i understood it to be a regional/continent wide type event not necessarily a worldwide extinction event
Love the Space Time talks but can't stand that guy and the way he talks. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but it's just annoying
Was it stars or galaxies? I remember it being galaxies. Seems silly to argue stars. Theres 100 octillion stars in the known universe.
Tilt-shift version of the Falcon 9 barge landing. Looks tiny! https://gfycat.com/UntriedExcitableDartfrog
Astronomers just spotted a giant galaxy orbiting our own Ali Sundermier 11h 8,413 5 FACEBOOK LINKEDIN TWITTER EMAIL A new type of galaxy is so big it baffles astronomers Our Galactic Neighbor Is Up To 40,000 Light-Years Closer To Us Than We Thought Astronomers discovered a new object in space that is the most compelling evidence yet for Planet 9 The astronomers who discovered it call it the “feeble giant.” By studying a collection of images taken by the Very Large Telescope (VST) in Chile, astronomers at Cambridge University recently detected the giant, a wallflower galaxy known as Crater 2 that's quietly lurking at the edge of our own. Crater 2 is a dwarf galaxy, a type of small galaxy containing only a few billion stars (compared to the Milky Way's hundred billion). It orbits around our galaxy like the moon orbits around the Earth and is located 390,000 light years from our solar system. It's a sixth of the size of the Milky Way, a hefty size for a dwarf galaxy, making it our fourth largest satellite galaxy. If we could see it with our naked eyes, reports theNew Scientist, it would look twice as big as the full moon. But we can’t see it with our naked eyes. Despite its size, Crater 2 has a very low luminosity, which translates to the amount of stars per area of the sky. It’s 100,000 times less bright than the Milky Way and 1,000 to 10,000 times less bright than the other three largest satellite galaxies. It’s so faint that it has managed to stay entirely off our radar. Until now. By looking at accumulations of stars over parts of the sky, these astronomers, including Gabriel Torrealba, have finally pulled Crater 2 into the spotlight. Aside from its large size and low luminosity, Crater 2 is also unique because of its shape, the researchers found. Unlike other satellite galaxies that are warped by the gravitational forces of the larger galaxies they orbit, Crater 2 is super round. Because it is unchanged by interactions with the Milky Way, the researchers think Crater 2 was formed at its current size. Galaxies eating galaxies Dave Young/ FlickrThere are about 40 satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. In some sense, Crater 2 is a part of our own galaxy, Torrealba told Business Insider. Galaxies like the Milky Way are galactic cannibals of sorts, formed when smaller galaxies merge. The galaxies that survive this process become satellites, orbiting around the larger galaxy. We've already detected about 40 satellite galaxies in the Milky Way. Simulations have shown that there's more to this seemingly cannibalistic merging process than meets the eye, however. There's some evidence to suggest, for example, that instead of being swallowed up one by one, smaller galaxies may merge in groups. Because it's part of another group of dwarf galaxies that may be falling into our own, Crater 2 may add more evidence to this idea. What’s next ESO/Y/BeletskyThe Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile is used to survey the sky and create catalogues of stars. The next step, Torrealba said, is to find more galaxies like Crater 2. Astronomers believe that we should see many more, possibly even dimmer than this one. By spotting them in future surveys, there are two main questions that they hope to answer: 1. What’s the limit on how big galaxies can be formed? 2. What’s the limit on how few stars they could have? Studying satellite galaxies like Crater 2, Torrealba said, will help us understand how galaxies form, which is a key component of the bigger puzzle of how the universe takes shape.
To be honest, I had no idea the Milky Way has orbiting galaxies. Question is, which Galaxy is the Milky Way orbiting? I know we are on a collision course with Andromeda, but is there something bigger we are actually orbiting?
the collision is actually probably not a huge deal. More of a merger. There's so much space between stars that there's supposedly only going to be a few potential collisions. I'm sure there will be overall gravitational changes for each star, but I don't know what kind of local effect that might have for any planets orbiting them.
