SPACElty blog

Cosmic Curiosity Reveals Ghostly Glow Of Dead Quasar

2010-11-04T15:38:00.001+02:00

The green Voorwerp in the foreground remains illuminated by light emitted up to 70,000 years ago by a quasar in the center of the background galaxy, which has since died out. (Photo: WIYN/William Keel/Anna Manning)

by Staff Writers

New Haven CT (SPX) Nov 04, 2010

While sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffled professional astronomers.

Two years later, a team led by Yale University researchers has discovered that the unique object represents a snapshot in time that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes.

In a new study, the team has confirmed that the unusual object, known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's "object" in Dutch), is a large cloud of glowing gas illuminated by the light from a quasar-an extremely energetic galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center.

The twist, described online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is that the quasar lighting up the gas has since burned out almost entirely, even though the light it emitted in the past continues to travel through space, illuminating the gas cloud and producing a sort of "light echo" of the dead quasar.

"This system really is like the Rosetta Stone of quasars," said Yale astronomer Kevin Schawinski, a co-founder of Galaxy Zoo and lead author of the study. "The amazing thing is that if it wasn't for the Voorwerp being illuminated nearby, the galaxy never would have piqued anyone's interest."

The team calculated that the light from the dead quasar, which is the nearest known galaxy to have hosted a quasar, took up to 70,000 years to travel through space and illuminate the Voorwerp-meaning the quasar must have shut down sometime within the past 70,000 years.

Until now, it was assumed that supermassive black holes took millions of years to die down after reaching their peak energy output.

However, the Voorwerp suggests that the supermassive black holes that fuel quasars shut down much more quickly than previously thought.

"This has huge implications for our understanding of how galaxies and black holes co-evolve," Schawinski said.

"The time scale on which quasars shut down their prodigious energy output is almost entirely unknown," said Meg Urry, director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics and a co-author of the paper.

"That's why the Voorwerp is such an intriguing-and potentially critical-case study for understanding the end of black hole growth in quasars."

Although the galaxy no longer shines brightly in X-ray light as a quasar, it is still radiating at radio wavelengths. Whether this radio jet played a role in shutting down the central black hole is just one of several possibilities Schawinski and the team will investigate next.

"We've solved the mystery of the Voorwerp," he said. "But this discovery has raised a whole bunch of new questions."

Other authors of the paper include Shanil Virani, Priyamvada Natarajan, Paolo Coppi (all of Yale University); Daniel Evans (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Elon University); William Keel and Anna Manning (University of Alabama and Kitt Peak National Observatory); Chris Lintott (University of Oxford and Adler Planetarium); Sugata Kaviraj (University of Oxford and Imperial College London); Steven Bamford (University of Nottingham); Gyula Jozsa (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Argelander-Institut fur Astronomie); Michael Garrett (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Leiden Observatory and Swinburne University of Technology); Hanny van Arkel (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy); Pamela Gay (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville); and Lucy Fortson (University of Minnesota). Citation: Kevin Schawinski et al 2010 ApJ 724 L30 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/724/1/L30

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Electrical malfunction delays Discovery launch to Thursday

2010-11-03T15:56:00.000+02:00

by Staff Writers
Cape Canaveral, Florida (AFP)
An electrical malfunction has forced the US space agency to delay until Thursday the shuttle Discovery's final mission to the International Space Station, NASA said.

"Space shuttle Discovery's launch on the STS-133 mission has been delayed until no earlier than Thursday," NASA said in a statement.

The mission, initially scheduled for Monday, has been postponed three times.

Earlier delays were announced so that Kennedy Space Center technicians could repair quick-disconnect fittings in the system used to pressurize one of Discovery's orbital maneuvering rocket engines.

earlier related report
Shuttle Discovery counts down to final space voyage
Washington (AFP) Oct 31, 2010 - Discovery, the oldest space shuttle in NASA's fleet, is readying for its final mission Wednesday following repairs to leaks in a pressurization system that has twice delayed the launch.

"Work is on schedule. We completed flight pressurization and all went well. That is behind us now," Steve Payne, NASA test director, told reporters as the countdown to launch kicked off at 2:00 pm (1800 GMT) Sunday.

The mission, initially scheduled for Monday, was postponed so Kennedy Space Center technicians could repair quick-disconnect fittings in the system used to pressurize one of Discovery's orbital maneuvering rocket engines.

Discovery and its six American astronauts will now launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 pm (1952 GMT) Wednesday bound for the International Space Station (ISS).

The weather forecast remains 70 percent for favorable conditions, Kathy Winters, Cape Canaveral's senior meteorologist, said at a press briefing, adding that there were slight concerns of possible rain and clouds in the launch area.

The flight to the orbiting ISS is the fourth and final shuttle flight of the year, and the last scheduled for Discovery, the oldest in the three-shuttle fleet that is being retired in 2011.

Discovery has been the busiest shuttle in history, with a record 38 trips into space since its first launch in 1984. According to NASA, it has traveled over 142 million miles (228 million kilometers) during that time, involving 5,628 orbits of the Earth over 351 days.

NASA has long relied on the Discovery spacecraft at key points along its 26-year career -- the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, the first ever female shuttle pilot Eileen Collins in 1995, and in 1998 it carried US space icon John Glenn to become the oldest human to fly in space at age 77.

Its all-American crew on this voyage, including female mission specialist Nicole Stott, will deliver a pressurized logistics module called Leonardo, which will be permanently attached to the space station to give it more storage space.

The shuttle will also bring Robonaut 2, the first human-like robot in space, and a permanent addition to the orbiting space station, as well as spare parts.

Two space walks, for maintenance work and component installation, are scheduled.

The three US shuttles -- the other two are Atlantis and Endeavour -- are due to be sent off to become museum pieces after a final shuttle mission to the space station in late February.

That means Russian Soyuz spacecraft, a modernized version of which recently dropped off three fresh crew members to the ISS, doubling the crew to six, will for several years be the only vehicle for transporting humans into space.

However, NASA's recently approved 2011 budget has left the door open to an additional shuttle flight in June.

space-travel.com

China Goes To Mars

2010-11-01T09:30:00.000+02:00

Mars Orbital Insertion will be a significant achievement for China's growing space science program.

by Morris Jones
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Oct 31, 2010
As China's second Moon probe continues its mission, more information is being disclosed about China's ambitions for worlds beyond. China has made no secret of its plans to explore Mars, but we are getting a firmer indication of what to expect.

Vague statements in the Chinese media have suggested that China could launch a mission to Mars in 2013. This is an interesting suggestion for a program that's still largely unknown to us. How does this add to our knowledge of China's Mars program?

China's first planned step to Mars is very well known. In 2011, the Yinghuo 1 orbiter will be launched to Mars in tandem with Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission. We know a lot about Yinghuo 1 already, thanks to some fairly open publicity about the mission. Yinghuo 1 is a small orbiter, which will enter a highly elliptical orbit around Mars.

Its main role is to study the tenuous Martian atmosphere, and help to answer one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the planet. Long ago, the atmosphere of Mars was much thicker, helping to produce almost Earthlike conditions on the surface. Why did Mars change into the barren world of today, and why did most of the atmosphere disappear?

Roughly two years after Yinghuo 1 is launched, a new "launch window" will open between Earth and Mars, as the position of the planets becomes favourable again. NASA plans to send an orbiter during this window, and it will also study the Martian atmosphere. Could China be ready to fly again so soon?

There are plenty of reasons to believe that China could do it. Consider recent events. China has successfully carried out a long mission in deep space. The Chang'e 1 mission was China's first lunar orbiter. Launched in 2007, the spacecraft performed well in mapping the entire Moon.

China has followed this with the launch of Chang'e 2 just a few weeks ago. This spacecraft is essentially a copy of Chang'e 1, with different instruments and some improvements to its sub-systems. Chang'e 2 is performing very well, and has navigated successfully into a low lunar orbit. Chinese space engineers must feel pleased. They've developed a generic spacecraft design and proven that it works well, on two flights out of two.

China has also openly discussed the possibility of sending Chang'e 2 beyond the Moon once its primary mission is complete. While the spacecraft will not be sent to Mars, it has been suggested that Chang'e 2 could be sent into heliocentric orbit, to test communications and control at vast distances from Earth. This is another hint at what China is planning.

This author suggests that the basic spacecraft bus used for the Chang'e lunar orbiters could be modified for use as a Chinese Mars probe. The Chang'e bus, or main spacecraft body, is itself derived from a geostationary communications satellite. Engineers love evolution, taking something that works and modifying it for other purposes. From Earth orbit, to the Moon, to Mars, is the steady path of this robust spacecraft design.

A dedicated Mars mission would require further modifications to the design of the spacecraft. There would need to be changes to the antennas and telemetry systems used, to compensate for the greater distance. One of the changes in Chang'e 2 over its predecessor is the use of a new, advanced radio system with different frequencies. Could this be a precursor of something designed to work at Mars?

Flying to the Moon is, technically speaking, a trip into deep space. But a flight all the way to Mars could expose a spacecraft to even more hazards. The spacecraft could probably use some additional hardening of some of its key components, even if this is just placing extra cosmic ray shielding on the computer.

Getting to Mars requires more energy than a mission to the Moon. China used the Long March 3A for the first Chang'e launch, and then switched to the more powerful Long March 3C for the second. But even this rocket would struggle to send a Chang'e-type probe to Mars.

It's entirely possible, however, that the Long March 3B could do it. Despite its lower alphabetical rank, this rocket is more powerful than the 3A or 3C, and draws much of its extra force from the use of four strap-on rocket boosters. If China really wanted a big boost, it could use the stretched variant of this rocket, the Long March 3B/E.

Right now, this is the most powerful booster in China's fleet. More powerful boosters will be available to China when the Long March 5 family of boosters makes its debut, but this is unlikely to happen before 2014. If China wants to fly to Mars in 2013, the well-tested Long March 3B will be the best choice.

So, we have a rocket that can reach Mars and a spacecraft design that can fly there. What else needs to be addressed? China has a large stable of scientific instruments at its disposal. Some have been tested on the Chang'e missions. Some are already going to Mars on board Yinghuo.

A large Mars orbiter will need a high-resolution camera (currently on Chang'e 2), spectrometers (Chang'e 1 and 2) and some particles and fields instruments (Yinghuo 1 and various Chinese scientific satellites). China just needs to pick and choose.

Then there's the tracking and support. China has already demonstrated the ability to track and communicate with spacecraft at the Moon. Through its co-operation with the European Space Agency, it has access to a global deep space network, and can also tap European experience in tracking planetary missions. Control and navigation of both Chang'e missions was impressive.

When all the recent progress in China's unmanned space program is considered, the idea of launching an advanced Mars mission within three years does not sound farfetched. But China could elect to wait for another launch window, and refine some of its mission goals and hardware.

There are also ambitious feats in the works for China's lunar program, with a robot lunar landing expected in 2012. China is also planning its first small manned space laboratory, which should also receive its first crew in 2012. There's plenty of activity in the near future without going to Mars.

Even if China does not launch its second Mars mission in 2013, the very fact that it can be considered is instructive. It points to a growing confidence in China's spaceflight capabilities, and also gives hints to the type of hardware that would probably be used. As usual, time will reveal the answers to these questions.

www.spacedaily.com

Inexpensive orbital launches described

2010-10-27T09:39:00.000+03:00

disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only

by Staff Writers
Washington (UPI) Oct 25, 2010
A U.S. company says it wants to offer inexpensive launch capabilities to dozens of universities and organizations hoping to put small satellites into orbit.

Currently, these mini-satellites must go as piggyback secondary payloads on large rocket launch missions, giving the satellite owners little choice over the timing of a launch or the final orbital positioning, SPACE.COM reports.

"Getting reasonable cost access [to space] for small spacecraft is really critical," says Kris Kimel, president of Kentucky Space, a private-public consortium hoping to launch its first small orbital satellite in 2011. "We need to get that kind of access that allows us to relentlessly innovate and quite frankly to fail more."

A start-up company called NanoLauncher proposes to provide that access using existing technology in the form of decommissioned military aircraft that will carry the satellites on a small rocket to be launched at high altitude to head to Earth orbit.

Jets under consideration for the NanoLauncher program include the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and the McDonnell Douglas F-15D Eagle, which would take the small satellite slung underneath their fuselage on a rocket to an altitude of several miles up then launch the rocket to send the payload to its intended destination above Earth.

NanoLauncher says it expects to begin full-scale operations sometime in 2014.

www.spacedaily.com

Space tourism ticket prices could drop

2010-10-26T09:31:00.001+03:00

disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only

by Staff Writers
Houston (UPI) Oct 25, 2010
Two space tourism companies say the price for a trip into space could drop from millions of dollars down to hundreds of thousands by late 2011.

A brief trip into space featuring a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the earth 62 miles below could be within reach of the merely well-off and not just the mega-rich, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.

"Now, the sky is no longer the limit," said Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group is one the companies planning to offer commercial suborbital missions late next year. "We will begin the process of pushing beyond to the final frontier of space itself."

Space Adventures, the Vienna, Va.-based company that brokered the flights of seven space tourists to the International Space Station between 2001 and 2009, also plans to offer suborbital tourist flights.

Both companies are expected to offer tickets at between $100,000 and $200,000, still a steep price for a flight lasting a few minutes.

"There's no magic wand out there to wave and reduce the cost of space access by a factor of 10 or 100," said Jeff Foust, a space industry analyst for the Futron Corp.

The big hope in space tourism, he said, is that once suborbital flights grow in demand ticket prices will drop.

"It's not going to be something where it's a $99 deal with Southwest," Foust said. "Relative to commercial air travel it will still be expensive. But people spend tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest, visit Antarctica or go on African safaris. This price will attract adventure tourists."

www.space-travel.com

Planet Hunters No Longer Blinded By The Light

2010-10-25T15:35:00.000+03:00

The planet Beta Pictoris b imaged using the Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph. The "bad" (bright) side of the image is visible to the right while the central bright regions of the central star (Beta Pictoris) have been masked out to enable the viewer to clearly see the planet to the left of the star. Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)

by Staff Writers
Tucson AZ (SPX) Oct 20, 2010
Using new optics technology developed at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, an international team of astronomers has obtained images of a planet on a much closer orbit around its parent star than any other extrasolar planet previously found.

The discovery, published online in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is a result of an international collaboration among the Steward Observatory, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the European Southern Observatory, Leiden University in the Netherlands and Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy.

Installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, or VLT, atop Paranal Mountain in Chile, the new technology enabled an international team of astronomers to confirm the existence and orbital movement of Beta Pictoris b, a planet about seven to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, around its parent star, Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away.

