I read a lot of Musk's stuff about Mars and was all jacked up with hypesugar. Then, I watched his speech about it and was little disappoint. Guy doesn't seem to be a very good speaker. Still excited though.
250,000 year old piece of Aluminum. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016...ce-aliens-visited-earth-250000-years-ago.html
Well if that's the case, it was found in a layer along with bones that were 80k years old, so why would it be 250k years old
Idk, I think I'll trust the historian saying it's a part from a German WW 2 plane over the Deputy Director of the Romanian Ufologists Association
New Horizons targets mysterious red object a billion miles beyond Pluto http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/10/22/nasa-object-mu69-new-horizons/
Are there going to be pictures? Or just scientific measurements? It would be pretty cool to see close up photos so far away from earth
Saturn's nipple is changing colors https://www.good.is/articles/saturn...l&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer Saturn’s North Pole Just Changed Color And Nobody Knows Why
Impossible Spaceship Engine Called "EmDrive" Actually Works, Leaked NASA Report Reveals Will Sabel Courtney The DriveNovember 7, 2016 Impossible Spaceship Engine Called "EmDrive" Actually Works, Leaked NASA Report Reveals When a scientist announced last decade that he’d built a new form of spacecraft propulsion called the EmDrive that didn’t require conventional fuel, it sounded too good to be true. But the great thing about science is that you don’t have to take someone’s findings at their word; you can test it for yourself. NASA did just that—and while the space agency hasn’t officially released its findings yet, a leaked copy of NASA’s report reveals the EmDrive seems to work as advertised. The EmDrive, which was demonstrated in 2006 by scientist Roger Shawyer, works by bouncing around microwave radiation within a cone-shaped piece of metal, known as a resonant cavity. Those photons zipping around inside the cavity, in turn, forces the cavity forward—along with anything else attached to it, like a spaceship—as the microwave energy bounces out the wide end. It’s vexed scientists due to the fact that it appears to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics. Based on our current understanding of Newton’s Third Law of Motion—y’know, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction—the EmDrive shouldn’t work, as it doesn’t producing a material (as in, made of matter instead of energy) exhaust. Yet as NASA itself apparently discovered...in spite of ol’ Isaac’s beloved maxim, the EmDrive works indeed. (The report is still awaiting peer review, which is why we're discussing a leaked copy instead of the formally-published version.) Now, if you’re picturing that scene from Iron Man where Tony Stark blows himself away with his own flight stabilizer, don’t get ahead of yourself. According to the paper, the experimental engine whipped up 1.2 millinewtons of force per kilowatt of energy. To put that in simple terms, you’d need about 900 times that to make an apple hover in midair under Earth’s gravity. Still, by proving the basic principle is sound, the test seems to demonstrate that a scaled-up version of the EmDrive could be used for propelling spacecraft across the interplanetary vacuum without the cumbersome demands of hauling around massive amounts of fuel—a problem that poses one of the largest logistical issues for engineers planning missions to Mars. Energy, on the other hand, is fairly cheap in space—all a ship needs to do is stretch out as many solar panels as needed and soak up all the free sunlight it likes. Indeed, with no atmosphere to mute the sun’s rays or claw at the bulky panels, panels are more efficient in the vacuum of space than they are here on our planet. Indeed, the EmDrive could supposedly allow humans to reach Mars in as little as 70 days—far faster than conventional rockets. In which case, Elon Musk’s pie-in-the-sky dreams of rapid round-trips to Mars just might work out after all.