No Place Like Home A Blog by Nadia Drake Milky Way Has 4 Billion Years to Live — But Our Sun Will Survive Posted Mon, 03/24/2014 Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraled neighbor, Andromeda. The galaxies as we know them will not survive. In fact, our solar system is going to outlive our galaxy. At that point, the sun will not yet be a red giant star – but it will have grown bright enough to roast Earth’s surface. Any life forms still there, though, will be treated to some pretty spectacular cosmic choreography. Currently, Andromeda and the Milky Way are about 2.5 million light-years apart. Fueled by gravity, the two galaxies are hurtling toward one another at 402,000 kilometers per hour. But even at that speed, they won’t meet for another four billion years. Then, the two galaxies will collide head-on and fly through one another, leaving gassy, starry tendrils in their wakes. For eons, the pair will continue to come together and fly apart, scrambling stars and redrawing constellations until eventually, after a billion or so years have passed, the two galaxies merge. Then, the solar system will have a new cosmic address: A giant elliptical galaxy, formed by the collision and merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda. This isn’t a chapter ripped from science fiction – it’s a real, scientific prediction. That science can forecast such events was the focus of the third episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. That Newton could describe the orbits of planets, and Halley the return of his eponymous comet, and contemporary astronomers, the end of the Milky Way – this gift of foresight is really a mathematical understanding of the physical laws that govern the movements of celestial bodies. “Using nothing more than Newton’s laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge with our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda,” host Neil DeGrasse Tyson says. “Because the distances between the stars are so great compared to their sizes, few if any stars in either galaxy will actually collide. Any life on the worlds of that far-off future should be safe, but they will be treated to an amazing, billion-year long light show.” The galactic collision that closes out the third Cosmos episode follows the sequence in the animation below, which is based on a 2006 simulation by astrophysicist Brant Robertson*. Video: NASA/Vimeo Now, how on Earth do we know this is going to happen? The story starts in the early 1900s, when astronomer Vesto Slipher measured the radial velocity of Andromeda — in other words, he calculated the speed at which the galaxy was moving toward or away from Earth. Slipher did this by looking for a telltale stretching or compression in the light from Andromeda arriving at Earth: Light from objects that are moving away from us is slightly stretched, or red-shifted. Light from objects moving toward us is blue-shifted, or compressed. The result was a little bit surprising. “We may conclude that the Andromeda Nebula is approaching the solar system with a velocity of about 300 kilometers per second,” Slipher wrote in the Lowell Observatory Bulletin in 1913 (Andromeda was called a nebula back then because astronomers didn’t realize it wasn’t part of the Milky Way; Slipher’s calculation strongly suggested that idea needed rejiggering). So Andromeda was zooming toward us – that much at least seemed clear. Whether its arrival would mean the end of the Milky Way was still uncertain. For decades, scientists had no way of knowing whether Andromeda and the Milky Way would collide head-on, or if they would slip past one another like star-filled vessels in the cosmic night. Turns out, it’s relatively easy to measure the velocity of faraway objects moving toward or away from us, but much more difficult to determine their sideways motion (something astronomers call “proper motion”). The farther away something is, the harder it is to measure its sideways motion, which doesn’t produce those telltale stretched or compressed wavelengths that astronomers can work with. Instead, astronomers rely on detailed observations of an object’s position relative to background stars – a small and subtle shift that without superior telescopes can take centuries to become apparent. Artist’s conception of the future Earth, whose oceans have boiled away due to the Sun’s increasing heat, exiled to the outskirts of the new merged galaxy that astronomers have dubbed “Milkomeda.” (David A. Aguilar, CfA) Around 2007, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb decided to revisit the question of Andromeda’s impending arrival. “Most theorists are interested in reproducing systems from our past that are observed now, and are reluctant to make predictions that will be tested only billions of years from now,” Loeb says. “The rationale was unclear to me; I am curious about the future as much as I am about the past.” Loeb and then post-doc T.J. Cox simulated the impending collision and merger of Andromeda and the Milky Way using estimates of Andromeda’s proper motion. Their results showed a better than decent chance of the two galaxies smashing into one another, and a pretty good possibility of the solar system being punted to the outskirts of the resulting elliptical galaxy, which Loeb named “Milkomeda.” In 2012, a team of astronomers based at the Space Telescope Science Institute re-did the collision calculations, this time using direct measurements of Andromeda’s proper motion. After all those years, the team was able to get those measurements with the Hubble space telescope – and an observing campaign that used years of data, beginning with images snapped in 2002. “We compared images taken at different times with the Hubble Space Telescope, and measured how much the Andromeda stars have moved relative to the fuzzy galaxies in the distant background,” says astronomer Sangmo Tony Sohn. “This gives us a sense of how fast the Andromeda stars moved across the sky.” The team concluded that Andromeda’s proper motion was tiny – and that a head-on collision was pretty much inevitable. That might sound a little bit traumatic, but it’s not all that unusual for galaxies to merge. The Hubble space telescope has captured some glorious images of faraway mergers and collisions, and astronomer Halton Arp included a number of galactic interactions in his “Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies,” published in 1966. They’re all really pretty. The good news is that, as Tyson says, stars are so far apart that even though galaxies are colliding, the probabilities of stellar collisions are small. So the sun and its planets will likely survive the birth of Milkomeda, though Earth will no longer be able to call the Milky Way home. And we’ll no longer live in a spiral galaxy: Milkomeda will be elliptical in shape, and it’ll probably look pretty red, which you can see toward the end of the 2012 team’s animation, and in the animation above. So there’s no doubt this merger is going to be a spectacle – and there’s a good chance that the Triangulum, a smaller, nearby galaxy, will get sucked into the fray. I, for one, am disappointed that I won’t be able to watch this great cosmic light show. For now, the best I can do is enjoy the sequence of illustrations below. Present day; 2 billion years from now; 3.75 billion years; 3.85 billion years; 3.9 billion years; 4 billion years; 5.1 billion years from now; and 7 billion years from now, when the galaxies have formed a huge elliptical galaxy. *9:45pm PDT, 3/24: This post has been updated to attribute the embedded animation to astrophysicist Brant Robertson, now at the University of Arizona, and his colleagues. NASA recently redid the animation.
