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Mars One finishes first round of choosing finalists for 2022 Mars mission | Science RecorderMars One begins choosing people for its Red Planet mission.
If you think getting into an Ivy League college is tough, just try getting chosen to join the crew of Mars Ones 2024 mission to Mars. The nonprofit announced Monday that out of more than 200,000 applications from aspiring volunteers for the mission, it has selected 1,058 to more on to the next round of screening.
Further rounds of winnowing down this pool of semifinalists will commence in 2015, when the nonprofit organizes them all into teams that will compete in extended training courses that tests their physical and mental capability. These training courses will air in a live reality show to audiences worldwide, with the proceeds going toward funding the mission itself.
The Active Particle-induced X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), carried by the Yutu rover of the Chang'e-3 satellite got its first X-ray fluorescence spectrum of lunar regolith around the landing site on December 25, 2013.
An initial analysis indicates that eight major rock-forming elements (Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, Ti, Cr and Fe) and at least 3 minor elements (Sr, Y and Zr) of the Moon can be identified in this spectrum.
Besides, the energy resolution of AXS is estimated to be about 135 @5.9keV, which demonstrates that it is currently one of the best X-ray spectrometer for the planetary exploration in the world.
(Phys.org) —More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. Astronomers don't know how they form or if they are made of rock, water or gas.
The Kepler team today reports on four years of ground-based follow-up observations targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations confirm the numerous Kepler discoveries are indeed planets and yield mass measurements of these enigmatic worlds that vary between Earth and Neptune in size.
(Phys.org) —Massive terrestrial planets, called "super-Earths," are known to be common in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now a Northwestern University astrophysicist and a University of Chicago geophysicist report the odds of these planets having an Earth-like climate are much greater than previously thought.
Nicolas B. Cowan and Dorian Abbot's new model challenges the conventional wisdom which says super-Earths actually would be very unlike Earth—each would be a waterworld, with its surface completely covered in water. They conclude that most tectonically active super-Earths—regardless of mass—store most of their water in the mantle and will have both oceans and exposed continents, enabling a stable climate such as Earth's.
Cowan is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, and Abbot is an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago.
Phys.org) —The first of a set of unprecedented, super-deep views of the universe from an ambitious collaborative program called The Frontier Fields is being released today at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The long-exposure image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is the deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies, and also contains images of some of the intrinsically faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected.
The target is the massive cluster Abell 2744, which contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. The immense gravity in this foreground cluster is being used as a "gravitational lens," which warps space to brighten and magnify images of far more-distant background galaxies as they looked over 12 billion years ago, not long after the big bang.
"The Frontier Fields is an experiment; can we use Hubble's exquisite image quality and Einstein's theory of General Relativity to search for the first galaxies?," said Space Telescope Science Institute Director Matt Mountain. "With the other Great Observatories, we are undertaking an ambitious joint program to use galaxy clusters to explore the first billion years of the universe's history."
After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.
The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres. It will also be a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument to be deployed on one of the world's biggest telescopes – the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile.
"Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect," says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument.
Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus spacecraft successfully launched its first cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station today. Coverage began via NASA TV at 9:15 a.m. PT/12:15 p.m. ET with the launch scheduled for just under an hour later.
The probability of acceptable weather has improved to 95 percent at the time of launch.
NASA's twitter feed indicates that fueling is underway.
They announced on twitter:
Solar array deployment is complete for #Cygnus on orbit, heading for a Sunday rendezvous with the #ISS on the #Orb1 mission.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of "hypervelocity stars" – solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy.
The discovery of this new set of "hypervelocity" stars was described at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week in Washington, D.C., and is published in the Jan. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
"These new hypervelocity stars are very different from the ones that have been discovered previously," said Vanderbilt University graduate student Lauren Palladino, lead author on the study. "The original hypervelocity stars are large blue stars and appear to have originated from the galactic center. Our new stars are relatively small – about the size of the sun – and the surprising part is that none of them appear to come from the galactic core."
The discovery came as Palladino, working under the supervision of Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt was mapping the Milky Way by calculating the orbits of Sun-like stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive census of the stars and galaxies in a region covering nearly one quarter of the sky.
Nasa has won White House backing to extend the life of the International Space Station for a further four years, until 2024.
Construction of the ISS began in 1998 and is a joint venture between the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and states in the European Space Agency (Esa).
For the extension to happen, it will likely need the partners' support.
Their current commitments run to 2020, but many engineers believe the station could work safely until at least 2028.
Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator at Nasa with responsibility for the station, told reporters that it was feasible to continue operating the ISS if some partners decided not to stay on board, but added that he expected them all to come through, even if the agreements took a few years to put in place: "I think the idea is that 10 years from today is a pretty far-reaching, pretty strategic decision," he said.
Ants, antibiotics and a fleet of tiny satellites are heading to the International Space Station (ISS), following the successful launch of the commercial Cygnus craft today.
As well as being Cygnus's first official ISS mission, the launch should herald a boom in the scientific and commercial exploitation of low Earth orbit.
Cygnus, which took off from Wallops, Virginia at 1.07pm local time, is operated by the private company Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Virginia. Last September, Orbital became the second private firm to send a craft to dock with the ISS, while its rival, SpaceX, is already conducting regular ISS resupply launches.
