Supersonic skydiver Felix Baumgartner's records confirmed

Remember the jump Felix Baumgartner did from an impressive 38,969.4 metres altitude back on October 14th last year? The World Air Sports Federation, or FAI, confirmed him breaking three records with that jump.

The records that have been smashed by Felix are the maximum vertical speed record ( 1,357.6 kilometres (843.6 miles) an hour, or Mach 1.25, in freefall), highest exit altitude (38,969.4 metres) and vertical distance of freefall (36,402.6 metres ) before he opened his parachute.

With his jump, Baumgartner was also the first human to break the speed of sound outside of a vehicle. The free fall part of his jump lasted 4 minutes and 19 seconds.

Cloudy with a chance of protons

A colossal sunspot captured on camera by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (one of several spacecraft that constantly monitor the sun), could trigger solar flares this week. The sunspot swelled to enormous proportions over 19 and 20 Feb, growing to over 6 Earth diameters across.

As magnetic fields on the sun rearrange and realign, dark spots called sunspots can be created. Sunspots are regions on the solar surface that are cooler than their surroundings (well, 4500K but still cool compared the rest of the photosphere).

The sunspot in question grew to a "delta region", in which the magnetic fields in the center of the sunspot, point in the opposite direction of the ones in the outer region. Such a fairly unstable configuration can lead to solar flares: eruptions of radiation on the sun.

The sun’s activity is expected to peak sometime this year, while being in the midst of its 11-year weather cycle (current one called Solar Cycle 24).

Image: The bottom two black spots are part of the same system and over six Earths across

CURIOSITY CAPTURES STUNNING NEW INTERACTIVE MARS PANORAMA

An incredible interactive self-portrait has been taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars revealing a wonderful insight into this distant world. The panorama was taken in the Yellowknife Bay region within the gale creator, an area believed to have been flooded with water in the distant past of the planet.

This area is in fact the first area in human history where a rover has drilled into the surface of another planet.
If you look closely at the ground in front of the rover you can see two small grey holes on the Martian surface, this is a shallow drill test hole and a sample collection hole, and both are 1.6 centimetres in diameter.

The panoramic image taken is comprised of many images taken from two separate cameras on the rover that have been stitched together. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) mounted on top of a robotic arm was used to capture the self-portrait of the rover but excluded any images that show the arm itself, resulting in a strange illusion that the picture was taken by something else, this is not the case. This camera took 66 images. The Mastcam was then used to take the panoramic landscape frames and comprises of 130 images.

The portrait and landscape photographs are then cleverly woven together to create an awe inspiring window into the surface of another planet.

Thanks to this incredible achievement, most of the human species can witness the exploration of another world; a new age of discovery has begun.

“Science is a collaborative enterprise spanning the generations, when it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way, seeing for them also” -Carl Sagan

Star-Forming Heart

Generations of stars can be seen in this infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region).

Younger stars line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen as pink dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The white knotty areas are where the youngest stars are forming. Red shows heated dust that pervades the region's cavities, while green highlights dense clouds.

MOON(S) OF VENUS

Venus (like Mercury) currently has no known natural satellite (moon).

But this doesn't mean we stop looking. As recently as 2009, astronomers completed a new survey searching for possible Venusian moons (with a lower size limit of about a kilometre).

However, Venus has had moon(s) in the past:
In 1672, Giovanni Cassini discovered a small object close to Venus. Re-observing the object in 1686, he declared it a possible moon of Venus. Many observations followed; including when a spot was seen to follow Venus during a transit across the Sun in 1761. However, some astronomers failed to find the satellite, despite determined observations.

In 1766, the director of the Vienna Observatory speculated that the “moon” was actually the result of an optical illusion but research carried on, and in 1977 its orbital period was calculated to be 11 days and 3 hours.

In 1884, the moon was declared to be a planet, which orbited the Sun every 283 days. The moon/planet was named Neith (after the Egyptian goddess of hunting and war).

The Belgian Academy of Sciences published a paper in 1887, reviewing every reported sighting of Neith. They determined that most of the sightings could be explained by stars (which appear on the sky in the vicinity of Venus).

And Venus was once again moonless.

More recently (2005), two Caltech researchers proposed that Venus had two moons in its early history, both caused by collisions with other bodies. Strong tidal forces from the Sun then caused the moons to be pulled out of orbit.

THAT'S NO MOON....

Quasi-satellites are objects which have a 1:1 mean-motion resonance with their host – that is, the planet and the satellites orbit the Sun in equal amounts of time (rather than the satellite orbiting the planet itself). The most well known examples are the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

2002 VE68 was the first quasi-satellite to be discovered around a major planet in the Solar System. It was discovered on November 11, 2002, however the possibility of retrograde or quasi-satellites was first considered in 1913. 2002 VE68 is included in the Minor Planet Center's list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids as it frequently comes within 0.05AU of the Earth (this is 5% of the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or about 7.5 million kilometres).

The asteroid also displays near-resonant behaviour with Mercury and the Earth. Simulations suggest that 2002 VE68 has been co-orbital with Venus for about 7,000 years (injected into its present orbit by the action of the Earth), but is likely to be ejected from orbital-resonance with Venus in the next 500 or so years.

Is the Ozone Layer on the Road to Recovery??

Satellites show that the recent ozone hole over Antarctica was the smallest seen in the past decade. Long-term observations also reveal that Earth’s ozone has been strengthening following international agreements to protect this vital layer of the atmosphere.
According to the ozone sensor on Europe’s MetOp weather satellite, the hole over Antarctica in 2012 was the smallest in the last 10 years.

The instrument continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric ozone started by its predecessors on the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, an ozone hole has developed over Antarctica during the southern spring – September to November – resulting in a decrease in ozone concentration of up to 70%.
Ozone depletion is more extreme in Antarctica than at the North Pole because high wind speeds cause a fast-rotating vortex of cold air, leading to extremely low temperatures. Under these conditions, human-made chlorofluorocar

bons – CFCs – have a stronger effect on the ozone, depleting it and creating the infamous hole.

Over the Arctic, the effect is far less pronounced because the northern hemisphere’s irregular landmasses and mountains normally prevent the build-up of strong circumpolar winds.

Reduced ozone over the southern hemisphere means that people living there are more exposed to cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

International agreements on protecting the ozone layer – particularly the Montreal Protocol – have stopped the increase of CFC concentrations, and a drastic fall has been observed since the mid-1990s.

However, the long lifetimes of CFCs in the atmosphere mean it may take until the middle of this century for the stratosphere’s chlorine content to go back to values like those of the 1960s.

The evolution of the ozone layer is affected by the interplay between atmospheric chemistry and dynamics like wind and temperature.

If weather and atmospheric conditions show unusual behaviour, it can result in extreme ozone conditions – such as the record low observed in spring 2011 in the Arctic – or last year’s unusually small Antarctic ozone hole.

Total ozone
To understand these complex processes better, scientists rely on a long time series of data derived from observations and on results from numerical simulations based on complex atmospheric models.

Although ozone has been observed over several decades with multiple instruments, combining the existing observations from many different sensors to produce consistent and homogeneous data suitable for scientific analysis is a difficult task.

Within the ESA Climate Change Initiative, harmonised ozone climate data records are generated to document the variability of ozone changes better at different scales in space and time.

With this information, scientists can better estimate the timing of the ozone layer recovery, and in particular the closure of the ozone hole.

Chemistry climate models show that the ozone layer may be building up, and the hole over Antarctica will close in the next decades.

