Space news and Exploration II

[longknife]

The Sun is letting out some X-class solar flares. Not pointed at earth, but news flares could be.

SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

Saw this on the web yesterday. Awesome. And hundreds of Earths could fit in each one.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA's new warp-speed spaceship concept is very familiar

NASA's new warp-speed spaceship concept is very familiar | DVICE

NASA scientist Harold White has long believed that warp speeds are possible. And now he's unveiled a concept renders by artist Mark Rademaker of what a warp speed spaceship would look like. Do you know, it's very similar to something 1960s TV threw up? (You know, goes by the name of Enterprise, head dude answers to the name of Kirk, hangs out with a hysterical Scotsman and another dude with large-ish ears.)

It's quite a beast, isn't it? The two Saturn-esque rings around the spacecraft proper are the things that will get the ship encased in the bubble that it needs to get to warp speed. Hang on, before we get too technical, you might want to read DVICE editor Evan Ackerman's explanation on how warp speed works. In a nutshell, you create a bubble around your spaceship and then force the space in the bubble to move faster than the speed of light (as nothing travels faster than the speed of light). Then you push your spaceship along by shrinking the space in front of your craft and extending it behind. Simples

There's a bunch of other drawings by Rademaker in the gallery below, and if you want to hear Professor White explaining how his spaceship would work, then you can watch him here, just before the 42-minute mark. He describes the I.X.S. Enterprise as being "sombrero-like" — a nice touch. The thick rings would generate enough energy to create your warp bubble, with the ship proper being contained within the rings, meaning it would be contained within the bubble to hit that speedo-busting velocity that you need.

The shit party from the back woods wouldn't allow it, but boy this would be nice.

 

[ScienceRocks]

First images from the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope

In preparation for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project set to start construction in 2018, the CSIRO’s recently unveiled Australia SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope array has been used to demonstrate and prove the technology involved. With the images it has captured so far, it has also shown its ability to operate as a fully-fledged radio telescope in its own right.

Located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, ASKAP has taken early images with just six of the 36 antennas in its array so far commissioned. Yet, even with so few instruments on line, these images show a degree of unexpectedly high resolution. Dr David McConnell, who leads the ASKAP Commissioning and Early Science (ACES) team, said that when the team saw the new image, they “practically fell off their chairs."

A radio wave image of a region of sky near the south celestial pole, the ASKAP image covers 10 square degrees of the sky – an area 50 times larger than that of a full Moon – made up of nine intersecting regions captured simultaneously. This was made possible through CSIRO’s use of a special axis of rotation control on each antenna, which kept the array on a fixed orientation to the sky, while its new "phased array feed" (PAF) technology provided the antenna with a wide field-of-view by creating 30 separate simultaneous beams at the antenna feed. The result is an image with a dynamic range of 50,000:1, which is good for a large instrument, but exceptional for so small an array.

First images from the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA NIAC - two orders of magnitude mass and power saving for Life Support and Reduced Complexity
NASA NIAC - two orders of magnitude mass and power saving for Life Support and Reduced Complexity

The abundant high-energy light in space (with wavelengths as low as 190 nm, compared to 300 nm on Earth) makes the TiO2 co-catalyst an ideal approach for sustainable air processor to generate O2, without consuming any thermal or electrical energy. The combination of novel photoelectrochemistry and 3-dimensional design allows tremendous mass saving, hardware complexity reduction, increases in deployment flexibility and removal efficiency. The high tortousity photocatalystic air processor design will achieve at least two orders of magnitude mass and power saving respectively, and enable feasibility of compact processors for spacecraft. The proposed work will demonstrate these drastic reduction in reactor mass, volume and power consumption in comparison to current technology with delivery of high-tortuosity device components allowed by 3D printing (potentially in space) at the end of the proposed work.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Scientists Discover Smallest Known Star

Astronomers recently stumbled upon a teeny star called 2MASS J0523-1403 located just 40 light years away. It's not only the smallest star discovered so far - it may also represent the smallest possible star. By studying stars such as this, scientists are starting to be able to answer the question: where do stars end and brown dwarfs begin?

