CBO

nationalpost:

NASA set to launch Sunjammer, the largest solar sail in history, with hopes to revolutionize near space travel

It might not get you all the way to Cardassia Prime, but NASA hopes its newly launched solar-sail Sunjammer program will lead to a future where propellantless space craft are used for a multitude of functions beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Once proven, solar sail technology could enable a host of versatile space missions, including flying an advanced space-weather warning system to more quickly and accurately alert satellite operators and utilities on Earth of geomagnetic storms caused by coronal mass ejections from the sun,” NASA said in a release.

Additionally, NASA sees the project as something that can work to help clean up the piles of floating space garbage in orbit. (NASA)

positive-press-daily:

The nearest single Sun-like star to the Earth hosts five planets - one of which is in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist, astronomers say.

Tau Ceti’s planetary quintet - reported in an online paper that will appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics - was found in existing planet-hunting data. The study’s refined methods of sifting through data should help find even more far-flung worlds.

The star now joins Alpha Centauri as a nearby star known to host planets. In both those cases, the planets were found not by spying them through a telescope but rather by measuring the subtle effects they have on their host stars’ light.

In the gravitational dance of a planet around a star, the planet does most of the moving. But the star too is tugged slightly to and fro as the planet orbits, and these subtle movements of the star show up as subtle shifts in the colour of the star’s light we see from Earth.

This “radial velocity” measurement is a tricky one; stars’ light changes also for a range of other reasons, and requires picking out the specifically planetary component from all this “noise”. Now, Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire and colleagues have refined their “noise modelling” in order to subtract it, and thereby see the smallest signals hiding in the data - starting with Tau Ceti.

“It’s a star on which we have a lot of data - an order of magnitude more data than we have for pretty much any other star,” Prof Jones told BBC News. “It’s a good test case for how low can we go, what size of signals can we pick up.”

The team started with data from three planet-hunting missions: Harps, AAPS, and HiRes, all of which had data on Tau Ceti. The trick to honing the technique was to put in “fake planets” - to add signals into the messy data that planets should add - and find ways to reduce the noise until the fake planets became more and more visible in the data.

“Putting all that together, we optimised a noise-modelling strategy which allows us to recover our fake signals - but in the process of doing that, we actually saw that we were finding signals as well,” Prof Jones said - actual planets.

The quintet includes planets between two and six times the Earth’s mass, with periods ranging from 14 to 640 days. One of them, dubbed HD 10700e, lies about half as far from Tau Ceti as the Earth is from the Sun - and because Tau Ceti is slightly smaller and dimmer than our Sun, that puts the planet in the so-called habitable zone.

It is increasingly clear that in existing data from radial velocity measurements there may be evidence of many more planets. On Monday, Philip Gregory at the University of British Columbia in Canada posted an as-yet unpublished paper to the arXiv repository, claiming to have seen three planets in the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, one of three stars in a triple-star system, 22 light-years away.

It is also clear that in almost every direction we look and in every way that we look, there are planets around stars near and far.

discoverynews:

Is Antimatter a Viable Starship Fuel?

Hope springs eternal for die-hard Star Trek fans that scientists will one day build an actual, working antimatter propulsion engine similar to the one that powers the fictional starship Enterprise.

A paper published earlier this year by a pair of enterprising (get it?) physicists should fan the flames of that fantasy even further. The results from their computer simulations indicate that at least one key component of realizing a working antimatter propulsion engine — highly efficient magnetic nozzles — should be far more efficient than previously thought. And such nozzles are feasible using today’s technologies.

find out more about how this COULD work…

Way cool.

OMG

Wondrous, indeed.

ikenbot:

Less Than a Week Remains Before NASA’s Biggest Rover Yet Lands on Mars

NASA’s newest Mars rover is less than a week away from its high-stakes landing on the surface of the Red Planet.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover is scheduled to touch down on Mars at 10:30 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:30 a.m. Aug. 6 EDT, 0530 GMT). The car-size robotic explorer is designed to investigate whether Mars is, or ever was, capable of hosting microbial life.

