Space news and Exploration II

[there4eyeM]

Earth would be 'superhabitable' if humans had a bit more sense.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Will asteroid 2012 TC4 hit Earth in October 2017?
1 hour ago by Tomasz Nowakowski, Astrowatch.net

On Oct. 12, 2017, the asteroid 2012 TC4 is slated to whizz by Earth dangerously close. The exact distance of its closest approach is uncertain, as well as its size. Based on observations in October 2012 when the space rock missed our planet, astronomers estimate that its size could vary from 12 to 40 meters. The meteor that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, injuring 1,500 people and damaging over 7,000 buildings, was about 20 meters wide. Thus, the impact of 2012 TC4 could be even more devastating. "It is something to keep an eye on," Judit Györgyey-Ries, astronomer at the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory, told astrowatch.net. "We could see an airburst maybe broken windows, depending on where it hits."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-asteroid-tc4-earth-october.html#jCp

 

[ScienceRocks]

Violent methane storms on Titan may solve dune direction mystery

With its thick, hazy atmosphere and surface rivers, mountains, lakes and dunes, Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is one of the most Earthlike places in the solar system.

As the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft examines Titan over many years, its discoveries bring new mysteries. One of those involves the seemingly wind-created sand dunes spotted by Cassini near the moon's equator, and the contrary winds just above.

Here's the problem: Climate simulations indicate that Titan's near-surface winds—like Earth's trade winds—blow toward the west. So why do the surface dunes, reaching a hundred yards high and many miles long, point to the east?

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-violent-methane-storms-titan-dune.html#jCp

 

[ScienceRocks]

Computers models show that Mars has briny liquid water in the top 2 inches of soil each night and it evaporates in the morning
[URL='http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/04/computers-models-show-that-mars-has.html']Next Big Future Computers models show that Mars has briny liquid water in the top 2 inches of soil each night and it evaporates in the morning [/URL]

[URL='http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27329-nasas-curiosity-rover-finds-astronauts-could-farm-water-on-mars.html#.VSvvlfzF_wE']Liquid water collects in the Martian soil each night, before evaporating during the day, according to NASA's Curiosity rover.

If future missions can confirm this water cycle, it means astronauts could one day farm moisture to provide drinking water on Mars.

Planetary scientists have seen a lot of evidence for frozen water at the Martian poles, and water vapour in the planet's atmosphere. Liquid water, on the other hand, has been harder to come by, as the temperature and atmospheric pressure at the surface is too low.

perchlorate salts in the planet’s soil are lowering the freezing temperature of water, setting up conditions for liquid brines to form at equatorial regions, new research from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows. Findings, published in this week’s Nature Geoscience, are based on nearly two years worth of atmospheric humidity and temperature measurements collected by the roving science laboratory Curiosity, which is exploring an ancient impact basin called Gale Crater near the planet’s equator.

The brines, computer models show, form nightly in the upper 2 inches of the planet’s soil as perchlorates absorb atmospheric water vapor. As temperatures rise in the morning, the liquid evaporate

[/URL]

 

[ScienceRocks]

'Dwarf planet' Ceres spawns giant mystery (Update)
14 hours ago

Enlarge
This map-projected view of Ceres was created from images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft during its initial approach to the dwarf planet, prior to being captured into orbit in March 2015. The map is an enhanced color view that offers an …more

First classified a planet, then an asteroid and then a "dwarf planet" with some traits of a moon—the more scientists learn about Ceres, the weirder it becomes.

And new observations of the sphere of rock and ice circling our Sun between Mars and Jupiter have added to the mystery, researchers said Monday.

Astrophysicists have been looking to a $473-million (446-million-euro) mission to test theories that Ceres is a water-rich planetary "embryo"—a relic from the birth of the Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago.

But an early batch of data from NASA's Dawn probe, unveiled at a conference of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), may have made the Ceres riddle even greater.

In orbit around Ceres since March 6 after a seven-and-a-half-year trek, Dawn peered at two bright spots on its surface deemed to be telltales of its chemical and physical ID.

But instead of explaining the spots, analysis found the two seemed to "behave distinctly differently," said Federico Tosi, who works on Dawn's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR).