Neil Armstrong talking to his son for the first time after returning from the moon. The three Apollo 11 astronauts were in quarantine for 21 days to prevent the spread of any contagions possibly picked up on the surface of the moon.
http://gizmodo.com/a-dozen-black-holes-are-mysteriously-spewing-energy-in-1772855254 Spoiler Something strange is going on in a distant corner of our universe. About a dozen supermassive black holes are all shooting enormous jets of energy in roughly the same direction. It could be a cosmic coincidence—but some astronomers suspect there are larger forces at play. Supermassive black holes, which are found at the center of nearly all galaxies, periodically erupt, hurling streams of energized plasma into intergalactic space. For instance our galaxy’s own supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, will sometimes swallow a star and belch x-ray energy all over the Milky Way. These eruptions are fascinating to astronomers, but they are typically thought to be independent events. Now, a survey of 64 galaxies located halfway across the known universe has revealed a bizarre alignment between the energy jets erupting from a handful of black holes, all of which are located within a hundred million light years of each other. A pattern like this shouldn’t exist, unless it’s being dictated by an even larger structure in our universe. Which is exactly what Russ Taylor, lead author of a forthcoming study in theMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, thinks may be happening. AsScience News reports, Taylor suspects the eruptions are all being steered by filaments, a sort of scaffolding along which matter congregates on a cosmic scale. If the hypothesis is correct, it could help explain how our universe’s present structure came to be. Not everybody is convinced, however. Some astronomers feel the number of galaxies in the study is too small to draw meaningful conclusions, and that the pattern could be chalked up to nothing more than chance. But the idea of a cosmic alignment is intriguing enough that Taylor and his colleagues plan to follow up on it by probing more black holes, and by figuring out the precise distances between the galaxies they’ve already studied. I suppose if there’s one takeaway for us puny Earthlings, it’s that there are mind-bogglingly vast forces shaping our universe in ways we’ve only just begun to understand. Keeps your Monday struggle in perspective.
Reading stuff like this, albeit over my head, makes me sad when i think of the future and what all i won't ever know because I'll already be gone :'(
But another you in another part of the multiverse is absorbing all the information ever made and understanding every bit of it.