With six days to go until Curiosity arrives at the Red Planet, project managers are bracing themselves for what NASA calls the riskiest part of the mission: the rover’s harrowing descent through the Martian atmosphere to the ground.

Full Article

mothernaturenetwork:

Sun erupts with most powerful summer solar flare yet
When aimed directly at Earth, solar flares and CMEs can endanger satellites and astronauts in orbit and interfere with GPS and communications signals.

laboratoryequipment:

Lichen Prove to be Toughest Life on Earth

You can freeze it, thaw it, vacuum dry it and expose it to radiation, but still life survives. ESA’s research on the International Space Station is giving credibility to theories that life came from outer space– as well as helping to create better sunscreens.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Lichen-Are-Toughest-Life-on-Earth-062612.aspx?xmlmenuid=51

aamukherjee:

Scientists Deduce The Existence Of Vast Reservoirs of Water on Mars

Claims of water being present on Mars have existed since 1870 with the first quantities of water actually being detected in 2003 by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. 

Now, according to an article published yesterday in the journal Geology, there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its interior as well. The utility of this evidence comes in the prospects of extraterrestrial life (no, not full fledged aliens) and future human colonisation.

The research itself did not require any samples from Mars; rather, by analysing the water content of two meteorites ejected roughly 2.5 million years ago, they were able to determine that Mars has somewhere between 70 to 300 parts per million of water in the mantle - a figure that is not too far from that of Earth’s 50 to 300 parts per million.

If all of this can be deduced from two meteorites that crashed on Earth over a century back, only time will tell what future missions to Mars could yield.

discoverynews:

The Dry Ice ‘Snowflakes’ of Mars

Everyone seems to ponder the lyrics of Train’s song “Drops of Jupiter,” so perhaps it’s about time a songwriter includes the “Snowflakes of Mars” in their next ballad. MIT scientists might even be able to add prose to the lyrics by describing their study into the very alien snow that falls from Red Planet skies.

After collecting the vast quantities of data gathered by orbiting Mars spacecraft, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has uncovered some rather interesting facts about Martian snow.

keep reading

ikenbot:

How Did Galaxies Form?

Image: M81 Spiral galaxy Credit: NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

This is one of the questions we still don’t have a conclusive answer to, but as scientists search the cosmos for clues, the mystery becomes clearer.

Galaxies probably began to form less than a billion years after the Big Bang, which occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. The primordial Universe consisted almost entirely of hydrogen and helium gas, as well as dark matter, and was, for a time, almost completely homogeneous. It is believed that hypothetical dark matter played a major role in the formation of galaxies and the advent of a heterogeneous Universe. Clouds of gas first began clumping together due to the accumulation of primordial fluctuations, which were small changes of the density in certain parts of the early Universe. Through gravity, gas and dark matter were drawn towards the denser regions of the Universe.

There are two main hypotheses on how galaxies began to form, both of which are based on the gravitational effects of collapsing gas. One is called the “bottom-up” theory, in which giant clouds of gas came together in small clumps, which then merged to form larger galaxies. The second theory is the “top-down” one, in which clouds of gas the size of multiple galaxies broke down into individual clumps. This theory would explain why galaxies occur in clusters, and is the most widely accepted model.

Hydrogen and helium gas were then drawn towards the inner part of protogalaxies while dark matter formed a halo surrounding the outer part. The gas within these infant galaxies also began to clump together and heat up, forming the first stars. In the beginning, matter in the Universe was composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium. Nuclear fusion within stars (and during supernovae) would help make the rest of the heavier elements.

jtotheizzoe:

scienceygoodness:

“For the first time in history, a private space craft was captured by the International Space Station.” USA Today     Click-through for live view.

Which is nice, because the ISS has been trying to catch one for years. Traps and everything. Even offered it candy.

Here’s the live video link. To space.

(Source: wethesciencey)

No billboards in space.

(Source: nuncasabemejor)