At the core of the system is a small piece of glass with a highly complex pattern inscribed into its surface. Called an Apodizing Phase Plate, or APP, the device blocks out the starlight in a very defined way, allowing planets to show up in the image whose signals were previously drowned out by the star's glare.

"This technique opens new doors in planet discovery," said Phil Hinz, director of the UA's Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at Steward Observatory. "Until now, we only were able to look at the outer planets in a solar system, in the range of Neptune's orbit and beyond. Now we can see planets on orbits much closer to their parent star."

In other words, if alien astronomers in another solar system were studying our solar system using the technology previously available for direct imaging detection, all they would see would be Uranus and Neptune. The inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn, simply wouldn't show up in their telescope images.

To put the power of the new optics system in perspective: Neptune's mean distance from the sun is about 2.8 billion million miles, or 30 Astronomical Units, or AUs. One AU is defined as the mean distance between the sun and the Earth.

The newly imaged planet, Beta Pictoris b, orbits its star at about seven AUs, a distance where things get especially interesting, according to Hinz, "because that's where we believe the bulk of the planetary mass to be in most solar systems. Between five and 10 AUs."

While planet hunters have used a variety of indirect methods to detect the "footprints" of extrasolar planets - planets outside our solar system - for example the slight gravitational wobble an orbiting planet induces in its parent star, very few of them have been directly observed.

According to Hinz, the growing zoo of extrasolar planets discovered to date - mostly super-massive gas giants on wide orbits - represents a biased sample because their size and distance to their parent star makes them easier to detect.

"You could say we started out by looking at oddball solar systems out there. The technique we developed allows us to search for lower-mass gas giants about the size of Jupiter, which are more representative of what is out there."

He added: "For the first time, we can search around bright, nearby stars such as Alpha Centauri, to see if they have gas giants."

The breakthrough, which may allow observers to even block out starlight completely with further refinements, was made possible through highly complex mathematical modeling.

"Basically, we are canceling out the starlight halo that otherwise would drown out the light signal of the planet," said Johanan (John) Codona, a senior research scientist at the UA's Steward Observatory who developed the theory behind the technique, which he calls phase-apodization coronagraphy.

"If you're trying to find something that is thousands or a million times fainter than the star, dealing with the halo is a big challenge."

To detect the faint light signals from extrasolar planets, astronomers rely on coronagraphs to block out the bright disk of a star, much like the moon shielding the sun during an eclipse, allowing fainter, nearby objects to show up.

Using his own unconventional mathematical approach, Codona found a complex pattern of wavefront ripples, which, if present in the starlight entering the telescope, would cause the halo part to cancel out but leave the star image itself intact.

The Steward Observatory team used a machined piece of infrared optical glass about the size and shape of a cough drop to introduce the ripples. Placed in the optical path of the telescope, the APP device steals a small portion of the starlight and diffracts it into the star's halo, canceling it out.

"It's a similar effect to what you would see if you were diving in the ocean and looked at the sun from below the surface," explained Sascha Quanz from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Institute for Astonomy, the lead author of the study.

"The waves on the surface bend the light rays and cause the sky and clouds to appear quite different. Our optic works in a similar way."

In order to block out glare from a star, conventional coronagraphs have to be precisely lined up and are highly susceptible to disturbance. A soft night breeze vibrating the telescope might be all it takes to ruin the image. The APP, on the other hand, requires no aiming and works equally well on any stars or locations in the image.

"Our system doesn't care about those kinds of disturbances," Codona said. "It makes observing dramatically easier and much more efficient."

In the development of APP, Codona was joined by Matt Kenworthy (now at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands). Hinz, who is a member of the instrument upgrade team for the VLT, played a key role in the technique's implementation on the 6.5 Meter Telescope on Mount Hopkins in Southeastern Arizona.

Former UA astronomy professor Michael Meyer, now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, where he led the group implementing the technology on the VLT, pointed out that APP is likely to advance areas of research in addition to the hunt for extrasolar planets.

"It will be exciting to see how astronomers will use the new technology on the VLT, since it lends itself to other faint structures around young stars and quasars, too."

spacedaily.com

LRO Detects Surprising Gases In LCROSS Lunar Impact Plume

2010-10-22T13:55:00.001+03:00

illustration only

by Staff Writers

Boulder CO (SPX) Oct 22, 2010

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its sophisticated suite of instruments have determined that hydrogen, mercury and other volatile substances are present in permanently shaded soils on the Moon, according to a paper published in Science.

The Lunar Crater Remote Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which launched with LRO, was intentionally crashed onto the Moon's surface Oct. 9, 2009, while LRO instruments watched. About 90 seconds after LCROSS hit the Moon, LRO flew past the debris plume raised by the impact, while the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) and other instruments collected data.

Using these data, LAMP team members eventually confirmed the presence of the gases molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide and atomic mercury, along with smaller amounts of calcium and magnesium, also in gas form.

"We had hints from Apollo soils and models that the volatiles we see in the impact plume have been long collecting near the Moon's polar regions," says Dr. Randy Gladstone, LAMP acting principal investigator, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Now we have confirmation."

The point of impact was the Cabeus crater near the lunar south pole. The tiny tilt of the Moon's rotation axis allows the floors of craters near the poles to be permanently shaded from direct sunshine.

Without sunlight, temperatures in these areas can be as low as 35 to 100 Kelvin (degrees above absolute zero) - so cold that almost all volatiles that find their way there become trapped. Ongoing micrometeorite impacts cover them with dirt, further isolating them from exposure and possible escape.

LRO's findings are valuable to the future consideration of robotic and manned Moon base locations.

Just as the poles have nearby crater floors with permanently shaded regions because of the Moon's orientation to the Sun, they also have nearby mountains and crater rims that are in nearly perpetual sunlight, which would enable the placement and operation of solar-powered systems and equipment.

The discovery of water-ice and other resources in the region could also reduce the need to transport resources from Earth for use by astronauts.

"The detection of mercury in the soil was the biggest surprise, especially that it's in about the same abundance as the water detected by LCROSS," says Kurt Retherford, LAMP team member, also of SwRI. "Its toxicity could present a challenge for human exploration."

Developed by Southwest Research Institute, LAMP uses a novel method to peer into the darkness of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions.

The ultraviolet spectrograph observes the nightside lunar surface using light from nearby space (and stars), which bathes all bodies in space in a soft glow.

This Lyman-alpha glow is invisible to human eyes, but visible to LAMP as it reflects off the Moon. Analyses of the emissions, in collaboration with other LRO instruments, help determine lunar surface properties.

Following the LCROSS impact observations, LAMP continues its investigation of the ultraviolet reflectance properties and composition of the lunar surface and the composition of the lunar atmosphere.

Since the conclusion of a one-year reconnaissance mission under NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, the Science Mission Directorate has assumed oversight of more in-depth investigations for the science instruments. During the science investigation, LAMP will shift into more detailed evaluations of the Moon's atmosphere and its variability.

The paper, "LRO-LAMP Observations of the LCROSS Impact Plume," by G.R. Gladstone, D.M. Hurley, K.D. Retherford, P.D. Feldman, W.R. Pryor, J.-Y. Chaufray, M. Versteeg, T.K. Greathouse, A.J. Steffl, H. Throop, J.W. Parker, D.E. Kaufmann, A.F. Egan, M.W. Davis, D.C. Slater, J. Mukherjee, P.F. Miles, A.R. Hendrix, A. Colaprete, and S.A. Stern, was published in the Oct. 22 issue of Science.

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Astronomer Employs HPC To Peer Into Cosmic Mysteries

2010-10-21T09:24:00.000+03:00

Three-panel surface density maps from three different simulations of the final stellar configurations of dwarf galaxies.

by Staff Writers
Columbus OH (SPX) Oct 20, 2010
An Ohio State University astronomer is working to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding the formation of vast galaxies and the evolution of massive black holes with his own large constellation of silicon wafers.

Over the last year, two research teams led by Stelios Kazantzidis, a Long-Term Fellow at the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP) at The Ohio State University, have used what would average out to nearly 1,000 computing hours each day on the parallel high performance computing systems of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC).

To develop their detailed models and resulting simulations, Kazantzidis and his colleagues tapped OSC's flagship system, the Glenn IBM Cluster 1350, which features more than 9,600 Opteron cores and 24 terabytes of memory.

Kazantzidis and University of Zurich student Simone Callegari recently authored a paper, "Growing Massive Black Hole Pairs in Minor Mergers of Disk Galaxies," and submitted it for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Their study involved a suite of high-resolution, smoothed-particle hydrodynamics simulations of merging disk galaxies with supermassive black holes (SMBHs). These simulations include the effects of star formation and growth of the SMBHs, as well as feedback from both processes.

"Binary SMBHs are very important, because once they form there is always the possibility that the two black holes may subsequently merge," Kazantzidis explained.

"Merging SMBHs will produce the strongest signal of gravitational wave emission in the universe. Gravitational waves have not yet been directly detected, although Einstein predicted them in his Theory of General Relativity."

The astronomers found that the mass ratios of SMBH pairs in the centers of merged galaxies do not necessarily relate directly to the ratios they had to their original host galaxies, but are "a consequence of the complex interplay between accretion of matter (stars and gas) onto them and the dynamics of the merger process."

As a result, one of the two SMBHs can grow in mass much faster than the other.

Kazantzidis believes simulations of the formation of binary SMBHs have the potential to open a new window into astrophysical and physical phenomena that cannot be studied in other ways and might help to verify general relativity, one of the most fundamental theories of physics.

Kazantzidis and his colleagues also recently developed sophisticated computer models to simulate the formation of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which are satellites of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The study concluded that, in a majority of cases, disk-like dwarf galaxies - known in the field as disky dwarfs - experience significant loss of mass as they orbit inside their massive hosts, and their stellar distributions undergo a dramatic morphological, as well as dynamical, transformation: from disks to spheroidal systems.

"These galaxies are very important for astrophysics, because they are the most dark matter-dominated galaxies in the universe," Kazantzidis said.

"Understanding their formation can shed light into the very nature of dark matter. Environmental processes like the interactions between dwarf galaxies and their massive hosts we've been investigating should be included as ingredients in future models of dwarf galaxy formation and evolution."

For this project, Kazantzidis, Callegari, Ewa Lokas of the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center - all of whom utilized the Glenn Cluster - and the rest of the team have submitted to the Astrophysical Journal an article titled, "On the Efficiency of the Tidal Stirring Mechanism for the Origin of Dwarf Spheroidals: Dependence on the Orbital and Structural Parameters of the Progenitor Disky Dwarfs."

Supercomputing centers such as OSC allow astronomers to create extremely sophisticated models that are not feasible on desktop systems. However, even with supercomputers, Kazantzidis and his colleagues find that simulating the multitude of elements involved in these galactic processes remains an enormous challenge.

"Our models can only follow a small subset of, say, the stars in a galaxy," he explained. "For example, a galaxy like our Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, and even the most sophisticated numerical simulations to date can only simulate a tiny fraction of this number. The situation becomes increasingly more difficult in simulations that involve dark matter.

"This is because the dark matter particle is an elementary particle and, therefore, it is much less massive than a star. A galaxy like the Milky Way contains of the order of 1067 dark matter particles (that is, the number one followed by 67 zeros)."

The goal of Kazantzidis' team is to develop representations of galaxies that are as accurate as possible. Access to the Glenn Cluster increases the number of objects (or simulation particles) that can be depicted in the model, enhancing their ability to perform accurate and meaningful calculations.

"The powerful hardware and software available at OSC are particularly well-suited for cutting-edge astronomy research, such as that being conducted by Dr. Kazantzidis," said Ashok Krishnamurthy, interim co-executive director and director of research at OSC.

"The results he and his colleagues have been able to achieve through their research projects are impressive and firmly demonstrate the Center's ability to help accelerate innovation and discovery."

www.spacedaily.com

How To Weigh A Star Using A Moon

2010-10-20T16:14:00.000+03:00

Artist's concept of an exoplanet and its moon transiting a sun-like star. Such a system could be used to directly weigh the star. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

by Staff Writers

How do astronomers weigh a star that's trillions of miles away and way too big to fit on a bathroom scale? In most cases they can't, although they can get a best estimate using computer models of stellar structure.

New work by astrophysicist David Kipping says that in special cases, we can weigh a star directly. If the star has a planet, and that planet has a moon, and both of them cross in front of their star, then we can measure their sizes and orbits to learn about the star.

"I often get asked how astronomers weigh stars. We've just added a new technique to our toolbox for that purpose," said Kipping, a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers have found more than 90 planets that cross in front of, or transit, their stars. By measuring the amount of starlight that's blocked, they can calculate how big the planet is relative to the star. But they can't know exactly how big the planet is unless they know the actual size of the star. Computer models give a very good estimate but in science, real measurements are best.

Kipping realized that if a transiting planet has a moon big enough for us to see (by also blocking starlight), then the planet-moon-star system could be measured in a way that lets us calculate exactly how large and massive all three bodies are.

"Basically, we measure the orbits of the planet around the star and the moon around the planet. Then through Kepler's Laws of Motion, it's possible to calculate the mass of the star," explained Kipping.

The process isn't easy and requires several steps. By measuring how the star's light dims when planet and moon transit, astronomers learn three key numbers: 1) the orbital periods of the moon and planet, 2) the size of their orbits relative to the star, and 3) the size of planet and moon relative to the star.

Plugging those numbers into Kepler's Third Law yields the density of the star and planet. Since density is mass divided by volume, the relative densities and relative sizes gives the relative masses. Finally, scientists measure the star's wobble due to the planet's gravitational tug, known as the radial velocity. Combining the measured velocity with the relative masses, they can calculate the mass of the star directly.

"If there was no moon, this whole exercise would be impossible," stated Kipping. "No moon means we can't work out the exact density of the planet, so the whole thing grinds to a halt."

Kipping hasn't put his method into practice yet, since no star is known to have both a planet and moon that transit. However, NASA's Kepler spacecraft should discover several such systems.

"When they're found, we'll be ready to weigh them," said Kipping.

spacedaily.com

TalkingFields Guides European Farmers From Space

2010-10-19T09:59:00.001+03:00

Sustainable food production and food security are critical challenges. An initiative of ESA's Integrated Application Promotion programme, TalkingFields will help by using space-based precision farming methods to produce crops more efficiently. For instance, by optimising farmers' use of fertiliser and giving early warning of plant disease risks not just on a field-by-field basis but within individual fields, both costs and environmental impacts can be reduced. Credits: TalkingFields

by Staff Writers
Paris, France (ESA) Oct 19, 2010
Farmers traditionally keep a close eye on their fields, but a new ESA-led project seeks to build on their vigilance with monitoring from space.

The TalkingFields initiative is now showing how to combine satellite observation with satellite navigation to benefit European farmers.