Pure metal asteroid has mysterious water deposits November 2, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today An artist’s concept of the Psyche spacecraft, a proposed mission for NASA’s Discovery program that would explore the huge metal Psyche asteroid from orbit. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Water has been showing up in all sorts of unexpected places in our solar system, such as the Moon, Mercury and Saturn's moon Ganymede. Add one more place to the list: Asteroid 16 Psyche. This metal-rich asteroid may have traces of water molecules on its surface that shouldn't be there, researchers say. Psyche is thought to be the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system, at 300 km (186 miles) across and likely consists of almost pure nickel-iron metal. Scientists had thought Psyche was made up of the leftover core of a protoplanet that was mostly destroyed by impacts billions of years ago, but they may now be rethinking that. "The detection of a 3 micron hydration absorption band on Psyche suggests that this asteroid may not be metallic core, or it could be a metallic core that has been impacted by carbonaceous material over the past 4.5 Gyr," the team said in their paper. While previous observations of Psyche had shown no evidence for water on its surface, new observations with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility found evidence for volatiles such as water or hydroxyl on the asteroid's surface. Hydroxyl is a free radical consisting of one hydrogen atom bound to one oxygen atom. "We did not expect a metallic asteroid like Psyche to be covered by water and/or hydroxyl," said Vishnu Reddy, from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a co-author of the new paper about Psyche. "Metal-rich asteroids like Psyche are thought to have formed under dry conditions without the presence of water or hydroxyl, so we were puzzled by our observations at first." The asteroid Psyche is one of the larger asteroids. Credit: Lindy T. Elkins-Tanton Asteroids usually fall into two categories: those rich in silicates, and those rich in carbon and volatiles. Metallic asteroids like Psyche are extremely rare, making it a laboratory to study how planets formed. For now, the source of the water on Psyche remains a mystery. But Redddy and his colleagues propose a few different explanations. One is, again, Psyche may not be as metallic as previously thought. Another option is that the water or hydroxyl could be the product of solar wind interacting with silicate minerals on Psyche's surface, such as what is occurring on the Moon. The most likely explanation, however is that the water seen on Psyche might have been delivered by carbonaceous asteroids that impacted Psyche in the distant past, as is thought to have occurred on early Earth. "Our discovery of carbon and water on an asteroid that isn't supposed to have those compounds supports the notion that these building blocks of life could have been delivered to our Earth early in the history of our solar system," said Reddy. If we're lucky, we won't have to wait too long to find out more about Psyche. A mission to Psyche is on the short list of mission proposals being considered by NASA, with a potential launch as early as 2020. Reddy and team said an orbiting spacecraft could explore this unique asteroid and determine if whether there is water or hydroxyl on the surface. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-pure-metal-asteroid-mysterious-deposits.html#jCp
New theory of gravity might explain dark matter November 8, 2016 Credit: Wikipedia A new theory of gravity might explain the curious motions of stars in galaxies. Emergent gravity, as the new theory is called, predicts the exact same deviation of motions that is usually explained by invoking dark matter. Prof. Erik Verlinde, renowned expert in string theory at the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics, published a new research paper today in which he expands his groundbreaking views on the nature of gravity. In 2010, Erik Verlinde surprised the world with a completely new theory of gravity. According to Verlinde, gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but an emergent phenomenon. In the same way that temperature arises from the movement of microscopic particles, gravity emerges from the changes of fundamental bits of information, stored in the very structure of spacetime. Newton's law from information In his 2010 article (On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton), Verlinde showed how Newton's famous second law, which describes how apples fall from trees and satellites stay in orbit, can be derived from these underlying microscopic building blocks. Extending his previous work and work done by others, Verlinde now shows how to understand the curious behaviour of stars in galaxies without adding the puzzling dark matter. The outer regions of galaxies, like our own Milky Way, rotate much faster around the centre than can be accounted for by the quantity of ordinary matter like stars, planets and interstellar gasses. Something else has to produce the required amount of gravitational force, so physicists proposed the existence of dark matter. Dark matter seems to dominate our universe, comprising more than 80 percent of all matter. Hitherto, the alleged dark matter particleshave never been observed, despite many efforts to detect them. No need for dark matter According to Erik Verlinde, there is no need to add a mysterious dark matter particle to the theory. In a new paper, which appeared today on the ArXiv preprint server, Verlinde shows how his theory of gravity accurately predicts the velocities by which the stars rotate around the center of the Milky Way, as well as the motion of stars inside other galaxies. "We have evidence that this new view of gravity actually agrees with the observations, " says Verlinde. "At large scales, it seems, gravity just doesn't behave the way Einstein's theory predicts." At first glance, Verlinde's theory presents features similar to modified theories of gravity like MOND (modified Newtonian Dynamics, Mordehai Milgrom (1983)). However, where MOND tunes the theory to match the observations, Verlinde's theory starts from first principles. "A totally different starting point," according to Verlinde. Adapting the holographic principle One of the ingredients in Verlinde's theory is an adaptation of the holographic principle, introduced by his tutor Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel Prize 1999, Utrecht University) and Leonard Susskind (Stanford University). According to the holographic principle, all the information in the entire universe can be described on a giant imaginary sphere around it. Verlinde now shows that this idea is not quite correct—part of the information in our universe is contained in space itself. This extra information is required to describe that other dark component of the universe: Dark energy, which is believed to be responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Investigating the effects of this additional information on ordinary matter, Verlinde comes to a stunning conclusion. Whereas ordinary gravity can be encoded using the information on the imaginary sphere around the universe, as he showed in his 2010 work, the result of the additional information in the bulk of space is a force that nicely matches that attributed to dark matter. On the brink of a scientific revolution Gravity is in dire need of new approaches like the one by Verlinde, since it doesn't combine well with quantum physics. Both theories, crown jewels of 20th century physics, cannot be true at the same time. The problems arise in extreme conditions: near black holes, or during the Big Bang. Verlinde says, "Many theoretical physicists like me are working on a revision of the theory, and some major advancements have been made. We might be standing on the brink of a new scientific revolution that will radically change our views on the very nature of space, time and gravity." Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-theory-gravity-dark.html#jCp