ISS NIGHTPOD

Any keen photographer knows that shooting in low light conditions can present unique challenges. Imagine then, if you were taking shots from the International Space Station; as well as low light levels you would also have to take into account the ground motion (which often causes blurry images).

Astronauts on the ISS have experimented with high speed film and manual tracking, with mixed results. The European Space Agency then developed NightPod.

NightPod includes a mount system for digital cameras designed to compensate for the motion of the Station relative to the Earth (27,000 km/h). The instrument can be set to auto mode for up to six hours – as a result the crew can take pictures while they sleep.

Pictured here is Liège, Belgium. A network of roadways is clearly seen extending out to the darker Belgian countryside. The image is about 70 km across.

Astronauts often take photographs of significant man made and natural events on the Earth – including storms and volcanic erruptions. These images can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive.

Global poll opens for naming two new moons of Pluto

A worldwide poll has been launched inviting people to give names to the two moons of Pluto that were discovered in 2011 and 2012. The moons are currently called P4 and P5.

Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute, who discovered the two baby moons using Hubble space telescope's photographs, launched a portal yesterday, called Pluto Rocks, to start a worldwide poll.

Pluto has three named moons called Charon, Nix and Hydra. These existing names hold the key to the new names that may be given - they are derived from Greek or Roman mythology, and all are connected to the underworld or Hades.

Pluto himself was the king of the underworld, just as Zeus ruled heaven and Poseidon ruled the seas. Charon ferried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron, Nix was the goddess of night and mother of Charon and Hydra was a nine-headed monster who was guardian of the underworld.

So the names of P4 and P5 will probably be taken from the underworld. The portal for the poll has 12 names for which votes can be cast online. These are: Acheron, Alecto, Cerberus, Erebus, Eurydice, Hercules, Hypnos, Lethe, Obol, Orpheus, Persephone and Styx.

Till last reports came in, Styx and Cerebrus (the three-headed dog that guards Hades) were leading with about 12,000 votes each.

A seperate form avaialable on the site also gives you an opportunity to suggest totally different names, only if you are able to justify your choice.

The winner of the poll, that closes on 25 February, will be recommended by the SETI Institute to the International Astronomical Union which gives names to astronomical bodies.

"We will take into consideration the results of the voting, but they are not binding. The discovery team, in consultation with the Nomenclature Working Groups of the International Astronomical Union, reserves the right to propose the names. Note that the International Astronomical Union has final authority over the naming of Pluto's moons," the Pluto Rocks portal says.

Showalter and his team of scientists discovered the new moons while making a detailed study of Pluto, ahead of the first ever human probe to reach Pluto in July 2015.

It is called New Horizons and is at present hurtling towards the icy Pluto. Showalter's survey was part of NASA's due diligence before New Horizon comes anywhere near Pluto. They don't want an undiscovered object crashing into the spacecraft which was launched way back in 2006.

New Horizons has traveled 3.9 billion kilometers in the past 7 years, and it has to cover another billion kms to reach the Pluto system. After observing the lonely ex-planet and its five moons, New Horizons will likely head towards the Kuiper Belt an eerie zone some 3 billion kilometers wide where debris from the Solar System's formation is whirling around.

NASA creates world’s first wide-field x-ray imager

Three of NASA‘s scientists have created the world’s first x-ray imager with a wide field-of-view to aid in the study of charge exchange. The scientists went on to successfully demonstrate the x-ray camera, which is called STORM (Sheath Transport Observer for the Redistribution of Mass). Both STORM and another NASA project called DXL took a trip on a Black Brant IX rocket in December.DXL stands for Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local galaxy, and is also used to study charge exchange. The phenomenon is the result of solar wind “blowing” into our planet’s exosphere, as well as neutral gas, something that is not well understood by scientists. Charge exchange was first discovered almost two decades ago, and has been observed on a regular basis ever since.

While other devices have existed that can look at the so-called soft x-ray emissions by the solar wind, STORM is different. Because the camera has a wide field-of-view, it can image the solar wind in relation to our planet’s magnetosphere, something never before possible. This will allow scientist to observe – and better understand – the effects this phenomenon has on space weather around Earth, as well as its myriad of effects.

Michael Collier, a NASA planetary scientists who worked on the device, said: “[STORM] is a wonderful example of cooperation across divisions to better understand a process that is of interest to us all, but for different reasons.” Scott Porter, an astrophysicist who worked on the project, went on to say that charge exchange is one of only a few things that draws different types of scientists together.

Hypervelocity Stars in the Milky Way

Astronomers Keith Hawkins of Ohio University and Adam Kraus of the University of Hawaii think they have found half a dozen stars with masses similar to the Sun that are rocketing away from the core of Milky Way at speeds up to 3.2 million kilometers per hour. If their findings are confirmed, these will be the first known “hypervelocity stars” in this mass range. These fast movers are thought to form when the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy consumes one star in a binary system and ejects the other star.

“These are incredibly fast-moving objects that are actually gravitationally

unbound to the Milky Way,” Hawkins said during the 221st annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, CA in early January.

Previously, astronomers looking for hypervelocity stars searched for bright, blue stars of 3-4 solar masses in places they weren’t supposed to form. Because of the abundance of sun-like stars in the galaxy, identifying hypervelocity stars in this mass range is more difficult. Using the 5.1 meter Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar, Hawkins and Kraus found 130 stars near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way that had traveled vast distances. They narrowed that grouping down to six stars traveling at speeds consistent with escape velocity from the galactic core.

Hawkins said that while new results are intriguing, they still need to be confirmed. If the findings are verified, they may provide insights into the types of stars forming in the center of the galaxy and also help astronomers estimate the size of the black hole at the Milky Way’s core.

A large meteor has crashed into Russia's Ural mountains, injuring hundreds of people. The resulting shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings. Fortunately, no large fragments hit populated areas.
It seems that the meteor itself burned up in the lower atmosphere, causing it to shatter into fragments. A 6m crater has been found at a lake near Chebarkul, where a large fragment is thought to have impacted.
Note: this is not the asteroid projected to pass by Earth later today. That will still be passing us by and there is no chance of an impact. This meteor was much, much smaller.

Mercury shows off its colourful side

It comprises thousands of images acquired by the spacecraft during its first year in orbit.

This is not how we would see Mercury, which would look like a dull, brownish-grey globe to our eyes.

Rather, the map represents an exaggerated view of the planet that is intended to highlight variations in the composition of its rock.

"Messenger's camera has filters that go from the blue to the near-infrared of the spectrum, and we are able to use computer processing to enhance the very subtle but real colour differences that are present on Mercury's surface," explained Dr David Blewett from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.


Dr Blewett and his colleagues are in the process of asking for a mission extension
"The areas that you see that are orange - those are volcanic plains. There are some areas that are deep blue that are richer in an opaque mineral which is somewhat mysterious - we don't really know what that is yet.

"And then you see beautiful light-blue streaks across Mercury's surface. Those are crater rays formed in impacts when fresh, ground-up rock is strewn across the surface of the planet," the mission scientist.

Dr Blewett displayed the map here in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was giving a sneak preview of the data that is about to be deposited in Nasa's planetary archive.

 This will include a black-and-white, or monochrome, map of the entire surface of Mercury at a resolution of 200m per pixel (the colour map has a resolution of 1km per pixel and is just short of 100% coverage). The mission so far has been a triumph, which ought to make the current request to Nasa management for an operational extension a very easy case to make.

Messenger's observations have thrown up many surprises and challenged a lot of assumptions.

The probe has revealed Mercury's rich volcanic history. It has confirmed the existence of great lava plains, but also uncovered evidence for explosive volcanism.