Sustainable food production and food security are critical challenges. TalkingFields will help by using precision farming methods to produce crops more efficiently. For instance, by optimising farmers' use of fertiliser and giving early warning of plant disease risks, both costs and environmental impacts can be reduced.

"There are existing services variously employing Earth observation data, satellite navigation, farm management software and crop growth models, but TalkingFields is the first to combine them all," said ESA's Tony Sephton.

"We're setting up an end-to-end service that is simple to use and sufficiently cost-effective to be self-sustaining."

How does it work? The farmer requests the service for an area defined using satnav. Satellites gather information on the land's potential - observations over several years can reveal variations in crop growth through soil changes - as well as current crop status.

These results are combined with information from field sensors such as weather conditions and soil moisture. The farmer adds in his own knowledge, and in return receives detailed satnav instructions on where and how much fertiliser to spray, for example.

A variety of satellites can be employed, although priority will be given to free data sources such as Landsat and ESA's forthcoming Sentinel-2 satellites, due for launch in 2012.

"Ideally, we might have weekly satellite acquisitions, but cloud cover makes that unfeasible," explained Dr Sephton.

"Instead, we need only two to four satellite images per growing season, which are fed into a sophisticated crop growth model.

"With TalkingFields the emphasis is on service: we're not giving raw satellite data straight to farmers. Instead, we advise them directly on actions to be taken throughout the growing season."

Following a 2009 feasibility study, TalkingFields is now being demonstrated in real fields, led for ESA by German Earth observation company VISTA with partners PC-Agrar, a German company specialising in providing farm management information software, and Ludwig Maximillians University Munich, which developed the hydrological and agricultural production model.

Farmers access TalkingFields via familiar farm management systems. "The quality of farming advice improves dramatically when all the available information is used," said Heike Bach of VISTA.

"Factors like crop variety, seeding date, row distance and fertilisation measures conducted so far are stored in the farm management system.

"Since TalkingFields is integrated with this software, we also have access to this information, improving our crop growth models."

Large intensive farms across Germany and Russia are participating in the demonstration. Customers can choose from a portfolio of services, such as estimating a crop's yield some two to four weeks before harvest.

Even before a farmer decides to use precision farming, he can obtain a detailed cost-benefit analysis for each field. Daily information on biomass and density will help to protect crops by revealing the onset of plant disease.

TalkingFields is being supported through the Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme of ESA's Telecommunications and Integrated Applications Directorate.

IAP builds services for new groups of users by combining different space and terrestrial systems in novel ways.

www.spacedaily.com

NASA Awards Contracts For Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data

2010-10-18T09:26:00.001+03:00

Illustration only.

by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 18, 2010
NASA has awarded Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) contracts to six companies for the purchase of technical data resulting from industry efforts to develop vehicle capabilities and demonstrate end-to-end robotic lunar landing missions.

The data from these contracts will inform the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles and exploration systems.

The ILDD Broad Agency Announcement resulted in multiple award firm-fixed price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a total value of up to $301 million over a period of up to five years.

For each selected contractor, the minimum government purchase is $10,000, and the maximum government purchase is $10.01 million.

The contracts were awarded to:

Astrobotic Technology Inc., Pittsburgh, Pa.
The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.
Dynetics Inc., Huntsville, Ala.
Earthrise Space Inc., Orlando, Fla.
Moon Express Inc., San Francisco Team FREDNET,
The Open Space Society, Inc., Huntsville, Ala.

The ILDD contracts provide for issuance of delivery orders that will specify data associated with system testing and integration, launch, in-space maneuvers, braking burns, lunar landing and other enhanced capabilities.

Knowledge acquired from this data will be applied to the development of lander systems necessary to execute human and robotic missions to the moon, near-Earth asteroids or other solar system destinations.

They will contribute to NASA's efforts to enable affordable and sustainable space exploration.

Awarded contracts will be managed by the Lunar Lander Project Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

www.space-travel.com

Doubt Cast On Existence Of Habitable Alien World

2010-10-15T09:50:00.000+03:00

illustration only

by Leslie Mullen
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Oct 14, 2010
Last month, astronomers announced the discovery of the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet. But this week at an International Astronomical Union meeting, doubts were raised about the existence of this exciting new planet said to be orbiting the star Gliese 581.

Called 'Gliese 581 g,' the planet was determined to be about 3 times the mass of Earth, meaning it was a rocky world, not a gas giant like Jupiter. Rocky extrasolar planets have been found before, but the unique trait about this planet was that it orbited within the red dwarf star's habitable zone, that region of space where temperatures are sufficient for water to remain as a liquid on a planetary surface.

Astrobiologists were thrilled at the news, since liquid water is considered necessary for the origin and evolution of life. In fact, NASA has made it a primary aim to 'follow the water' in the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

The star Gliese 581 is 20 light years away from Earth, located in the constellation Libra.

"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common," said Steven Vogt in a press release announcing the discovery.

Vogt is one of the lead astronomers of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, and lead author on the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal (and posted online at the arxiv.org web site.) The paper also announced the discovery of planet 'f', a 7-Earth mass planet with a 433-day orbit around Gliese 581. Planet 'g' was calculated to have an orbital period of only 37 days. Although an extremely close orbit by the standards of our own solar system, because Gliese 581 is not as luminous as our sun its habitable zone must be much closer in.

Because the planet orbits so close to its star, astronomers said it must be tidally locked, with the same side of the planet always facing the star. This would mean that the star-side of the planet would be much hotter than the perpetually dark side, but a more temperate region could exist in the border zone between the dark and light sides.

To find the planet, the Lick-Carnegie team looked at 122 radial velocity measurements from the HIRES instrument on the Keck I telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. They also used 119 measurements from the HARPS instrument on the La Silla telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The HIRES measurements were taken over a period of 11 years, while the HARPS measurements were made over 4 years.

Planet's Existence Not Confirmed

Francesco Pepe, an astronomer who works on HARPS data at the Geneva Observatory, said at the IAU meeting this week that his team could not confirm the existence of Gliese 581 g. In email correspondence with Astrobiology Magazine, Pepe said that they could not confirm the existence of planet 'f' either.

The Geneva team, led by Michel Mayor, announced in 2009 the discovery of planet 'e' in the Gliese 581 solar system. At approximately 1.9 Earth masses, this 'e' planet is the lowest mass extrasolar planet yet found, and has a 3.15-day orbital period around the star. "Since Mayor's announcement in 2009 of the lowest-mass planet Gliese 581 e, we have gathered about 60 additional data points with the HARPS instrument for a total of 180 data points spanning 6.5 years of observations," said Pepe. "From these data, we easily recover the 4 previously announced planets b, c, d, and e."

However, he said they do not see any evidence for planet 'g', the fifth planet in the system as announced by Vogt and his team.

"The reason for that is that, despite the extreme accuracy of the instrument and the many data points, the signal amplitude of this potential fifth planet is very low and basically at the level of the measurement noise," said Pepe.

The planets in the Gliese 581 system were discovered using spectroscopic radial velocity measurements. Planets 'tug' on the star they orbit, causing it to shift in position (stars and planets actually orbit a common center of mass). By measuring the star's movement in the sky, astronomers can figure out what sort of planets are orbiting it.

Multi-planet systems create a complicated signal, and astronomers must tease out the spectral lines to figure out what represents a planet, and what is just "noise" - shifts in the star light not caused by an orbiting planet. Astronomers have developed various ways to reduce such noise in their telescopic observations, but it still creates a level of uncertainty in detecting extrasolar planets.

The Geneva team plugged the HARPS data on Gliese 581 into computer models to check on the odds the signal was the result of noise, rather than evidence of the habitable planet 'g' as claimed by the Lick-Carnegie team.

"Simulations on the real data have shown that the probability that such a signal is just produced 'by chance' out of the noise is not negligible, of the order of several percents," Pepe said. "Under these conditions we cannot confirm the presence of the announced planet Gliese 581 g."

Pepe noted that while he did not speak at the IAU meeting about Gliese 581 f, the other potential planet in this system announced by the Lick-Carnegie team, the HARPS data calls that planet into question as well.

"We haven't made a detailed analysis yet, but at first glance no statistically significant signal [for planet f] is emerging from our data set," he said.

Gliese 581 is already one of the most intriguing solar systems known, with four planets confirmed orbiting the star. The addition of the potentially habitable planet 'g' would make the system the go-to place in the search for alien life, but more work needs to be done to either confirm or refute the planet's existence.

"I would say the detection was less than comfortably secure, even in the original Vogt et al. paper - the paper was carefully worded, as opposed to what was in some media reports," said Ray Jayawardhana, a University of Toronto astronomer who was not involved in either study. "Of course, it's not easy to definitively rule out something, but the HARPS evidence is at least raising some doubts."

www.spacedaily.com

Sciencespace Hotel Project To Be Launched After Contract Is Signed - Energia

2010-10-14T10:23:00.000+03:00

...

by Staff Writers
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Oct 13, 2010
The implementation of the project to build the first space hotel will only start after a contract between Russian state-owned rocket and space corporation Energia and Moscow-based company Orbital Technologies is signed, the Energia head said.

Orbital Technologies on Wednesday announced sky-high plans to launch an orbiting hotel in space by 2015-2016.

"As of now, the company only has an agreement of intent. When we have a firm contract, there will be the terms and engineering design," Vitaly Lopota said.

The project will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Orbital Tehcnologies' CEO Sergei Kostenko said in late September, adding that Russian and U.S. investors have already been found.

Individuals, professional crews and explorers interested in implementing their own research programs are expected to be the first clients of the commercial tourist hub, Kostenko said then.

So far, several super-rich businesspeople have been the only space tourists, traveling into space with professional cosmonauts, but if the project is implemented the space tourism market is likely to develop rapidly.

www.space-travel.com

Habitable Martian Environments Could Be Deep Beneath Planet's Surface

2010-10-12T17:01:00.000+03:00

The Holy Grail

by Staff Writers

Tucson AZ (SPX) Oct 12, 2010

A new discovery of hydrothermally altered carbonate-bearing rocks on Mars points toward habitable environments deep in the Martian crust, a PlanetaryScience Instituteresearcher said.

A deposit of carbonate rocks that once existed 6 km (about 4 miles) below the surface of Mars was uplifted and exposed by an ancient meteor impact, said Joseph Michalski, research scientist with PSI. The carbonate minerals exist along with hydrated silicate minerals of a likely hydrothermal origin.

Using data returned from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, researchers have spotted this unique mineralogy within the central peak of a crater to the southwest of a giant Martian volcanic province named Syrtis Major.

With infrared spectra from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), planetary geologists detected the hydrothermal minerals from their spectroscopic fingerprints.

Visible images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard MRO show that the carbonates and hydrated silicate minerals occur within deformed bedrock that was exhumed by an ancient meteor impact that poked through the volcanic upper crust of Mars.

"Carbonate rocks have long been a Holy Grail of Mars exploration for several reasons," Michalski said.

"One reason is because carbonates form with the ocean and within lakes on Earth, so the same could be true for ancient Mars - such deposits could indicate past seas that were once present on Mars.

"Another reason is because we suspect that the ancient Martian atmosphere was probably denser and CO2-rich, but today the atmosphere is quite thin so we infer that the CO2 must have gone into carbonate rocks somewhere on Mars."

Michalski and co-author Paul B. Niles of NASA Johnson Space Center recently published the results in a paper titled "Deep crustal carbonate rocks exposed by meteor impact on Mars" in Nature Geoscience.

While this is not the first detection of carbonates on Mars, Michalski said, "This detection is significant because it shows other carbonates detected by previous workers, which were found in a fairly limited spatial extent, were not a localized phenomenon.

Carbonates may have formed over a very large region of ancient Mars, but been covered up by volcanic flows later in the history of the planet. A very exciting history of water on Mars may be simply covered up by younger lava!"

The discovery also has implications for the habitability of the Martian crust.

"The presence of carbonates along with hydrothermal silicate minerals indicates that a hydrothermal system existed in the presence of CO2 deep in the Martian crust," Michalski says.

"Such an environment is chemically similar to the type of hydrothermal systems that exist within the ocean floor of Earth, which are capable of sustaining vast communities of organisms that have never seen the light of day.

"The cold, dry surface of Mars is a tough place to survive, even for microbes. If we can identify places where habitable environments once existed at depth, protected from the harsh surface environment, it is a big step forward for astrobiological exploration of the red planet."

marsdaily.com

Opportunity Hits The Road Again

2010-10-11T09:35:00.000+03:00

File image.

by Staff Writers
Pasadena CA (SPX) Oct 11, 2010
After spending time investigating a meteorite, Opportunity has resumed the trek to Endeavour crater with drives totaling over 370 meters (1,214 feet) for the past week.

On Sol 2377 (Oct. 1, 2010), the rover drove over 100 meters (328 feet), making a "bank shot" maneuver to avoid some troubling terrain. On Sol 2379 (Oct. 3, 2010), the rover performed a test of autonomous navigation using only the rear hazardous avoidance cameras (Hazcams).

The test was successful with the rover completing just about of 92 meters (302 feet) for the day. This new autonomous driving technique may enable longer, backward drives each sol.

On Sol 2381 (Oct. 5, 2010), Opportunity headed northeast to rejoin the original path to Endeavour crater, covering about 86 meters (282 feet). The rover drove again on the next sol moving another 93 meters (305 feet) along its way to Endeavour.

As of Sol 2382 (Oct. 6, 2010), solar array energy production was 610 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.538 and a solar array dust factor of 0.716.

Total odometry is 23,897.09 meters (23.90 kilometers, or 14.85 miles).

www.marsdaily.com

Hubble Uncovers An Overheated Early Universe

2010-10-08T09:31:00.000+03:00

This diagram traces the evolution of the universe from the big bang to the present. Two watershed epochs are shown. Not long after the big bang, light from the first stars burned off a fog of cold hydrogen in a process called reionization. At a later epoch quasars, the black-hole-powered cores of active galaxies, pumped out enough ultraviolet light to reionize the primordial helium. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI). For a larger version of this image please go here.

by Staff Writers
Boston MA (SPX) Oct 08, 2010
If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent, well, universal warming. The consequence was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years.

This is the conclusion of a team of astronomers who used the new capabilities of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to probe the invisible, remote universe.

Using the newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) they have identified an era, from 11.7 to 11.3 billion years ago, when the universe stripped electrons off from primeval helium atoms - a process called ionization.

This process heated intergalactic gas and inhibited it from gravitationally collapsing to form new generations of stars in some small galaxies. The lowest-mass galaxies were not even able to hold onto their gas, and it escaped back into intergalactic space.

Michael Shull of the University of Colorado and his team were able to find the telltale helium spectral absorption lines in the ultraviolet light from a quasar - the brilliant core of an active galaxy.