SpaceX just asked permission to launch 4,425 satellites — more than currently orbit Earth SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by the Mars-hungry tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, just made a big move to enshroud the planet in high-speed internet coverage. On November 15, the company filed a lengthy application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch 4,425 satellites. (We first heard about the filing through the r/SpaceX community on Reddit.) That is a hell of a lot of satellites. According to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are 1,419 active satellites currently orbiting Earth. There are estimates of roughly 2,600 satellites that no longer work floating in space, but even factoring those in, SpaceX's planned fleet would be larger than everything already in space. Some of the biggest telecommunications satellites can weigh several tons, be the size of a bus, and orbit from a fixed point about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth. After we took a look at SpaceX's FCC application, though, it seems these won't be your typical telecommunications satellites. Each satellite in SpaceX's planned constellation will weigh about 850 lbs (386 kg) and be roughly the size of a MINI Cooper car. They will orbit at altitudes ranging from 715 miles (1,150 km) to 790 miles (1,275 km). From this lofty vantage point, SpaceX says each satellite could cover an ellipse about 1,300 miles (2,120 km) wide. That's about the distance from Maine to the Florida panhandle. "The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide," SpaceX wrote in its application. SpaceX/FCC SpaceX's filing with the FCC outlines a two-phase launch plan. To get the party started, SpaceX wants to send up 1,600 satellites at one orbital altitude, then follow up with another 2,825 satellites placed in four shells at different altitudes. "With deployment of the first 800 satellites, SpaceX will be able to provide widespread U.S. and international coverage for broadband services," SpaceX wrote. "Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1 Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the U.S. and globally." Turbo speeds A speed of 1 Gbps globally would be huge. The global average for internet speed in late 2015, according Akamai's "State of the Internet" report, was 5.1 Mbps per user — about 200 times slower than SpaceX's target — with most of the higher speeds tied up in cable and fiberoptic connections. SpaceX also makes the point in its filing's legal statement that, according to a July 2016 reportby UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, "4.2 billion people (or 57% of the world’s population) are offline for a wide range of reasons, but often also because the necessary connectivity is not present or not affordable." Bathing the planet in internet is one way to get those people online. Here are some more details directly from SpaceX's filing, which are notable: High capacity: Each satellite in the SpaceX System provides aggregate downlink capacity to users ranging from 17 to 23 Gbps, depending on the gain of the user terminal involved. Assuming an average of 20 Gbps, the 1600 satellites in the Initial Deployment would have a total aggregate capacity of 32 Tbps. SpaceX will periodically improve the satellites over the course of the multi-year deployment of the system, which may further increase capacity. High adaptability: The system leverages phased array technology to dynamically steer a large pool of beams to focus capacity where it is needed. Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system. Broadband services: The system will be able to provide broadband service at speeds of up to 1 Gbps per end user. The system’s use of low-Earth orbits will allow it to target latencies of approximately 25-35 ms. Worldwide coverage: With deployment of the first 800 satellites, the system will be able to provide U.S. and international broadband connectivity; when fully deployed, the system will add capacity and availability at the equator and poles for truly global coverage. Low cost: SpaceX is designing the overall system from the ground up with cost- effectiveness and reliability in mind, from the design and manufacturing of the space and ground-based elements, to the launch and deployment of the system using SpaceX launch services, development of the user terminals, and end-user subscription rates. Ease of use: SpaceX’s phased-array user antenna design will allow for a low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs. The satellites will last between 5 years and 7 years and decay within a year after that. Musk first discussed the unnamed satellite constellation project back in January 2015, later filing for an FCC application to test basic technologies that'd support it. At the time, Musk said during a SpaceX event (our emphasis added): "The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is, in the long term, like rebuilding the Internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance Internet traffic go over this network and about 10% of local consumer and business traffic. So that's, still probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber but we'll do about 10% business to consumer direct and more than half of the long distance traffic." According to a June 2015 story by Christian Davenport at The Washington Post, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion into Musk's company, in part to support the project. So it's a good guess that if and when the network becomes functional, those companies would partly assume control of it. (Google parent company Alphabet is also working on its own effort to beam internet connectivity from the skies using satellites, balloons and drones.) The filing comes just two months after a SpaceX rocket exploded during a routine launchpad test. It was carrying the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite, which Facebook intended to license to beam free internet to parts of Africa. Business Insider contacted SpaceX for more details on the project, including its projected timeline and how the satellites would be launched (presumably through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets), but representatives did not immediately answer our questions.
I love seeing all of Elons projects and futuristic goals. But sometimes I wish he would focus on one big thing at a time, get it completed quickly and then move on to the next great idea.