We know now, too, that the planet has ice in shadowed craters. "It's got polar ice caps. Who'd have thought that?" said Dr Blewett.

In addition, the probe's instruments have detected relatively high abundances of sulphur and potassium in surface materials.

These are volatile elements that should not really be present on such a scale on a planet that orbits so close to the Sun with its searing heat.

But these elements may help explain many puzzles, like the nature of those opaque terrains. These could get their dark hue from the presence of sulphides. The compounds could also lie behind the intriguing "hollows" that pockmark great swathes of Mercury's surface.

Shallow with irregular shapes, the depressions often have bright halos and bright interiors. When scientists look around the Solar System for similar phenomena, the best comparison would appear to be the depressions that form in the carbon dioxide ice at the poles of Mars.

Those features are thought to arise when the CO2 ice sublimates away - that is, when it transforms directly from a solid state to a gaseous state. "Well, Mercury's surface isn't made of ice - it's scorching hot next to the Sun. But it seems that there is some sort of sublimation-like loss in the solid, silicate rocks that is causing these hollows to initiate and enlarge.

"It may be that a combination of high temperatures and what's called severe space weathering destroys sulphide minerals in the rocks, causing them to crumble and open up a depression."

Messenger is in great shape should Nasa management agree to a mission extension. The probe is thought to have enough fuel to operate until 2015.

And by then, new spacecraft will be on their way to Mercury. Under a joint venture known as BepiColombo, Europe and Japan are sending two satellites that should arrive at the innermost world in 2022.

Airburst Explained- NASA Addresses the Russian Meteor Explosion

A small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere early Friday, February 15, 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia at about 9:20 am local Russian time. Initial estimates, according to Bill Cooke, lead for the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, is that the asteroid was about 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter, with a weight of 7,000 metric tons. It hit the atmosphere at a shallow angle of about 20 degrees, at a speed of about 65,000 km/h (40,000 mph).

It traveled through the atmosphere for about 30 seconds before breaking apart and producing violent airburst ‘explosion’ about 20-14 km (12-15 miles) above Earth’s surface, producing an energy shockwave equivalent to a 300 kilotons explosion. That energy propagated down through the atmosphere, stuck the city below – the Chelyabinsk region has a population of about 1 million — and windows were broken, walls collapsed and there were other reports of minor damage throughout the city.
The official impact time was 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).
Cooke said that at this time, the known damage is not due to fragments of the bolide striking the ground but only from the airburst. “There are undoubtedly fragments on the ground, but at the current time no pieces have been recovered that we can verify with any certainty,” Cooke said during a media teleconference today.

Forget about leprechauns, engineers are catching rainbows

University at Buffalo engineers have created a more efficient way to catch rainbows, an advancement in photonics that could lead to technological breakthroughs in solar energy, stealth technology and other areas of research. Qiaoqiang Gan, PhD, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UB, and a team of graduate students described their work in a paper called "Rainbow Trapping in Hyperbolic Metamaterial Waveguide," published Feb. 13 in the online journal Scientific Reports. They developed a "hyperbolic metamaterial waveguide," which is essentially an advanced microchip made of alternate ultra-thin films of metal and semiconductors and/

or insulators. The waveguide halts and ultimately absorbs each frequency of light, at slightly different places in a vertical direction, to catch a "rainbow" of wavelengths. Gan is a researcher within UB's new Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics. "Electromagnetic absorbers have been studied for many years, especially for military radar systems," Gan said. "Right now, researchers are developing compact light absorbers based on optically thick semiconductors or carbon nanotubes. However, it is still challenging to realize the perfect absorber in ultra-thin films with tunable absorption band. "We are developing ultra-thin films that will slow the light and therefore allow much more efficient absorption, which will address the long existing challenge." Light is made of photons that, because they move extremely fast (i.e., at the speed of light), are difficult to tame. In their initial attempts to slow light, researchers relied upon cryogenic gases. But because cryogenic gases are very cold – roughly 240 degrees below zero Fahrenheit – they are difficult to work with outside a laboratory. Before joining UB, Gan helped pioneer a way to slow light without cryogenic gases. He and other researchers at Lehigh University made nano-scale-sized grooves in metallic surfaces at different depths, a process that altered the optical properties of the metal. While the grooves worked, they had limitations. For example, the energy of the incident light cannot be transferred onto the metal surface efficiently, which hampered its use for practical applications, Gan said. The hyperbolic metamaterial waveguide solves that problem because it is a large area of patterned film that can collect the incident light efficiently. It is referred to as an artificial medium with subwavelength features whose frequency surface is hyperboloid, which allows it to capture a wide range of wavelengths in different frequencies including visible, near-infrared, mid-infrared, terahertz and microwaves. It could lead to advancements in an array of fields. For example, in electronics there is a phenomenon known as crosstalk, in which a signal transmitted on one circuit or channel creates an undesired effect in another circuit or channel. The on-chip absorber could potentially prevent this. The on-chip absorber may also be applied to solar panels and other energy-harvesting devices. It could be especially useful in mid-infrared spectral regions as thermal absorber for devices that recycle heat after sundown, Gan said. Technology such as the Stealth bomber involves materials that make planes, ships and other devices invisible to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods. Because the on-chip absorber has the potential to absorb different wavelengths at a multitude of frequencies, it could be useful as a stealth coating material.

How to Deflect Killer Asteroids With Spray Paint

A fresh paint job might be all that’s needed to prevent a giant asteroid from raining destruction upon our planet.

Though strange-sounding, the strategy would make use of a real-world phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect, named for the Russian engineer who discovered it in 1902. The effect results from the fact that asteroids heat up as they bask in the sun’s light.

“The coat of paint would be a very thin, almost like a Saran Wrap layer,” said aerospace engineer David Hyland of Texas A&M, who leads a team that has been studying this method for several years. “If we push it in the right direction, we can get the asteroid to cease crossing Earth’s orbit and completely eliminate the threat.”

Asteroids make fairly frequent flybys of our planet, with one of the latest Earth-grazers being 2012 DA14, which on Feb. 15 will pass closer to our world than some satellites orbit. Though small objects enter the atmosphere all the time, the odds of a large asteroid hitting the planet are thankfully small. There was some concern that 325-meter-long asteroid Apophis could impact in 2036 but recent observations have put the probability of this potentially catastrophic event at less than one in 10 million.

Still, the thought of an ecosystem-annihilating rock from space, like the one that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, is unnerving. Scientists have long thought about ways to mitigate the hazard of a civilization-destroying asteroid and developed many different techniques to deflect any killer rocks, including shooting it with lasers, ramming it with a spacecraft, or blowing up a nuclear bomb on its surface. Now a team of researchers wants to launch a mission to test the effects of painting an asteroid in order to repel it.

The Yarkovsky effect works by changing the amount of light an asteroid gives off. As an asteroid rotates, the surface that has been heated by the sun moves away to face space and radiates infrared photons. Though massless, these photons carry away small bits of momentum from the asteroid, essentially generating a tiny rocket thrust in one direction. The effect is very slight but over time can noticeably change an asteroid’s orbit. By making an asteroid lighter or darker, and therefore changing the amount of radiation it absorbs, we could turn up or down this miniscule rocket thrust. It’s a long haul-technique, requiring years, decades, or even centuries of advanced notice to alter an asteroid’s trajectory.

Researchers have considered using the Yarkovsky effect to drive off dangerous asteroids for several decades, though Hyland and his collaborator’s proposal is among the most detailed investigations. Last year, a graduate student at MIT suggested using paintballs to deflect an asteroid but Hyland said that ordinary water- or oil-based paints wouldn’t work in space. When exposed to a vacuum, these substances would vaporize, “basically exploding,” he said. Paintballs would have to be tough enough to not explosively decompress yet weak enough to splatter on the asteroid’s surface instead of merely leaving hundreds of tiny craters.