Daily news 25 April 2016 Cassini gears up for final fiery plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere Going where no spacecraft has gone before NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute By Andy Coghlan The countdown has begun. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spent more than a decade orbiting Saturn, dipping in and out of its rings and peering at its moons. But in just one year, it will begin its grand finale, a daring series of manoeuvres that will bring views of Saturn like never before – and end with the spacecraft plummeting to its death in the gas giant’s atmosphere. “It’s going to be a tough day,” says project manager Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who presented details of Cassini’s last act in Vienna on 20 April at the European Geophysical Union meeting. The so-called Grand Finale programme will begin next year, following six months studying Saturn’s outermost F ring, including 12 close fly-bys of Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, which sports rivers and lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Cassini’s last act will be its most daredevil mission yet. From April 2017 to September, the probe will zoom 22 times between the planet and the innermost of Saturn’s famous rings. “No spacecraft has flown in that region before, so it’s very exciting,” said Spilker. Enduring mysteries The scientific payback will be enormous. Flying closer than ever before to the gas giant’s surface – some 64,000 kilometres from its centre – Cassini will gather information previously unobtainable to help solve Saturn’s enduring mysteries. These include such basic questions as whether it has a rocky core, how its weather works and the precise length of its day. “We’ll have the opportunity to study Saturn’s internal structure, measure its gravity and magnetic fields and hopefully measure Saturn’s rotation rate for the first time,” says Spilker. At such close quarters, Cassini’s instruments can gather unprecedented information about the composition of the planet’s ionosphere and atmosphere. The craft will also collect data on radiation belts girding the planet, and will be in a position to use gravity measurements to give the best estimate yet of the mass of the rings. “I am especially interested in Cassini’s measurement of the mass of Saturn’s rings,” says Larry Esposito at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. Knowing the mass will help determine whether the rings were recently created, or whether they are as old as the solar system – Esposito’s favoured idea. “It will be a major scientific discovery either way, with implications for the formation of planets in proto-planetary discs.” And the images it will send back should be spectacular. “We will get some of the highest resolution images ever obtained of the inner D ring,” says Spilker. “We’ll get wonderful views with the sun high in the sky for the solstice.” Daredevil descent In terms of derring-do, the only comparably hazardous mission was in 2008, when Cassini flew through enormous plumes of warm water 100 kilometres across gushing from the surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. The risk was worth it, because the data collected from that and subsequent fly-bys demonstrated that Enceladus has a salty ocean containing organic material, energy and a hydrothermal system at the base of the ocean – all ingredients necessary for life. Ironically, that potential for life is part of why Cassini must die. After a decade of orbiting and two mission extensions, Cassini is almost out of fuel. “We are ending the mission by burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere to protect two worlds, Enceladus and Titan, that might have oceans suitable for life,” Spilker says. “NASA required that we dispose of Cassini… in a way that would protect Enceladus and Titan from a later impact.” Sentimental goodbye The mission will end on 15 September, 2017. “Even in its final plunge, it will continuously download data until the last few minutes,” says Spilker. The team speaks of the end sentimentally. “As Mephistopheles told Faust, ‘all that exists is worthy to perish’,” Esposito says. “This is a worthy ending for Cassini that allows us to take more risk to discover new results.” “There’s something romantic about the idea of Cassini sailing on forever, but it’s trapped in Saturn orbit and can’t roam the cosmic void,” says Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “There’s some solace in thinking that Cassini’s atoms will merge in Saturn’s interior with atoms that have been there since the beginning.” “On the day, we’ll gather at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the Cassini family, and when the signal stops, there will be a moment of silence for the loss of a dear friend we’ve known since 1990,” says Spilker. “It will be a sad day, but it’s achieved so much over the course of many years, we’ll say goodbye with a mixture of sadness and pride.”
I so much want for one of the last picture to look something like this as it dips into the atmosphere:
Dawn Just Wants To Make All The Other Probes Look Bad 22 Apr , 2016 by Evan Gough The Dawn spacecraft, NASA’s asteroid hopping probe, may not be going gently into that good night as planned. Dawn has visited Vesta and Ceres, and for now remains in orbit around Ceres. The Dawn mission was supposed to end after its rendezvous with Ceres, but now, reports say that the Dawn team has asked NASA to extend the mission to visit a third asteroid. Dawn was launched in 2007, and in 2011 and 2012 spent 14 months at Vesta. After Vesta, it reached Ceres in March 2015, and is still in orbit there. The mission was supposed to end, but according to a report at New Scientist, the team would like to extend that mission. Dawn is still is fully operational, and still has some xenon propellant remaining for its ion drive, so why not see what else can be achieved? There’s only a small amount of propellant left, so there’s only a limited selection of possible destinations for Dawn at this point. A journey to a far-flung destination is out of the question. Chris Russell, of the University of California, Los Angeles, is the principal investigator for the Dawn mission. He told New Scientist, “As long as the mission extension has not been approved by NASA, I’m not going to tell you which asteroid we plan to visit,” he says. “I hope a decision won’t take months.” If the Dawn mission is not extended, then its end won’t be very fitting for a mission that has accomplished so much. It will share the fate of some other spacecraft at the end of their lives; forever parked in a harmless orbit in an out of the way place, forgotten and left to its fate. The only other option is to crash it into a planet or other body to destroy it, like the Messenger spacecraft was crashed into Mercury at the end of its mission. The crash and burn option isn’t available to Dawn though. The spacecraft hasn’t been sterilized. If it hasn’t been sterilized of all possible Earthly microbial life, then it is strictly forbidden to crash it into Ceres, or another body like it. Planetary protection rules are in place to avoid the possible contamination of other worlds with Earthly microbial life. It’s not likely that any microbes that may have hitched a ride aboard Dawn would have survived Dawn’s journey so far, nor is it likely that they would survive on the surface of Ceres, but rules are rules. The secret of Dawn’s long-life and success is not only due to the excellent work by the teams responsible for the mission, it’s also due to Dawn’s ion-drive propulsion system. Ion drives, long dreamed of in science and science fiction, are making longer voyages into deep space possible. Ion drives start very slow, but gain speed incrementally, continuing to generate thrust over long distances and long periods of time. They do all this with minimal propellant, and are ideal for long space voyages like Dawn’s. The success of the Dawn mission is key to NASA’s plans for further deep space exploration. NASA continues to work on improving ion drives, and their latest project is the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS.) This project is meant to further develop the Hall Thruster, a type of ion-drive that NASA hopes will extend spacecraft mission capabilities, allow longer and deeper space exploration, and benefit commercial space activities as well. The AEPS has the potential to double the thrust of current ion-drives like the one on Dawn. It’s a key component of NASA’s Journey to Mars. NASA also has plans for a robotic asteroid capture mission called Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will use the AEPS. That mission will visit an asteroid, retrieve a boulder- sized asteroid from the surface, and place it in orbit around the Moon. Eventually, astronauts will visit it and return samples to Earth for study. Very ambitious. As far as the Dawn mission goes, it’s unclear what its next destination might be. Vesta and Ceres were chosen because they are thought be surviving protoplanets, formed at the same time as the other planets. But they stopped growing, and they remain largely undisturbed, so in that sense they are kind of locked in time, and are intriguing objects of study. There are other objects in the vicinity, but it would be pure guesswork to name any. We are prone to looking at the past nostalgically, and thinking of prior decades as the golden age of space exploration. But as Dawn, and dozens of other current missions and scientific endeavours in space show us, we may well be in a golden age right now.
‘Wow!’ Signal Was…Wait For It…Comets 17 Apr , 2016 by Bob King The Wow! signal recorded on August 15, 1977. The ones, twos and threes indicate weak background noise. Letters, especially those closer to the end of the alphabet, represent stronger signals. The “6EQUJ5” is read from top to bottom (see graph below) and shows the signal rising from “6” to “U” before dropping back down to “5”. Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO) Comets get blamed for everything. Pestilence in medieval Europe? Comets! Mass extinctions? Comets! Even the anomalous brightness variations in the Kepler star KIC 8462852 was blamed for a time on comets. Now it looks like the most famous maybe-ET signal ever sifted from the sky, the so-called “Wow!” signal, may also be traced to comets. Say it ain’t so! The Big Ear Observatory, on the grounds of Ohio Wesleyan University, operated from 1963-1998. It was part of Ohio State University’s long-running Search for Extraterrestrial (SETI) program. The observatory was torn down in 1998 to make room for a golf course. Credit: Bigear.org / NAAPO In August 1977, radio astronomer Jerry Ehman was looking through observation data from the Ohio State’s now-defunct Big Ear radio telescope gathered a few days earlier on August 15. He was searching for signals that stood apart from the background noise that might be broadcast by an alien civilization. Since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and emits energy at the specific frequency of 1420 megahertz (just above the TV and cellphone bands), aliens might adopt it as the “lingua franca” of the cosmos. Scientists here on Earth concentrated radio searches at and around that frequency looking for strong signals that mimicked hydrogen. Ehman’s searches turned up