By having a bunch of ideas out there, he encourages copy cats and competition that might not otherwise have thought to work on problems. It also mitigates the effect if one of his ideas turns out to be a big failure.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/22/nasa_finds_ice_under_martian_surface/ LAKE OF frozen WATER THE SIZE OF NEW MEXICO FOUND ON MARS – NASA
Could there be life in Pluto's ocean? December 1, 2016 by Diana Lutz View of Pluto with color-coded topography as measured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Purple and blue are low and yellow and red are high, and the informally named Sputnik Planitia stands out at top as a broad, 1300 km- (800 mile-) wide, …more Pluto is thought to possess a subsurface ocean, which is not so much a sign of water as it is a tremendous clue that other dwarf planets in deep space also may contain similarly exotic oceans, naturally leading to the question of life, said one co-investigator with NASA's New Horizon mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. William McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a co-author on two of four new Pluto studies published Dec. 1 in Nature, argues that beneath the heart-shaped region on Pluto known as Sputnik Planitia there lies an ocean laden with ammonia. The presence of the pungent, colorless liquid helps to explain not only Pluto's orientation in space but also the persistence of the massive, ice-capped ocean that other researchers call "slushy"—but McKinnon prefers to depict as syrupy. Using computer models along with topographical and compositional data culled from the New Horizon spacecraft's July 2015 flyby of Pluto, McKinnon led a study on Sputnik Planitia's churning nitrogen ice surface that appeared this past June in Nature. He is also an author on the recently released study regarding the orientation and gravity of Pluto caused by this subsurface ocean some 600 miles wide and more than 50 miles thick. "In fact, New Horizons has detected ammonia as a compound on Pluto's big moon, Charon, and on one of Pluto's small moons. So it's almost certainly inside Pluto," McKinnon said. "What I think is down there in the ocean is rather noxious, very cold, salty and very ammonia-rich—almost a syrup. "It's no place for germs, much less fish or squid, or any life as we know it," he added. "But as with the methane seas on Titan—Saturn's main moon—it raises the question of whether some truly novel life forms could exist in these exotic, cold liquids." As humankind explores deeper into the Kuiper Belt and farther from Earth, this means to McKinnon the possible discovery of more such subsurface seas and more potential for exotic life. "The idea that bodies of Pluto's scale, of which there are more than one out there in the Kuiper Belt, they could all have these kinds of oceans. But they'd be very exotic compared to what we think of as an ocean," McKinnon said. "Life can tolerate a lot of stuff: It can tolerate a lot of salt, extreme cold, extreme heat, etc. But I don't think it can tolerate the amount of ammonia Pluto needs to prevent its ocean from freezing—ammonia is a superb antifreeze. Not that ammonia is all bad. On Earth, microorganisms in the soil fix nitrogen to ammonia, which is important for making DNA and proteins and such. "If you're going to talk about life in an ocean that's completely covered with an ice shell, it seems most likely that the best you could hope for is some extremely primitive kind of organism. It might even be pre-cellular, like we think the earliest life on Earth was." The newly published research delves into the creation—likely by a 125-mile-wide Kuiper Belt object striking Pluto more than 4 billion years ago—of the basin that includes Sputnik Planitia. The collapse of the huge crater lifts Pluto's subsurface ocean, and the dense water—combined with dense surface nitrogen ice that fills in the hole—forms a huge mass excess that causes Pluto to tip over, reorienting itself with respect to its big moon. But the ocean uplift won't last if warm water ice at the base of the covering ice shell can flow and adjust in the manner of glaciers on Earth. Add enough ammonia to the water, and it can chill to incredibly cold temperatures (down to minus 145 Fahrenheit) and still be liquid, even if quite viscous, like chilled pancake syrup. At these temperatures, water ice is rigid, and the uplifted surface ocean becomes permanent. "All of these ideas about an ocean inside Pluto are credible, but they are inferences, not direct detections," McKinnon said, sounding the call. "If we want to confirm that such an ocean exists, we will need gravity measurements or subsurface radar sounding, all of which could be accomplished by a future orbiter mission to Pluto. It's up to the next generation to pick up where New Horizons left off!" Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-life-pluto-ocean.html#jCp
http://www.economist.com/news/scien...s-has-become-routine-next-step-try-photograph How to take pictures of exoplanets Finding exoplanets has become routine. The next step is to try to photograph them IN THE quarter of a century since the first extrasolar planets were discovered, astronomers have turned up more than 3,500 others. They are a diverse bunch. Some are baking-hot gas giants that zoom around their host stars in days. Some are entirely covered by oceans dozens of kilometres deep. Some would tax even a science-fiction writer’s imagination. One, 55 Cancri e, seems to have a graphite surface and a diamond mantle. At least, that is what astronomers think. They cannot be sure, because the two main ways exoplanets are detected—by measuring the wobble their gravity causes in their host stars, or by noting the slight decline in a star’s brightness as a planet passes in front of it—yield little detail. Using them, astronomers can infer such basics as a planet’s size, mass and orbit. Occasionally, they can interrogate starlight that has traversed a planet’s atmosphere about the chemistry of its air. All else is informed conjecture. What would help is the ability to take pictures of planets directly. Such images