The quasar beacon shines light through intervening clouds of otherwise invisible gas, like a headlight shining through a fog. The beam allows for a core-sample probe of the clouds of gas interspersed between galaxies in the early universe.

The universe went through an initial heat wave over 13 billion years ago when energy from early massive stars ionized cold interstellar hydrogen from the big bang. This epoch is actually called reionization because the hydrogen nuclei were originally in an ionized state shortly after the big bang.

But Hubble found that it would take another 2 billion years before the universe produced sources of ultraviolet radiation with enough energy to do the heavy lifting and reionize the primordial helium that was also cooked up in the big bang.

This radiation didn't come from stars, but rather from quasars. In fact the epoch when the helium was being reionized corresponds to a transitory time in the universe's history when quasars were most abundant.

The universe was a rambunctious place back then. Galaxies frequently collided, and this engorged supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies with infalling gas. The black holes furiously converted some of the gravitational energy of this mass to powerful far-ultraviolet radiation that would blaze out of galaxies.

This heated the intergalactic helium from 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly 40,000 degrees. After the helium was reionized in the universe, intergalactic gas again cooled down and dwarf galaxies could resume normal assembly. "I imagine quite a few more dwarf galaxies may have formed if helium reionization had not taken place," said Shull.

So far Shull and his team only have one sightline to measure the helium transition, but the COS science team plans to use Hubble to look in other directions to see if the helium reionization uniformly took place across the universe.

www.spacedaily.com

Living Fossils Debunk Star-Formation Route

2010-10-07T16:49:00.000+03:00

A simulation of a star-forming galaxy similar to those observed. Cold gas (red) flowing onto a spiral galaxy feeds star formation. This intense star formation drives turbulent outflows (blue). Credit: Robert Crain, James Geach, the Virgo Consortium, Andy Green and
by Staff Writers

Work based on data from the Australian Astronomical Observatory has discounted one route for forming stars. The work is this week's cover story in the journal Nature.
In their paper ("High star formation rates as the origin of turbulence in early and modern disk galaxies"), Swinburne University astronomy student Andy Green, Green's supervisor and team leader Professor Karl Glazebrook, and their colleagues report finding galaxies in today's Universe that were thought to exist only in the distant past.
"They're living fossils of space - galaxies we just didn't expect to find in today's world," said Green.
The galaxies in question are like our own Galaxy in shape, but unlike our Galaxy they are physically turbulent and are forming lots of stars. Astronomers see many of them in the distant, early Universe, but they are rare now, and this team is the first to find any in today's Universe.
The finding knocks on the head one way astronomers thought stars might form.
Stars form from gas, and to form rapidly they need a good supply of it. Astronomers had thought that star formation in distant, early galaxies might be fuelled by cold streams of gas continually falling into those galaxies. But this mechanism could only work when the Universe was young. Finding these modern galaxies frenziedly forming new stars calls this idea into question.
Instead it seems more likely that galaxies get their new gas through 'mergers and acquisitions' - merging with like-sized counterparts or swallowing smaller galaxies.
To find the very rare, turbulent galaxies, Green's team had to observe many galaxies, over a large volume of sky. They started by selecting galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that showed a key indicator of star formation: a bright H-alpha spectral line emitted by hydrogen gas.
Green then observed these chosen galaxies with the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory, and the 2.3-meter telescope of the Australian National University, both located at Siding Spring Observatory in eastern Australia. About two-thirds of the data came from the AAT.
Australian Astronomical Observatory Director, Professor Matthew Colless, was a member of the research team. He says the study shows the value of the Australian telescopes for complementing observations of the very distant Universe.
"Our telescopes are ideal for detailed study of the nearby counterparts of galaxies seen in the distant universe by the eight- and ten-meter telescopes," he said. "That's essential for piecing together the history of the Universe, from ancient times down to the present."
spacedaily.com

Soyuz Moved To Pad For Thursday Launch To Station

2010-10-06T09:28:00.000+03:00

Launch scaffolding is raised into place around the Soyuz rocket shortly after arrival to the launch pad Tuesday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

Russia holds 1st place on space launch market
MOSCOW, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) Russia held the first place in terms of space launches, according to the report of the Russian space agency, Roskosmos, published by RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday. Since the start of 2010, Russia made 22 launches. Of this number, 16 were made from Kazakhstan-located Baikonur site, five from Russian Plesetsk and one from a launching site of Dombarovskaya missile division, Roskosmos' report said. These launches have been made for service of the Defense Ministry, GLONASS navigation system and federal space programs. For the same period, the United States made 11 launches, and China sent to space 10 rockets. This is the third year in a row that Russia occupies the first place on the space launches market. In 2009, the frequency of Russian flights to the International Space Station rose twofold compared with that in 2008.

by Staff Writers
Baikonur, Kazakhstan (SPX) Oct 06, 2010
The Soyuz spacecraft that will carry three new Expedition 25 flight engineers to the International Space Station was rolled out to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka will launch aboard the new Soyuz TMA-01M Thursday at 7:10 p.m. EDT (Friday, Kazakhstan time) and begin a five-month tour of duty aboard the station after docking to the Poisk module Saturday evening.

Meanwhile, the three Expedition 25 crew members already living and working aboard the station conducted a depressurization drill, collected data for science research and prepared for the installation of a device to produce water.

Commander Doug Wheelock began his workday early by participating in the Pro K experiment, which studies dietary countermeasures to lessen the bone loss experienced by astronauts during long-duration spaceflight.

With assistance from Flight Engineer Shannon Walker, Wheelock collected a blood sample and stored it in the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS for study later by scientists back on Earth.

Walker spent much of her morning with the Capillary Flow Experiment for an investigation of capillary flows and flows of fluids in containers with complex geometries.

Results of this study will improve current computer models used by designers of low-gravity fluid systems and may improve fluid transfer systems on future spacecraft.

Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin continued unpacking cargo from the ISS Progress 39 spacecraft that has been docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module since September

Later Yurchikhin joined Wheelock and Walker for an emergency drill to sharpen the crew's response to a rapid, unexpected loss of cabin pressure within the station. Afterward the three tagged up with flight controllers for a debrief of the drill.

After a break for lunch, Wheelock used a ham radio to speak with students at the Institute of Research and Education in Italy and answered a variety of questions about life aboard the space station.

Wheelock then tagged up with flight controllers to discuss the upcoming installation of the Sabatier, which combines carbon dioxide from the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly and hydrogen from the Oxygen Generation System to form water and methane.

The water will be recycled by the Water Processor Assembly, and the methane vented overboard.

www.space-travel.com

Cluster Helps Disentangle Turbulence In The Solar Wind

2010-10-05T16:05:00.000+03:00

An artist's impression of the Cluster quartet. Credit: ESA.

by Karen C. Fox

Washington DC (SPX) Oct 05, 2010

From Earth, the Sun looks like a calm, placid body that does little more than shine brightly while marching across the sky. Images from a bit closer, of course, show it's an unruly ball of hot gas that can expel long plumes out into space - but even this isn't the whole story.

Surrounding the Sun is a roiling wind of electrons and protons that shows constant turbulence at every size scale: long streaming jets, smaller whirling eddies, and evenmicroscopic movements as charged particles circle in miniature orbits. Through it all, great magnetic waves and electric currents move through, stirring up the particles even more.

This solar wind is some million degrees Celsius, can move as fast as 750 kilometers (466 statute miles) per second, and - so far - defies a complete description by any one theory. It's hotter than expected, for one, and no one has yet agreed which of several theories offers the best explanation.

Now, the ESA/NASA Cluster mission - four identical spacecraft that fly in a tight formation to provide 3-dimensional snapshots of structures around Earth - has provided new information about how the protons in the solar wind are heated.

"We had a perfect window of 50 minutes," says NASA scientist Melvyn Goldstein, chief of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and co-author of the new paper that appeared in Physical Review Letters on September 24.

"It was a time when the four Cluster spacecraft were so close together they could watch movements in the solar wind at a scale small enough that it was possible to observe the heating of protons through turbulence directly for the first time."

Scientists know that large turbulence tends to "cascade" down into smaller turbulence - imagine the sharply defined whitecaps on top of long ocean waves.

In ocean waves, the energy from such cascades naturally adds a small amount of heat from friction as the particles shift past each other, thus heating the water slightly. But the fast, charged particles - known as "plasma" - around the sun don't experience that kind of friction, yet they heat up in a similar way.

"Unlike the usual fluids of everyday life," says Fouad Sahraoui, lead author of a new paper on the solar wind and a scientist at the CNRS-Ecole Polytechnique-UPMC in France, "plasmas possess electric and magnetic fields generated by the motions of proton and electrons. This changes much of the intuitive images that we get from observing conventional fluids."

Somehow the magnetic and electric fields in the plasma must contribute to heating the particles. Decades of research on the solar wind have been able to infer the length and effects of the magnetic waves, but direct observation was not possible before the Cluster mission watched large waves from afar.

These start long as long wavelength fluctuations, but lose energy - while getting shorter - over time. Loss of energy in the waves transfer energy to the solar wind particles, heating them up, but the exact method of energy transfer, and the exact nature of the waves doing the heating, has not been completely established.

In addition to trying to find the mechanism that heats the solar wind, there's another mystery: The magnetic waves transfer heat to the particles at different rates depending on their wavelength. The largest waves lose energy at a continuous rate until they make it down to about 100-kilometer wavelength.

They then lose energy even more quickly before they hit around 2-kilometer wavelength and return to more or less the previous rate. To tackle these puzzles, scientists used data from Cluster when it was in the solar wind in a position where it could not be influenced by Earth's magnetosphere.

For this latest paper, the four Cluster spacecraft provided 50 minutes of data at a time when conditions were just right - the spacecraft were in a homogeneous area of the solar wind, they were close together, and they formed a perfect tetrahedral shape - such that the instruments could measure electromagnetic waves in three dimensions at the small scales that affect protons.

The measurements showed that the cascade of turbulence occurs through the action of a special kind of traveling waves - named Alfven waves after Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven, who discovered them in 1941.

The surprising thing about the waves that Cluster observed is that they pointed perpendicular to the magnetic field. This is in contrast to previous work from the Helios spacecraft, which in the 1970's examined magnetic waves closer to the sun.

That work found magnetic waves running parallel to the magnetic field, which can send particles moving in tight circular orbits - a process known as cyclotron resonance - thus giving them a kick in both energy and temperature. The perpendicular waves found here, on the other hand, create electric fields that efficiently transfer energy to particles by, essentially, pushing them to move faster.

Indeed, earlier Cluster work suggested that this process - known as Landau damping - helped heat electrons. But, since much of the change in temperature with distance from the sun is due to changes in the proton temperature, it was crucial to understand how they obtained their energy. Since hot electrons do not heat protons very well at all, this couldn't be the mechanism.

That Landau damping is what adds energy to both protons and electrons - at least near Earth - also helps explain the odd rate change in wave fluctuations as well. When the wavelengths are about 100 kilometers or a bit shorter, the electric fields of these perpendicular waves heat protons very efficiently.

So, at these lengths, the waves transfer energy quickly to the surrounding protons - offering an explanation why the magnetic waves suddenly begin to lose energy at a faster rate.

Waves that are about two kilometers, however, do not interact efficiently with protons because the electric fields oscillate too fast to push them. Instead these shorter waves begin to push and heat electrons efficiently and quickly deplete all the energy in the waves.

"We can see that not all the energy is dissipated by protons," Sahraoui said. "The remaining energy in the wave continues its journey toward smaller scales, wavelengths of about two kilometers long. At that point, electrons in turn get heated."

Future NASA missions such as the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, scheduled for launch in 2014, will be able to probe the movements of the solar wind at even smaller scales.

Cluster recently surpassed a decade of passing in and out of our planet's magnetic field, returning invaluable data to scientists worldwide. Besides studying the solar wind, Cluster's other observations include studying the composition of the earth's aurora and its magnetosphere.

spacedaily.com

Milky Way Sidelined In Galactic Tug Of War

2010-10-04T16:37:00.000+03:00

This plot shows the simulated gas distribution of the Magellanic System resulting from the tidal encounter between the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) as they orbit our home Milky Way Galaxy. The entire sky is plotted in galactocentric coordinates of longitude and latitude. The Magellanic Stream is the pronounced tail of material that stretches 150 degrees across the southern sky. The solid line shows the calculated path of the LMC and the dotted line is the path of the SMC. The color range from dark to light shows the density (lower to higher) of the hydrogen gas making up the Magellanic Stream and the Bridge that connects the two dwarf galaxies. Credit: Plot by G. Besla, Milky Way background image by Axel Mellinger
by Staff Writers

The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been thought to be the dominant gravitational force in forming the Stream by pulling gas from the Clouds.
A new computer simulation by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues now shows, however, that the Magellanic Stream resulted from a past close encounter between these dwarf galaxies rather than effects of the Milky Way.
"The traditional models required the Magellanic Clouds to complete an orbit about the Milky Way in less than 2 billion years in order for the Stream to form," says Besla. Other work by Besla and her colleagues, and measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope by colleague Nitya Kallivaylil, rule out such an orbit, however, suggesting the Magellanic Clouds are new arrivals and not long-time satellites of the Milky Way.
This creates a problem: How can the Stream have formed without a complete orbit about the Milky Way?
To address this, Besla and her team set up a simulation assuming the Clouds were a stable binary system on their first passage about the Milky Way in order to show how the Stream could form without relying on a close encounter with the Milky Way.
The team postulated that the Magellanic Stream and Bridge are similar to bridge and tail structures seen in other interacting galaxies and, importantly, formed before the Clouds were captured by the Milky Way.
"While the Clouds didn't actually collide," says Besla, "they came close enough that the Large Cloud pulled large amounts of hydrogen gas away from the Small Cloud. This tidal interaction gave rise to the Bridge we see between the Clouds, as well as the Stream."
"We believe our model illustrates that dwarf-dwarf galaxy tidal interactions are a powerful mechanism to change the shape of dwarf galaxies without the need for repeated interactions with a massive host galaxy like the Milky Way."
While the Milky Way may not have drawn the Stream material out of the Clouds, the Milky Way's gravity now shapes the orbit of the Clouds and thereby controls the appearance of the tail.
"We can tell this from the line-of-sight velocities and spatial location of the tail observed in the Stream today," says team member Lars Hernquist of the Center.
spacedaily.com

Russian company to build 'space hotel' with home comforts

2010-09-30T15:12:00.000+03:00

one day...

by Staff Writers
Moscow (AFP) Sept 29, 2010
A Russian company on Wednesday announced plans to launch a comfortable space hotel for tourists who up to now have shared cramped accommodation with astronauts, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

The company, Orbital Technologies, plans to launch the first module of the hotel in 2015-16, its chief executive Sergei Kostenko told RIA Novosti at a presentation.