mostly background noise, but that mid-August night he spotted a surprise — a vertical column with the alphanumerical sequence “6EQUJ5″ that indicated a strong signal at hydrogen’s frequency. Exactly as predicted. Big Ear picked up the signal from near the 5th magnitude star Chi-1 Sagittarii in eastern Sagittarius not far from the globular cluster M55. Astonished by the find, Ehman pulled out a red pen, circled the sequence and wrote a big “Wow!” in the margin. Ever since, it’s been called the Wow! signal and considered one of the few signals from space that defies explanation. Before we look at how that may change, let’s make sense of the code. Plot of signal strength vs time of the Wow! signal on August 15, 1977. The signal rose and fell during the 72 seconds observation window. Credit: Maksim Rossomakhin Each digit on the chart corresponded to a signal intensity from 0 to 35. Anything over “9” was represented by a letter from A to Z. It was probably the “U” that knocked Ehman’s socks off, since it indicated to a radio burst 30 times greater than the background noise of space. In Big Ear’s 35 years of operation, it was the most intense, unexplainable signal ever recorded. What’s more, it was narrowly focused and very close to hydrogen’s special frequency. Big Ear listened for just 72 seconds before Earth’s rotation carried the signal’s location out of “view” of antenna. Since the radio array had two feed horns, the transmission was expected to appear three minutes apart in each of the horns, but only a single one ever picked it up. Despite follow-up observations byEhman and others (more than 100 studies were made of the region) the signal was gone. Never heard from again. Nor has anything else like it ever been recorded anywhere else in the sky. Careful scrutiny eliminated earthbound possibilities such as aircraft or satellites. Nor would anyone have been transmitting at 1420 MHz since it was within a protected part of the radio spectrum used by astronomers and off-limits to regular broadcasters. The nature of the signal implied a point source somewhere beyond the Earth. But where? On August 15, 1977, periodic comets 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs would have both been very close to the narrow swath of sky south of Chi Sagittarii where the Wow! signal was received. Could they be implicated? Diagram: Bob King, source: Stellarium If it really was an attempt at alien contact, why try only once and for so short a time interval? Even Ehman doubted (and still doubts) an extraterrestrial intelligence origin, but a much more recent suggestion made by Prof. Antonio Paris of St. Petersburg College, Florida may offer an answer. Paris earlier worked as an analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense and returned to the “scene of the crime” looking for any likely suspects. After studying astronomical databases, he discovered that two faint comets, 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, discovered only within the past decade, had been plying the very area of the Wow! signal on August 15, 1977. A huge cloud of hydrogen surrounded Comet Hale-Bopp when it neared the Sun in 1997. Ultraviolet light, charted by the SWAN instrument on the SOHO spacecraft, revealed that the cloud far exceeded the great comet’s visible tail (inset photo) — 70 times wider than the Sun itself (yellow circle to scale at right). Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA) and SWAN Consortium / inset: Dennis di Cicco If you recall, a comet has two or three basic parts: a fuzzy head or coma and one or two tails streaming off behind. Invisible to earthbound telescopes, but showing clearly in orbiting telescopes able to peer into ultraviolet light, the coma is further wrapped in a huge cloud of neutral hydrogen gas. As the Sun warms a comet’s surface, water ice or H2O vaporizes from its nucleus. Energetic solar UV light breaks down those water molecules into H2 and O. The H2 forms a huge, distended halo that can expand to many times the size of the Sun. Paris published a paper earlier this year exploring the possibility that the hydrogen envelopes of either or both comets were responsible for the strong 1420 MHz signal snagged by Big Ear. On the surface, this makes sense, but not all astronomers agree. First off, if comets are so radio-bright in hydrogen light, why don’t radio telescopes pick them up more often? They don’t. Second, some astronomers doubt that the signals from these comets would have been strong enough to be picked up by the array. Image of the full page of the computer printout that contains the “Wow!” signal. Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO) A quick check on 266P and 335P at the time of the signal show them both around 5 a.u. from the sun (Jupiter’s distance) and extremely faint at magnitudes 22 and 27 respectively. Were they even active enough at those distances to form clouds big enough for the antenna to detect? Paris knows there’s only one way to find out. Comet 266P/Christensen will swing through the same area again on Jan. 25, 2017, while 335P/Gibbs follows suit on January 7, 2018. Unable to use an existing radio telescope (they’re all booked up!), he’s begun a gofundme campaign to purchase and install a 3-meter radio telescope to track and analyze the spectra of these two comets. The goal is $20,000 and Paris is already well on his way there. It would be a little bit sad if the Wow! signal turned out to be a “just a comet”, but the possibility of solving a 39-year-old mystery would ultimately be more satisfying, don’t you think?
That bookmark will go right next to the ISS Location bookmark, which is next to the New Horizons Location bookmark. Moar!