Instead, Hyland suggested using a dry powder with an electrical charge. The solar wind – a river of charged particles constantly flowing out from the sun – bathes everything in the solar system and should give an asteroid a small positive charge. A satellite could come up to the asteroid and shoot paint through a tribocharging gun. No, that’s not some misspelling of turbocharging but rather what happens when you force particles through a narrow tube where they rub against the walls and pick up extra electrons, becoming negatively charged. Once bathed in ultraviolet light from the sun, the paint particles would melt together to cover the asteroid with a new color. Hyland and his collaborators are hoping to get funding for a mission that could launch in 2021 to rendezvous with the formerly worrisome asteroid Apophis to test their spray-paint method. The researchers have collaborated with NASA and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology(KACST), which runs Saudi Arabia’s space research institute, to design a satellite. Hyland is currently working to secure a launch date for their first hardware tests either on the International Space Station or in low-Earth orbit in late 2014 or 2015.

The proposal is interesting and worth investigating but “it needs a demonstration to show that it actually works,” said geologist Jay Melosh of Purdue University.

Melosh noted that while asteroid surfaces should be positively charged in principle, scientists don’t actually know the electric field in the vicinity of such objects because no asteroid-encountering spacecraft has ever carried instruments to study this. Researchers would also need to gather detailed information about the axis on which an asteroid spins before attempting to move one with paint.

Melosh is a co-author on a 2010 study called “Defending Planet Earth” that looked at different asteroid deflection techniques. Because it could only be used on fairly small asteroids whose potential for destruction is known well ahead of time, the report ranked slow-push methods, like using the Yarkovsky force, below other techniques like exploding a nuclear warhead on an asteroid or ramming it with a giant impactor.

The spray-painting method doesn’t allow for detailed fine-tuning and would probably only work with a few specific asteroids, such as Apophis, said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, co-founder of the B612 Foundation, which aims to protect Earth against deadly impacts. “The problem is that Apophis is not that typical and what you’ll need for most deflections is a precise orbital change,” he said. A gravity tractor that pulls an asteroid into a specific orbit would be more useful for the majority of cases.

Hyland understands the limitations of his proposed method. “This is not going to be the sole method of asteroid deflection,” he said. “And I think we need as many tools in our tool box as we can get.”

One advantage of the method is the risk of screwing things up catastrophically is relatively low. Because it works so slowly, it would give scientists plenty of time to rejigger their calculations and try again. Unlike the nuclear or ramming options, moving an asteroid snail’s pace also means that it can’t fall into the wrong hands and be used as a weapon of mass destruction – you’ve got ample time to deflect a bullet that takes years to hit you.

Instead of work on something that could be weaponized, Hyland said “it’s nice to collaborate on a project that, who knows, might one day save the Earth.”

NASA to Launch World's Largest Solar Sail in 2014

The largest solar sail ever constructed is headed for the launch pad in 2014 on a mission to demonstrate the value of "propellantless propulsion"— the act of using photons from the sun to push a craft through space.

Dubbed Sunjammer, the giant solar sail measures about 124 feet (38 meters) on a side and boasts a total surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet (1,208 square m, or one-third of an acre). The project is under the wing of NASA's Space Technology Program, within the agency's Office of the Chief Technologist.

NASA has contracted with a team of high-tech "solar sailors" at L'Garde Inc. of Tustin, Calif., to build Sunjammer. L'Garde is no newcomer to novel space structures. The company has worked with the space agency on several projects, including the creation of inflatable structures for radio frequency antennas and solar arrays. In 1996, the company flew the Inflatable Antenna Experiment (IAE) aboard the space shuttle Endeavour's STS-77 mission.

Programmatic milestone

"We took the name Sunjammer from an Arthur C. Clarke short story, a fictional yacht race in the heavens using solar sails," said Nathan Barnes, L'Garde's chief operating officer and executive vice president, as well as Sunjammer's project manager. Permission to use the name came from the Clarke estate, he told
Work on Sunjammer this year includes a programmatic milestone — a critical design review — along with a variety of ground demonstration tests and qualification of components, Barnes said. The flight of the solar sail, he said, is set for the end of 2014, to be sent spaceward atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

"With this sail, we’re targeting our end goal somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,864,114 miles (3 million kilometers) distance from the Earth," Barnes said.

A number of test objectives are to be checked off within the first couple months of flight, he added. These include deployment of the sail, demonstration of vector control using sail-tipped vanes, navigation with accuracy and, finally, maintenance of the spacecraft's position at a gravitationally stable location called Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1.

Sunjammer won't be the world's first solar sail mission. NASA launched NanoSail-D, whose sail covered just 100 square feet (9.3 square m), in November 2010. And Japan's Ikaros probe deployed its solar sail in June 2010, becoming the first craft ever to cruise through space propelled only by sunlight.

Starburst Galaxy

Messier 82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy, is a starburst galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Starburst galaxies undergo extremely high rates of star formation and are thought to represent a particular phase in a galaxy's evolution. Because of its excessive star birth, M82 is five times brighter than our own Milky Way galaxy.

This image, from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, required a 28-hour exposure using the 32-inch Schulman telescope.

NASA restarts most powerful rocket engine ever built!!

The last time NASA fired an F-1 in anger was in 1972, with the launch of Skylab. Since then, the F-1 program has been largely dormant, passed over in favor of the Space Shuttle and its solid fuel booster rockets. But NASA still has a bunch of old F-1s kicking around (17 of them at last count), and last week, the agency got one out of storage at the Smithsonian where it had been sitting for like 40 years and fired up a little piece of it. This firing was not of the entire F-1 engine, which would have been stupendously more firey. No, what you're looking at is what's called a gas generator, which is an auxiliary rocket engine used to power components of the actual rocket engine. In this case, the gas generator is what powers the turbine that pumps liquid fuel into the combustion chamber on the engine itself: the generator burns liquid oxygen and kerosene, just like a normal rocket engine, but all of that power is fed to a turbine instead of used as thrust.

On the F-1, that turbine spins at 5,500 RPM and produces 55,000 horsepower (!), while driving over 40,000 gallons of fuel into the F-1 combustion chamber every minute. So yeah, the fact that this rocket engine doesn't even count as a real rocket engine when it's attached to the F-1 should give you a good sense of how ridiculously powerful the whole thing was.The F-1s worked incredibly well, both in terms of power and reliability, and NASA is hoping to learn from the design of the F-1 as it develops booster rockets to power the Space Launch System. Last year, NASA awarded three contracts aimed at improving the affordability, reliability and performance of the SLS boosters, and one of these contracts is focused entirely on the F-1: the engine could soon be back, and better than ever.

Pretty Veils in Orion

This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion's stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed.

The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori's cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula's hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture. In three dimensions, LL Ori's wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the "bottom" edge. The beautiful picture is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation.

Exoplanets near red dwarfs suggest another Earth nearer

The nearest habitable, Earth-sized planet could be just 13 light-years away, research suggests.

An analysis of small, dim "red dwarf" stars - which make up a majority of stars in our galaxy - shows that 6% of them host such a planet.

The results will appear in Astrophysical Journal.

Study co-author David Charbonneau of Harvard University said the findings had implications for the search for life elsewhere.

"We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy," said Prof Charbonneau.

"That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."

The hunt for exoplanets has reached a pace that is difficult to keep up with.

