I hope he is using the term experts very loosely. We aren't trying to feel good and be worth something. We are doing what we've always had the desire to do - expand our knowledge through the ambitions of curiosity. There is no made up language or claiming credit for the already created. There's the urge to understand the misunderstood and to conquer the unknown. We are no experts.
What's so amazing about how LIGO affirmed the theory. Two stations far apart shooting a laser down a tunnel several miles long all done in the hope to catch a ripple in space-time. The lasers had to be so precise that if a vehicle 10 miles away started to approach, the project had to be postponed. The only hours to work during were at night. There had to be a constant monitoring of seismic activity, Earth's movements, weather patterns, and any nearby activity. This is just the start as these two methods can only detect the strongest of gravitational waves - those created by the merging of two black holes. To detect a ripple that is a thousands the size of a proton is extraordinary. We are literally witnessing a new age of astronomy unfold in our lifetime.
I am amazed that they can weed out all of the outside noise and variables. Seems like the hvac equipment or a fatass walking around would throw the whole thing off.
There's a tremendous New Yorker article about LIGO. I'm not sure the truck thing mentioned above is accurate now though. The New Yorker article talked about the mirrors being suspended with silica and that a project leader can start his Harley directly outside the control room and the vibrations are calibrated that workers inside can't even detect them. The first real grav waves they detected, they had to check that they weren't influenced by thunderstorms in...Africa. They also talked about a team whose sole job was to potentially insert fake gravitational waves into the process. They did it years ago and the scientists got all the way towards publication before they were informed the waves were fake and planted by the team. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/eleme...exist-heres-how-scientists-finally-found-them
Free, awesome 'retro' NASA space posters. I have a large format printer and will def be printing some of these out. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/
First map of Mars has been produced https://www.flickr.com/photos/osmapping/25012985956/in/photostream/ Spoiler Britain mapping agency creates map of Mars Emilee SpeckContact Reporter For the first time Britain’s major mapping agency has created a map truly out of this world, because it's of Mars. For those of us who still keep a Rand McNally Road Atlas in their cars the idea is similar. Britain’s Ordnance Survey wanted to create the first map to be used by future inhabitants of Mars. The mapping agency used NASA open data to make a 1:4,000,000 scale, 2,281X1690 mile (3672x2721 km) map of the Martian surface. “The private sector and space agencies are currently in competition to land the first person on Mars,” said Ordnance Survey Director of Products David Henderson. “Becoming more familiar with space is something that interests us all and the opportunity to apply our innovative cartography and mapping tradecraft to a different planet was something we couldn’t resist." The map’s designer Chris Wesson said the game plan was to treat Mars no different to how they would map "any other Earth-based geographic information or landscape.” Wasson’s goal proved to be a challenge because of the lack of sea level and the difference in topography. “The surface is very bumpy but at such a large scale I had vast expanses of land that appeared flat relative to the craters each of several thousands of meters depth,” said Wesson on the Ordnance Survey blog. “Even though the principles are the same, the design and the aesthetics of an Earth map differ considerably.” Styled with a soft color palette the map features grid lines and a legend similar to Earth maps, but none of the colors of the actual Red Planet. Wasson choose lighter shades to incorporate the British mapping agency signature style and for easier viewing. “Red is also a very dominant color that is not very supporting of thematic overlays such as landing sites or place names,” explained Wasson. Just like maps of Earth, the Martian map will be updated with new information. Ordnance Survey and the UK paper The Times are currently hosting a competition seeking designs for a landing site symbol for the map. The icon will represent landing sites of previous missions and any future landing sites, according to the mapping agency. The winner will receive a large framed map of Mars with their winning design. Learn how to submit an illustration and make your mark on Mars at www.thetimes.co.uk. A digital version of the map is on Flickr, but Ordnance Survey does not have plans to sell the paper map yet.