While Spot 1 is colder than its immediate surroundings, Spot 5 is not.

The spots are two of a known dozen or so which on photographs taken by Dawn resemble lights shining on a dull grey surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-dwarf-planet-ceres-spawns-giant.html#jCp

 

[ScienceRocks]

Very Large Telescope observations of Gomez’s Hamburger: Insights into a young protoplanet candidate

Planets are thought to form in the gas and dust disks around young stars. In particular, it has been proposed that giant planets can
form via gravitational instability of massive extended disks around intermediate mass stars. However, direct observations to constrain
this mechanism lack. We have spatially resolved the 8.6 and 11.2 µm emission of a massive edge on protoplanetary disk around an A
star, Gomez’s Hamburger (GoHam), using VISIR at the Very Large Telescope. A compact region situated at a projected distance of
350 ± 50 AU South of the central star is found to have a reduced emission. This asymmetry is fully consistent with the presence of
a cold density structure, or clump, identified in earlier CO observations, and we derive physical characteristics consistent with those
observations: a mass of 0.8-11.4 Jupiter masses (for a dust to gas mass ratio of 0.01), a radius of the order of 102
astronomical units,
a local density of the order of 107
cm−3
. Based on this evidence, we argue that this clump, which we call GoHam b, is a promising
candidate for a young protoplanet formed by gravitational instability, that could be representative of the precursors of massive planets
observed around A stars, like HR 8799 or Beta-pictoris. Further studies at high angular resolution are needed to better constrain the
physical properties of this object in order to confirm this proposal.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing pic.twitter.com/eJWzN6KSJa

6,001 retweets 4,811 favorites

so fucking close

 

[ScienceRocks]

United Launch Alliance developing reusable rocket called Vulcan

United Launch Alliance Monday unveiled the name of its next rocket and it will be called Vulcan.

The new rocket could launch as soon as 2019. It is ULA's response to competition from SpaceX and political pressure to phase out use of the Russian RD-180 engine powering its workhorse Atlas V rocket.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the rocket's design will allow recovery and reuse of the booster's main engines, the rocket's most expensive components.

ULA has partnered with Blue Origin, the Seattle-based firm privately funded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, to develop new American engines.

Plans also call for an eventual replacement of the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage.

Bruno said the Vulcan would be the "highest-performing, most cost-efficient rocket on the market."

Good to see others are getting into it.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA's Spitzer Spots Planet Deep Within Our Galaxy
NASA s Spitzer Spots Planet Deep Within Our Galaxy NASA

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer -- from its unique perch in space -- can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Are they concentrated heavily in its central hub, or more evenly spread throughout its suburbs?

"We don't know if planets are more common in our galaxy's central bulge or the disk of the galaxy, which is why these observations are so important," said Jennifer Yee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a NASA Sagan fellow. Yee is the lead author of one of three new studies that appeared recently in the Astrophysical Journal describing a collaboration between astronomers using Spitzer and the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE.

OGLE's Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile scans the skies for planets using a method called microlensing. A microlensing event occurs when one star happens to pass in front of another, and its gravity acts as a lens to magnify and brighten the more distant star's light. If that foreground star happens to have a planet in orbit around it, the planet might cause a blip in the magnification.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Dark matter becomes less 'ghostly'



15 April 2015

The mysterious stuff known as dark matter just became less ghostly.

It makes up 85% of the total matter in the cosmos and comprises some 27% of the known Universe.
For the first time, the enigmatic quantity may have been caught interacting with other dark matter in a cluster 1.4 billion light-years away.
Previous studies of colliding galaxy clusters have shown that dark matter barely interacts with anything.