The Kepler space telescope has been the source of most of the known candidate exoplanets. It stares at a fixed patch of sky, watching a field of more than 150,000 stars for the tiny dips in starlight that occur if an orbiting planet passes between a star and the telescope.

A catalogue run by US space agency Nasa lists more than 800 "exoplanets", most of them spotted with this so-called transit method.

That is just the tip of the planetary iceberg, however. On the basis of results from other methods, it has been estimated that on average, there are 1.6 planets around every star in the night sky.

But a major goal has been finding something more like our home planet; because of the way that we search for exoplanets, it is easier to spot the largest examples, and many in the catalogue are far larger than the Earth.

Yet, even roughly Earth-sized planets abound - more recent research suggests that one in six stars has a planet of about Earth's size in an orbit close to their host stars - making for at least 17 billion in our galaxy alone.

But close orbits would broadly be too hot - the hunt seeks roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting at a sufficient distance that water, if it is there, can exist in liquid form - and not so distant that it freezes. This range is called the habitable zone - or colloquially, the Goldilocks zone. The new announcement concerns Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around red dwarf stars - far dimmer and smaller than our Sun. Their low light output means that the habitable zone is far closer in.

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA) trawled through data from Kepler, plucking out a number of red dwarf stars.

Red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy - and research has shown that older galaxies contain even more.

The team found 95 planet candidates around the dwarfs, showing that at least 60% of them host planets smaller than Neptune.

But from the analysis, three planets of about the right temperature and roughly Earth's size (between 90% and 170% of the Earth's radius) emerged - all between 300 and 600 light-years away.

Taking into account the red dwarfs that are yet to be detected, the analysis suggests that 6% of the stars host an Earth-like planet in terms of size and temperature - that makes for at least 4.5 billion of them in our galaxy.

And given the proximity of many red dwarfs to the Earth, the statistics suggest that our nearest cosy Earth-sized planet could be just 13 light-years away.

"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realise another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted," said Courtney Dressing, lead author of the study.

The findings hit at the heart of a question posed by the Kepler mission's principal investigator, William Borucki, during the American Astronomical Society meeting in January.

"I think what we need to do, now we know most stars have planets, [is find out]: do most stars have small planets like the Earth in the habitable zone?," he told BBC News.

"That's what we'd like to know - is there likely to be life? If we find lots of those planets, there probably is."

Curiosity Rover's Self Portrait at 'John Klein' Drilling Site, Cropped

This rectangular version of a self-portrait of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013).

The rover is positioned at a patch of flat outcrop called "John Klein," which was selected as the site for the first rock-drilling activities by Curiosity. The self-portrait was acquired to document the drilling site.

The rover's robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic. MAHLI, which took the component images for this mosaic, is mounted on a turret at the end of the arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images or portions of images used in the mosaic.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, developed, built and operates MAHLI. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project and the mission's Curiosity rover for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Feeding the Final Frontier-3-D Printers Could Make Astronaut Meals

Several decades from now, an astronaut in a Mars colony might feel a bit hungry. Rather than reach for a vacuum-sealed food packet or cook up some simple greenhouse vegetables in a tiny kitchen, the astronaut would visit a microwave-sized box, punch a few settings, and receive a delicious and nutritious meal tailored to his or her exact tastes.

This is the promise of the rapidly maturing field of 3-D food printing, an offshoot of the revolution that uses machines to build bespoke items out of metal, plastic, and even living cells. Sooner than you think, 3-D printed designer meals may be coming to a rocketship, or a restaurant, near you.


“Right now, astronauts on the space station are eating the same seven days of food on rotations of two or three weeks,” said astronautical engineer Michelle Terfansky, who studied the potential and challenges of making 3-D printed food in space for a master’s thesis at the University of Southern California. “It gets the job done, but it’s not exactly home cooking.” With 3-D printers coming of age, engineers are starting to expand the possible list of materials they might work with. The early work in food has been in making desserts – a Japanese company lets you order your sweetheart a creepy chocolate 3-D model of their head – but some researchers are already thinking of what comes next. The Fab@Home team at Cornell University has developed gel-like substances called hydrocolloids that can be extruded and built up into different shapes. By mixing in flavoring agents, they can produce a range of tastes and textures.

The ability to 3-D print meals could be particularly handy on long-duration space missions, said Terfansky. Food is a basic source of comfort to humans, who would be dealing with a high-stress environment during a trip to an asteroid or Mars. Monotony will be a major challenge for such endeavors and the ability to provide variety and change in diet could be key. Having a family member back on Earth be able to design a special meal for an astronaut, beam it to their spaceship, and have it prepared in space might help travelers deal with distance and loneliness.

A 3-D printer could mix vitamins and amino acids into a meal to provide nutrients and boost productivity. There are limitations to the types of fresh foods that can be grown in space – NASA says some of the best crops for a Mars mission are lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes. With that you could make a salad, but a 3-D printer could manufacture croutons or protein-dense supplements. The device could take up less space than a supply of packets of food and, because each item is custom built, would help cut down on waste.

Obviously, such technology would find many applications on Earth. A 3-D printer could create unique and novel foods that are impossible to produce with conventional cooking. Hot dogs could be filled with layers of ketchup or mustard and cakes could have a logo inside that appears when a slice is cut out. Likely the first people to embrace the new design possibilities will be avant-garde chefs.

But 3-D food printing systems still have a long way to go, with most of the current limitations involving the printer’s extruding system. Some items, like frosting or processed cheese, are easy to make printable. A chocolate treat, for instance, is created using a syringe filled with melted chocolate to build up a shape specified by a computer layer by layer.

But other materials – fruits, vegetables, and meats – are much more of a challenge. Even with flavored gels, printing a wide variety of foods would require figuring out how to lay down potentially dozens of different materials, each with their own characteristic viscosity or perfect temperature range, using interchangeable printer heads. Of course, this is food we’re talking about, and it has to be appealing. In the earliest tests of the hydrocolloid 3-D food printer, the Cornell team produced different fake items — bananas, mushrooms, mozzarella – all with the appropriate texture and flavor.

“We quickly ran into the yuck factor,” said engineer Jeffery Lipton, who leads Cornell’s Fab@Home lab, which makes open-source 3-D printer kits. “It was the Uncanny Valley of food,” he added. It was very close to, but still unlike, the cuisine people expected.

Terfansky understands this is an issue. At first, she said such devices would probably extrude gloppy shapes filled with chemicals that make them smell or taste like chicken (while not quite being a drumstick). Because no one wants to eat something that looks and tastes bad, Terfansky said the best thing would be to focus on making sure things are delicious and then improving the visual aesthetics.

Within five to 10 years, she said the technology might get to the point where a single printer could produce lots of different food items that are both flavorful and look like what they’re supposed to be. Terfansky sees a day further in the future when most home kitchens include a 3-D printer simple enough for a child to go up and press the “hamburger” button in order to receive a meal. Such plans may seem like the food machine from The Jetsons but other researchers say they’re not out of the realm of possibility.

“At first I thought of it being ridiculously difficult,” said engineer Boris Fritz of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, who works on 3-D printers that produce extremely high-precision metallic machinery. “But this stuff doesn’t have to be precise at all. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed obvious and inevitable that within about five years something like this will be done.”

Lipton thinks the more out-there possibilities, like building up a meal of steak and potatoes from scratch, are still 15 to 20 years or more in the future. He agrees that the technology could be adopted first in places like hospitals or space stations, where people have sensitive or predictable nutritional needs.

“It’s an exciting premise it’s just a long ways away,” he said.