Only 2 1/2 more years. Been waiting so long. Building James Webb: the biggest, boldest, riskiest space telescope http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/building-james-webb-biggest-boldest-riskiest-space-telescope Spoiler Video of Webb telescope unfolds Share Building James Webb: the biggest, boldest, riskiest space telescope By Daniel CleryFeb. 18, 2016 , 11:00 AM GREENBELT, MARYLAND—For months, inside the towering Building 29 here at Goddard Space Flight Center, the four scientific instruments at the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb) have been sealed in what looks like a house-sized pressure cooker. A rhythmic chirp-chirp-chirp sounds as vacuum pumps keep the interior at a spacelike ten-billionth of an atmosphere while helium cools it to –250°C. Inside, the instruments, bolted to the framework that will hold them in space, are bathed in infrared light—focused and diffuse, in laserlike needles and uniform beams—to test their response. The pressure cooker is an apt metaphor for the whole project. Webb is the biggest, most complex, and most expensive science mission that NASA has ever attempted, and expectations among astronomers and the public are huge. Webb will have 100 times the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be able to look into the universe’s infancy, when the very first galaxies were forming; study the birth of stars and their planetary systems; and analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps even detecting signs of life. “If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., and former JWST telescope scientist. Like that of Hubble, however, Webb’s construction has been plagued by redesigns, schedule slips, and cost overruns that have strained relationships with contractors, partners in Canada and Europe, and—most crucially—supporters in the U.S. Congress. Other missions had to be slowed or put on ice as Webb consumed available resources. A crisis in 2010 and 2011 almost saw it canceled, although lately the project has largely kept within its schedule and budget, now about $8 billion. But plenty could go wrong between now and the moment in late 2018 when the telescope begins sending back data from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. It faces the stresses of launch, the intricate unfurling of its mirror and sunshield after it emerges from its chrysalis-like launch fairing, and the possibility of failure in its many cutting-edge technologies. Unlike Hubble, saved by a space shuttle mission that repaired its faulty optics, it is too far from Earth to fix. And not just the future of space-based astronomy, but also NASA’s ability to build complex science missions, depends on its success. That’s why those instruments sat in Goddard’s pressure cooker for what is known as cryo-vacuum test 3 (CV3). And it is why Webb’s other components—including the mirror and telescope structure, the “bus” that will supply power and control the telescope, and the tennis court–sized, multilayer parasol that will help keep it cool—must undergo a gauntlet of testing, alone and in combinations, until the whole spacecraft is ready. For those on the inside, the strain will only increase as assembly continues, the tests get bigger and more comprehensive, and the spacecraft is launched into space. Only when Webb opens its eye and successfully focuses on its first star will the strain be released. In the mid-1990s, after Hubble had had its optics corrected and was busy revolutionizing astronomy, researchers began planning its successor. The catch phrase in NASA at the time, championed by agency chief Daniel Goldin, was “faster, better, cheaper.” Goldin challenged NASA engineers and the astronomical community to come up with a follow-on that was cheaper than Hubble but bigger, with a mirror 8 meters across. He received a standing ovation when he described the plans to the American Astronomical Society in 1996. Whereas Hubble covered the whole range of visible light, plus a smidgen of ultraviolet and infrared, the Next Generation Space Telescope (as it was then known) would be a dedicated infrared observatory. If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful. Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, and former JWST telescope scientist For astronomers, the infrared spectrum was a beckoning frontier. Visible light from the most distant objects in the universe, the very first stars and galaxies that formed after the big bang, gets stretched so much by the expansion of the universe that it ends up in the infrared range by the time it reaches us. Many chemical signatures in exoplanet atmospheres also show themselves in the infrared region. Yet Earth’s atmosphere blocks most infrared. Webb will give us “the first high-definition view of the midinfrared universe,” says Matt Greenhouse, JWST project scientist for the instrument payload at Goddard. To capture that light, however, NASA engineers had to overcome huge challenges. The first was heat: To keep the infrared glow of the telescope itself from swamping faint astronomical signals, Webb would need to operate at about –233°C, 40° above absolute zero (40 K). That would require entirely new instrument designs. Size and weight constraints posed additional hurdles: An 8-meter mirror would never fit inside a rocket fairing, so it would have to fold up for launch. The sunshield, too, would have to be collapsible and made of a superthin, lightweight membrane. And the telescope structure would have to be absolutely rigid but lightweight enough to limit the weight of the whole orbiting observatory to no more than 6 tonnes, just a few percent of the weight of a similar-size ground-based telescope. “We knew we would have to invent 10 new technologies” to make the telescope work, says NASA’s JWST Program Director Eric Smith, in Washington, D.C. Open the full graphic to see how the telescope was put together and how it will unfold in space. Take the mirror. Hubble’s was made from a single slab of glass, but Webb’s folding mirror would need to be segmented, made up of separate hexagonal pieces—a design used in many top ground-based instruments, including the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The segments would have to be minutely controlled to meld them into a single optical surface, with their reflected light completely in step—a process known as phasing. In Webb, each hexagonal segment will sit on six actuators that control its orientation, plus one in the center to adjust its curvature. Open to see how Webb deploys in space Choosing the mirror material itself was a challenge, because it would have to stand up to a grueling ordeal. Because any material will change shape as it cools, each segment would have to be ground to a shape that is optically wrong at room temperature but warps into one that is correct—to within nanometers—at 40 K. To do that, the mirrormakers planned to combine sophisticated computer modeling with a laborious, iterative process of grinding, cooling, measuring, warming, regrinding, cooling again, and so on. After testing both glass and the metal beryllium, Webb planners chose beryllium because it is strong and light, and it behaves more predictably during repeated cooling and warming cycles. The final design for Webb fell short of NASA’s original ambitions. Beginning in 2001, concerns about the swelling cost of the telescope forced NASA to shrink the mirror from 8 meters to 6.5 meters, reducing the number of mirror segments from 36 to 18 and its light-collecting area from 50 square meters to 25. But review panels decided that Webb could still achieve its scientific goals. To cut costs further, NASA decided to use less precise mirrors that could be manufactured with many fewer cooling-warming-grinding steps. The change would make Webb less sharp at near-infrared wavelengths between 1 and 2 micrometers—no great loss, as ground-based telescopes already cover that part of the spectrum. By 2006, all of Webb’s key technologies had been tested and proven viable. The