And the finding, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may hint at exotic physics - beyond the scope of current theories.
According to widely accepted ideas, the visible matter in galaxies exists inside clumps of dark matter. Without dark matter's gravity to stabilise them, galaxies like the Milky Way would tear themselves apart as they spin.
Yet despite its all-importance, dark matter's true nature remains elusive. It has been shown only to interact with the fundamental force of gravity.
And while it is widely believed to be associated with a specific particle, the current theory of physics known as the Standard Model does not account for one.
A team of astronomers led by Dr Richard Massey of Durham University studied a simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the cluster Abell 3827.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-32303622

 

[ScienceRocks]

SpaceX launch recap Dragon headed to space station but Falcon 9 landing fails again VIDEO ExtremeTech

Watch SpaceX s Vine Falcon 9 first stage landing burn and touchdown on Just Read the Instructions

According to Musk, the rocket actually landed on the ship fine. But it had too much lateral velocity and tipped over immediately thereafter. You can see in the video above how the rocket swings to the side as it lines up at the last second. So yes, it was a failure, but this was still a step in the right direction. The last attempt following the January 2015 Dragon mission failed in a more dramatic fashion, when the steering fins on the Falcon 9 ran out of hydraulic fluid and the rocket smashed into the deck of the ship.

If SpaceX can get vertical rocket landings figured out, it could dramatically lower the cost of getting cargo into space. These landing attempts will continue, and once SpaceX masters the landing procedure, it plans to bring reusable rockets down on land where they can be quickly refueled for another launch. The next Falcon 9 launch for NASA is currently scheduled for June 19th. Fingers crossed they can land this one.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA releases first color image of Pluto and its moon Charon

NASA has just released the first color image ever taken of Pluto and its moon Charon. The image was taken by the Ralph color imager that is stationed aboard the New Horizon spacecraft -- the fastest ever launched -- which is on a historic mission to study Pluto up-close.

The image was taken on April 9 and sent down to researchers on Earth the following day. A preliminary reconstruction for now, the image will be "redefined" by the research team at a later date. Captured from a distance of 71 million miles, the picture does not give too clear a look at Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. New Horizons plans to release color images of surface features of Pluto as it gets closer to its scheduled July 14 flyby of the dwarf planet and its system of at least five moons.

Nasa rocks!!! They deserve 100,000,000,000 per year!!! 99% of everything else deserves that much.

 

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

This amazing map shows just how little of our galaxy we’ve explored so far
This amazing map shows just how little of our galaxy we ve explored so far ExtremeTech

• By Jamie Lendino on April 15, 2015 at 3:07 pm
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Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OLGE), astronomers have discovered a planet that’s roughly 13,000 light-years from Earth — one of the furthest ever such exoplanets ever discovered. The official name for it is OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L, which like most of these, rolls right off the tongue. Not much is known about this planet other than the fact that it’s a gas giant.

Coinciding with the discovery, NASA/JPL has released an artist’s rendering of a map showing exactly where we’ve found exoplanets to date. It’s amazing: We’ve barely scratched the surface of our own galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, even after finding more than 1,800 exoplanets so far (and 4,600 other possible suspects). Each time we get a little push or bump in technology or search methods, we’re able to push our search that much further out.

There are many methods scientists use to find exoplanets, and nearly all of them are indirect in some way (i.e. not visibly observed). Let’s review three of the most common ones.

The ‘transit’ method: Scientists discovered the first exoplanets using ground telescopes and what’s called pulsar timing and radial velocity, but a more common method used since the turn of the century is the ‘transit’ method. It’s pretty simple; when a planet crosses in front of a star, that star dims ever so slightly. So going by the distance to that star, and the relative sizes of the star and planet, you can confirm a planet is orbiting a star by the regular, very small dips in brightness.

In the map below (click it for a larger version), most of the planets found this way are in the orange-pink circle around our Solar System. More recently, scientists are sifting through data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, using the transit method and others to find possible candidates. Exoplanets found with Kepler are shown with the orange-pink “cone” that extends outward, representing the space telescope’s field of view.



Gravitational microlensing: Astronomers are also working with a technique called microlensing (illustrated below) to reach these further-out exoplanets, like the one that’s 13,000 light-years away. The gravitational field of the star acts like a lens that magnifies the light from a distant background star. If there’s a planet present, that will affect the results in an extremely tiny, but still detectable way. Exoplanets found with microlensing are in yellow. The furthest-out one we found so far is about 25,000 light years away, and sits just near the center of our galaxy.