Stars are burning balls of gas held together by gravity that are fuelled by the fusion of hydrogen atoms to helium in their cores. Stars come in a variety of sizes; the smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, can possess as little as 10% of the mass of our Sun, whereas the biggest stars (hypergiants) can be over 100 times as massive as the Sun. But just how small can an object be and still be defined as a star? This has mystified astronomers for years. All that was previously known is that objects below this limit don’t have enough mass to ignite the fusion of hydrogen in their cores. These objects are known as brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are elusive objects that are thought to be the missing link between gas giants and low-mass stars such as red dwarfs. They’re generally around the size of Jupiter, but they don’t have enough mass to become a star. Unlike stars, brown dwarfs have no internal energy source.

There exists another strange difference between brown dwarfs and stars; they have opposite relationships between mass and size. The more material you add to a star, in the form of hydrogen, the bigger the radius of the star. I.e. stars increase in size as mass increases. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, actually shrink in size with increasing mass because of something called electron degeneracy pressure.

So how do we find the limit that dictates whether an object is a star or a brown dwarf? Astronomers scanned the skies and located objects that were thought to lie around the stellar/brown dwarf border. They then calculated the luminosity, temperatures and radii of all of these objects and plotted them. Temperature is dependent on mass but it’s easier to measure. They found that as temperature decreased, so did radius; this is the expected trend for stellar objects. However, they found that after temperatures of around 2100K (1826oC [3320 oF]) there was a break until radius starts to increase with decreasing temperature; this is the trend that would be expected for brown dwarfs.

Thanks to this data, scientists can now pinpoint the specific temperature, luminosity and radius at which the main sequence ends. The main sequence is a relationship between luminosity and temperature (and luminosity and radius) that is obeyed by stars throughout the majority of their lives. 2MASS J0523-1403 is located around this boundary, but toward the stellar side. This star actually has a temperature of 2074K, which is the lowest described temperature so far for a main sequence star. It’s also the smallest and the least massive; if it had less mass then it would be a brown dwarf. This star has therefore been identified as a representative of the smallest possible star. However, it is theoretically possible that a star with a slightly smaller mass than 2MASS J0523-1403 could exist, but we haven’t found it yet.

Read more at Scientists Discover Smallest Known Star | IFLScience

 

[ScienceRocks]

3D printer to fly to space in august, sooner than planned

A 3-D printer intended for the International Space Station has passed its NASA certifications with flying colors—earning the device a trip to space sooner than expected. The next Dragon spacecraft, scheduled to launch in August, will carry the Made In Space printer on board.

"Passing the final tests and shipping the hardware are significant milestones, but they ultimately lead to an even more meaningful one – the capability for anyone on Earth to have the option of printing objects on the ISS. This is unprecedented access to space," stated Made In Space CEO Aaron Kemmer.

This 3-D printer will be the first to be used in orbit. Officials have already printed out several items on the ground to serve as a kind of "ground truth" to see how well the device works when it is installed on the space station. It will be put into a "science glovebox" on the International Space Station and print out 21 demonstration parts, such as tools.

"The next phase will serve to demonstrate utilization of meaningful parts such as crew tools, payload ancillary hardware, and potential commercial applications such as cubesat components," Made In Space added in a statement.

Read more at: 3D printer to fly to space in august, sooner than planned

 

[william the wie]

I wonder how many iterations will be needed to work out the bugs.

 

[ScienceRocks]

I wonder how many iterations will be needed to work out the bugs.

I don't think the printer has any bugs. Not as far as I know.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Two giant planets may cruise unseen beyond Pluto

17:30 11 June 2014 by Nicola Jenner
For similar stories, visit the Solar System Topic Guide

The monsters are multiplying. Just months after astronomers announced hints of a giant "Planet X" lurking beyond Pluto, a team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding in the outer reaches of our solar system.

When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto. These small objects have curiously aligned orbits, which hints that an unseen planet even further out is influencing their behaviour. Scientists calculated that this world would be about 10 times the mass of Earth and would orbit at roughly 250 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Now Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain have taken another look at these distant bodies. As well as confirming their bizarre orbital alignment, the pair found additional puzzling patterns. Small groups of the objects have very similar orbital paths. Because they are not massive enough to be tugging on each other, the researchers think the objects are being "shepherded" by a larger object in a pattern known as orbital resonance.

Two giant planets may cruise unseen beyond Pluto - space - 11 June 2014 - New Scientist

 

[ScienceRocks]

Inside Virgin Galactic's newest passenger spaceship

Inside Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket factory - CNN.com

Mojave, California (CNN) -- When I first poked my head inside Virgin Galactic's newest spaceship, I felt a little like I was getting a front-row seat to space history.

