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XCOR Lynx space plane to begin flight tests soon | DVICEVirgin Galactic has been getting a lot of the space tourism press in recent months, but now another company is gearing up for some high-profile tests of their own. XCOR Aerospace is a privately funded outfit that has been designing and constructing their Lynx space plane out in California's Mojave Desert.
XCOR CEO Jeff Greason has been a life-long fan of manned spaceflight, and the Lynx space plane will be his very first foray into the arena for himself. The Lynx Mark 1 is nearing completion and is expected to begin test flights next year. Once those have been completed, the Mark 1 will be capable of carrying one passenger at a time to an altitude of 40 miles — approximately the height at which shooting stars burn up.
The first of three satellites designed to undertake a comprehensive study the Earth’s magnetic field left Munich airport on Tuesday aboard an Ilyushin-76 transport aircraft bound for Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. This first Swarm satellite will be followed by two identical craft and more than 60 tons of support equipment before all three are launched into polar orbit in November
Commercial space flight took another step forward today as NASA and Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia launched Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft for a rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). The unmanned cargo ship lifted off at 10:58 AM EDT atop an Orbital Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and is intended as a demonstration flight of the Cygnus to show its suitability for delivering supplies to the ISS.
A UK team is developing its idea for a Mars "hopper" - a robot that can bound across the surface of the Red Planet.
At the moment, landing missions use wheels to move around, but their progress can be stymied by sand-traps, steep slopes and boulder fields.
A hopper would simply leap across these obstacles to the next safest, flat surface.
The research group is led from Leicester University and the Astrium space company.
They propose the use of a vehicle powered by a radioisotope thermal rocket engine
An American and two Russians blasted off Thursday for the International Space Station atop a Soyuz rocket that will slash more than a day off the usual travel time.
Michael Hopkins of NASA and Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky of Russia took off without a hitch from the Baikonur space centre that Moscow leases from Central Asia's ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
"Everything went according to plan. Everything went as expected," NASA's official flight commentator announced via a web feed after the Soyuz reached orbit about 10 minutes into its flight.
Read more at: How engineers revamped Spitzer to probe exoplanets(Phys.org) —Now approaching its 10th anniversary, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier observatory for an endeavor not envisioned in its original design: the study of worlds around other stars, called exoplanets. While the engineers and scientists who built Spitzer did not have this goal in mind, their visionary work made this unexpected capability possible. Thanks to the extraordinary stability of its design and a series of subsequent engineering reworks, the space telescope now has observational powers far beyond its original limits and expectations.
"When Spitzer launched back in 2003, the idea that we would use it to study exoplanets was so crazy that no one considered it," said Sean Carey of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But now the exoplanet science work has become a cornerstone of what we do with the telescope."
Spitzer views the universe in the infrared light that is a bit less energetic than the light our eyes can see. Infrared light can easily pass through stray cosmic gas and dust, allowing researchers to peer into dusty stellar nurseries, the centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems.
After scooping up Martian soil and analyzing it for the first time, NASA's Curiosity rover has something interesting to report: there's water in the soil. A fair bit of the stuff, too.
"One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Dean of Science Laurie Leshin, the lead author of a study detailing the findings. "About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water, which is a great resource, and interesting scientifically." If you heated a cubic foot of the Martian soil up, you'd get about two pints of water.
Although scientists have speculated that ancient rivers and even oceans once existed on Mars, the fact that the very first soil sample they analyzed contained two percent water is pretty remarkable. It means that water is still very much present, and even widespread, in Martian soil.
"We now know there should be abundant, easily accessible water on Mars," said Leshin. "When we send people, they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just a bit, and obtain water."
That should come as a relief to the 200,000 people vying for a one-way ticket to Mars.
Earth's atmosphere may have contained oxygen much earlier than the current timetable of our history predicts, according to new research from the University of British Columbia. After studying the chemical composition of the oldest soils on Earth, scientists from the university found evidence that oxygen was present in the layer of gases surrounding Earth as early as 3 billion years ago.
Researchers working on dilithium-powered fusion impulse engines
Researchers working on dilithium-powered fusion impulse engines | DVICE
Hear that, Star Trek? Technology is catching up! The University of Alabama's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are all getting together to develop an "impulse engine" that's powered in part by "dilithium crystals."
Here's how the scientists describe their own research:
"Star Trek fans love it, especially when we call the concept an impulse drive, which is what it is. The fusion fuel we're focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure. That's basically dilithium crystals we're using."
We would be remiss, of course, if we didn't point out that in reality (that is, in Star Trek), dilithium is not quite the same as lithium-6 (which would be, uh, hexalithium?), and also, dilithium regulates the matter/antimatter reaction in the warp drive, not the impulse drive. So good, we've gotten all of our hrrumphing out of the way, let's move on.