could let astronomers deduce a world’s surface temperature, analyse what that surface is made from and even—if the world were close enough and the telescope powerful enough—get a rough idea of its geography. Gathering the light needed to create such images is hard. The first picture of an extrasolar world, 2M1207b, 170 light-years away, was snapped in 2004, but the intervening dozen years have seen only a score or so of others join it in the album. That should soon change, though, as new instruments both on the ground and in space add to the tally. And a few of the targets of these telescopes may be the sorts of planets that have the best chance of supporting life, namely Earth-sized worlds at the right distance from sun-like stars, in what are known as those stars’ habitable zones—places where heat from the star might be expected to stop water freezing without actually boiling it. Taking pictures of exoplanets is hard for two reasons. One is their distance. The other is that they are massively outshone by their host stars. Interstellar distances do not just make objects faint. They also reduce the apparent gap between a planet and its host, so that it is hard to separate the two in a photograph. Such apparent gaps are measured in units called arc-seconds (an arc-second is a 3,600th of a degree). This is about the size of an American dime seen from four kilometres away. The exoplanet closest to Earth orbits Proxima Centauri, the sun’s stellar neighbour. Yet despite its proximity (4.25 light-years) the angular gap between this planet and its star is a mere 0.038 arc-seconds, according to Beth Biller, an exoplanet specialist at the University of Edinburgh. Separating objects which appear this close together requires a pretty big telescope. The second problem, glare, is best dealt with by inserting an opaque disc called a coronagraph into a telescope’s optics. A coronagraph’s purpose is to block light coming directly from a star while permitting any that is reflected from planets orbiting that star to shine through. This palaver is necessary because, as a common analogy puts it, photographing an exoplanet is like trying to take a picture, from thousands of kilometres away, of a firefly buzzing around a lighthouse. Seen from outside the solar system, Earth would appear to be a ten-billionth as bright as the sun. Those exoplanets that have had their photographs taken so far are ones for which these problems are least troublesome—gigantic orbs (which thus reflect a lot of light) circling at great distances (maximising angular separation) from dim hosts (minimising glare). In addition, these early examples of planetary photography have usually involved young worlds that are still slightly aglow with the heat of their formation. Even then, serious hardware is required. For example, four giant planets circling a star called HR8799 were snapped between 2008 and 2010 by the Keck and Gemini telescopes on Hawaii (see picture). These instruments have primary mirrors that are, respectively, ten metres and 8.1 metres across. The good news for planet-snappers is that such giant telescopes are becoming more common, and that people are building special planet-photographing cameras to fit on them. At the moment, the three most capable are the Gemini Planet Imager, attached to the southern Gemini telescope, in Chile; the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research Instrument on the Very Large Telescope, a European machine also in Chile; and the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics Device on the Subaru telescope, a Japanese machine on Hawaii. All of those telescopes sport a mirror more than eight metres across, making them some of the biggest in the world, and their planet-photographing attachments are fitted with the most sophisticated coronagraphs available. The result is that the Subaru device, for example, can take pictures of giant planets that orbit their stars slightly closer in than Jupiter orbits the sun. This improved sensitivity will let astronomers take pictures of many more worlds. The Gemini Planet Imager, for instance, is looking for planets around 600 promising stars. (Its first discovery was announced in August 2015.) But even these behemoths will still be limited to photographing gas giants. To take snaps of the next-smallest class of planets (so-called “ice giants” like Neptune and Uranus), and the class after that (large, rocky planets called “super-Earths” that have no analogue in the solar system), will require even more potent instruments. These are coming. The European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is currently under construction in the Chilean mountains. Its 39.3 metre mirror will be nearly four times the diameter of the present record-holder, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, in the Canary Islands, which has a mirror 10.4 metres across. When it is finished, in 2024, the ELT should be sensitive enough to photograph Proxima Centauri’s planet, as well as other rocky ones around nearby stars. A smaller instrument, with a 24.5 metre mirror, the Giant Magellan Telescope, should be finished in 2021. The Thirty Metre Telescope, planned for Hawaii, will, as its name suggests, fall somewhere between those two—though its construction has been halted by legal arguments. For ground-based telescopes that may be the end of the line, says Matt Mountain, who is president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, and who oversaw the construction of the Gemini telescopes. The shifting currents of Earth’s atmosphere (the reason stars seem to twinkle even to the naked eye) impose limits on how good they can ever be as planetary cameras. To get around those limits means going into space. Although it is not specifically designed for the job, the James Webb space telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2018 and which boasts both a mirror 6.5 metres across and a reasonably capable coronagraph, should be able to snap pictures of some large, nearby worlds. It will be able to sniff the atmospheres of many more, analysing starlight that has passed through those