Engineers Building Hard-working Mining Robot

After decades of designing and operating robots full of scientific gear to study other worlds, NASA is working on a prototype that leaves the delicate instruments at home in exchange for a sturdy pair of diggers and the reliability and strength to work all day, every day for years.

Think of it as a blue collar robot.

Dubbed RASSOR, for Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot and pronounced "razor," the autonomous machine is far from space-ready, but the earliest design has shown engineers the broad strokes of what their lunar soil excavator needs in order to operate reliably.

"We were surprised at what we could do with it," said Rachel Cox, a Kennedy Space Center engineer on the RASSOR team.

The primary challenge for any digging robot operating off Earth is that they have to be light and small enough to fly on a rocket, but heavy enough to operate in gravity lower than that of Earth.

"The lighter you make your robot, the more difficult it is to do this excavating," said A.J. Nick, an engineer on the RASSOR team.

RASSOR tackles this problem by using digging bucket drums at each end of the robot's body that rotate in opposite directions, giving enough traction on one end to let the opposite side dig into the soil.

The team built a weight off-loading harness that simulated working the rover in the moon's 1/6th gravity field.

"We proved that if you engage one bucket, it pulls itself but when you lower the other bucket and rotate it, once they both catch in, it starts digging," Nick said.

Another secret of the drum, inspired by a previous Lockheed Martin design, is the staggered shallow scoops that shave the soil a bit at a time rather than scoop large chunks of it all at once, the way bulldozers do on Earth.

A concept mission for RASSOR would have a 2000 pound payload in addition to the lander, which would be about the size of the Phoenix lander NASA sent to Mars. The RASSOR is expected to weigh about 100 pounds. The remaining payload would be used to process the lunar soil delivered by RASSOR.

The RASSOR looks like a small tank chassis with a drum at either end, each attached with arms. The drums are perhaps the robot's most innovative feature. Because they are mounted on moving arms, they can act almost as legs letting the robot step and climb over obstacles.

The team calls such moves "acrobatics." They point out that the robot can safely drive off the lander and right itself, flip itself over to get unstuck from fine soil and lift the whole body off the ground to let its treads run smoothly to remove built up soil. RASSOR is designed to easily make itself into a Z-shaped position to drop its soil collection into the hopper.

With the drums positioned above the main body of the robot, it stands about 2 1/2 feet tall.

The robot is designed to skim lunar soil and dump it into a device that would pull water and ice out of the dirt and turn their chemicals into rocket fuel or breathing air for astronauts working on the surface. The device would be part of the lander that carries the RASSOR to the moon's surface. So the robot would be the feeder for a lunar resource processing plant, a level of industry never before tried anywhere besides Earth.

Producing water and fuel from the lunar soil would save the tremendous expense of launching the supplies from Earth, since 90 percent of a rocket's mass normally consists of propellant, which can be made on the moon.

"This has been kind of the dream, the mission they gear this around," Nick said.

The concept could work on Mars, too, since its soil also is suspected of holding large amounts of water ice.

"There are some areas at the poles where they think there's a lot of ice, so you'd be digging in ice," Nick said. "There's other areas where the water is actually 30 centimeters down so you actually have to dig down 30 centimeters and take off the top and that depth is really where you want to start collecting water ice."

But in order to provide enough material to the production platform to create usable amounts of resources, the RASSOR would need to operate about 16 hours a day for five years.

It would drive five times faster than the Mars Curiosity rover's top speed of 4 centimeters per second, then shave the moon's surface with a pair of rotating drums and return to the resource processing plant with some 40 pounds of lunar soil for processing.

"Right now, we just want to make sure nothing in our design precludes it from doing that," said Jason Schuler, one of the engineers on the RASSOR project.

Devising a robot for such demands called for numerous innovations, and the team says it has at least one major decision to make before it begins construction of the second generation RASSOR prototype: keep going with tracks like those that tanks use, or switch to wheels.

The tracks showed some flaws in recent testing, mostly relating to the pebbles and sand particles clogging the gears and making the track slip off. The group tried out RASSOR on several surfaces at Kennedy, including the crushed river rock dug up from the crawlerway.

The rock, even though pulverized by the gigantic crawlers, is not a great substitute for lunar soil, the engineers said, but as long as the robot handles that matter well, they say they know it will manage whatever the moon soil offers.

"The mobility was definitely a challenge," Schuler said. "You can't take for granted that it's going to work like it does on grass or concrete or even on sand."

Part of the problem, the engineers said, might be the rubber material the tracks are made of, but a lunar version of the robot would use a different material, possibly metallic. For example, the lunar rover the astronauts drove on the surface used wheels made of stainless steel springs rather than rubber.

"We are studying if we want to invest the time and make a more robust track system or if we want to go to wheels," Cox said.

A 25-foot-square area has been cleared in part of the engineers' workshop to make room for a large area of imitation lunar soil that will allow the robot to be tested in material close to what it will face on the moon.

The team already is designing RASSOR 2, a prototype that would be much closer to what NASA could launch in the future. It's expected to begin testing in early 2014.

DARPA Can See You -- From 17,500 Feet In The Air

Curious as to how the Defense Department could be spying on you next? PBS checked in with DARPA about the latest in drone camera technology for the NOVA special "Rise of the Drones," including the world's highest-resolution camera.
Actually seeing the sensor on ARGUS-IS, or Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is still classified, but the basics of how it works have been deemed fit for public consumption.
ARGUS-IS uses 368 imaging chips like those found in cell phone cameras, to stitch together a 1.8 billion pixel video. That means from 17,500 feet in the air, ARGUS-IS can see someone on the ground waving their arms. And it generates that kind of high-definition video for an area 15 square miles across. It can see a bird flying through a parking lot from more than three miles in the air.
It can store a million terabytes of video a day, up to 5,000 hours of footage, so soon drones will not only be able to see everything that happens on the ground, but also keep that record.
Whether or not ARGUS has been used in the field is still classified. Let's get real, though: Does this cool a toy get put in a corner?

F-35C First in-Flight Dual Refueling!!

For the first time, two Lockheed Martin F-35C Lightning II carrier variant test aircraft refueled together with a Lockheed Martin KC-130 Hercules in the sky above Patuxent River, Md. recently. The CV aircraft, known as CF-1 and CF-2, completed the milestone as part of an F-35 flight test program that will accomplish more than 1,000 flights in 2013. Later this year, Eglin AFB, Fla., will receive its first CV aircraft joining the F-35 pilot and maintainer training program there.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs about 120,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems,
products and services. The corporation’s net sales for 2011 were 34.31€ billion.

See the World Spinning 'Round!!

One of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) stands beneath bright star trails appearing to circle the south celestial pole, lying in the southern constellation of Octans (The Octant). Many exposures were taken over time and combined to give the final appearance of circular tracks. Four Unit Telescopes (UTs) make up the VLT at Paranal, Chile. Each UT possesses a name in the language of the native Mapuche tribe. The names of the UTs — Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun — represent celestial objects: the sun, moon, the Southern Cross constellation and Venus, respectively. The UT in this photograph is Yepun, also known as UT4.

Space History Photo- Skylab and Earth Limb

In this historical photo from the U.S. space agency, an overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules (CSM) during the final fly-around by the CSM on Feb. 8, 1974, before returning home. The space station is contrasted against the pale blue Earth.

During launch on May 14, 1973, some 63 seconds into flight, the micrometeor shield on the Orbital Workshop (OWS) experienced a failure that caused it to be caught up in the supersonic air flow during ascent. This ripped the shield from the OWS and damaged the tie downs that secured one of the solar array systems.