The company, led by billionaire Richard Branson, allowed CNN unprecedented access to a "SpaceShipTwo, Serial Two" spacecraft which was being carefully assembled by workers at a secure facility in the high desert north of Los Angeles.

This invention spun from carbon fiber and imagination is designed to fly tourists some 60 miles high to the edge of space.

In 2008, Branson predicted the company would be launching paying passengers by 2010. Obviously that hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile, more than 700 people -- reportedly including astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Justin Bieber and Ashton Kutcher -- are awaiting to gain official status as Space Cowboys.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Enter the Dragon: Mega-Earth in Draco smashes notions of planetary formation

Worlds like this one aren't supposed to exist. In Draco the Dragon-the 8th largest constellation in our sky-there exists a solid planet weighing close to 17 times as much as Earth. This announcement rocked the scientific world.

"We were very surprised when we realized what we had found," said Dr. Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the analysis that lead to the discovery.

This is the second time the Kepler-10 system has made space history. The first was in 2011, when Kepler-10b, the so-called lava-Earth, was discovered by the Kepler space telescope. That marked the first certain discovery of a rocky exoplanet in the history of planet-hunting. At that time, astronomers were 99.998% certain that there was another planet nearby. The only estimate at that time for the size of the second planet, Kepler-10c, was 2.2 times the radius of the Earth.

Much has changed since Kepler-10b was first discovered.

In the last three years our ability to seek, find and identify exoplants has increased exponentially. In the last week of May 2014 alone thirteen exoplanets were added to the NASA archive. In the Almost a dozen rocky bodies have also been to the dossier and many probably rocky planets have been found, including the 4.8 Earth-mass Kapteyn b, which surprised the scientific community by being ancient, enormous-relative to other rocky bodies known at the time-and in the habitable zone of a star only 13 light years away.

At 560 light-years away, Kepler-10 is much further than Kapteyn, but is like our Sun in more ways than one.

Read more at: Enter the Dragon: Mega-Earth in Draco smashes notions of planetary formation

 

[ScienceRocks]

Space giants join forces to battle SpaceX: This is how cheap space travel begins

Space giants join forces to battle SpaceX: This is how cheap space travel begins | ExtremeTech

Two of Europe’s largest companies, Airbus and Safran, are joining forces to fight SpaceX’s attempts to steal away their majority share of the lucrative commercial space launch business. This is one of the first times that one of the larger, entrenched, government-backed aerospace consortia has deigned to raise a quizzical eyebrow in acknowledgement at the presence of SpaceX — but it certainly won’t be the last. SpaceX, after a series of cheap, successful space launches, is now starting to make waves: After decades of expensive, monopolistic control of space travel, companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Airbus are finally going to have to slash their costs to stay competitive. This is how the era of cheap space travel begins.

Arianespace, co-owned by Airbus and the French government, has dominated the commercial space launch business for years, and is by far the world’s largest player when it comes to putting satellites into orbit. Following the Falcon 9′s high-profile missions to the International Space Station, its much lower cost ($60 million vs. $120 million for the Ariane 5, pictured above), and SpaceX’s continued advances towards reusable space launchers, it was only a matter of time until Arianespace was forced to react. Today, Airbus has announced a partnership with Safran (a French rocket engine maker) to create a new family of price-competitive space launch vehicles.

When it comes to big-time commercial space launches, there are three main players: The United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing), Arianespace (Airbus and French government), and International Launch Services (Lockheed, and two big Russian companies, Khrunichev and Energia). These consortia account for close to 100% of the annual multi-billion-dollar spend on space launches. SpaceX is one of a few new upstarts that wants a piece of that pie. [Read: SpaceX unveils Dragon V2, the world’s first commercial manned reusable spaceship.]

As we’ve seen, though, when it comes to big government contracts it can be hard to squeeze out an incumbent like Lockheed or Boeing, both of which have decades-long relationships with the government (and no doubt a significant amount of cronieism). SpaceX is currently fighting the US government after it awarded a huge defense contract to the United Space Alliance without a fair bidding process. The ULA argues that it alone has the strength and breadth to successfully manage the US military’s space efforts. SpaceX probably wouldn’t argue that the ULA has more experience, and is a more tried-and-tested entity, but everyone has to start somewhere.

About fucking time!