final design was drawn up, and construction of components got underway. Meanwhile, NASA engineers began dreaming up the byzantine series of tests each separate component would have to pass—and the additional tests to be done as components were combined to form larger elements of the spacecraft. “As soon as we put two or three parts together, we test them,” says Scott Willoughby, who is in charge of the Webb effort at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California. To put Webb’s enormous mirror through its paces, engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, completely refitted Chamber A, a huge cryo-vacuum chamber built to test the crew-carrying spacecraft of the Apollo program. For the instruments, they devised the peculiar tortures at Goddard. The flight models of the instruments began arriving in 2012: four infrared imagers and spectrographs built by collaborators including the European Space Agency, a NASA/European consortium, the University of Arizona, and the Canadian Space Agency. Once the instruments were secured on their rigid framework, they were vigorously shaken to simulate the stresses of launch, as well as blasted with 150 decibels by loudspeaker horns as tall as a person. Next came the first cryo-vacuum test to simulate space conditions. The telescope's main mirror with all 18 segments installed but protective covers still in place. NASA/Chris Gunn Problems emerged almost immediately. The heating and cooling caused the delicate multilayer semiconductor sandwiches that make up the infrared detectors to swell and crack. Another critical technology, the microshutter array in the near-infrared spectrograph, also succumbed. This is a device the size of four postage stamps with a grid of 250,000 tiny flaps that can be opened selectively so that the instrument can take separate spectra from, say, 100 galaxies in a single field of view—the first such multiobject spectrograph to fly in space. But the deafening noise of the acoustic chamber caused many of the flaps to jam. Instrument teams and manufacturers scrambled to identify the problems and produce new parts. Meanwhile, testing went on. All the replacements came together in time for the recent CV3 test, and as the test ended in late January the signs were encouraging that the fixes had worked. “We’re quite pleased with the performance,” says astronomer Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in Tucson, principal investigator for the near-infrared camera. “We’re very close to ready for launch.” While the instruments underwent their ordeal, white-clad engineers in a nearby clean room were painstakingly fitting the mirror segments onto their support, known as the backplane. Hollowed out on the back to reduce weight, each 1.3-meter-wide segment can be carried by a single person, and each has a particular destination on the backplane, depending on its precise optical qualities. Now that the instruments have been tested and the mirror assembled, these two elements will be mated in March. Then the combined telescope and instrument package, collectively known as OTIS, will endure the shaker tables and acoustic chamber before being inserted into a specially built shipping container. In the dead of night, a truck will carry the container at just 8 kilometers per hour from Goddard to Joint Base Andrews, where it will be placed into a huge C-5 Galaxy transport plane, with just centimeters of clearance, for its flight to Houston. Webb’s mirror backplane is made from a graphite composite that is lightweight and rigid, retaining its shape down to cryogenic temperatures. NASA/Chris Gunn The few months OTIS spends in Chamber A early next year will be the most critical it will face. Light sources on the ceiling will create an artificial universe, allowing NASA engineers to run light all the way through the system from main mirror to detectors for the first and only time in spacelike conditions. They will practice phasing up the mirror and will check out all observing modes of the four instruments. “Hubble didn’t do an end-to-end optical test. We’re not skipping that on this program,” Greenhouse says. Then it’s back into the shipping container and another C-5 flight to Redondo Beach, where Northrop Grumman has been building the bus and sunshield. There the full observatory will take shape as the telescope and instruments are mated to these last two elements. Now too large to fit inside a plane, Webb will make its final prelaunch journey by ship, down the California coast and through the Panama Canal to French Guiana—home of Europe’s spaceport, and a waiting Ariane 5 launcher, part of Europe’s contribution to the project. In October 2018, the Ariane will fling Webb toward L2, a gravitational balance point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, directly away from the sun. The journey will take 29 days. Webb will begin unfolding and deploying components almost as soon as it hits space. Deployment will be “3 weeks of terror,” Mountain says. “No one has done this before, ever.” First to deploy will be solar arrays and antennas to provide power and communications with Earth; then the sunshield will unfurl to begin cooling the telescope and instruments; finally, the secondary mirror will swing into position and the main mirror wings will snap into place. Once the mechanical gymnastics routine is finished, there will come the heart-stopping moment when the mirror first looks at the sky. Then the mirror has to be phased up, and the instruments cooled and all their modes tested. Commissioning is expected to take a full 6 months after launch. “A whole chain of things have to be done to get that really good-looking star,” says Lee Feinberg, JWST telescope manager at Goddard. “But then we can really rest.” Until then, the pressure will be unrelenting. But the builders of Webb say they do find time to reflect on what they are doing. Pierre Ferruit, JWST project scientist at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, recalls watching from the control room at Goddard during CV3 as technicians carried mirror segments into the clean room and fitted them to the backplane. “Even for someone working on the mission, it’s quite incredible,” he says. Rieke had the same sensation: “It’s just enchanting to be witnessing history.” Open to see how Webb deploys in space Posted in: Space Technology DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4080
Pluto’s moon Charon may have hosted a vast ocean By Sid PerkinsFeb. 19, 2016 , 1:45 PM A newly released image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, reveals a heavily fractured surface that may have formed when a subsurface ocean froze and expanded to split an exterior shell of ice. High-resolution images show that much of the moon’s northern hemisphere is cracked, nowhere more dramatically than in an equator-straddling series of chasms that includes Serenity Chasma (shown in the 175-km-by-386-km close-up seen at right above, and color coded for elevation at bottom right). Altogether, the low-latitude system of cracks and valleys is the longest known anywhere in our solar system (about four times the length and in some places almost five times the depth of Earth’s Grand Canyon), the researchers report. Because Charon’s modern-day surface is mostly water ice, it makes sense that the 1212-km-diameter moon once had a subsurface ocean kept liquid by heat from the radioactive decay of elements in its core, as well as by the heat generated from collisions of smaller bits when the moon first accumulated. Later, surface waters exposed to space were the first to freeze. As the moon aged its icy shell got thicker. Eventually, possibly a few hundred million years after the moon formed, the deepest parts of the ocean froze, swelling to crack surface ice—which may have been 10 km thick or more—just as ice cubes in a freezer often do. The image released yesterday, obtained just 100 minutes before the New Horizons craft swooped past Charon last 14 July, was taken from a range of about 78,700 km.