Direct observation and imaging: This one is extremely tough with our current level of technology, and only relatively recently (2008) was it confirmed that the first exoplanet was found in this manner. In these cases, usually the planet is very young, emits infrared light, and is far enough from the glare of the star that you can pick it out.

We’re finding everything from so-called “super Earths” to hot Jupiters and massive gas giants. But all of this is not just about finding other worlds. There’s the search for exoplanets (and exomoons) in general, and then specifically the search for planets that could harbor alien life. For the latter, scientists have been looking in what’s called the ‘Goldilocks’ zone. And of course, we’re still looking within our own Solar System for alien life as well.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA Is Studying How to Replace Mirrors in Its Telescopes With Glitter
3
Sarah Zhang and 24 others

Space telescope Hubble and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope are made with huge, expensive mirrors. And that can be a problem when you’re paying to launch the thing into space. So instead of one big mirror, how about thousands, or even millions, of tiny ones? In other words, how about glitter?

» Yesterday 7:40pm

Orbiting Rainbows is in fact a very real system being considered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A telescope reflecting light with glitter clouds could potentially be a lot cheaper than the $8.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope.

So how will it work? JPL explains in a press release today:

In the proposed Orbiting Rainbows system, the small cloud of glitter-like grains would be trapped and manipulated with multiple laser beams. The trapping happens because of pressure from the laser light — specifically, the momentum of photons translates into two forces: one that pushes particles away, and another that pushes the particles toward the axis of the light beam. The pressure of the laser light coming from different directions shapes the cloud and pushes the small grains to align in the same direction. In a space telescope, the tenuous cloud would be formed by millions of grains, each possibly as small as fractions of a millimeter in diameter.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Russia to build own space station by 2023: Putin
dailytimes.com ^

"By 2023, we plan to create our own national space station in orbit. This is something far-off in the future, but also necessary for us from the point of view of our national economy," Putin said. Russia and NASA recently agreed to keep operating and financing the International Space Station (ISS) at least until 2024, but future joint space projects remain in doubt, as relations between Russia and the United States have plunged to post-Cold War lows over the Ukraine conflict.
The Kremlin strongman said that Russia needed its own space station to be able to view its own territory properly from space. "We use the ISS actively for science and the economy, but from the ISS only five per cent of the area of Russia can be seen. From a national station, we should be able to see the whole of the area of our huge country. It goes without saying we will bring this project to fruition, and without any doubt, it will be under our control," the Russian president said.
Russia said earlier this year that it planned to create its own space station using its modules from the ISS after it is mothballed. In March, the head of Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), said at Baikonur after meeting his NASA counterpart that Russia would work jointly with the US on a project of a new orbital station.

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I think America should build one 10 times its size and make it the station for our planetary space ship.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Overnight, Dragon will execute a series of burns that bring the spacecraft within 200 meters of the International Space Station, and then finally to the capture point 10 meters from the space station. Grapple by the station’s robotic arm is targeted for 7am ET / 4am PT – watch live at www.spacex.com/webcast.

 

[ScienceRocks]

So very fucking close!

You'd almost think that one of the legs had a problem.

 

[ScienceRocks]

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Dawn spacecraft captures a sunlit Ceres on cam

by Mariella Moon | @mariella_moon | 1hr ago

The Dawn spacecraft has recently captured the sharpest pictures of Ceres to date, showing the dwarf planet's bright, sunlit north pole. NASA's space probe has been steadily making its way to the celestial body since 2012 after a 14-month stint orbiting the asteroid Vesta. It fired up its ion thrusters in March to slowly approach the Texas-sized proto-planet and settle into orbit, until it reaches an altitude of 233 miles from the surface. Its ultimate goal? To take 3D images and create a high-res map of Ceres, which might harbor some form of water.

 

[ScienceRocks]

A celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope: 25 years in orbit
By Anthony Wood
April 17, 2015
34 Pictures

April 24 will mark a significant milestone in the life of one of mankind's greatest scientific instruments – the 25-year anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. This bus-sized piece of scientific equipment has become a household name, thanks to the incredible scientific insights and iconic images returned by the legendary telescope over the course of its quarter-century tenure in low-Earth orbit. Join us as we celebrate the history and achievements of NASA's flagship space telescope.