Complete loss of one of the solar arrays happened at 593 seconds when the exhaust plume from the S-II's separation rockets impacted the partially deployed solar array system. Without the micrometeoroid shield that was to protect against solar heating as well, temperatures inside the OWS rose to 126 degrees fahrenheit.

Historic First Use of Drill on Mars Set for Jan. 31 – Curiosity’s Sol 174

Image caption: Curiosity will conduct Historic 1st drilling into Martian rock at this spot where the robotic arm is pressing down onto the Red Planet’s surface at the John Klein outcrop of veined hydrated minerals. The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) is in contact with the ground. This panoramic photo mosaic of Navcam camera images was snapped on Jan. 25 & 26, 2013 or Sols 168 & 169 and shows a self-portrait of Curiosity dramatically backdropped with her ultimate destination- Mount Sharp.
The long awaited and history making first use of a drill on Mars is set to happen on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013, or Sol 174, by NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) rover, if all goes well, according to science team member Ken Herkenhoff of the USGS.
Curiosity’s first drilling operation entails hammering a test hole into a flat rock at the location where the rover is currently parked at a scientifically interesting outcrop of rocks with veined minerals called ‘John Klein’. See our mosaics above & below illustrating Curiosity’s current location.
“Drill tailings will not be collected during this test, which will use only the percussion (not rotation) drilling mode,” says Herkenhoff.
Curiosity is an incredibly complex robot that the team is still learning to operate. So the plan could change at a moment’s notice.
The actual delivery of drill tailings to Curiosity’s CheMin and SAM analytical labs is still at least several days or more away and must await a review of results from the test drill hole and further drilling tests.
“We are proceeding with caution in the approach to Curiosity’s first drilling,” said Daniel Limonadi, the lead systems engineer for Curiosity’s surface sampling and science system at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “This is challenging. It will be the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars.”
On Sol 166, Curiosity drove about 3.5 meters to reach the John Klein outcrop that the team chose as the 1st drilling site. The car sized rover is investigating a shallow depression known as ‘Yellowknife Bay’ – where she has found widespread evidence for repeated episodes of the ancient flow of liquid water near her landing site inside Gale Crater on Mars.
In anticipation of Thursday’s planned drilling operation, the rover just carried out a series of four ‘pre-load’ tests on Monday (Jan. 27), whereby the rover placed the drill bit onto Martian surface targets at the John Klein outcrop and pressed down on the drill with the robotic arm. Engineers then checked the data to see whether the force applied matched predictions.

3-D Printed Buildings Coming Soon to a Moon Near You

The European Space Agency wants to 3-D print a moon base.

One of the biggest challenges for space colonists is just how expensive (in terms of energy) it is to get supplies off of Planet Earth. Until we get a space elevator, it’s going to stay that way. One solution is to send as little as possible up there. When it comes to building a moon base, couldn’t we just make it out of rock? After all, the moon is already made of rocks.

The European Space Agency in partnership with Foster + Partners and Monolite UK is aiming to do exactly that.

By using the Moon’s loose rocks (regolith) as a base for concrete, robots based on Monolite’s D-Shape 3-D printer will be able to build up a structure that uses as many local materials as possible. The idea is that with a shell made of moon rocks to act as a shield against micro-meteors and similar hazards, the living quarters for moon colonists could be inflatable envelopes protected by these shells. 3-D printing concrete in a vacuum is very, very different from printing it on earth. The teams have been experimenting with simulated moon rock material in vacuum chambers to find methods of construction that work. The problem being that concrete relies on applying liquids and unprotected liquids boil away when there’s no atmosphere. They discovered that by inserting the 3-D printer’s nozzle underneath the regolith, capillary forces kept enough liquid in place long enough to set properly. The ESA aren’t the only ones looking at 3-D printed moon bases. In 2011, NASA released images of what it might look like to send architectural rovers to the moon to lay down the foundations of a moon base before people even got near. Let the robots do the construction in high hazard, painstaking work, and then humans can waltz in once the environment is ready.

It’s kind of amazing how quickly we’ve gone from “this is crazy” to “this is a probably a thing that will happen”.

First Color Image of Curiosity’s Tracks from Orbit

As Curiosity prepares for the historic first drilling operation on Mars, the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of it from 271 km (169 miles) up, along with twin lines of tracks and the blast marks from the dramatic rocket-powered descent back on August 6 (UTC).
The image here was acquired on Jan. 13, Sol 157 of the MSL mission, as part of a dual HiRISE/CRISM observation of the landing site. According to The University of Arizona’s HiRISE site it’s the first time the rover’s tracks have been imaged in color.
Her original landing site can be seen at the right edge. (Wait… did I just say “her?”)
The pair of bright white spots in the HiRISE image show the area immediately below where sky crane’s rockets were pointed. Those areas were “blasted clean” and therefore show brightest. The larger dark scour zone is dark because the fine dust has been blown away from the area leaving darker materials.
– Ross A. Beyer, UofA HiRISE team
Curiosity can be seen as she (yes, it was confirmed today during ScienceOnline2013 that the rover — like all exploration vehicles — is a girl) was preparing for drilling into a rock outcrop called John Klein within the “Yellowknife” region in Gale Crater. Drilling is expected to begin today, Jan. 31.

London to Sydney in 90 minutes- Hypersonic SpaceLiner that travels at 24 times the speed of sound 'to be built by 2050'

A hypersonic SpaceLiner capable of reaching 24 times the speed of sound and transporting passengers from London to Sydney in 90 minutes could be with us by 2050.
Although the finished article is still a long way off, Martin Sippel, project coordinator for SpaceLiner at the German Aerospace Center believes the project could attract private funding within a decade.
The current concept includes a rocket booster stage for launch and a separate orbiter stage to carry up to 50 passengers halfway around the world without ever making it to space.
A journey between Europe and the U.S. would be reduced to just over 60 minutes, providing passengers are happy to pay space travel prices, estimated to be in the region of several hundred thousand dollars per ticket.
Should it take off in both sense of the word, there is no reason why a fleet of SpaceLiners couldn't make up to 15 flights a day, believes Sippel.
'Maybe we can best characterise the SpaceLiner by saying it's a kind of second-generation space shuttle, but with a completely different task,' Sippel told.
The SpaceLiner would take approximately eight minutes to climb to an altitude of some 50 miles where it reach the earth's upper atmosphere before gliding back to Earth at hypersonic speeds of more than 15,000mph.
SpaceLiner engineers hope to use a liquid oxygen and hydrogen rocket fuel, leaving water vapour as waste.
Engineers predict that advances in materials could be combined with new cooling technologies and heat shielding to safeguard the SpaceLiner's structures against the intense heat of hypersonic flight.

The Spaceliner would likely require an isolated launch site and careful route planning to keep sonic booms from negatively affecting residential areas.
The empty rocket stage from SpaceLiner would return to Earth after launch so that it could be reused.
The plan would be for an aircraft to fly out and latch on to the rocket stage before towing it towards an airfield where it could glide in to land.
SpaceLiner's eventually design could well be influenced by upcoming, EU-funded study FAST20XX (Future High-Altitude High-Speed Transport 20xx).
A close eye will also be on the success or failure of space ventures by the likes of Virgin Galactic. Should space travel capture the interest of travellers, Sippel is confident a fleet of SpaceLiners could make up to 15 flights a day.

A lightning flash from a line of severe thunderstorms sweeping across the eastern United States was spotted from space by the Suomi NPP satellite on the night of Jan. 29, 2013.

A line of severe storms, reaching from Pittsburgh to the Gulf Coast, is currently sweeping its way across the eastern United States. The system started rolling through the mid-South and parts of the Midwest yesterday (Jan. 29), and a satellite snapped a nighttime view of a lightning flash generated by the storms.