A cosy fit, the first module will measure just 20 cubic metres (706 cubic feet) and have four cabins, designed for up to seven passengers, who would go into orbit using the Soyuz shuttle, Kostenko said.

Up to now space tourists, who have included the Canadian founder of the Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberte, have squeezed into the International Space Station (ISS) along with cosmonauts and animal life including fruit flies.

The new hotel will offer more comforts than the ISS, Kostenko said.

"Our planned module inside will not remind you of the ISS. A hotel should be comfortable inside, and it will be possible to look at the Earth through large portholes," Kostenko said, calling it a "cosmic hotel".

The space hotel will be aimed at wealthy individuals and people working for private companies who want to do research in space, Kostenko said.

The space tourism programme was halted earlier this year as the crew numbers on the ISS increased, leaving no room for extra passengers.

Kostenko said that the project has "found Russian and American investors, and we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars", without elaborating.

"At the moment, the project is already at the design stage," he said.

The space hotel would be built by Russian spacecraft manufacturer Energia, the company's website says. It would follow the same orbit as the ISS.

Kostenko told RIA Novosti that "a number of agreements on partnership have already been signed" with Energia and the Russian space agency.

The company's website cites the deputy head of Russian space agency Roskosmos, Vitaly Davydov, as saying that "the suggested project is extremely interesting".

www.space-travel.com

Peculiar Phenomena During Northern Spring On Mars

2010-09-29T16:08:00.000+03:00

(a) Simulation of katabatic (downhill) winds. Color bar: friction velocity from 0.1 to 0.6 m/s. (b) Localization of regions where early disappearances (blue) and sudden reappearances (orange) of the carbon dioxide ice signature are observed.

by Staff Writers

Scientists may have solved the mystery of the carbon dioxide ice disappearance early in the Northern Martian springs followed later by its sudden reappearance, revealing a very active water cycle on the planet. Dr. Bernard Schmitt and Mr. Thomas Appere are reporting their results at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome this week through Friday 24th September.

Seasonal ice deposits are one of the most important Martian meteorological processes, playing a major role in the water cycle of the planet. Every Martian year, alternatively during northern and southern winter, a significant part of the atmosphere condenses on the surface in the form of frost and snow.

These seasonal ice deposits, which can be up to one meter thick, are mainly composed of carbon dioxide with minor amounts of water and dust. During spring, the deposits sublimate (vaporize), becoming a substantial source of water vapor, in particular in the northern hemisphere of the planet.

Dr. Schmitt and his colleagues Thomas Appere and Dr. Sylvain Doute at the Laboratoire de Planetologie de Grenoble, France, have analyzed data taken with the OMEGA instrument onboard Mars Express, for two northern Martian regions.

Before the Mars Express mission (ESA), the evolution of the seasonal deposits has been monitored by the albedo (reflectivity) and temperature changes of the surface, as the ice deposits appear much brighter and are colder than the surrounding defrosted terrains.

"But we couldn't resolve their exact composition and how they were distributed on the planet. Near-infrared observations, such as the OMEGA data, are much better for detecting strong signatures of water and carbon dioxide ice," says Mr. Appere.

The first Martian region that the scientists observed is located on Gemina Lingula, a Northern plateau, where peculiar evolution of the carbon dioxide ice deposits was observed.

"During spring the ice signature disappeared from our data, but the surface temperature was still cold enough to sustain plenty of CO2 ice. We concluded that a thick layer of something else, either dust or water ice, was overlaid. If it was dust then it would also hide water ice and the surface of the planet would become darker. None of these happened so we concluded that a layer of water ice was hiding the CO2 ice. We had to wait until the weather gets warm enough on Mars for the water to vaporize as well, and then the carbon dioxide signatures re-appeared in our data," explains Dr. Schmitt.

Soon after spring sunrise, the solar radiation hitting the surface of Mars warms enough the CO2 ice lying on the top layer to cause it to vaporize. But the water ice needs higher temperatures to sublimate, so a fine grained layer of water ice gradually forms hiding the carbon dioxide ice still lying beneath it.

"A layer only 2 tenths of a millimeter thick is enough to completely hide the CO2 ice. Also some water that has been vaporized at lower, warmer, Martian latitudes condenses as it moves northward and may be cold trapped on top of the CO2 ice," says Mr. Appere.

The second region analyzed by the team is located in the spiral troughs structure of the North permanent cap. A similar situation was observed but the carbon dioxide ice re-appeared very quickly here after its initial disappearance.

"This hide-and-seek game didn't make much sense to us. It wasn't cold enough for CO2 ice to condense again, neither warm enough for water ice to sublimate," explains Dr. Schmitt.

"We concluded that somehow the water ice layer was removed. The topography of the North permanent Martian cap is well-suited to entail the formation of strong katabatic (downhill) winds. Dr. Aymeric Spiga used a model from the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique du CNRS to simulate those winds and he indeed confirmed the sudden re-appearances of CO2 ice where strong katabatic winds blow," says Mr. Appere.

Dr. Schmitt concludes: "To decipher the present and past water cycles on Mars and improve our weather models on the planet, one needs to have a good understanding of the seasonal ice deposits dynamics, how they change in space and time. We are confident that our results will make a significant contribution in this direction".

marsdaily.com

New Views Of Saturn's Aurora

2010-09-28T15:53:00.000+03:00

This false-color composite image shows the glow of auroras streaking out about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from the cloud tops of Saturn's south polar region. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Leicester. Please go here to view video.

by Staff Writers

A new movie and images showing Saturn's shimmering aurora over a two-day period are helping scientists understand what drives some of the solar system's most impressive light shows.

The movie and images are part of a new study that, for the first time, extracts auroral information from the entire catalogue of Saturn images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. These images and preliminary results are being presented by Tom Stallard, lead scientist on a joint VIMS and Cassini magnetometer collaboration, at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome.

In the movie, the aurora phenomenon clearly varies significantly over the course of a Saturnian day, which lasts around 10 hours 47 minutes. On the noon and midnight sides (left and right sides of the images, respectively), the aurora can be seen to brighten significantly for periods of several hours, suggesting the brightening is connected with the angle of the sun.

Other features can be seen to rotate with the planet, reappearing at the same time and the same place on the second day, suggesting that these are directly controlled by the orientation of Saturn's magnetic field.

"Saturn's auroras are very complex and we are only just beginning to understand all the factors involved," Stallard said. "This study will provide a broader view of the wide variety of different auroral features that can be seen, and will allow us to better understand what controls these changes in appearance."

Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. Particles from the solar wind are channeled by Saturn's magnetic field toward the planet's poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light.

At Saturn, however, auroral features can also be caused by electromagnetic waves generated when the planet's moons move through the plasma that fills Saturn's magnetosphere.

Previous data from Cassini have contributed to a number of detailed snapshots of the aurora. But understanding the overall nature of the auroral region requires a huge number of observations, which can be difficult because Cassini observation time close to Saturn is in high demand, Stallard said.

However, VIMS observations of numerous other scientific targets also include auroral information. Sometimes the aurora can be clearly seen, but sometimes Stallard and colleagues add multiple images together to produce a signal.

This wide set of observations allows Cassini scientists to understand the aurora in general, rather than the beautiful specific cases that dedicated auroral observations allow, Stallard said.

Stallard and his colleagues have investigated about 1,000 images from the 7,000 that VIMS has taken to date of Saturn's auroral region.

The new, false-color images show Saturn's aurora glowing in green around the planet's south pole. The auroral information in the two images was extracted from VIMS data taken on May 24, 2007, and Nov. 1, 2008. The video covers about 20 Earth hours of VIMS observations, from Sept. 22 and 23, 2007.

"Detailed studies like this of Saturn's aurora help us understand how they are generated on Earth and the nature of the interactions between the magnetosphere and the uppermost regions of Saturn's atmosphere," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

spacedaily.com

International Partners Discuss ISS Extension And Use

2010-09-24T09:22:00.000+03:00

File image.

by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Sep 24, 2010
The International Space Station partner agencies met Tuesday, Sept. 21, by videoconference to discuss continuation of space station operations into the next decade and its use as a research laboratory.

The Multilateral Coordination Board (MCB) meeting included senior representatives from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The MCB meets periodically to ensure coordination of station operations and activities among the partners.

The MCB was pleased to learn that the government of Japan has approved continuing space station operations beyond 2016. Coupled with the approval of the government of the Russian Federation for continuation to 2020, this progress is indicative of the strength of the station partnership and the successful use of station.

ESA and CSA are working with their respective governments to reach consensus about the continuation of the station. NASA also is continuing to work with the U.S. Congress to complete the necessary procedures to extend station operations consistent with the presidential budget request.

The MCB also noted the benefits to future exploration beyond low-Earth orbit through enhanced station research, technology development and other opportunities.

Each partner agency reaffirmed its commitment to gaining the maximum return from station with increasing the operational efficiency. On-going research with potential societal impacts includes:

+ NASA and the National Institutes of Health recently announced three new biomedical experiments using the station's unique microgravity facilities to improve human health on Earth. The experiments will use the station to study how bones and the immune system weaken in space as part of NIH's new BioMed-ISS program.

+ CSA will focus its life science research program on mitigating health risks associated with spaceflight. More specifically, these health experiments and activities will monitor crew health and deliver health care on space missions, develop exercise, etc.

+ ESA just started a fluid physics experiment in the Microgravity Science Glovebox onboard the station's Columbus module that is of high interest to material scientists. The experiment uses advanced optical diagnostics to investigate the transformation of particles to aggregates due to density fluctuations in a mixture. The ESA experiment demonstrates a new capability to reverse and fine-tune the aggregation process; such control may yield a significant potential impact on fabrication of micro-structured materials such as photonic crystals.

+ Roscosmos continues experimental programs aimed at human's adaptation to future long-term expeditions. Effects of the flight conditions on the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system and bones are being carefully investigated in dedicated medical experiments. Other research being conducted includes plantation of wheat and vegetables followed by genetic, microbiological and biochemical tests of plants.

+ Japan's externally mounted X-Ray camera monitors more than 1,000 X-ray sources in space, including black holes and neutron stars. The instrument scans the entire sky in X-ray wavelengths and downlinks data to be distributed through the Internet to research groups around the world. Since last October, it has issued more than 50 alerts for the X-ray transient phenomena.

All of the partners also recognize the key role of the space station in inspiring students around the world to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. More than 30 million students have participated in human spaceflight though communications downlinks and interactive experiments with station astronauts.

www.space-travel.com

Avoid Swimming In Interplanetary Lakes

2010-09-23T15:49:00.000+03:00

The chemical processes on Titan are different than those on Earth because there is no water vapor in Titan's air, leading to hydrocarbon-based lakes unlike those seen on our planet. Because of this, the frequent claims that Titan could be a laboratory for the investigation of life's emergence on Earth are unfounded.

by Staff Writers

Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Sep 23, 2010

Titan, one of Saturn's moons, is the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere - ten times denser than the atmosphere of Earth. Five years ago, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, sent a probe through Titan's atmosphere, revealing that Titan is home to a landscape that includes hills, valleys and most notably lakes.

A researcher involved with the mission, Prof. Akiva Bar-Nun of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, has now determined the composition of these lakes. Taking into account the chemical components of Titan's atmosphere, he has demonstrated that the lakes are not composed of water but contain liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane, which are also found in oil and gas wells on Earth.

His in-depth analysis of the chemical composition of Titan's atmosphere and lakes was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets.

Gases turned to rain

"Titan's unique atmosphere does not include nitrogen and oxygen like Earth's, but rather nitrogen and methane," Prof. Bar-Nun says. Solar irradiation of the methane in Titan's atmosphere produces a variety of hydrocarbon gases, which condense in the atmosphere and fall to the surface of Saturn's moon.

"Upon reaching the cold surface, they liquefy, raining down, flowing through the gullies and accumulating into lakes - but you wouldn't want to jump into them on a summer holiday," he continues. Further solar irradiation of these hydrocarbons in the atmosphere also produces tiny globules of polymers, or aerosols, which give Titan its famed orange glow.

From Titan to Siberia?

Prof. Bar-Nun says that these recent findings confirm predictions that he made in 1979, when he first developed the theory that there were lakes on Titan. Upon falling to the moon's surface, he theorized, the hydrocarbons in the atmosphere would form lakes with a depth of approximately 43 meters had they been covering the entire surface of Titan. In addition, he hypothesized that the same elements would form aerosols in the atmosphere.

The Cassini-Huygens mission also confirmed a prediction that Prof. Bar-Nun and his fellow researchers made in 1999 regarding the height of mountains on Titan. Titan's water-ice crust, he explains, has similar properties to the permafrost found in Siberia. Being partly fluid, permafrost permits hills and mountains to rise no higher than 1,900 meters, or approximately 6,200 feet. And indeed, no hill or mountain on Titan's surface exceeds that height, the researchers found.

.spacedaily.com

Bringing Grace To Earth Mass And Water Movements

2010-09-22T15:47:00.000+03:00

Global present-day trends in the transport of water mass around Earth, as determined using data from GRACE, surface measurements and an ocean model. Darker areas represent greater loss of mass. Image credit: NASA-JPL/-Caltech.

NASA and European researchers have conducted a novel study to simultaneously measure, for the first time, trends in how water is transported across Earth's surface and how the solid Earth responds to the retreat of glaciers following the last major Ice Age, including the shifting of Earth's center of mass.

To calculate the changes, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands; and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, Netherlands, combined gravity data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites with direct measurements of global surface movements from GPS and other sources and a JPL-developed model that estimates the mass of Earth's ocean above any point on the ocean floor. Results are reported in the September issue of Nature Geoscience.

Using the new methodology, the researchers, led by Xiaoping Wu of JPL, calculated new estimates of ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica that are significantly smaller than previous estimates.

According to the team's estimates, mass losses between 2002 and 2008 measured 104 (plus or minus 23) gigatonnes a year in Greenland, 101 (plus or minus 23) gigatonnes a year in Alaska/Yukon, and 64 (plus or minus 32) gigatonnes a year in West Antarctica.

A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds. The smaller but significant ice loss estimates reflect the revised role that post-glacial rebound was found to play in relation to current ice mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

Post-glacial rebound (known as glacial isostatic adjustment) is the response of the solid Earth to the retreat of glaciers following the last Ice Age. After the weight of ice from the land surface was removed, the land under the ice rose and continues to slowly rise.

In addition, the team found that the shift of water mass around the globe, combined with the post-glacial rebound of Earth's surface, is shifting Earth's surface relative to its center of mass by 0.88 millimeters (.035 inches) a year toward the North Pole. The estimate of the shift due to rebound-0.72 millimeters (.028 inches) per year--is believed to be the first estimate based on actual data, rather than a model prediction.