The drive should/would/will be based on the principle of Z-pinch fusion. A Z-pinch, for you physics fans, is when you run a huge jolt of electricity through an array of tiny wires, turning them into a plasma and generating a massive magnetic field at the same time. The field "pinches" the plasma, collapsing it down onto a core of deuterium and lithium, causing those atoms to fuse and releasing a big burst of fusion energy- more than it took to set the Z-pinch off in the first place. Here's a picture of what it looks like when they do a Z-pinch on the Z Machine at Sandia National Labs:
At full throttle, the impulse engine will produce Z-pinches nearly continuously, and astronauts onboard a spaceship using this method of propulsion would feel a series of pulses as opposed to some non-stop beastly acceleration. The acceleration will be beastly, though: the researchers say the impulse engine would generate "millions of pounds of thrust out the back of this thing--on the order of Saturn-V-class thrust."
Since a fusion-driven impulse engine is far more efficient than a conventional rocket engine, you can go much farther, much faster, on a lot less fuel, meaning that a trip from Earth to Mars could take just six weeks instead of six months or more. And as for speed, the impulse engine may be able to propel a spacecraft at up to 62,600 miles per hour. This is quite fast, although not up to Star Trek's definition of full impulse, which (depending on who you ask) is probably somewhere between 16 and 17 million miles per hour.
There are a bunch of things that the researchers need to figure out before they're ready to fire this thing up. They need to the the fusion to be self-sustaining, of course, but they also need to figure out how to channel the resulting, er, explosion in the right direction (i.e. away from the spaceship), probably using some sort of magnetic nozzle. It's going to take some work, and some time, but smart people are actually working on a fusion-driven impulse engine as we speak. Wow.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Privately owned Space Exploration Technologies plans to test an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday from a site in California as part of its push into the satellite launch market.
Previous versions of the Falcon 9 have flown five times from the company's launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
If the new rocket's debut goes well, SpaceX plans to return to Florida for the Falcon 9's first commercial mission, an SES World Skies communications satellite, later this year.
Perched on top of the 22-story, beefed-up Falcon 9 will be Canada's Cassiope science satellite. Liftoff is targeted for 9 a.m. PDT (1600 GMT) from a newly refurbished launch site at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
A SpaceX rocket carrying a Canadian satellite intended to track space weather launched from the California coast Sunday in what was billed as a test flight
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles, shortly after 9 a.m. under clear skies, eventually reaching its intended orbit.
SpaceX launched an older model of Falcon 9 five times from Florida. This was the first time the Southern California-based private rocket maker flew the next-generation version that boasts upgraded engines designed to improve performance and deliver heavier payloads.
The rocket carried a satellite dubbed Cassiope, a project of the Canadian Space Agency and other partners.
NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.
The printers would serve as a flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools. Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to build exquisite jewelry.
In NASA labs, engineers are 3-D printing small satellites that could shoot out of the Space Station and transmit data to earth, as well as replacement parts and rocket pieces that can survive extreme temperatures.
Number Of Alien Planets Confirmed Beyond Our Solar System Nears 1,000, Data ShowsJust two decades after discovering the first world beyond our solar system, astronomers are closing in on alien planet No. 1,000.
Four of the five main databases that catalog the discoveries of exoplanets now list more than 900 confirmed alien worlds, and two of them peg the tally at 986 as of Sept. 26. So the 1,000th exoplanet may be announced in a matter of days or weeks, depending on which list you prefer.
That's a lot of progress since 1992, when researchers detected two planets orbiting a rotating neutron star, or pulsar, about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Confirmation of the first alien world circling a "normal" star like our sun did not come until 1995.
Number Of Alien Planets Confirmed Beyond Our Solar System Nears 1,000, Data Shows
Number Of Alien Planets Confirmed Beyond Our Solar System Nears 1,000, Data ShowsJust two decades after discovering the first world beyond our solar system, astronomers are closing in on alien planet No. 1,000.
Four of the five main databases that catalog the discoveries of exoplanets now list more than 900 confirmed alien worlds, and two of them peg the tally at 986 as of Sept. 26. So the 1,000th exoplanet may be announced in a matter of days or weeks, depending on which list you prefer.
That's a lot of progress since 1992, when researchers detected two planets orbiting a rotating neutron star, or pulsar, about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Confirmation of the first alien world circling a "normal" star like our sun did not come until 1995.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft finds ingredient of household plastic in space | e! Science NewsNASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected propylene, a chemical used to make food-storage containers, car bumpers and other consumer products, on Saturn's moon Titan. This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth.
A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). This instrument measures the infrared light, or heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons in much the same way our hands feel the warmth of a fire.
Propylene is the first molecule to be discovered on Titan using CIRS. By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical with a high degree of confidence. Details are presented in a paper in the Sept. 30 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene," said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the paper. "That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom -- that's polypropylene."
