208 stars. These candidates range in size from gas giants to smaller than the Earth, and range in orbital periods from hours to over a month. We conducted initial reconnaissance spectroscopy of 68 of the brighter candidate host stars, and present high resolution optical spectra for these stars. We make all of our data products, including light curves, spectra, and vetting diagnostics available to users online.



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NASA has captured the first ever images of a full day on Pluto, and it looks so, so pretty… http://ift.tt/1MOaZSZ

 

[ScienceRocks]

A Blue, Neptune-Size Exoplanet Around a Red Dwarf Star
A team of astronomers have used the LCOGT network to detect the signature of water, Rayleigh scattering, through the atmosphere of a Neptune-size transiting exoplanet, suggesting a blue sky on this world which is only 100 light years away from us. The result was published in the Astrophysical Journal on November 20 (and is available on ArXiV).

Transits occur when an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, reducing the amount of light we receive from the star by a small fraction. When the orbit of an exoplanet is aligned just right for transits to occur, astronomers can measure the planet’s size at different wavelengths in order to generate a spectrum of its atmosphere. The spectrum then reveals the substances present in the planet’s atmosphere, and therefore its composition. This measurement is most often performed using infrared light, where the planet is brightest and most easily observed. During the last few years, researchers have been probing the atmospheres of several small exoplanets with large ground and space-based telescopes, but have found it challenging to determine their composition using this method. This is either because the planets have clouds (which obscure the atmosphere) or because the measurements were not sufficiently precise.

Image credit: NAOJ

At four times the size of the Earth, GJ 3470b is a transiting exoplanet closer in size to our own planet than to the hot Jupiters which so far make up the majority of exoplanets with well-characterized atmospheres. Astronomers led by Diana Dragomir of the University of Chicago have followed up on a discovery by a different group, whose results tentatively hinted at the presence of Rayleigh scattering in the atmosphere of GJ 3470b. Dr. Dragomir’s team acquired and combined transit observations from all of LCOGT’s observatory sites (Hawaii, Texas, Chile, Australia and South Africa) to conclusively confirm the detection of Rayleigh scattering for GJ 3470b.

The result is significant for several reasons. GJ 3470b is the smallest exoplanet for which a detection of Rayleigh scattering exists. While this planet is also believed to be cloudy or hazy, the measurement tells astronomers that the planet has a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere covered by haze which scatters blue light at blue. Indeed, the sky is blue on GJ 3470b. Moreover, the planet orbits a small (red dwarf) star, which means it blocks a large amount of light during every transit, making the transit easier to detect and the planet more easily characterisable. Finally, this measurement is the first clear detection of a spectroscopic feature in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that was made only with small (1.0m and 2.0m) telescopes. The team has also supplemented the LCOGT data with observations obtained from the 1.5m Kuiper Telescope in Arizona.

Dr. Dragomir, who carried out the project while she was a researcher at LCOGT, says that “this detection brings us closer to understanding the nature of increasingly smaller exoplanets through the use of a novel approach which allows us to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets even if they are cloudy.” At the same time, the result highlights the role that meter-size telescopes can play toward characterising the atmospheres of these worlds.

A Blue, Neptune-Size Exoplanet Around a Red Dwarf Star | LCOGT

 

[ScienceRocks]

http://www.leonarddavid.com/europes-...off-next-year/

The voyage of Europe’s ExoMars 2016 spacecraft is moving closer to the Red Planet – departing the clean rooms of Thales Alenia Space in Cannes for shipment to Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

This ExoMars spacecraft is headed for a March 2016 liftoff atop a Proton booster.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope gets its first mirror

• Chris Wood
• November 26, 2015
• 2 PICTURES

Construction is well under way on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the space agency's next generation installation, scheduled to launch in 2018. The instrument is really starting to take shape, with engineers successfully installing the first of 18 mirrors.

 

[Moonglow]

NASA And Aerojet Sign $1.16B Deal For Deep Space Project Rocket Engines - See more at: NASA And Aerojet Sign $1.16B Deal For Deep Space Project Rocket Engines : Related Articles | OOYUZ

 

[Moonglow]

My youngest son(13) wants to go to Mars...

 

[Spinster]

My youngest son(13) wants to go to Mars...

Junior astronaut, huh?

 

[Moonglow]

My youngest son(13) wants to go to Mars...

Junior astronaut, huh?

I also wanted to be in the space program when I was his age..

 

[ScienceRocks]

My youngest son(13) wants to go to Mars...

Junior astronaut, huh?

I also wanted to be in the space program when I was his age..