I can't imagine the feeling the people that worked on this will feel when this thing is going through all those motions. It has the potential to unlock so questions about the universe.
Daily news 18 February 2016 Four big cosmology secrets gravitational waves could uncover A new window on the universe Julian Stratenschulte/DPA/Corbis On 11 February, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave observatory, or LIGO, announced it had spotted gravitational waves, the stretching and squeezing of space-time created by the movement of massive objects. The announcement caused a sensation among physicists and astronomers across the world, and they are now gearing up to exploit this new window on the universe. This particular signal, picked up by LIGO’s two observatories on 14 September 2015, was made by two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, colliding with each other. This immediately resolved one open question for astronomers: before the signal came in, the very existence of such black hole binaries was contested. Further observations could tell us more about exotic objects like neutron stars and supernovas. But that’s just the beginning. Gravitational waves will allow us to explore fundamental physics and possibly even peer back to the universe’s earliest moments. Here are four mysteries of cosmology that may finally be solved in the era of gravitational wave astronomy. 1. Dark energy Put several detections together and we should gain insights into the history and composition of the universe as a whole, says Avi Loeb of Harvard University. Combining the signals from a number of black hole mergers, for example, could help understand the nature of dark energy, which is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate. From the “shape” of the signal – how the waves’ frequency and amplitude rise and fall – we can discern the sizes of the black holes involved, and determine how strong the event was at its source. Comparing how powerful it really was to the faint vibrations LIGO detected tells us how far away it occurred. Combined with observations from standard telescopes, this can reveal how space has expanded during the time the waves took to reach us, providing a measure of dark energy’s effect on space. This measure should be stronger and more reliable than anything we have used so far. Spotting just a few black hole mergers would change everything, Loeb says. “If you have tens of them, it will be a new branch in cosmology.” 2. Equivalence principle Other researchers are hoping to use gravitational wave signals to put Einstein’s general theory of relativity through even more stringent tests. One way is to investigate the equivalence principle, an assumption that gravity affects all masses in the same way. “In the age of GPS and space travel, where even minute deviations from the assumed theory of gravity would have major consequences, it is of enormous importance,” says XueFeng Wu of Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China. Erminia Calabrese, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, sees gravitational waves as a way to check whether gravity behaves as relativity predicts it should over large distances. “If their strength fell off with distance in a surprising way, we could detect this with the upcoming LIGO data,” she says. 3. Cosmic inflation LIGO’s success could see more gravitational wave detectors being built around the world. More sensitive detectors, working at shorter wavelengths than LIGO, may allow us to sense primordial gravitational waves from the very young universe. These waves should have been produced in the period of inflation – the tremendous cosmic growth spurt in the first instants after the big bang. Unlike photons and other electromagnetic radiation, they would have travelled freely through the newborn universe. At the moment we can only see as far back as 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe became transparent to light. “We can potentially see almost all the way to the big bang,” says Dejan Stojkovic of the State University of New York in Buffalo. LIGO itself won’t be able to sense such vibrations, but the detector’s success raises hopes that future experiments will get off the ground. “Now that we know gravitational waves exist, it will be much easier to convince people to invest money and make all kinds of gravitational wave detectors,” Stojkovic says. 4. Grand unified theory Gravitational waves may even point the way toward a grand unified theory of the universe. Models predict that at some point in the universe’s history, all four fundamental forces were united into a single force. As the universe expanded and cooled, the forces split off from one another in a series of as yet poorly understood events. “Gravitational wave observatories that can detect much shorter wavelengths could probe those,” Stojkovic says. LIGO team member Daniel Holz at the University of Chicago thinks this is just the beginning. “Every time we’ve opened a window to the universe, we’ve found all sorts of unexpected things,” Holz says. “I’d be surprised if I wasn’t surprised.”
SpaceX is going to try another droneship landing tomorrow night. They're saying they don't expect it to be successful.