Assuming it reaches the ISS without any problems, NASA now has a choice of two delivery firms – a boon to companies operating from there. "The more ways to get there the better. It's similar to having multiple companies competing for freight delivery, like Fed Ex and UPS along with the postal service," says Rich Pournelle of NanoRacks, a company based in Houston, Texas, that leases space and equipment on the ISS and sells access to other customers.
Let nasa focus on science and idea's....
(Phys.org) —The Kepler team today reports on four years of observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems, announcing results this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations, from Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, confirm that numerous Kepler discoveries are indeed planets and yield mass measurements of these enigmatic worlds that vary between Earth and Neptune in size.
More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. Astronomers don't know how they form or if they are made of rock, water or gas.
Using one of the two world's largest telescopes at Keck Observatory in Hawaii, scientists confirmed 41 of the exoplanets discovered by Kepler and determined the masses of 16. With the mass and diameter in-hand, scientists could immediately determine the density of the planets, characterizing them as rocky or gaseous, or mixtures of the two.
Included in the findings are five new rocky planets ranging in size from ten to eighty percent larger than Earth. Two of the new rocky worlds, dubbed Kepler-99b and Kepler-406b, are both forty percent larger in size than Earth and have a density similar to lead. The planets orbit their host stars in less than five and three days respectively, making these worlds too hot for life as we know it.
A major component of these follow-up observations were Doppler measurements of the planets' host stars. The team measured the reflex wobble of the host star, caused by the gravitational tug on the star exerted by the orbiting planet. That measured wobble reveals the mass of the planet; the higher the mass of the planet, the greater the gravitational tug on the star and hence the greater the wobble.
"This marvelous avalanche of information about the mini-Neptune planets is telling us about their core-envelope structure, not unlike a peach with its pit and fruit," said Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley who led the summary analysis of the high-precision Doppler study using the HIRES instrument installed on the 10-meter, Keck I telescope. "We now face daunting questions about how these enigmas formed and why our solar system is devoid of the most populous residents in the galaxy."
Space tourism company Virgin Galactic sent its SpaceShipTwo reusable space vehicle to new heights on Friday, blasting the craft nearly 13.5 miles into the air and reaching a speed of Mach 1.4.
The craft left Mojave Air and Space Port at approximately 7:22 a.m. PST strapped to the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, which took the slick plane to around 46,000 feet. At the controls were Virgin Galactic Pilot Mike Masucci and Scaled Test Pilot Mike Alsbury.
When we look for alien solar systems, we tend to look for planets and stars that resemble ones we’re familiar with, including Earth-like planets and sun-like stars. Thanks to the HARPS telescope in Chile, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) not only discovered a star that could be our sun’s twin in a star cluster, but we’ve also found three planets close to it.
The star cluster in question is Messier 67. What’s important here is that these three new planets reside in a star cluster, something that's rare. And this star cluster also contains our solar twin, a star that resembles our sun in almost every way: it has almost the same mass, temperature, and chemical composition. Obviously, such stars, as far as we know, are rare. But that’s not all astronomers discovered: this twin to our sun resides in a cluster with two other stars and has at least three nearby planets. Two of those planets are about the size of Jupiter, with the other being slightly larger. These observations mark the first time that we’ve seen a star cluster with a solar twin that also has planets. In Messier 67’s configuration, the stars and planets orbit around the larger star, that which is our sun’s twin.
Unfortunately, these new planets are probably not habitable. They are extremely hot and do not fall in what we define as the “habitable zone,” a place in orbit where a planet can exist with liquid water. Studying them, though, may still tell us more about our own solar system, particularly if these are planets that might have once resided in the habitable zone and slowly moved out of it (something that occurs naturally over billions of years).
If the space junk surrounding the Earth was a reality show, it might as well be an episode of Hoarders. After all, there's currently something like 22,000 sizable bits of space junk floating around that scientists say are big enough to pose a danger to space vehicles. This includes everything from huge discarded rocket stages, to smaller bits that broke away from space vehicles in collisions. The total weight of this stuff is over 5,500 tons, so you really don't want to collide with any of it. Just check out the movie Gravity to see an exaggerated version of what could happen.
To avoid that possibility, several space agencies constantly track the paths of every larger piece out there, and make sure that newly launched spaceships and satellites use an orbit that avoids collisions. The problem is that the situation is now reaching a critical point, and future Earth orbiting objects could be in danger unless something is done to clean the dump up.
Japan's space agency JAXA plans to start the cleanup process, by launching a sort of extraterrestrial version of a street sweeper to scoop up some of the junk. The first tests will use a 1,000 foot long net, which has a magnetic charge to attract the junk as it passes. The net was made by a Japanese fishing net manufacturer, but this time the catch will be nothing like a net full of tuna. Once the net is loaded up with space junk, the ship leading it will be instructed to re-enter the atmosphere, where it, along with all of the junk, will simply burn up.
Assuming the first test goes well, JAXA already prepared a net that's 2/3 of a mile long for the next run, and future plans include larger versions that can snag entire rocket stages and other big pieces.
Look for the initial test version to be launched in late February.
China's Jade Rabbit Moon rover has completed its first examination of the lunar soil, state media claim.
The Beijing Aerospace Control Center said the rover had explored the surface using its mechanical arm on Tuesday night (Beijing time).
The survey lasted half an hour and official news service Xinhua said the rover performed well in the tests.
In December, the Chinese landing module and rover made the first "soft" landing on the Moon since 1976.