NASA Cuts Funds for Mars Landing Technology Work By Jeff Foust, SpaceNews Writer | April 27, 2016 11:43pm ET WASHINGTON — NASA is cutting funding for a Mars landing technology demonstration project by about 85 percent in response to budget reductions to its space technology program and the need to set aside funding within that program for a satellite servicing effort. In a presentation to a joint meeting of the National Academies' Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board here April 26, James Reuter, NASA deputy associate administrator for space technology, said the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project would get only a small fraction of its originally planned budget of $20 million for 2016. That cut, he said, was required by the outcome of the fiscal year 2016 appropriations bill completed last December. NASA received $686.5 million for space technology, an increase of about $90 million from 2015. However, Congress moved the RESTORE-L satellite servicing from NASA's space operations budget account to space technology, and directed NASA spend $133 million, or nearly 20 percent of the overall space technology budget, on it. [NASA's Inflatable Flying Saucer for Mars Landings (Photo Gallery)] "The net effect is that we had to find $40 million to cut" from other space technology programs, Reuter said. That ultimately included LDSD as well as a project to study composite structures for use on the Space Launch System's upper stage. Several smaller "game changing" technology programs were also cut, he said. LDSD was studying the use of inflatable decelerators and advanced parachutes to slow down spacecraft as they enter a planetary atmosphere, particularly that of Mars. In two tests, a balloon carried the LDSD vehicle into the upper atmosphere, where the vehicle's rocket motor fired to accelerate it to Mach 3.5. LDSD deployed the inflatable decelerator, followed by the parachute, to slow down to subsonic speeds. Two LDSD test flights, however, failed to successfully demonstrate the technology. In both flights the inflatable decelerator appeared to work as planned. However, in a June 2014 test, the parachute failed to fully open. During a second test a year later, the parachute opened, but suffered tears in its canopy. NASA had not made a decision on whether to fund a third flight test of LDSD when it decided to cut funding the project, Reuter said after his presentation. The space technology program now plans to work with the science program on studies to better understand the dynamics of parachute deployment in those conditions. Reuter said NASA likely would have carried out such studies regardless of the budget situation, but will be able to do less now. "We certainly would have been more aggressive" with that research at the original funding level of $20 million, versus the $3 million now available, he said. In his talk, he warned that NASA's space technology program is facing another budget crunch in 2017. NASA requested $826.7 million for the program, but a spending bill approved by Senate appropriators April 21 provides $686.5 million, the same level as 2016. That bill also requires $130 million of that be spent on RESTORE-L, double the agency's request. Other big programs, like a contract awarded April 19 to Aerojet Rocketdyne for solar electric propulsion work valued at $67 million, will further constrain NASA's space technology efforts if its budget remains at the Senate's level. "It will mean a bigger impact this coming year than what we just went through," Reuter said. - See more at: http://www.space.com/32727-nasa-cuts-funds-for-mars-landing-technology-work.html?
Elon Musk is saying FUK U I DO IT MY OWN DAM SELF. I mean there's no one else up on par with him nowadays. Sir Richard Branson was the shit with Virgin Galactic like 10-12 years back, but Musk is in another tier altogether.
YES YES YES YES YES Dive head-first into the cosmos with SpaceVR Posted 8 hours ago by Lucas Matney (@lucas_matney) One of the major promises of virtual reality is the ability to find yourself transported to exotic locations. Nothing is quite so exotic as the final frontier. SpaceVR wants to launch high-definition 360-degree cameras into space so that users can experience the majesty of the cosmos on their virtual reality headsets. The small 5-person company just raised a $1.25 million Seed round led by Shanda Group with participation from Skywood Capital. This money is going to quite literally throw their company into the sky. SpaceVR launched a KickStarter this past September to begin the process of getting their cameras into space. They raised over $110,000 with the goal of presenting viewers the same views as the International Space Station. Fast forward a few months and the company has gotten more ambitious— they want to launch their own satellites. To do so they’re looking to recruit the help of a little company called SpaceX to launch their eye 200 miles into the sky. The camera, dubbed the Overview 1, will have a pair of 4K fisheye cameras capturing the vast space around it and a lifespan of 6 months. VR filmmaker Chris Milk has famously called virtual reality the “ultimate empathy machine.” SpaceVR founder and CEO Ryan Holmes believes that VR in space only heightens that emotion. I chatted with Holmes about the “overview effect,” where people, when presented with a view of earth from afar, are much more likely to empathize with others and see the pettiness of so-called major issues in the face of viewing our little planet. “Prioritization changes,” Holmes told me. “There’s more of a focus on making the world sustainable, and [people] freak out about a lot of the stuff we’re doing to the planet now.”
Send me on a trip to space? Sign me up! Add some Morgan Freeman narrating Carl Sagan while John Effing Williams plays in the background. I'll weep like a schoolgirl.
I have an Oculus Rift and I'm already pretty blown away by the "presence" you can get with the tech and it's just 1st gen. SpaceVR with it will be great, SpaceVR with the next generation stuff which should be coming out around the time this gets ready will be flat out amazing.