 

[ScienceRocks]

SpaceX's Elon Musk hopes to put humans on Mars in 10 years

SpaceX's Elon Musk hopes to put humans on Mars in 10 years - CNET

The founder of the private space transport company gives a short timeline for the possibility of firing up a self-sustaining city on the Red Planet.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been solitarily rolling around the Red Planet collecting samples and beaming information back to Earth. But, according to SpaceX's Elon Musk, it might not be too long before Curiosity gets some company.

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Musk said that he thinks humans could be shuttled to Mars in as soon as a decade.

"I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," Musk told CNBC. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary."

A private company founded by Musk in 2002, SpaceX designs, builds, and launches spacecrafts and rockets into low-Earth orbit. The company's goal is to one-day send humans into space so that they can live on other planets.

I'd try for the moon by 2018 and then mars by 2025. It will be much harder to take the real big step first.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Progress reported on asteroid mission
Progress reported on asteroid mission

WASHINGTON — NASA is reporting significant progress identifying potential asteroids where astronauts could land as part of a Mars mission, even as skeptics in Congress say the moon would make a better stepping stone.

Three candidates, none bigger than a school bus, are being monitored for a mission that would redirect a near-Earth asteroid into lunar orbit.

Sporting names like 2009 DD, 2013 EC and 2011 MD, each has the mass, shape, spin rate and orbit required for a mission that could cost as much as $1.25 billion and is still up to a decade away.

NASA also is looking at three larger asteroids (Itokawa, Bennu and 2008 EV5) as part of an "Option B." Those asteroids contain small boulders that could be broken off robotically and redirected into lunar orbit as well.

Agency officials held a news conference Thursday to discuss the status of the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or "ARM," exactly a year after NASA unveiled the unusual plan. They hope to decide on an option by early next year but don't have to choose a specific asteroid to land on until a year before the launch, expected to take place between 2021 and 2024.

If I had my damn way this would be done by 2017! Then we'd go back to the moon to build our base by 2020. But the losertrian savages want us to go backwards. I honestly, think the moon is better as we could put a base on it.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA expects to send drone to Titan
NASA expects to send drone to Titan | DVICE

NASA thinks Titan, one Saturn's moons, may have life. And what better way to find out than to send in the drones? The agency is proposing to send in a 22-pound quadrocopter drone to scour Titan for traces of life or prebiotic chemistry, after images from NASA's Cassini mission showed all sorts of similarities to our planets. The UAV would land, explore and pick up samples (maybe flee from rampaging Cylon-type warriors) and then buzz off back to a mothership, somewhere in the near vicinity.

So what sort of drone are we looking at? Something more sophisticated than the Parrot AR.Drone, for sure. The scientist behind the idea is Larrie Mathies, the senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he has dismissed the other options for obvious reasons. Landers are stationary once they've plopped down onto Titan's surface. Aircraft or balloons can't land on the moon to get the samples, and a large, long-range helicopter is far too expensive for the budgeting agency to commit to. So it's obvious that the solution starts with a D, ends with an E and has RON in the middle of it.

"We propose a mission study of a small rotorcraft," writes Mathies, "that can deploy from a balloon or lander to acquire close-up, high-resolution imagery and mapping data of the surface, land at multiple locations to acquire microscopic imagery and samples of solid and liquid material, return the samples to the mothership for analysis, and recharge from an RTG on the mothership to enable multiple sorties."

 

[ScienceRocks]

Success! Cassini flies by Titan, collects intel on mysterious lakes

NASA's Cassini mission flew past Titan early Wednesday morning, successfully completing a complex maneuver that will help scientists better understand one of the solar system's most intriguing moons.

Beginning around midnight, a team of scientists and engineers guided the spacecraft into an orbit that allowed them to bounce a radio signal off the surface of Titan toward Earth, where it was received by a land-based telescope array 1 billion miles away.

"We are essentially using Titan as a mirror," said Essam Marouf of San Jose State University, who's a member of the Cassini radio science team. "And the nature of the echo can tell us about the nature of Titan's surface, whether it is liquid or solid, and the physical properties of the material."

Saturn's moon Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and in some ways it's one of the most Earth-like bodies we have encountered. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere, and it is the only other world we know of that has a system of liquid lakes and seas on its surface.

However, unlike Earth, its surface is far too cold to sustain liquid water.

Scientists have hypothesized that Titan's famous lakes and seas are made of liquid methane or ethane, but Marouf explains that those inferences are mostly based on the fact that methane and ethane would take on a liquid state in the conditions on Titan, rather than direct observation.