Cool! Space is the exploration of our day and there's so much to be learned. WE haven't even started to scratch the surface too it and the resources make the new world of the 16th century look like childs play.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Over the last few weeks some kepler updates on mass and radius have updated at exoplanet.eu. http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/calculators

I calculated the density with the calculator


Kepler 100b 1.305 radi/7.34 mass = 18.22g/cm^3 density
Kepler 100c 2.22 radi/.86 mass = .4335 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 100d 1.514 radi/3 mass = 4.767 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 103b 3.476 radi/9.9 mass = 1.3g/cm^3 density
Kepler 103c 5.319 radi/36.2 mass = 1.327 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 106b .82 radi/.15 mass = 1.501 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 106c 2.5 radi/10.44 mass = 3.685 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 106d .95 radi/7.9 mass = 50.81g/cm^3 density
Kepler 106e 2.56 radi/11.17 mass = 3.672 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 109b 2.338 radi/1.3 mass = .5608 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 109c 2.63 radi/2.22 mass = 1.326 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 60c 2.5 radi/6 mass = 2.118 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 60b 2 radi/3 mass = 2.068 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 60d 2.6 radi/3.5 mass = .3344 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 37b .32 radi/2.78 mass = 467.9 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 37c .75 radi/10 mass = 130.7 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 37d 1.94 radi/12.2 mass = 9.215 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 113b 1.82 radi/11.7 mass = 10.7 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 113c 2.17 radi/8.6 mass = 4.641 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 131b 2.41 radi/16.13 mass = 6.353 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 131c .84 radi/8.3 mass = 77.21 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 406b 1.43 radi/6 mass = 11.32 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 406c .85 radi/2.71 mass = 24.34 g/cm^3
Kepler 93b 1.483 radi/4 mass = 6.761 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 10b 1.473 radi/3.33 mass = 5.746 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 10c 2.323 radi/17.2 mass = 7.566 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 23b 1.694 radi/15.2 mass = 17.24 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 23d 2.236 radi/17 mass = 8.388 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 23c 3.12 radi/60.1 mass = 10.91 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 25c 5.154 radi/14 mass = .5642 g/cm^3 density
Kepler 25d 89.9 mass

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Scientists May Have Just Discovered a Parallel Universe Leaking Into Ours [View all]
Scientists May Have Just Discovered a Parallel Universe Leaking Into Ours
We may have just, for the first time ever, caught a momentous glimpse of a parallel universe bumping against our own.

Scientists say that signals from the furthest reaches of space suggest that the fabric of our universe is being disrupted by another universe. The discovery could provide proof of the multiverse theory, which says that there are many alternate universes.

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Dr. Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, examined data from the cosmic microwave background gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck Space Telescope. Within this glow left over from the moments after the Big Bang, he discovered a number of spots where the microwave light was far brighter than it should be. He claims that theses may be signals caused by the interaction between our universe and another one a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago.

 

[ScienceRocks]

The K2-ESPRINT Project III: A Close-in Super-Earth around a Metal-rich Mid-M Dwarf

Teruyuki Hirano, Akihiko Fukui, Andrew W. Mann, Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda, Eric Gaidos, Norio Narita, Fei Dai, Vincent Van Eylen, Chien-Hsiu Lee, Hiroki Onozato, Tsuguru Ryu, Nobuhiko Kusakabe, Ayaka Ito, Masayuki Kuzuhara, Masahiro Onitsuka, Misako Tatsuuma, Grzegorz Nowak, Enric Pallè, Ignasi Ribas, Motohide Tamura, Liang Yu
(Submitted on 26 Nov 2015)
We validate a candidate super-Earth (Rp=2.38±0.25R⊕) on a close-in orbit (P=2.26 days) around EPIC 206318379, a metal-rich M4-type dwarf in the Campaign 3 field of the K2 mission. Our follow-up observations included multi-band transit observations from the optical to the near infrared, low-resolution spectroscopy, and high-resolution adaptive-optics (AO) imaging. The phase-folded K2 transit light curve has a V-shape because the transit duration around this small star is comparable to the 30-minute K2 cadence. However, the light curves from our follow-up observations exhibit a sharp ingress and/or egress and flat bottom, ruling out a grazing eclipse of a binary system. We perform a global fit to all ground-based observations using a Gaussian process-based method and show that the transit depths in all passbands (r′2,zs,2,J,H,Ks) are within 2.2σ of the K2 value. Based on a model of the background stellar population and the absence of nearby sources in our AO imaging, we estimate the probability that a background eclipsing binary could cause a false positive to be <2×10−5. We also show that given the almost constant transit depths in the five passbands, EPIC 206318379 cannot have a physically associated companion later than M4, and the probability that it has another M4 dwarf is low as well (≈0.0721+0.023−0.036), even in which case the size of EPIC 206318379b falls on the planetary regime. EPIC 206318379b has the same radius (within 1σ) and experiences a similar irradiation from its host star as the well-studied GJ 1214b. A comparison between the atmospheric properties of these two objects with future observations would be especially interesting.

[1511.08508] The K2-ESPRINT Project III: A Close-in Super-Earth around a Metal-rich Mid-M Dwarf

 

[ScienceRocks]

James Webb 'Pathfinder Telescope' successfully completes second super-cold optical test
November 30, 2015 by Rob Gutro

Engineers inspect the James Webb Space Telescope's 'pathfinder telescope' after its second super-cold optical test in Chamber A at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA/ Chris Gunn

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope's "pathfinder telescope," or "Pathfinder" completed its second super-cold optical test that resulted in the first checkout of specialized optical test equipment designed to illuminate the telescope's optics through to the instrument focal planes, and the procedures used to operate this test equipment.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-james-webb-pathfinder-telescope-successfully.html#jCp