A Mars update since we haven't had one in awhile. Plus some pretty cool pics (click pics for full size). Curiosity drills a hole. Spoiler Curiosity Cores Hole in Mars at ‘Lubango’ Fracture Zone 28 Apr , 2016 by Ken Kremer Curiosity rover reached out with robotic arm and drilled into ‘Lubango’ outcrop target on Sol 1320, Apr. 23, 2016, in this photo mosaic stitched from navcam camera raw images and colorized. Lubango is located in the Stimson unit on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. MAHLI camera inset image shows drill hole up close on Sol 1321. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover successfully bored a brand new hole in Mars at a tantalizing sandstone outcrop in the ‘Lubango’ fracture zone this past weekend on Sol 1320, Apr. 23, and is now carefully analyzing the shaken and sieved drill tailings for clues to Mars watery past atop the Naukluft Plateau. “We have a new drill hole on Mars!” reported Ken Herkenhoff, Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and an MSL science team member, in a mission update. “All of the activities planned for last weekend have completed successfully.” “Lubango” counts as the 10th drilling campaign since the one ton rover safely touched down on the Red Planet some 44 months ago inside the targeted Gale Crater landing site, following the nailbiting and never before used ‘sky crane’ maneuver. After transferring the cored sample to the CHIMRA instrument for sieving it, a portion of the less than 0.15 mm filtered material was successfully delivered this week to the CheMin miniaturized chemistry lab situated in the rovers belly. CheMin is now analyzing the sample and will return mineralogical data back to scientists on earth for interpretation. The science team selected Lubango as the robots 10th drill target after determining that it was altered sandstone bedrock and had an unusually high silica content based on analyses carried out using the mast mounted ChemCam laser instrument. Indeed the rover had already driven away for further scouting and the team then decided to return to Lubango after examining the ChemCam results. They determined the ChemCam and other data observation were encouraging enough – regarding how best to sample both altered and unaltered Stimson bedrock – to change course and drive backwards. Lubango sits along a fracture in an area that the team dubs the Stimson formation, which is located on the lower slopes of humongous Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. This mid-afternoon, 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on April 4, 2016, as part of long-term campaign to document the context and details of the geology and landforms along Curiosity’s traverse since landing in August 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Since early March, the rover has been traversing along a rugged region dubbed the Naukluft Plateau. “The team decided to drill near this fracture to better understand both the altered and unaltered Stimson bedrock,” noted Herkenhoff. See our photo mosaic above showing the geologically exciting terrain surrounding Curiosity with its outstretched 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm after completing the Lubango drill campaign on Sol 1320. The mosaic was created by the imaging team of Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Its again abundantly clear from the images that beneath the rusty veneer of the Red Planet lies a greyish interior preserving the secrets of Mars ancient climate history. Curiosity rover views ‘Lubango’ drill target up close in this MAHLI camera image taken on Sol 1321, Apr. 24, 2016, processed to enhance details. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com The team then commanded Curiosity to dump the unsieved portion of the sample onto the ground and examine the leftover drill tailing residues with the Mastcam, Navcam, MAHLI multispectral characterization cameras and the APXS spectrometer. ChemCam is also being used to fire laser shots in the wall of the drill hole to make additional chemical measurements. To complement the data from Lubango, scientists are now looking around the area for a suitable target of unaltered Stimson bedrock as the 11th drill target. “The color information provided by Mastcam is really helpful in distinguishing altered versus unaltered bedrock,” explained MSL science team member Lauren Edgar, Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center, in a mission update. The ChemCam laser has already shot at the spot dubbed “Oshikati,” a potential target for the next drilling campaign. “On Sunday we will drive to our next drilling location, which is on a nearby patch of normal-looking Stimson sandstone,” wrote Ryan Anderson, planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of the ChemCam team on MSL in today’s (Apr. 28) mission update. As time permits, the Navcam imager is also being used to search for dust devils. As I reported here, Opportunity recently detected a beautiful looking dust devil on the floor of Endeavour crater on April 1. Dust devil detections by the NASA rovers are relatively rare. Curiosity has been driving to the edge of the Naukluft Plateau to reach the interesting fracture zone seen in orbital data gathered from NASA’s Mars orbiter spacecraft. Curiosity images Naukluft Plateau in this photo mosaic stitched from Mastcam camera raw images taken on Sol1296. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com The rover is almost finished crossing the Naukluft Plateau which is “the most rugged and difficult-to-navigate terrain encountered during the mission’s 44 months on Mars,” says NASA. Prior to climbing onto the Naukluft Plateau the rover spent several weeks investigating sand dunes including the two story tall Namib dune. Curiosity explores Red Planet paradise at Namib Dune during Christmas 2015 – backdropped by Mount Sharp. Curiosity took first ever self-portrait with Mastcam color camera after arriving at the lee face of Namib Dune. This photo mosaic shows a portion of the full self portrait and is stitched from Mastcam color camera raw images taken on Sol 1197, Dec. 19, 2015. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo As of today, Sol 1325, April 28, 2016, Curiosity has driven over 7.9 miles (12.7 kilometers) since its August 2012 landing, and taken over 320,100 amazing images. Spectacular Mastcam camera view of Gale Crater rim from Curiosity on Sol 1302 enhanced to bring out detail. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com