An artist's conception of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab NASA moves ahead with its next space telescope By Daniel CleryFeb. 19, 2016 , 10:15 AM With NASA’s huge James Webb Space Telescope coming together and due for launch in 2018, the agency has announced its next major astrophysics project: another telescope known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). With a field of view more like a searchlight compared with Webb’s laser beam, WFIRST will aim to better understand the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy that is speeding the expansion of the universe. In addition, it will be equipped to directly image planets around other stars. “This mission uniquely combines the ability to discover and characterize planets beyond our own solar system with the sensitivity and optics to look wide and deep into the universe in a quest to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter,” John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a 17 February statement. WFIRST was identified by astronomers at the top priority space mission in the 2010 decadal survey compiled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. But its development has been in a state of suspended animation for several years because of cost overruns on Webb. The delay had an upside, however: In 2012 the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA a pair of unwanted 2.4-meter mirrors designed for spy satellites. These were larger than what was planned for WFIRST, but design studies showed that, without the cost of grinding new mirrors, the spacecraft could be enlarged to accommodate one of them at no extra cost. The new mirror also added extra capabilities: The mission had originally been planned as a dark energy mission, but the new optics would allow direct imaging of exoplanets with the addition of a coronagraph—a mask to block out the light from a star so that planets around it can be seen more easily. In addition to exoplanets studies, WFIRST’s wide field of view—100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope—will allow it to measure the shapes, positions, and distances of millions of galaxies so as to understand the dark matter that facilitated their creation and how dark energy has affected cosmic expansion. Not long ago, NASA officials had not expected to get WFIRST rolling until next year at the earliest. But lawmakers in Congress had pushed for a faster pace, adding money to NASA’s budget in recent years for planning and design. This past December, Congress approved a 2016 spending plan that included $90 million for work on WFIRST, along with orders to officially move the project forward early in 2016. NASA’s Program Management Council took that step on 17 February, with a view to launching the instrument in the mid-2020s. The next steps will be to come up with a formal schedule and cost estimate for WFIRST, which is expected to cost more than $2 billion.
Video in link. http://www.space.com/32026-photon-propulsion-mars-three-days.html Powerful Laser Could Blast Spacecraft to Mars in 3 Days (Video) By Shannon Hall | February 23, 2016 04:32pm ET It sounds like science fiction, but it's eminently possible, researchers say: Robotic spacecraft could get to Mars after a journey of just three days. The key to making this happen is photon propulsion, which would use a powerful laser to accelerate spacecraft to relativistic speeds, said Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "There are recent advances which take this from science fiction to science reality," Lubin said at the 2015 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fall symposium last October. "There's no known reason why we cannot do this." [The Top 10 Star Trek Technologies] Lubin and his team were awarded one of 15 Phase 1 NIAC grants last year, which gave them about $100,000 to perform initial studies of their project, known as Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration (DEEP-IN). The list of 2015 Phase 1 NIAC awardees also includes a squidlike rover that could study the oceans of icy moons such as the Jovian satellite Europa, ball-like robots that could explore shadowed craters on Earth's moon and even a proposal to mine asteroids with the help of concentrated sunlight. The hope is that one or more of these technologies will have a huge impact on space science and exploration down the road. Lubin and his colleagues will use the funding to create a more complete road map for building a fully functioning spacecraft, complete with controllable photon thrusters. The money will also help the team design ultra-low-mass probes, which will be able to travel quickly. The team aims to eventually place a laser in Earth orbit, which would use photon pressure to power a sail-equipped spacecraft as it travels away from Earth. Photons have quite a bit of stored energy, which would transfer into a push once they hit the sail. This method could propel a 220-lb. (100 kilograms) robotic craft to Mars in just three days, Lubin said. A crewed vehicle would take a bit longer to get to the Red Planet — maybe a month or so, he said. Ultimately, Lubin would like to use the technology to send small probes into interstellar space. "Within about 25 light-years of the Earth, there are actually quite a few potential exoplanets and habitable things to visit," Lubin said at the NIAC symposium. "There are many targets to choose from." There are also many potential spin-off applications for the technology, Lubin said. For example, any laser powerful enough to drive a spacecraft over 25 percent of the speed of light is also powerful enough to defend the planet against asteroids. (For comparison, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is now traveling at 0.006 percent of the speed of light.) "Exploring the nearest stars and exoplanets would be a profound voyage for humanity, one whose nonscientific implications would be enormous," Lubin wrote in a recent paper on the topic. "It is time to begin this inevitable journey beyond our home."
Self-Driving cars. Detecting gravity waves. Dark matter. Photon engines. We're living in the fucking future.