Wu said the shift of Earth's surface is due primarily to the melted Laurentide ice sheet, which blanketed most of Canada and a part of the northern United States around 21,000 years ago. "The new estimate of shift is much larger than previous model estimates of 0.48 millimeters [.019 inches] per year," said Wu.

"This suggests that either Earth's lower mantle must be much more viscous than previously believed, or that the history of Earth's deglaciation needs to be significantly revised."

Wu said previous GRACE-based estimates of the movement of mass at Earth's surface have been calculated by correcting the data using a post-glacial rebound model, while estimates of post-glacial rebound itself have been estimated using a hydrological model.

These models are not as precise as the geodetic data, however, and contain unknown and potentially large errors that will throw off estimates of the other process.

GRACE project scientist Michael Watkins of JPL, who was not an author on the paper, said that although some of the new results, such as those for Greenland, are surprising, they are not due to a reanalysis of GRACE or GPS data alone.

Rather, they are a result of the simultaneous use of GRACE, GPS and other geodetic measurements to help objectively sort out the relative sizes of post-glacial rebound and present-day ice mass loss.

"Both the GPS and gravity measurements are accurate on their own, but untangling the relative contributions of the two processes as observed by satellites is difficult. This technique provides a first global attempt at doing that," Watkins said.

"The Earth system is so complex that measuring and understanding it requires scientists to combine observations from as many satellites and ground-based measurements as possible," Watkins added.

"With each new study like this one, we learn more and more about how to conduct future studies and interpret their data. The more data, and different types of data we collect, the better we'll be able to answer fundamental questions about how our planet works.

spacedaily.com

Data Clippers Set Sail To Enhance Future Planetary Missions

2010-09-21T15:38:00.000+03:00

Recent advances in technology mean that spacecraft propelled by solar sails, which use radiation pressure from photons emitted by the Sun, or electric sails, which harness the momentum of the solar wind, can now be envisaged for mid-term missions. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, is currently testing a solar sail mission, IKAROS. Credit: Thales Alenia Space

by Staff Writers

Paris, France (SPX) Sep 21, 2010

A new golden age of sailing may be about to begin - in space. Future missions to explore the outer planets could employ fleets of 'data-clippers', maneuverable spacecraft equipped with solar sails, to ship vast quantities of scientific data to back Earth.

According to Joel Poncy of Thales Alenia Space, the technology could be ready in time to support mid-term missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Poncy will be presenting an assessment of data clippers at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on Monday 20th September.

"Space-rated flash memories will soon be able to store the huge quantities of data needed for the global mapping of planetary bodies in high resolution. But a full high-res map of, say, Europa or Titan, would take several decades to download from a traditional orbiter, even using very large antennae.

Downloading data is the major design driver for interplanetary missions. We think that data clippers would be a very efficient way of overcoming this bottleneck," said Poncy.

Poncy and his team at Thales Alenia Space have carried out a preliminary assessment for a data clipper mission. Their concept is for a clipper to fly close to a planetary orbiter, upload its data and fly by Earth, at which point terabytes of data could be downloaded to the ground station.

A fleet of data clippers cruising around the Solar System could provide support for an entire suite of planetary missions.

"We have looked at the challenges of a data clipper mission and we think that it could be ready for a launch in the late 2020s. This means that the technology should be included now in the roadmap for future missions, and this is why we are presenting this study at EPSC," said Poncy.

Poncy's team have assessed the communications systems and trackingdevices that a data clipper would need, as well as the flyby conditions and pointing accuracy required for the massive data transfers.

The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, is currently testing a solar sail mission, IKAROS.

"Using the Sun as a propulsion source has the considerable advantage of requiring no propellant on board. As long as the hardware doesn't age too much and the spacecraft is maneuverable, the duration of the mission can be very long. The use of data clippers could lead to a valuable downsizing of exploration missions and lower ground operation costs - combined with a huge science return.

"The orbiting spacecraft would still download some samples of their data directly to Earth to enable real-time discoveries and interactive mission operations. But the bulk of the data is less urgent and is often processed by scientists much later. Data clippers could provide an economy delivery service from the outer Solar System, over and over again," said Poncy.

.space-travel.com

Building A Tower To The Stars

2010-09-20T09:26:00.000+03:00

The attraction of the Space Elevator concept is not only how environmentally friendly it would be, but also how cheap it would be compared with current rocket technologies

by Tony Healey
London, UK (SPX) Sep 20, 2010
In his 1979 novel 'The Fountains of Paradise' Science Fiction author Arthur C Clarke imagined a not-too-distant future where technology would have progressed so far as to allow us to engineer a material strong enough to be used as a cable connecting an orbiting satellite with the ground - a concept commonly referred to as 'The Space Elevator' or 'Tether'.

It involves having a satellite in near-Earth orbit, with one tether stretched out into space, attached to a heavy object acting as a counter weight, against a line that is dropped to Earth from the satellite and secured to the ground.

The satellite remains fixed in synchronous orbit, and the counter weight would keep the line held taut.

A vehicle would be used to go up and down this line, much like an elevator, moving with relative ease to and from Earth orbit. As Clarke notes in his book, perhaps it is easier to think of the Space Elevator as being something stretching not upward toward the stars, but outward... that is, 35,000 kilometers outward.

The idea is not originally Clarke's however, although he certainly brought it to widespread attention in 1979 with the publication of his novel; the Space Elevator it has its roots more in science fact than science fiction.

The key idea behind it dates back to 1895, when a Soviet Rocket Scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky - inspired by the Eiffel Tower - proposed an idea for building a solid free-standing tower from Earth's surface, reaching up 35,000 kilometers into space. He proposed that from the top of this tower, objects could be launched into space with relative ease into orbit.

However the lack of a material strong enough to support its own weight at such a height proved the concept beyond human capability. Still, the underlying idea of simply connecting ground and sky, as opposed to travelling from ground to sky, stuck.

Later, in 1959, leading Soviet Engineer called Yuri Artsustanov followed on from Tsiolkovsky's work when he conceived of the Space Elevator as we think of it today.

It is worth mentioning that Artsustanov drew on not just one but two concepts of Tsiolkovsky's - the huge tower reaching up into space, and the geostationary satellite, theorized by Tsiolkovsky in his 1903 work 'The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices'.

This concept was further developed by Clarke himself in 1945, as an idea for communication satellites in geostationary orbits. This led to the obvious: the Satellite Television, GPS, etc, that we all take for granted today.

The extent of the impact Tsiolkovsky's work had on the early thinkers of the twentieth century is obvious - the most famous example of his influence might well have been the successful launching of Sputnik into space; showing that a geostationary orbit could be sustained by a man-made object. This allowed Artsustanov to base his concept of a Space Elevator in known truth - making it a more viable idea.

The attraction of the Space Elevator concept is not only how environmentally friendly it would be, but also how cheap it would be compared with current rocket technologies with the cost of sending anything up into space at roughly $20,000 per lb. Using the Space Elevator technology would be many times less than that.

Another factor is the level of public interest. People need something new to get excited about. Since the heydays of the Space Race in the 50's and 60's, public interest in leaving our planet has waned severely.

Perhaps that is partly due to the fact that we stopped heading to the moon and seemed more content remaining within Earth's orbit.

It could be because of the amount of time it takes to plan, and implement each separate mission; losing public interest in the waiting. And surely the reality of how much each mission into space currently costs is a factor also.

With the Space Elevator, we could travel from a point on Earth's surface into space, without the need for rockets, and at a dramatically lower cost. It would also be safer; removing the danger involved in riding an over-sized firework.

We could ferry supplies to an orbiting Space Station such as the ISS with ease. Even the ability to launch Satellites and Space Probes without the need of a rocket would be money well saved. Indeed the uses of the Space Elevator concept, and the opportunities that it opens to us, are immense. The technology would have a profound effect on not only the way that we reach space, but on what we do next.

Imagine a Space Elevator not only on Earth, but on the Moon as well, helping us to establish and maintain a Moon Base on the lunar surface. Perhaps even ferrying processed lunar ore to awaiting transports to bring back to Earth. And what of Mars?

The problem with a manned mission to Mars is the difficulty of establishing a base on Mars, and the logistics of getting back off of the surface. With a Space Elevator on Mars, a single ship could be sent to Mars and left in orbit whilst the surface is explored. The astronauts could then return to the ship via the Elevator, and head back to Earth.

The other proposed use of the Space Elevator concept, is in using the tethers to slingshot objects away from Earth into space. With the counter weight at one end of the tether, and for example a space probe at the other, the tether would transfer momentum to the probe, throwing it away from Earth at great speed.

This would not only negate the need for a probe to circle the Earth continuously until it had picked up enough speed to break away from Earth's gravity, but it might also mean that a probe's journey into deep space might be that much quicker, given the kick start.

There are several drawbacks to building a Space Elevator, the biggest of which is the production of a material that is suitable to be stretched tight over tens of thousands of kilometers, and endure great weights and strains from various forces. The other is the immense cost of actually getting such a 'construction' built.

However, there has recently been a resurgence of interest in the concept, and amongst several ongoing projects to build a Space Elevator is a recent announcement by Shuichi Ono, Chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, of their intent to build a Space Elevator with a trillion yen price tag.

Only the future will tell if such grand plans come to see fruition.

It is very clear that if we want to go back into space, and send people like you and I there, then we need to make travelling to space as cheap and as easy as possible. We cannot continue to rely on rocket technology, which is hundreds of years old, and far too expensive (the average cost sending the Space Shuttle into space is around about $450 Million).

We need to use technologies that can get Mankind to and from Space cheaply, quickly, and regularly. The development of new, strong materials that will allow us to build things like the Space Elevator will be a major factor in allowing us to do that. Surely the key to getting Mankind back into space is to make space a tourist attraction and allow companies to make money by taking them there.

In much the same way that airlines and jets offer to us the prospect of travelling anywhere on the globe, in the future they must be able to offer trips into space, the moon, and perhaps other planets. And they will not do this by using rockets.

A rich elite may be able to afford such trips in rocket-powered craft, but not the everyday men and women who have spent their lives looking up at the night sky and wishing they could reach out and touch it.

To open space to the masses, travel to it must be cheap and safe, and we must be able to send one trip after another. Links from the surface to the stars, and the advances in Science and Engineering that will make them possible, will help make going into space a realistic dream that will not be confined to only the super rich.

In the near future, perhaps within our own lifetimes, such trips might be as simple as riding a train... they might even be just as cheap.

www.spacedaily.com

Cyborgs Needed For Escape From Earth

2010-09-17T09:20:00.000+03:00

The image shows an artist's rendition of a future base on Mars. A manned-Mars mission would take require astronauts being in space for more than a year. Currently, there isn't enough research to know what long-term deep space travel would do to astronaut health. Credit: John J. Olson

by Anuradha K. Herath
for Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Sep 17, 2010
Scientists have warned for decades that humans are straining the Earth. The global population is increasing, economies are expanding and consumption doesn't appear to be slowing.

While save-the-planet campaigns are asking people to save energy, conserve water, recycle and even go vegetarian, some scientists are thinking literally out of this world by suggesting that humans may eventually have to consider leaving Earth if they are to survive as a species.

In the September issue of Endeavour, senior curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Roger Launius takes a look at the historical debate surrounding human colonization of the solar system and how human biology will have to adapt to such extreme space environments.

Colonizing the Solar System
Experiments have shown that certain life forms can survive in space. Recently, British scientists found that bacteria living on rocks taken from Britain's Beer village were able to survive 553 days in space, on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS). The microbes returned to Earth alive, proving they could withstand the harsh environment.

Humans, on the other hand, are unable to survive beyond about a minute and a half in space without significant technological assistance. Other than some quick trips to the moon and the ISS, astronauts haven't spent too much time too far away from Earth. Scientists don't know enough yet about the dangers of long-distance space travel on human biological systems.

A one-way trip to Mars, for example, would take approximately six months. That means astronauts will be in deep space for more than a year with potentially life-threatening consequences.

"If it's about exploration, we're doing that very effectively with robots," Launius said. "If it's about humans going somewhere, then I think the only purpose for it is to get off this planet and become a multi-planetary species."

Launius isn't the only person who envisions humans leaving Earth. Acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking recently discussed his own thoughts on how the human race would survive.

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking told the Big Think website in August. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet."

If humans are to colonize other planets, Launius said it could well require the "next state of human evolution" to create a separate human presence where families will live and die on that planet. In other words, it wouldn't really be Homo sapien sapiens that would be living in the colonies, it could be cyborgs-a living organism with a mixture of organic and electromechanical parts-or in simpler terms, part human, part machine.

To Be a Cyborg
By definition, cyborgs are not a thing of the future, but very much a thing of the present. Launius classifies himself as a cyborg because he relies on medical technology to sustain and enhance his life.

"There are cyborgs walking about us," Launius said. "There are individuals who have been technologically enhanced with things such as pacemakers and cochlea ear implants that allow those people to have fuller lives. I would not be alive without technological advances."

The possibility of using cyborgs for space travel has been the subject of research for at least half a century. An influential article published in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline titled "Cyborgs and Space" changed the debate.

According to them, there was a better alternative to recreating the Earth's environment in space, the predominant thinking during that time. The two scientists compared that approach to "a fish taking a small quantity of water along with him to live on land." They felt that humans should be willing to partially adapt to the environment to which they would be traveling.

"Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him in space," Clynes and Kline wrote.

Even though it may be both logically and technologically possible, the ethical question is whether it should be done.

"It does raise profound ethical, moral and perhaps even religious questions that haven't been seriously addressed," Launius said. "We have a ways to go before that happens."

Grant Gillett, a professor of medical ethics at the Otago Bioethics Center of the University of Otago Medical School in New Zealand said addressing the ethical issue is really about justifying the need for such an approach, the need for altering humans so significantly that they end up not entirely human in the end.

"(Whether we) should do it largely depends on if it's important enough for humanity in general," Gillett said. "To some extent, that's the justification."

The greater concern, according to Gillett, is that the cyborgs will likely only have a simulation of human behavior. What is important, he said, is not what the cyborgs are made up of but what types of moral sensibilities and intuitions are built in. And there is really no way of knowing for sure or even of making reasonable guesses without doing a lot more work on the moral nature of humans.

"I think the danger is that we might end up producing a psychopath because we don't quite understand the nature of cyborgs," Gillett said.

The Future of Cyborgs
At first, as Launius points out in his article, NASA did support this field of research, but that interest lasted for less than a decade. By the late 1960s, the agency had distanced itself from the topic. For one, the technology was not available at that time. However, some scientists think the problem was more about public image.

Would the American public of that decade-one that was arguably obsessed with the space program and idolized astronauts-have accepted the "cyborgization of (the) astronaut corps"?