The Suomi NPP satellite, run jointly by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, flew over the satellite activity last night. Because of the near-full moon, the satellite was able to see details of the storm clouds that would only be visible during daylight hours to other satellites, according to a NOAA statement.

Where not blocked by the clouds, the lights of several major southern cities, including Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Chattanooga, Tenn., are clearly visible. Two very bright lights in western Tennessee, though, are not cities at all, but lightning flashes caught by Suomi NPP. The system brought severe weather to the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee valleys yesterday, with the National Weather Service issuing several tornado watches and severe thunderstorm warnings. The system continued raging overnight, bringing the threat of nighttime tornadoes, which can be particularly deadly, as people tend to be in bed and unaware of warnings and the storms are harder to see as they bear down. The threat of deadly nighttime tornadoes is exacerbated in the winter with the season's shorter daylight hours.

The potential for severe weather extends from the Southeast up to New York City today, with the possibilities of locally heavy winds and rains.

There have been 430 severe thunderstorm reports, 20 large hail reports and nine tornado reports as of 1 p.m. EST, according to The Weather Channel. One death has been confirmed from a tornado that hit Adairsville, Ga. A tornado that hit Mt. Juliet, Tenn., in the early morning hours was confirmed to be an EF-2 on the tornado damage scale, with maximum winds of 115 mph (185 kph), according to the Nashville National Weather Service office.

Accuweather.com warned that rains from the line of storms would hit the I-95 corridor around rush hour this evening from New Jersey to South Carolina.

Haunting Ghost Nebula

This image was obtained with the wide-field view of the Mosaic Camera on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. vdB 141 is a reflection nebula located in the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes referred to as the ghost nebula, its awkward name is its catalog number in Sidney van den Bergh's catalog of reflection nebulae, published in 1966. Several stars are embedded in the nebula. Their light gives it a ghoulish brown color. North is down and East is to the right. Imaged August 28, 2009.

NASA's SDO Provides First Sightings of How a CME Forms

On July 19, 2012, SDO captured images of a solar flare in numerous wavelengths. The 131 Angstrom wavelength, shown here in the middle and colorized in teal, portrays particularly hot material on the sun, at 10 million Kelvin, which is why the incredibly hot flare shows up best in that wavelength. The 131 wavelength was also able to show kinked magnetic fields known as a flux rope that lay at the heart of a coronal mass ejection (CME), which also erupted at the same time as the flare. On July 18, 2012, a fairly small explosion of light burst off the lower right limb of the sun. Such flares often come with an associated eruption of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME - but this one did not. Something interesting did happen, however. Magnetic field lines in this area of the sun's atmosphere, the corona, began to twist and kink, generating the hottest solar material - a charged gas called plasma - to trace out the newly-formed slinky shape.

The plasma glowed brightly in extreme ultraviolet images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and scientists were able to watch for the first time the very formation of something they had long theorized was at the heart of many eruptive events on the sun: a flux rope.

Eight hours later, on July 19, the same region flared again. This time the flux rope's connection to the sun was severed, and the magnetic fields escaped into space, dragging billions of tons of solar material along for the ride -- a classic CME.

"Seeing this structure was amazing," says Angelos Vourlidas, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "It looks exactly like the cartoon sketches theorists have been drawing of flux ropes since the 1970s. It was a series of figure eights lined up to look like a giant slinky on the sun."

More than just gorgeous to see, such direct observation offers one case study on how this crucial kernel at the heart of a CME forms. Such flux ropes have been seen in images of CMEs as they fly away from the sun, but it's never been known - indeed, has been strongly debated - whether the flux rope formed before or in conjunction with a CME's launch. This case shows a clear-cut example of the flux rope forming ahead of time. Vourlidas is a co-author, along with Spiro Patsourakos and Guillermo Stenborg, of a paper on these results published in the Astrophysical Journal on Jan. 31, 2013.

Spotting such a foreshadowing of a CME could help scientists develop ways to predict them, says Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for SDO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "By telling us when and where flux ropes will erupt," Pesnell says. "SDO helps us predict a major source of space weather."

Scientific research is always a dance between hypothesis and experimental confirmation, and the history of the flux rope is no exception. Plasma physicists suggested that such coils of magnetic field lines were at the heart of flares in the 1970s and spacecraft near Earth provided in-situ measurements that occasionally traced out helical structures inside CMEs.

Later, the flux ropes were spotted in images of CMEs captured by the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) - which launched in 1995 - using the mission's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), a telescope that blocks out the bright light of the solar disk in order to better see the tenuous corona around it. They are now a regular appearance on coronagraph and heliospheric imaging observations.

When it came to watching them form in a CME, however, the task was much harder. Since CMEs can form quite suddenly - known as impulsive CMEs - the associated flux ropes are smaller and closer to the surface, making it difficult to spot them amongst the many structures in the corona.

In the absence of direct observational evidence, theorists have produced two theories based on general physics of plasmas and magnetic fields of how and when the flux rope might form. In one, the magnetic structure of the rope exists before the CME, and as it evolves over time it twists and kinks becoming increasingly unstable.

Eventually it erupts from the sun, releasing enormous amounts of energy and solar plasma. In the second version, the CME erupts when looping magnetic field lines are severed from the sun's surface. While the great blob of solar material streams off the sun, the fields reconnect with each other to form a classic flux rope shape.

"In this case, we saw this big eruption on July 19," says Vourlidas. "We wanted to analyze the eruption and we started going back in time - a few minutes, then an hour, then eight hours. And then we saw it. A flux rope that looked just like the cartoons scientists have been drawing for decades."

Vourlidas credits this first sighting to three things. First, the team looked far enough back in time, when previous searches have often only looked a few minutes back.

Second, the sun obliged its viewers with the perfect angle at which to see the tell-tale loops of the flux rope. SDO's cameras could look right down the center of the rope, like looking down the tunneled center of a slinky. Third, AIA's cameras capture imagery that no other cameras do: light at the 131 Angstrom wavelength, which shows solar material heated to temperatures of 10,000,000 K (18,000,000 F / 10,000,000 C).

In images of the same region at the same time showing cooler material, the flux rope doesn't show up at all. AIA scientists chose to include a filter to view this unprecedentedly high temperature because they posited that flares could heat the corona to those temperatures. Apparently the same incredibly hot plasma helped highlight the flux rope that would later give rise to a CME.

Over the course of the next eight hours after the July 18 flux rope formed, the rope did show up faintly in images of cooler material, suggesting that the hot material from the flare cooled down over time as the flux rope also rose in space. Then eight hours later, on July 19, the material got hot again, the region flared, and the flux rope escaped into space.

"We could verify that the flux rope was there in the coronagraph from SOHO. We could see the typical slinky structure with multiple round loops inside it," says Vourlidas. "We looked at it with other NASA telescopes, too. We looked at it with everything we've got. It's a wonderful time to be a solar physicist, because thanks to the large number of telescopes we have in space at the moment, we can see things like this from every angle."

Vourlidas says that images from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) also helped with analysis. Since the two STEREO spacecraft observe the sun from a different perspective than does SDO, the team got a top-down view of the flux rope with STEREO-A's EUV Imager, which helped unravel the 3-D structure of the flux rope. The foot points of the rope touched in widely separated areas of the solar surface - an interesting structural development in of itself that is worth further study.

The team will certainly look for other examples in the images of the hottest plasma, searching for evidence of pre-formed flux ropes further back in time. But even one such example of direct evidence adds an important step to the constant scientific cycle of theory and observation, helping refine and improve the theories of what causes these giant explosions on the sun.