How Friendly Is Enceladus' Ocean to Life? By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor | February 23, 2016 11:42am ET Plumes erupting off the surface of Enceladus, an icy moon. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI How acidic is the ocean on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus? It's a fundamental question to understanding if this geyser-spouting moon could support life. Enceladus is part of a family of icy worlds, including Europa (at Jupiter) and Titan (also at Saturn), populating our outer solar system. These bodies are some of the most promising places for life because they receive tidal energy from the gas giants they orbit and some contain liquid water. The Cassini spacecraft has been taking regular measurements of Enceladus for more than a decade to evaluate its environment. One of the key factors influencing the habitability of an environment is its chemical composition, in particular its pH. On Earth, it's possible for life to exist near the extremes of the pH scale that ranges from 0 (battery acid) to 14 (drain cleaner). Knowing the pH can help us to identify geochemical reactions that affect the habitability of an environment, because many reactions cause predictable changes in pH. [Photos: Enceladus, Saturn's Cold, Bright Moon] Oceanography of another world While we cannot stick a strip of pH paper into the ocean water on Enceladus to measure the pH directly, it can be estimated by looking at molecules in its plumes that change form in response to pH changes. Recently, geochemist Christopher Glein led a team that developed a new approach to estimating the pH of Enceladus' ocean using observational data of the carbonate geochemistry of plume material. This is a classic problem in geochemical studies of Earth (such as rainwater), but scientists can now solve the carbonate problem on an extraterrestrial body thanks to measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA), and carbon dioxide gas by the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) onboard Cassini. Glein's team tried to create the most comprehensive chemical model to date of the ocean by accounting for compositional constraints from both INMS and CDA, such as the salinity of the plume. Their model suggests that Enceladus has a sodium, chloride and carbonate ocean with an alkaline pH of 11 or 12, close to the equivalent of ammonia or soapy water. The estimated pH is slightly higher by 1 to 2 units than an earlier estimate based on CDA data alone, but the different modeling approaches are consistent in terms of the overall chemistry of an alkaline ocean. Serpentinization, which is believed to occur on Enceladus, may also happen on other moons such as Europa (pictured). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute "It's encouraging that there is general agreement, considering that these approaches are based on spacecraft data from a plume. This is much more difficult than getting the pH of a swimming pool, so it would not be surprising if the models are missing some of the details. Of course, we are trying to reconcile the data as much as possible because the details may provide clues to understanding the eruptive processes that turn an ocean's chemistry into a plume," said Glein. A paper based on Glein's research, "The pH of Enceladus' ocean," was published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta in August. Glein is a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute, but completed the research while at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The work was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute element of the Astrobiology Program at NASA. [Inside Enceladus, Icy Moon of Saturn (Infographic)] Hydrothermal activity for life A portion of the "Lost City" hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic Ocean, which may be most similar to what is happening on Enceladus. Credit: NASA It is believed that Enceladus' alkaline chemistry comes from a geochemical process called serpentinization. This happens when a rock that is rich in magnesium and iron is converted to more clay-type minerals. On Earth, we see this process in very limited locations, such as the low-temperature hydrothermal vent field named Lost City in the Atlantic Ocean. "It's exactly what we would expect if there is a liquid water ocean in contact with rocks on and below the ocean floor on Enceladus," Glein said. In addition to a high pH, this process produces hydrogen gas, a potent fuel that can drive the formation of organic molecules that in some cases can be building blocks of life. An unresolved question, however, is whether serpentinization is taking place now. If the activity is ongoing, this would provide habitable conditions, which could support an ecosystem similar to Lost City. If it occurred long ago, the high pH may be a relict and life may be less likely, although still not impossible if there are other sources of chemical energy. Cassini did a final flyby of Enceladus in late October that targeted the chemistry of the plumes directly. The INMS team, which includes Glein, is searching for molecular hydrogen in that plume, which would be chemical evidence of active serpentinization. An absence of molecular hydrogen would be a sign that the serpentinization is extinct. The data analysis from this flyby may be completed in time for the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in December. Glein added that the planned NASA mission to Europa includes advanced descendants of both the CDA and INMS instruments, meaning that in a decade or two, scientists can start to make these same measurements at Europa. This will allow us to better understand the importance of serpentinization across the Solar System. "On other icy worlds, if they have liquid water oceans, [serpentinization] should be inevitable because these bodies are massive mixtures of water and rock," he said. "Maybe the methane we see in Titan's atmosphere formed when hydrogen from serpentinization combined with deep carbon in a hydrothermal environment. There may also be liquid water on [dwarf planet] Pluto, through cryovolcanoes and a youthful surface. We expect there to be some degree of water-rock interaction on such ocean worlds, setting the stage for serpentinization and the generation of hydrogen that could be utilized if there is anyone out there."
This is the stuff that fascinates me. I started the Nautilus thread a while back, where you can watch and listen to a crew as they explore the ocean floor and various types of vents and structures. The life that teems from the vents, even down to the smallest, tiniest microorganisms is riveting to think about. Life finds a way in all environments.
So sounds like you could use this to propel a car sized ship on a round trip to Mars in like 2 weeks? Nice little vaca
Yeah, but they don't mention how big the laser would have to be. And you would have to have one on both ends to get you going. It's not something that will happen anytime soon.