atmospheres on its way to Earth. WFIRST, a space telescope due to launch in the mid-2020s, will have picture-taking capabilities of its own, and will serve to test the latest generation of coronagraphs. After that, astronomers who want to picture truly Earth-like worlds are pinning their hopes on a set of ambitious missions which, for now, exist only as proposal documents in NASA’s in-tray. One of the most intriguing is the New Worlds Mission. This hopes to launch a giant occulter (in effect, an external coronagraph) that would fly in formation with an existing space telescope (probably the James Webb) to boost its exoplanet-imaging prowess. There may, though, be an alternative to this big-machine approach. That is the belief of the members of a team of researchers led by Jon Morse, formerly director of astrophysics at NASA. Project Blue, as this team calls itself, hopes, using a mixture of private grants, taxpayers’ money and donations from the public, to pay for a space telescope costing $50m (as opposed, for example, to the $9 billion budgeted for the James Webb) that would try to take pictures of any Earth-like exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A—the closest sun-like star to Earth, and a big brother to Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri is hotter than Proxima, which means its habitable zone is much further away. That, combined with its closeness, means Project Blue can get away with a mirror between 30 and 45cm across—the size of mirror an enthusiastic amateur might have in his telescope. What such an amateur would not have, though, is a computer-run “multi-star wavefront controlled” mirror. This will draw on a technology already fitted to ground-based telescopes, called adaptive optics, in which portions of the mirror are subtly deformed in order to sculpt incoming light. In combination with a coronagraph the wavefront controller will, according to Supriya Chakrabarti of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, let the telescope blot out the light not only of Alpha Centauri A, but also of Alpha Centauri B, a companion even closer to it than Proxima Centauri is. Moreover, the plan is to take thousands of pictures over the course of several years. By combining these and looking for persistent signals—particularly ones that appear to follow plausible orbits—computers should be able to pluck any planets from the noise. If it works, Alpha Centauri A’s closeness means Project Blue’s telescope could reveal lots of information about any planets orbiting that star (and statistical analysis of known exoplanets suggests there will almost certainly be some). Examining the spectrum of light from them would reveal what their atmospheres and surfaces were made from, including any chemicals—such as oxygen and methane—that might suggest the presence of life. It might even be possible to detect vegetation, or its alien equivalent, directly. The length of a planet’s day could be inferred by watching for regular changes in light as its revolution about its axis caused continents and seas to become alternately visible and invisible. Longer-term variations might reveal planetary seasons; shorter-term, more chaotic ones might be evidence of weather. If they can raise the money in time, the Project Blue team hope to launch their telescope in 2019 or 2020. Being able to take a picture of a rocky planet around one of the sun’s nearest neighbours would be an enormous scientific prize. If a habitable planet were found, it would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century. Donors may think that worth a punt. Correction (November 25th): A previous version of this piece said that the gap between Proxima Centauri and a planet that orbits it is 0.38 arc-seconds; it is, in fact, 0.038 arc-seconds. Our apologies for the missing zero.
I consider myself to be a reasonably smart human being, but i feel so incredibly dumb when i come in this thread. Never does apply more than ITT.
Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth. “The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.” Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth. “If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft. We had 22 months of total warning.” Nasa recently established a planetary defense office, and Nuth has recommended that the agency build an interceptor rocket to keep in storage, with periodic testing, alongside an observer spacecraft. Nuth said that Nasa could cut that five-year schedule in half, but that even reducing that schedule by a quarter would be “basically a hail-mary pass”. A rocket in storage and ready to launch within a year, however, “could mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that’s hard to observe, like from the sun”, he said. Nuth stressed that he and his co-authors do not speak for Nasa administrators, and that the mission would require a request to Congress and their approval. Nasa has discovered an estimated 90% or more of near-Earth objects larger than a kilometer, the size that could cause devastation on Earth. Smaller objects are still extremely dangerous, though, and Nasa has found 874 1km-wide asteroids among 1,748 “potentially hazardous asteroids”. Asteroids are darker and rockier than icy comets, and many fly within a band that stretches between Jupiter and Mars. Dr Cathy Plesko, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said there were two ways humans might deflect an asteroid: a nuclear warhead or a “kinetic impactor, which is basically a giant cannonball”. “Cannonball technology is actually very good technology, intercepting an object at high speed actually ends up being more effective than high explosives”. The calculations of a cannonball deflector would take far longer to refine, however, than the last-resort pyrotechnics of a nuclear bomb. To “blow it to smithereens”, Plesko said, would have dangerous side-effects, including shrapnel from the blast. “We are very carefully doing our homework before finals week,” Plesko said. “We don’t want to be doing our calculations before something is coming. We need to have this work done.” Part of the scientists’ concern is a lack of knowledge. “We don’t have a lot of data about what the insides of asteroids or comets look like,” she said, “but based on what we know about physics and rock and ice we can guess.” Galen Gisler, another Los Alamos scientist, said an asteroid or comet that escaped a deflection attempt would likely strike the ocean. But he said that while an asteroid smaller than 500ft in diameter would cause a spectacular splash, casting water thousands of feet into the sky, it would probably not cause a tsunami. But a rock that explodes near a populated shoreline, above the water or when it crashes into it, would still be “highly dangerous”, Gisler said, citing the damage caused by a 60ft-wide, 7,000-ton meteoroid that tore apart over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. Casting a blinding fireball across the sky, the meteoroid shattered windows for miles, injured more than 1,000 people across 55 miles of the rock’s path. For over a decade, Nasa and the National Nuclear Security Administration have worked together on studying asteroids. In October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Nasa performed a simulation exercise of what might happen if a huge asteroid hit near Los Angeles. If a 330-foot asteroid hit southern California, they estimated, the explosion would level cities and kill tens of thousands. In 1908, a massive fireball, believed 50-100m wide, flattened hundreds of squre miles of forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. Windows were blown out more than 30 miles away, and witnesses reported burns on their skin and finding the charred remains of a herd of reindeer. Scientists calculate that the Tunguska event, as it’s called, was an explosion about 185 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
excellent article on our deep space probes and staying in contact with them -- Sometime in the next 10 or so years, the massive antennas that comprise NASA’s Deep Space Network will pick up a faint, distant signal for the final time. When that day comes, humanity will say goodbye to Voyager 1, the first and to date only spacecraft to reach interstellar space. For scientists at NASA, Voyager’s death will be a moment long prepared for, and something they will have spent decades attempting to delay. “It’s kind of like the death of a family member,” NASA scientist Suzanne Dodd told Vocativ. Dodd is the project manager of the Voyager Interstellar Mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You know it’s coming, but it’s still sad to recognize it’s really over and you can’t communicate with the spacecraft anymore.” No human-made object has ever traveled farther than Voyager 1, which has made it about 12.5 billion miles from Earth since its launch in 1977. That’s about 137 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, a measure known as an astronomical unit or AU. The probe’s twin, Voyager 2, is at about 112 AU, meaning it too should reach interstellar space sometime in the next few years. Given Voyager 1’s enormous head start and speed – it’s traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour – it’s certainly conceivable that nothing will overtake it as humanity’s most distant outpost in any of our lifetimes. But there’s no getting around it: Their condition is terminal, and what Dodd and her team are engaged in is the equivalent of deep space hospice care. While the nearly 40-year-old spacecraft present many identical challenges like managing the fading power reserves and guarding against the incredible cold of outer space, each has developed its own particular chronic conditions. “You can think of them as twins, like twin sisters, but different ailments have affected the different spacecraft,” said Dodd. “Voyager 2 is kind of tone-deaf. You need to rack through several frequencies before it finds one that it can hear.” To remain in contact with both Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 nearly 40 years after launch, NASA scientists have had to slowly power down the scientific instruments until, sooner or later, nothing but the transmitter remains. According to Dodd, 2020 is when the shutdown will really begin in earnest in the final effort to squeeze as much time as possible out of the probes’ plutonium batteries. “We will shut off the heater for a lot of the instruments, and that will save anywhere from two to four watts of power, so six months to a year of power,” she said. That will expose the instruments to the elements of outer space, where it’s only a handful of degrees above absolute zero. “When you shut off the heater, it could mean the instruments stop working because it gets too cold. It could mean that they will continue to work, we really don’t know.” Here on Earth, Dodd and her team can use NASA’s most modern technology to stay in contact, but the Voyagers are effectively relics of the 1970s. “The computer systems and whatnot are vintage 1974, 1975, when the spacecraft was being built,” said Dodd. “Your iPhone has 100,000 times more memory than the Voyager spacecraft.” She compared the challenge of uploading new software to the spacecraft with playing a game of Tetris, with the team having to cram irregular blocks of data into tiny spaces. Voyager 1 and 2 aren’t the only probes headed toward interstellar space and, eventually, out of the solar system. (Those aren’t exactly the same thing.) Their slightly slower predecessors in deep space exploration, Pioneer 10 and 11, lost contact with Earth in 2003 and 1995, respectively, meaning we can’t know precisely when in the next 15 or so years these spacecraft will cross the interstellar threshold. Then there’s New Horizons, which launched in 2006 to reach Pluto, the one planet left out of the Voyagers’ grand tour of the outer solar system – and arrived in 2015, just in time for Pluto to get demoted to dwarf planet status, much to the NASA team’s chagrin. Talking with the leaders of these various missions, a common theme emerges: None of these probes were designed to last long enough to reach interstellar space, as that was never their goal. Voyager 1 and 2 completed their exploration of the