NASA still isn't focusing much research on how to improve human biological systems for space exploration. Instead, its Human Research Program is focused on risk reduction: risks of fatigue, inadequate nutrition, health problems and radiation.

While financial and ethical concerns may have held back cyborg research, Launius believes that society may have to engage in the cyborg debate again when space programs get closer to launching long-term deep space exploration missions.

"If our objective is to become space-faring people, it's probably going to force you to reconsider how to reengineer humans,' Launius said.

www.space-travel.com

Herschel Finds Hot Water Vapor Around a Carbon Star

2010-09-15T15:57:00.001+03:00

The red giant pulsating carbon star CW Leonis as seen by the PACS and SPIRE cameras and spectrometers on board Herschel. The star itself is too bright to be seen well. But it is releasing material in a violent stellar wind, some of which is seen in a 'bow shock' to the left of the star in this image. Observations have shown that water vapor is being formed deep down near the surface of the star; a place where it was previously thought to be impossible to appear. This means that the stellar wind must be much more 'clumpy' than previously foreseen, with some regions having a much weaker wind than others. This allows ultraviolet light from interstellar space to reach the deeper, warmer regions and trigger the creation of water vapor. Credit: ESA / KU Leuven / LUTH / Observatoire de Paris

by Staff Writers
Paris, France (SPX) Sep 15, 2010
Using the European Herschel spacetelescope, an international team including astronomers at Observatoire de Paris, Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique and Observatoire de Grenoble in France observed hot water vapor formed somewhere that was previously thought to be impossible: deep into the atmosphere of a red giant pulsating carbon star, CW Leonis.

This result, published in the 2 September 2010 issue of Nature magazine, should help to understand how this type of evolved star produces and expels key ingredients for all known forms of life.

The major building blocks of life on Earth are water and carbon-based molecules, synthesized in large quantities by stars like the Sun at the end of their lives. When they age, these stars become red giants and puff out their atmospheres. These have previously been seen to contain either water or carbon-based molecules, and it was thought that these two types of species could not co-exist.

New results from the Photodetector Array Camera Spectrometer PACS and Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver SPIRE onboard the European Space Agency ESA Herschel observatory, launched in May 2009, have overturned this longstanding concept by detecting abundant hot water vapor in the atmosphere of a very carbon-rich red giant star.

CW Leo (catalogued IRC+10216) is a red giant pulsating star in the constellation of Leo. With a mass roughly similar to that of the Sun, it has expanded to hundreds of times the size of our own star - if placed in the Solar System it would extend beyond the orbit of Mars.

Barely detectable in the visible, even by the largest telescopes, it is the brightest star in the sky observed in the infrared, at wavelengths ten times longer than those seen by human eyes. This suggests that huge quantities of dust particles have condensed around the star. They absorb almost all of its visible radiation and re-emit it in the infrared.

The star is classified as a 'carbon-star' and, at a distance of around 500 light-years, it is the closest such object to Earth. Nuclear fusion reactions deep inside are converting helium into carbon. The star is currently emitting ten thousand times as much energy as the Sun. And its outer layers are billowing out in a 'stellar wind' - a billion times more intense than the solar wind.

This matter is rich in many different carbon based molecules and dust particles. CW Leonis will soon end its life by becoming a hot white dwarf star surrounded by a diffuse planetary nebula - an extended cloud of gas and dust made up of material presently in its atmosphere and expelled into space afterwards.

With so much carbon in its atmosphere, almost all of the oxygen should be locked up in carbon monoxide CO, say scientists. There should be no water vapor, H2O.

However, in 2001 the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite SWAS detected emission from CW Leonis at a wavelength of water vapor. A possible proposed origin was that the wind was releasing water molecules from a cloud of evaporating icy comets around the star.

However, now, Herschel has detected the definitive signature of water at many more wavelengths. Vapor appears at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees, implying that it is distributed throughout and deep down into the wind.

The model of the stellar wind interacting with a distant icy comet cloud must now be replaced by another one in which water vapor is created by previously unsuspected chemical reactions triggered with help from interstellar ultraviolet radiation. Ultraviolet light breaks up the carbon monoxide, releasing oxygen atoms that can then react with hydrogen to form water molecules.

The only possible source of the ultraviolet light is interstellar space. It was already known that the stellar wind is 'clumpy', and the Herschel results have shown that some regions around the star must be almost empty. These allow the ultraviolet light to reach the deepest layers of the atmosphere and initiate chemical reactions to produce water.

On primitive Earth, harsh ultraviolet radiation from the Sun may have played a crucial role in triggering prebiotic processes that ultimately created the molecular building blocks of life. New Herschel results imply that analogous processes operate around red giant stars that supply material for new generations of stars and planets in galaxies like our Milky Way.

This news is based on a scientific paper entitled "Warm water vapour in the sooty ouflow from a luminous carbon star," published on Thursday, 2 September 2010, in Nature. This work was conducted by 37 scientists from 8 countries. The lead author is Leen Decin from Katholieke Universteit Leuven (Belgium). Marcelino Agundez at Observatoire de Paris, Michel Guelin at Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique IRAM and Claudine Kahane at Observatoire de Grenoble contributed in France. Marcelino Agundez is at Laboratoire Univers et Theories LUTH, a common research unity between Observatoire de Paris, CNRS and Universite Paris-Diderot. IRAM is a French, German and Spanish institute supported in France by INSU/CNRS. Herschel is an ESA observatory. PACS and SPIRE instruments have been developed by a consortium of institutes with support from CEA, CNES, CNRS funding agencies in France.

spacedaily.com

Avoiding An Asteroid Collision

2010-09-14T16:42:00.000+03:00

Illustration only.

by Staff Writers
Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Sep 14, 2010
Though it was once believed that allasteroids are giant pieces of solid rock, later hypotheses have it that some are actually a collection of small gravel-sized rocks, held together by gravity. If one of these "rubble piles" spins fast enough, it's speculated that pieces could separate from it through centrifugal force and form a second collection - in effect, a second asteroid.

Now researchers at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with an international group of scientists, have proved the existence of these theoretical "separated asteroid" pairs.

Ph.D. student David Polishook of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences and his supervisor Dr. Noah Brosch of the university's School of Physics and Astronomy say the research has not only verified a theory, but could have greater implications if an asteroid passes close to earth.

Instead of a solid mountain colliding with earth's surface, says Dr. Brosch, the planet would be pelted with the innumerable pebbles and rocks that comprise it, like a shotgun blast instead of a single cannonball. This knowledge could guide the defensive tactics to be taken if an asteroid were on track to collide with the Earth.

A large part of the research for the study, recently published in the journal Nature, was done at Tel Aviv University's Wise Observatory, located deep in the Negev Desert - the first and only modern astronomical observatory in the Middle East.

Spinning out in space
According to Dr. Brosch, separated asteroids are composed of small pebbles glued together by gravitational attraction. Their paths are affected by the gravitational pull of major planets, but the radiation of the sun, he says, can also have an immense impact. Once the sun's light is absorbed by the asteroid, rotation speeds up. When it reaches a certain speed, a piece will break off to form a separate asteroid.

The phenomenon can be compared to a figure skater on the ice. "The faster they spin, the harder it is for them to keep their arms close to their bodies," explains Dr. Brosch.

As a result, asteroid pairs are formed, characterized by the trajectory of their rotation around the sun. Though they may be millions of miles apart, the two asteroids share the same orbit. Dr. Brosch says this demonstrates that they come from the same original asteroid source.

Looking into the light
During the course of the study, Polishook and an international group ofastronomers studied 35 asteroid pairs. Traditionally, measuring bodies in the solar system involves studying photographic images. But the small size and extreme distance of the asteroids forced researchers to measure these pairs in an innovative way.

Instead, researchers measured the light reflected from each member of the asteroid pairs. The results proved that in each asteroid pair, one body was formed from the other.

The smaller asteroid, he explains, was always less than forty percent of the size of the bigger asteroid. These findings fit precisely into a theory developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which concluded that no more than forty percent of the original asteroid can split off.

With this study, says Dr. Brosch, researchers have been able to prove the connection between two separate spinning asteroids and demonstrate the existence of asteroids that exist in paired relationships.

spacedaily.com

New Results On Dwarf Galaxy Evolution

2010-09-13T16:12:00.000+03:00

File image: dwarf galaxy.

by Staff Writers
Lisbon, Portugal (SPX) Sep 13, 2010
The 'Local Cosmology from Isolated Dwarfs (LCID)' team showed their most recent results that suggest that reionization alone is not able to stop star formation in Dwarf Galaxies, as had been expected. The results were presented during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Sciences.

The Big Bang model predicts that the universe started out as completely ionized plasma, which later cooled and allowed all of the atoms to recombine into neutral atoms.

The first generation of stars and galaxies formed from this neutral material and produced high energy radiation which then "reionized" the universe. This period of reionization ended approximately 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

The 'Local Cosmology from Isolated Dwarfs (LCID)' project, led by Carme Gallart of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Tenerife, Spain), has used over 100 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observing time with the ACS camera in order to obtain detailed star formation histories for six Local Group dwarf galaxies, which include details about early star formation.

"All the galaxies in the sample, including those that ended star formation very early on, such as the Cetus dSph galaxy, formed most of their stars after reionization was complete. This demonstrates that reionization alone is not able to stop star formation in the smallest galaxies, as had been expected" says Gallart, who has been working with a team of about a dozen people for 5 years on this project.

The smallest galaxies represent important probes of the conditions of the early Universe, since their early star formation can be strongly influenced by cosmic reionization.

The most common prediction of models of dwarf galaxy evolution is that the early ionization of the gas in these galaxies by the cosmic UV background should have halted and prevented any subsequent star formation in them after about 12.5 Gyr ago.

spacedaily.com

Deadly Tides Mean Early Exit For Hot Jupiters

2010-09-10T15:20:00.000+03:00

An artist's depiction of an early stage in the destruction of a hot Jupiter by its star. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Frank Reddy
by Elizabeth Zubritsky
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Sep 10, 2010
Bad news for planet hunters: most of the "hot Jupiters" that astronomers have been searching for in starclusters were likely destroyed long ago by their stars.
In a paper accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal, John Debes and Brian Jackson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., offer this new explanation for why no transiting planets (planets that pass in front of their stars and temporarily block some of the light) have been found yet in star clusters.
The researchers also predict that the planet hunting being done by the Kepler mission is more likely to succeed in younger star clusters than older ones.
"Planets are elusive creatures," says Jackson, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at Goddard, "and we found another reason that they're elusive."
When astronomers began to search for planets in star-packed globular clusters about 10 years ago, they hoped to find many new worlds. One survey of the cluster called 47 Tucanae (47 Tuc), for example, was expected to find at least a dozen planets among the roughly 34,000 candidate stars.
"They looked at so many stars, people thought for sure they would find some planets," says Debes, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at Goddard. "But they didn't."
More than 450 exoplanets (short for "extrasolar planets," or planets outside our solar system) have been found, but "most of them have been detected around single stars," Debes notes.
"Globular clusters turn out to be rough neighborhoods for planets," explains Jackson, "because there are lots of stars around to beat up on them and not much for them to eat."
The high density of stars in these clusters means that planets can be kicked out of their solar systems by nearby stars. In addition, the globular clusters surveyed so far have been rather poor in metals (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), which are the raw materials for making planets; this is known as low metallicity.
Debes and Jackson propose that hot Jupiters-large planets that are at least 3 to 4 times closer to their host stars than Mercury is to our sun-are quickly destroyed. In these cramped orbits, the gravitational pull of the planet on the star can create a tide-that is, a bulge-on the star.
As the planet orbits, the bulge on the star points a little bit behind the planet and essentially pulls against it; this drag reduces the energy of the planet's orbit, and the planet moves a little closer to the star. Then the bulge on the star gets bigger and saps even more energy from the planet's orbit.
This continues for billions of years until the planet crashes into the star or is torn apart by the star's gravity, according to Jackson's model of tidal orbital decay.
"The last moments for these planets can be pretty dramatic, as their atmospheres are ripped away by their stars' gravity," says Jackson.
"It has even been suggested recently the hot Jupiter called WASP-12B is close enough to its star that it is currently being destroyed."
Debes and Jackson modeled what would have happened in 47 Tuc if the tidal effect were unleashed on hot Jupiters. They recreated the range of masses and sizes of the stars in that cluster and simulated a likely arrangement of planets. Then they let the stars' tides go to work on the close-in planets.
The model predicted that so many of these planets would be destroyed, the survey would come up empty-handed. "Our model shows that you don't need to consider metallicity to explain the survey results," says Debes, "though this and other effects will also reduce the number of planets."
Ron Gilliland, who is at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and participated in the 47 Tuc survey, says, "This analysis of tidal interactions of planets and their host stars provides another potentially good explanation-in addition to the strong correlation between metallicity and the presence of planets-of why we failed to detect exoplanets in 47 Tuc."
In general, Debes and Jackson's model predicts that one-third of the hot Jupiters will be destroyed by the time a cluster is a billion years old, which is still juvenile compared to our solar system (about 4-1/2 billion years old). 47 Tuc has recently been estimated to be more than 11 billion years old. At that age, the researchers expect more than 96% of the hot Jupiters to be gone.
The Kepler mission, which is searching for hot Jupiters and smaller, Earth-like planets, gives Debes and Jackson a good chance to test their model.
Kepler will survey four open clusters-groups of stars that are not as dense as globular clusters-ranging from less than half a billion to nearly 8 billion years old, and all of the clusters have enough raw materials to form significant numbers of planets, Debes notes.
If tidal orbital decay is occurring, Debes and Jackson predict, Kepler could find up to three times more Jupiter-sized planets in the youngest cluster than in the oldest one. (An exact number depends on the brightness of the stars, the planets' distance from the stars, and other conditions.)
"If we do find planets in those clusters with Kepler," says Gilliland, a Kepler co-investigator, "looking at the correlations with age and metallicity will be interesting for shaping our understanding of the formation of planets, as well as their continued existence after they are formed."
If the tidal orbital decay model proves right, Debes adds, planet hunting in clusters may become even harder. "The big, obvious planets may be gone, so we'll have to look for smaller, more distant planets," he explains. "That means we will have to look for a much longer time at large numbers of stars and use instruments that are sensitive enough to detect these fainter planets."
The Kepler mission is managed by NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

spacedaily.com

Universe Chaotic From Very Beginning

2010-09-08T11:29:00.000+03:00

The work has direct implications for cosmology and shows in particular that the erratic changes between red- and blue-shift directions in the early universe were in fact chaotic.

by Staff Writers

Evanston IL (SPX) Sep 08, 2010

Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments.