Fucking amazing they can use the Cassini probe to calculate the orbits of the planets. Daily news 24 February 2016 Planet Nine hunters enlist big bang telescopes and Saturn probe Are you out there? Caltech The fate of an entire world is at stake. Astronomers are enlisting every telescope and space probe they can think of in the hunt for the solar system’s potential ninth planet, and some unlikely sources may be key to tracking it down. Last month, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena announced they had found indirect evidence for “Planet Nine“. Following up on previous hints, they analysed the wonky orbits of small bodies beyond Neptune and determined they may have been caused by a planet 10 times the mass of Earth, with an orbital axis 700 times longer than the distance from Earth to the sun. Now the race is on to spot the planet directly. We can’t just point the Hubble Space Telescope out into the void and track it down – the planet’s potential orbit is so large that we don’t know where to look, so a thorough search would waste Hubble’s precious time. Not only that, but Planet Nine’s suggested location is so far from the sun that it would barely reflect enough light for us to see. So astronomers are getting crafty. Instead of visible light, they are looking for other unlikely signals that could help narrow the search. Nicolas Cowan of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues have calculated that it should emit its own kind of signal we can pick up – radio waves. The proposed planet is large enough to have retained a small amount of heat from its formation. Using Uranus and Neptune as a model, the team calculated this would be just tens of degrees above absolute zero – which means it would faintly radiate millimetre-length radio waves. Motion sensing It just so happens we have a bunch of telescopes searching the skies at these wavelengths, though planet-hunting astronomers don’t normally use them. Instead, they are used to look for the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the remnant of the first light left over from the big bang, which is at the same wavelength. Cosmologists use telescopes like BICEP2 and Planck to map this radiation and learn more about the universe. They don’t normally concern themselves with mere planets. “Cosmologists never look for moving targets,” says Cowan. But his cosmologist colleague Gil Holder, who works in a neighbouring office, heard the news of Planet Nine last month, and asked Cowan whether it would show up in CMB telescopes. “Apparently Neptune is so bright that they use it as a calibration source,” says Cowan. Seeing a single bright spot at these wavelengths isn’t enough to detect a planet, as it could just be part of the background radiation. But a planet’s motion should help it stand out from the background. Working with Nathan Kaib of the University of Oklahoma, the team calculated that Planet Nine’s speed across the sky should be distinct from the thousands of asteroids that are similarly bright, making it easy to spot with just a few months’ observations. Many CMB telescopes are sited at the south pole with a narrow field of view. This is ideal for cosmology but not so good for planet hunting – they might not be pointing in the direction of Planet Nine. Future telescopes will look over wider patches of the sky, upping the chances of catching the planet. But it is possible current observations could hit the jackpot. “There is an outside chance that Planet Nine is already in someone’s CMB experiment,” says Cowan. Saturnian searches But these big bang telescopes aren’t our only option for finding Planet Nine. Agnès Fienga of the Nice Observatory in France and her colleagues have been using data from NASA’s Cassini probe, which has been exploring Saturn and its moons for the past 10 years, to pinpoint the planet’s potential location. Astronomers have used radio-ranging data from the probe to make a model of the motion of all the large bodies in the solar system. Fienga’s team tried adding Planet Nine into the mix and found they could rule out the planet’s existence in around half of its potential orbit, as its tug from these locations would have shown up in the Cassini data. The probe’s mission is due to end in 2017, but the team estimate that extending its life to 2020 would narrow the search even further. “It could help extend the forbidden zone,” says Fienga. Data from NASA’s New Horizons probe, which flew by Pluto last year, and Juno, due to arrive at Jupiter this July, could also rule out other parts of the orbit, she says. “These are very clever ideas,” says Batygin. “It is wonderful to see that members of the community are presenting their own proposals on how to best optimise the observational search for Planet Nine. This is exactly what Mike and I hoped for.” Cowan thinks the hunt for Planet Nine has fired astronomers’ imaginations, and by combining methods we should soon have a definitive discovery, or another explanation that rules out the planet. “I don’t think it will be very long, I’d say it’ll be two or three years,” he says. So if Planet Nine does exists, what should we call it? Some, including Cowan, have already suggested “Bowie”, after rock star David Bowie who died shortly before Batygin and Brown’s paper was published. But the International Astronomical Union, which governs the naming of the cosmos, has strict rules on naming and prefers to reference ancient myths rather than modern celebrities, so it remains to be seen whether Bowie will be allowed. “I guess you could argue that maybe he is a mythological creature,” says Cowan.
That's a sweet article. Need a video montage of all the space geeks around the world crunching numbers and brainstorming as to how to detect it. Set to the karate kid theme.
How about a gravity-powered perpetual-motion space trip between Earth and Mars? It's feasible. THE MARTIAN EXPRESS ARTICLE #319 • WRITTEN BY ALAN BELLOWS On the 5th of February 1974, NASA’s plucky Mariner 10 space probe zipped past the planet Venus at over 18,000 miles per hour. Mission scientists took advantage of the opportunity to snap some revealing photos of our sister planet, but the primary purpose of the Venus flyby was to accelerate the probe towards the enigmatic Mercury, a body which had yet to be visited by any Earthly device. The event constituted the first ever gravitational slingshot, successfully sending Mariner 10 to grope the surface of Mercury using its array of sensitive instruments. This validation of the gravity-assist technique put the entire solar system within the practical reach of humanity’s probes, and it was used with spectacular success a few years later as Voyagers 1 and 2 toured the outer planets at a brisk 34,000 miles per hour. One of the more intriguing theories to fall out of the early gravity-assist research was a hypothetical spacecraft called the Cycler, a vehicle which could utilize gravity to cycle between two bodies indefinitely— Earth and Mars, for instance— with little or no fuel consumption. Even before the complex orbital mathematics were within the grasp of science, tinkerers speculated that a small fleet of Cyclers might one day provide regular bus service to Mars, toting men and equipment to and from the Red Planet every few months. Though this interplanetary ferry may sound a bit like perpetual-motion poppycock, one of the concept’s chief designers and proponents is a man who is intimately familiar with aggressive-yet-successful outer-space endeavors: scientist/astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin. The year was 1985: David Hasselhoff was fighting crime in a sass-talking Trans Am, Mr Mister’s Broken Wingswere learning to fly again, and Buzz “Dr Rendezvous” Aldrin was unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. The first primitive Cycler orbits had been discovered sixteen years earlier, but these curiosities depended upon irregular planetary