"There is no really direct measurement that tells us what they are exactly," he said. "If the data from this morning is good enough, it will tell us what these liquids really are."

Read more at: Success! Cassini flies by Titan, collects intel on mysterious lakes

 

[ScienceRocks]

SpaceX to launch ORBCOMM OG2 mission Friday
June 20, 2014

SpaceX to launch ORBCOMM OG2 mission Friday | KurzweilAI

SpaceX is targeted to launch the first satellite in the ORBCOMM OG2 mission on Friday, June 20th, 2014 at 6:08pm ET, with a back-up date of Saturday, June 21.

The launch from from Cape Canaveral will be webcast live beginning at 5:35 pm ET.

In this flight, the Falcon 9 rocket will deliver six next-generation OG2 satellites to an elliptical 750 x 615 km low-Earth orbit. The OG2 satellites are commercial telecommunications satellites.

ORBCOMM offers global satellite and cellular services the M2M (machine-to-machine) industry, designed to track, monitor and control a variety of powered and unpowered assets in key vertical markets such as transportation and logistics, heavy equipment, oil and gas, maritime, and government.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Construction begun on world’s largest optical telescope

Construction on the world’s largest telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope or E-ELT, has begun in Chile with observations expected to occur in the 2020s.

The World Cup is not the only exiting event this month: on June 19, explosives were detonated in Northern Chile to begin the construction of what will be the largest optical telescope in the world.

Called the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, the project is the latest from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and one of its most ambitious.

E-ELT’s primary mirror is 128.9 feet (9.3 m) long, composed of 798 hexagonal segments, each 4.7 feet (1.45 m) long, but only 1.96 x 10-9 inches (50 nm) thick.

A mirror made of many segments is typical of very large telescopes: a nearly 130 foot long mirror is too large to transport to a remote mountaintop and there is currently no way to construct a mirror of that size that would also be accurate.

The telescope has 6,000 actuators that can distort the direction of the mirror segments 1000 times each second to obtain a “perfect shape” for the primary mirror. The perfect shape is the shape that minimizes or even removes the effects of the atmosphere, which can obscure the viewing of objects in deep space and introduce error into the data.
Most telescopes are then located atop remote mountains with the least amount of atmosphere. Cerro Armazones in Northern Chile was chosen as the site of the telescope in part because it has 330 cloud-free days each year making the weather extremely predictable.

Given that most astronomers will travel nearly 7,000 miles to reach this remote location, Chile’s weather increases the probability that once an astronomer arrives, he or she will be able to use this machine.

Scientists plan to use the E-ELT to search for extrasolar planets or planets that orbit other stars and thus exist outside our solar system. Already, 1,800 extrasolar planets have been found, but this telescope should be capable of identifying many more, while also characterizing their atmospheres.

Read more: Construction begun on world?s largest optical telescope | Science Recorder

 

[ScienceRocks]

Scientists Spy "Magic Island" On Titan, Saturn's Strangest Moon

Scientists Spy "Magic Island" On Titan, Saturn's Strangest Moon - Forbes
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As if Titan , the Saturnian moon with mountains, dunes, rivers and lakes made of flammable hydrocarbons, wasn’t weird enough, now researchers have spotted an “island” in the middle of its second-largest lake that seems to appear and disappear.

Rather than an island of magic or any other sort, the feature identified using data from the Cassini spacecraft is more likely some indication of weather whipping up on the distant orb. In the time that astronomers have been able to spy on Titan close-up it’s mostly been winter or spring in the northern part of the moon where the mysterious island has been spotted. But now summer appears to finally be coming after several Earth years, and perhaps bringing winds causing waves that appear as an island in images.

Other possibilities proposed by the authors of a paper on the findings published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience include sunken solids in the lake becoming buoyant thanks to the onset of warmer temperatures, or gases from the sea floor rising to the surface as bubbles.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Space tourism balloon aces first test, on track to begin operations in 2016

Space tourism balloon aces first test, on track to begin operations in 2016

Arizona-based World View Enterprises has successfully completed its first test flight of a space tourism balloon that, for the price of US$75,000 per person, will lift six passengers into the stratosphere to an altitude of 20 miles (32 km). From there, they will be able to see the curvature of the Earth. The company says it is on track to fly its first passenger in just two years time.