outer planets in about the first dozen years of their missions, with Voyager 2 becoming the only spacecraft to visit Neptune in 1989 and Voyager 1 taking its famous “Family Portrait” photographs of the Sun and six of the planets on Valentine’s Day 1990. Every last one of the billion of miles traveled since then has exceeded official expectations. But even that has got nothing on how long the Pioneer missions lasted relative to the original plan. “Both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were only designed to operate for 21 months,” former Pioneer project manager Lawrence Lasher told Vocativ. Pioneer 11, the shortest-lived of the four original deep-space probes, still managed to turn 21 months into more than 22 years. While its signal was working fine in 1995, its death came as it essentially lost control of its motor functions, with NASA unable to reposition the spacecraft to point its antenna back toward Earth. Launched along with its twin in 1972, Pioneer 10’s 31-year lifespan ended up being longer than NASA’s balance sheets could quite account for. “The science mission was over on March 31, 1997. And the reason that had to stop at that time was budgetary considerations, and there were other missions that NASA felt would be delayed if we kept on funding Pioneer 10.” Lasher and a few colleagues managed to put together a significantly reduced new mission to keep in contact with Pioneer 10, so that they could take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to study deep space communication and help pave the way for future interstellar probes. His team took on managing Pioneer as an extra-hours special project, taking advantage of late nights and weekend hours when the Deep Space Network’s resources weren’t being used by higher-priority missions. After a few years, Pioneer could no longer transmit science data or even the basic telemetry of where it was in the solar system. The probe was slowly dying. “The last signal that we got was January 23, 2003,” said Lasher. “It was a very weak signal. We just weren’t able to get any more because of the fact that the power source had decayed, and it just didn’t have enough power to send additional transmissions.” A final effort was made to regain contact with the probe in 2006, but there would be no resurrection for Pioneer. New Horizons is still in the middle of its science mission, having reached Pluto last year and now en route to a flyby with an object in the Kuiper Belt in 2019. “The spacecraft’s prime mission was nine and a half years, actually ten and a half counting the data downlink,” mission leader Alan Stern told Vocativ. “We’re there now. So now everything else is now gravy and bonus because we completed the prime mission.” He estimated New Horizons will have enough power to operate until around the mid-2030s, possibly even the early 2040s, with the rest of its mission after the next flyby likely being along the same lines as Voyager’s interstellar mission. The ship is still young, not yet having had to switch on any of its backup systems. The Voyagers have long since either gone to their backups or shut them down preemptively to conserve power. Though New Horizons is three decades more advanced than Voyager 1, the nature of its mission means it will never reach the same speed as its predecessor. And, like Voyager and its tiny 1970s-bound memory, part of it will always be stuck in 2006. In this case, that means limitations on the lifespan of its plutonium battery. “Ours was not fully fueled at the time of launch because of difficulties at the place that produces plutonium called Los Alamos National Lab,” said Stern. New Horizons ended up going into space with 80 percent of a fully fueled battery. “For that reason, we have plenty of power to conduct our prime mission and our Kuiper Belt mission, but we’re not able to fly on as long as Voyager.” Of course, the “we” there is meant in a general sense, as the scientists that direct New Horizons today likely won’t all be the same ones who oversee the eventual shutdown of New Horizons. Stern called this the challenge of longevity, or the question of keeping alive “the intimate knowledge of how to operate this complicated spacecraft decades from now after many of us have retired and a whole new generation of people who didn’t build it or fly it to Pluto.” Humanity is still a long way away from launching generation ships to the stars, but the task of maintaining these probes across the decades is a first approximation. What the loss of these probes means varies depending on who you asked. Dodd compared it to the death of an elderly family member, while Lasher said he was philosophical about the loss of Pioneer 10 and 11, just satisfied that they had gotten so much extra data from their extended lifespans. How much you grieve for Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and eventually New Horizons perhaps depends on how much you’re willing to anthropomorphize the robotic avatars of our most distant explorations. Then again, maybe there’s another way of looking at the “deaths” of NASA’s deep space probes. After all, even after we lose contact with all five, they will still be speeding away from the solar system toward distant stars. In the vacuum of space, there’s nothing to corrode or degrade the spacecraft other than the occasional stray particle, meaning there’s every possibility that these probes will still be out there somewhere millions of years from now. By then, it’s entirely possible that the last humans in existence will be the couple carved onto the Pioneer plaque, those photographed for Voyager’s Golden Record, and Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, an ounce of whose ashes are aboard New Horizons. “One of the motivations for the plaque was that maybe some sentient being with an advanced civilization around one of those stars might somehow come across it and they’d have that plaque,” said Lasher. When famed astronomer Carl Sagan spearheaded the effort behind that plaque more than 40 years ago, it was thought of as a greeting. By the time it’s finally found, it might well be our species’s epitaph