encounters, and they had round-trips on the order of a decade. In 1985, however, Dr Aldrin reasoned that there must be trajectories which swing by Earth and Mars every twenty-six months or so. This interval corresponds to the Earth-Mars synodic period, the time required for Earth’s orbit to overtake Mars around the sun. Guided by Aldrin’s advice, physicists sprang into action with renewed vigor and fistfuls of formulas. As predicted, such an orbit was indeed discovered, and it was promptly christened the Aldrin Cycler. The value of a perpetually repeating trajectory was immediately evident to NASA’s engineers. Rocket scientists must contend with an immense expense when hefting material into low-Earth orbit— roughly $20 million per metric ton. Even a simple brain surgeon can grasp that a Cycler would allow mission planners to shed much of the rocket’s fuel flab. In 1999, for example, NASA estimated that a rocket-powered manned mission to Mars would require 437 metric tons of stuff to be lifted into space. This equates to $8.74 billion to orbit the materials for one round trip to our rusty neighbor. Over half of that weight— 250 tons— is propellant for the Mars transfer. In contrast, a Cycler adheres to a philosophy of practical re-use rather than littering the cosmos with discarded multi-billion-dollar vehicles. Although Dr Aldrin’s massive vehicle would need an initial thrust to insert it into the sweet spot, only occasional coaxing would be necessary to maintain the rhythmic encounters. If a network of shiny new Cyclers were to be established, each one might spend its first few years making automated supply runs to the Red Planet. This approach would help to shake any lingering bugs from the system, while ensuring that the anticipated human visitors would be properly equipped upon their arrival. It would also afford mission planners the opportunity to deploy a fuel manufacturing unit on Mars to slowly convert some of the planet’s plentiful carbon dioxide into oxygen/methane rocket fuel. Once the Martian supply depot is fully stocked, the first human passengers would clamber aboard a small, fuel-efficient rocket ship and intercept Cycler Alpha during one of its regular Earth flybys. Onboard the space-station-like Cycler, the travelers would spend the five-month trip to Mars in relative comfort, protected from most of the gamma-rays, high-energy protons, and cosmic rays which pepper the vehicle’s exterior. The hull’s gentle spin would also produce some centrifugal gravity to counteract the health effects of weightlessness, though this incessant spinning may cause occasional disorientation, nausea, and troublesome low-gravity “protein spills.” When Mars looms large in the viewport, the crew would then disembark using the “taxi” which brought them to the Cycler from Earth. Meanwhile the Cycler would pilfer some momentum from Mars to increase its own speed; this results in a negligible loss to the planet’s orbital velocity, but a substantial gain for the spacecraft. Fortunately this exchange is in accordance with the law of conservation of momentum, therefore Sir Isaac Newton’s body can remain at rest. After releasing the taxi and passing the planet, the unattended Cycler would start its lonely twenty-one-month trip back to Earth. Upon their arrival on the Martian surface, the intrepid explorers would no doubt utter their pre-prepared profundities, erect a flag or two, and photograph their footprints. In the ensuing weeks, the pre-delivered cache of food, water, habitats, and equipment will support the astronauts as they conduct the earnest business of astronauting. Several months later, when the time comes to depart, the travelers will refuel their short-sprint space taxi and blast back into orbit to dock with the passing Cycler Omega. This sister Cycler shares the same trajectory shape as Alpha, but with a complimentary route that puts the journey from Mars to Earth on the short leg of the orbit. Within five months of leaving Mars, the members of the first manned-and-womanned Mars mission would return home to a tempest of ticker tape and talk shows. Cycler Omega, in the meantime, would be en route to another Martian rendezvous. As grand and simple as it all may seem, the Aldrin Cycler concept is not devoid of drawbacks. The Cyclers’ construction would certainly require more upfront money and resources than classic point-and-shoot rocketry technology; however the reusable Cycler would ensure that the second Mars journey is much more economical, as well as any subsequent manned or unmanned missions. Another concern is that the departure and arrival times would be governed by the iron fist of Newtonian mechanics, offering no arrival/departure flexibility, and very little margin for error. An additional inconvenience is the flyby speed: as designed, the Cyclers would swing by Earth at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, and fly past Mars at 22,000 mph. In order to intercept such speedy Cyclers, the rocket-taxis would need to be capable of splitting a lot of lickety. Rocket fuel tanks such as the Space Shuttle's rust-colored external tank could be carried into orbit rather than jettisoned, and used as building blocks for the Cyclers. To address such concerns, the incorrigible Dr Aldrin is perfecting plans for a new hybrid vehicle which mates the charm of a Cycler with the convenience of a rocket. With this revised design, the outbound journey to Mars would still be handled by an Aldrin-brand Cycler, but the return leg would be served by aSemi-Cycler capable of parking in a low-velocity orbit around Mars. This craft would be much much easier to intercept, however a brief engine burn would be required to break from Mars orbit. Additionally, its lower cruising speed would prolong the trip home by approximately three months. On the Earth end of the trajectory, the Semi-Cycler would perform a normal slingshot to make its way back to Mars. Although this method has greater propellant demands than a straightforward Cycler, it is still quite frugal in contrast to regular rocketry. Research continues. Ultimately the Cycler’s greatest calling is not to serve as a low-cost transportation service, but as a stepping stone towards a true space-faring future. It was the establishment of railroads which finally opened up the western frontier of the United States, and so could the Earth-Mars Cycler help to tame the wilderness of space. An interplanetary transit system would encourage a spirit of long-term commitment rather than the myopic “footprints and flagpoles” mindset that undermined the Apollo moon missions. Certain astronomical sticks-in-the-mud will argue that space exploration should be relegated to the robots, and insist that rovers can make the same discoveries as humans at a lower cost and lesser risk. For many of us, however, it is better to inhabit the universe than to observe it from afar; and if there are indeed more giant leaps in store for mankind, then Dr Aldrin’s revolutionary spaceship may just be the most practical way to make them.