The study, published by the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, reports not only that chaos is absolute but also the mathematical tools that can be used to detect it. When applied to the most accepted model for the evolution of the universe, these tools demonstrate that the early universewas chaotic.

Certain things are absolute. The speed of light, for example, is the same with respect to any observer in the empty space. Others are relative.

Think of the pitch of a siren on an ambulance, which goes from high to low as it passes the observer. A longstanding problem in physics has been to determine whether chaos - the phenomenon by which tiny events lead to very large changes in the time evolution of a system, such as the universe - is absolute or relative in systems governed by general relativity, where the time itself is relative.

A concrete aspect of this conundrum concerns one's ability to determine unambiguously whether the universe as a whole has ever behaved chaotically. If chaos is relative, as suggested by some previous studies, this question simply cannot be answered because different observers, moving with respect to each other, could reach opposite conclusions based on the ticks of their own clocks.

"A competing interpretation has been that chaos could be a property of the observer rather than a property of the system being observed," said Motter, an author of the paper and an assistant professor of physics andastronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "Our study shows that different physical observers will necessarily agree on the chaotic nature of the system."

The work has direct implications for cosmology and shows in particular that the erratic changes between red- and blue-shift directions in the early universe were in fact chaotic.

Motter worked with colleague Katrin Gelfert, a mathematician from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a former visiting faculty member at Northwestern, who says that the mathematical aspects of the problem are inspiring and likely to lead to other mathematical developments.

An important open question in cosmology is to explain why distant parts of the visible universe - including those that are too distant to have ever interacted with each other - are so similar.

"One might suggest 'Because the large-scale universe was created uniform,'" Motter said, "but this is not the type of answer physicists would take for granted."

Fifty years ago, physicists believed that the true answer could be in what happened a fraction of a second after the big bang. Though the initial studies failed to show that an arbitrary initial state of the universe would eventually converge to its current form, researchers found something potentially even more interesting: the possibility that the universe as a whole was born inherently chaotic.

The present-day universe is expanding and does so in all directions, Motter explained, leading to red shift of distant light sources in all three dimensions - the optical analog of the low pitch in a moving siren. The early universe, on the other hand, expanded in only two dimensions and contracted in the third dimension.

This led to red shift in two directions and blue shift in one. The contracting direction, however, was not always the same in this system. Instead, it alternated erratically between x, y and z.

"According to the classical theory of general relativity, the early universe experienced infinitely many oscillations between contracting and expanding directions," Motter said.

"This could mean that the early evolution of the universe, though not necessarily its current state, depended very sensitively on the initial conditions set by the big bang."

This problem gained a new dimension 22 years ago when two other researchers, Gerson Francisco and George Matsas, found that different descriptions of the same events were leading to different conclusions about the chaotic nature of the early universe. Because different descriptions can represent the perspectives of different observers, this challenged the hypothesis that there would be an agreement among different observers. Within the theory of general relativity, such an agreement goes by the name of a "relativistic invariant."

"Technically, we have established the conditions under which the indicators of chaos are relativistic invariants," Motter said. "Our mathematical characterization also explains existing controversial results. They were generated by singularities induced by the choice of the time coordinate, which are not present for physically admissible observables."

spacedaily.com

China Launches Satellite Sinosat-6 For TV, Radio Live Broadcast

2010-09-06T09:19:00.000+03:00

China launches the "SinoSat-6" satellite for radio and television live broadcast from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Sept. 5, 2010. Photo courtesy Xinhua.

by Staff Writers
Xichang, China (XNA) Sep 06, 2010
China successfully launched the "SinoSat-6" satellite for radio and television live broadcast at 12:14 a.m.Sunday from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The satellite was carried on the Long March 3B rocket which took the SinoSat-6 into a geostationary transfer orbit 26 minutes after the launch.

In the following days, Xi'an Satellite Control Center and Yuanwang tracking ship will manipulate the satellite's position and transfer it to enter the geostationary orbit.

SinoSat-6 has a designed lifespan of 15 years and will eventually work at longitude 126.4 degrees east about 35,700 kilometers above the equator, said the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC), the satellite's researcher and producer.

It will mainly serve for relaying TV and radio live broadcast signals and will greatly improve cultural life for people living in remote and mountainous regions, according to China Satellite Communications Corporation which will operate the satellite.

China has launched the first SinoSat series satellite, SinoSat-1, in 1998. The SinoSat-2 was launched in 2006 but malfuctioned for it failed to deploy its solar panels and communication antennae.

SinoSat-6 will serve as a substitute for SinoSat-3 which was launched on June 1, 2007, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

www.space-travel.com

God did not create Universe: Hawking

2010-09-03T09:27:00.001+03:00

by Staff Writers
London (AFP) Sept 2, 2010
God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time", Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.

Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.

In "A Brief History of Time", Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton's belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass -- far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he wrote.

Hawking argued earlier this year that mankind's only chance of long-term survival lies in colonising space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats.

He also warned in a recent television series that mankind should avoid contact with aliens at all costs, as the consequences could be devastating.

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Sunlight Spawns Many Binary And 'Divorced' Binary Asteroids

2010-09-02T16:28:00.000+03:00

The conclusion fits a theory of binary asteroid formation originated by co-author Daniel Scheeres, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His theory predicts that if a binary asteroid forms by rotational fission, the two can only escape from each other if the smaller one is less than 60 percent the size of the larger asteroid.

by Staff Writers
The asteroid beltbetween Mars and Jupiter is often depicted as a dull zone of dead rocks with an occasional wayward speedster smashing through on its way toward the sun.

A new study appearing in the journal Nature paints a different picture, one of slow but steady change, where sunlight gradually drives asteroids to split in two and move far apart to become independent asteroids among the millions orbiting the sun.

"This shows that asteroids are not inert, dead bodies of no interest," said study co-author Franck Marchis, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "In fact, small asteroids very slowly evolve into binaries and, eventually, divorced binaries."

Marchis, who studies double- and triple-asteroid systems, teamed up with former UC Berkeley undergraduate Brent Macomber to analyze two pairs of former or "divorced" binaries, which are asteroid pairs that have drifted apart and are no longer gravitationally bound to one another. Macomber, now a graduate student at Texas A and M University, participated through UC Berkeley's Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP), which matches students with researchers in need of assistance.

Marchis and Macomber contributed their findings to a group of astronomers in the Czech Republic, who analyzed the evolution of 35 pairs of divorced binaries.

The leader of that group, Petr Pravec of the Astronomical Institute in the Czech Republic, and 25 colleagues from 15 other institutions published the results this week, showing that all of the asteroid pairs have similar relative masses and relative velocities that point to a similar origin by fission.

Of all the asteroid pairs in the study, the smallest of each pair was always less than 60 percent of the mass of its companion asteroid.

Of the estimated one million asteroids 1 kilometer or more in diameter orbiting the sun, many are thought to be rubble piles of smaller rocks gravitationally bound together.

Previous research has shown that asteroid rubble piles less than 10 kilometers in diameter can start rotating faster because of the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect: the imbalance between sunlight absorbed on one side of an out-of-round asteroid and heatradiated on the other makes it spin.

"Sunlight striking an asteroid less than 10 kilometers across can change its rotation over millions of years, a slow motion version of how a windmill reacts to the wind," Scheeres said.

As an asteroid spins up, the equator bulges and the rocks at the extreme edge eventually reach escape velocity and detach. The detached rocks coalesce into a moonlet and, over millions of years, the primary and secondary asteroids "separate gently from each other at relatively low velocities," Scheeres said.

"This slow process, rather than catastrophic demolition, replenishes the population of binary asteroids, and accounts for the many binaries and ex-binaries that we see," Marchis said, noting that 10-15 percent of all small asteroids could be a binary system.

The researchers focused on so-called "asteroid pairs": independent asteroids in the same orbit around the sun that have come close to each other - usually within a few miles - at very low relative speeds at some point in the past million years. Asteroid pairs were first discovered in 2008 by co-author David Vokrouhlicky of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, but their formation process remained a mystery prior to the new study.

Suspecting that asteroid pairs were at one point binary asteroid systems, Pravec asked collaborators to measure two characteristics of each of the 35 asteroid pairs: the relative brightness of each asteroid - which correlates to its size - and the spin rates of the asteroid pairs using a technique known as photometry.

The 35 asteroids in the study ranged from about 1 to 10 kilometers (0.6 - 6 miles) in diameter. Observations were contributed by co-authors from institutions in North Carolina, California, Massachusetts, Chile, Israel, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Spain and France.

Macomber's contributions to research are not unusual for a UC Berkeley undergraduate. More than 1,400 students were involved in research last year in all fields of science, social science and the humanities.

"In the three years that I worked with Dr. Marchis, I got more experience than I could have possibly imagined in all aspects of observationalastronomy, everything from planning a night of observations, to collecting data with advanced adaptive optics imagers, to processing the data after the observations are completed," said Macomber, who obtained his bachelor's in physics and astronomy in December 2008, worked for a semester with Marchis at the SETI Institute and is now a Bradley Fellow in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A and M.

"The most important thing I learned was how real science works, the process of collaborating with a team around the world to collect observations, analyze them and publish scientific results."

"When students work with us, they can be involved in state-of-the-art research and make a real contribution to science," Marchis said.

spacedaily.com

Orcus Patera - Mars's Mysterious Elongated Crater

2010-08-31T09:23:00.000+03:00

Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons. This well-defined depression extends approximately 380 by 140 kilometres in a north-northeast to south-southwest direction. It has a rim that rises up to 1800 metres above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lies 400 to 600 metres below the surroundings. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum).

by Staff Writers
Bonn, Germany (SPX) Aug 30, 2010
Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression near Mars's equator, in the eastern hemisphere of the planet. Located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, its formation remains a mystery. Often overlooked, this well-defined depression extends approximately 380 by 140 kilometres in a north-northeast to south-southwest direction.

It has a rim that rises up to 1800 metres above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lays 400 to 600 metres below the surroundings.

The High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter acquired the images during Mars Express orbits 2216 and 2238.

The images show an area centred at approximately 14 degrees N / 177 degrees E, and have a ground resolution of about 30 metres per pixel. The camera is operated by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR).

The term 'patera' is used for deep, complex or irregularly shaped volcanic craters such as the Hadriaca Patera and Tyrrhena Patera at the north-eastern margin of the Hellas impact basin. However, despite its name and the fact that it is positioned near volcanoes, the actual origin of Orcus Patera remains unclear.

Aside from volcanism, there are a number of other possible origins. Orcus Patera may be a large and originally round impact crater, subsequently deformed by compressive forces.

Alternatively, it could have formed after the erosion of aligned impact craters. However, the most likely explanation is that it was made in an oblique impact, when a small body struck the surface at a very shallow angle, perhaps less than five degrees above the horizontal.

The existence of tectonic forces at Orcus Patera is evident from the presence of the numerous 'graben', rift-valley-like structures that cut across its rim. Up to 2.5 kilometres wide, these graben are oriented roughly east-west and are only visible on the rim and the nearby surroundings.

Within the Orcus Patera depression itself, the large graben are not visible, probably having been covered by later deposits. But smaller graben are present, indicating that several tectonic events have occurred in this region and also suggesting that multiple episodes of deposition have taken place.

The occurrence of 'wrinkle ridges' within the depression proves that not only extensional forces, as would be needed to create graben, but also compressive forces shaped this region. Wind-driven processes probably formed the dark shapes near the centre of the depression, where dark material excavated by small impact events in the depression has been redistributed.

However, the presence of graben and wrinkle-ridges has no bearing on the origin of Orcus Patera, as both can be found all over Mars. The true origin of Orcus Patera remains an enigma.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) experiment on the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission is led by the Principal Investigator (PI) Prof. Dr Gerhard Neukum, who was also responsible for the technical design of the camera. The science team of the experiment consists of 45 Co-Investigators from 32 institutions and 10 nations.

The camera was developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under the leadership of the PI, G. Neukum, and built in cooperation with industrial partners (EADS Astrium, Lewicki Microelectronic GmbH and Jena-Optronik GmbH).

The experiment on Mars Express is operated by the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, through ESA/ESOC. The systematic processing of the HRSC image data is carried out at DLR. The scenes shown here were processed by the PI-group at the Institute for Geosciences of the Freie Universitat Berlin in cooperation with the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin.

www.marsdaily.com

Moon Capital: A Commercial Gateway To The Moon

2010-08-30T09:21:00.000+03:00

File image.

by Marc M. Cohen
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 30, 2010
On 21 September 2010, the Moon Capital Competition will accept entries for the architectural design of an international and commercial lunar habitation. The prime sponsors of the competition who are putting up the prize money are: The Boston Society of Architects (American Institute of Architects) and The New England Council of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Other sponsors include: Draper Laboratory, Google Lunar X Prize, AIAA Space Architecture Technical Committee, and The Boston Center for the Arts

The competition is open to all comers, although its slant is largely toward space architects and architects who may become inspired to design in space.

Moon Capital consists of the planning and design of a Second Generation Habitation on the Moon to support a resident staff of 60 people. The groundbreaking on the Moon will occur July 20, 2069, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Second Generation means that a prior lunar base exists that can serve as the construction camp and the assembly point for building Moon Capital.

This assumption means that the project designers do not need to address the means of delivering materials and construction equipment to the site; the technology and transportation capability exists to assure these deliveries proximate to the construction site.

The primary purpose of Moon Capital is to provide a permanent commercial, science, and technology development facility on the Moon. Up to now, scientists and engineers have conducted lunar research almost exclusively from Earth. Certainly, the Apollo Astronauts returned over 300kg of lunar materials to Earth, which have provided a subject for study for over 40 years.

However, lunar science goes far beyond picking up rocks for return to Earth; and lunar technology development has barely begun. The scientific and technological disciplines have matured to where they can be far more productive and serendipitous if these professionals can do their work directly on the Moon.

Moon Capital arises from a concept of the evolution of lunar Habitation and Space Architecture. The First Generation Habitation will take the form of a largely government-driven lunar base that currently appears on the NASA exploration timeline for a construction start in the 2030s or later.

This base will provide habitation elements that include rigid, pre-integrated modules, deployable or inflatable structures, and the reuse of lunar lander parts.

The first generation base can provide some manufacturing and assembly of modules and components for the Second Generation Habitation: Moon Capital. However, mass delivered out of the gravity well of Earth is always at a premium in space, so any design decisions that reduce landed payload-mass and mass that the construction process must move will contribute to the success of the project.

As the Second Generation Habitation, Moon Capital represents an international and commercial effort to build a permanent human community on the moon. This community intends to achieve a much broader scope of endeavor than the First Generation base. It will support an entrepreneurial and commercial activity that can become the forerunner of a true in-space economy.

Moon Capital will be much more advanced in achieving self-sufficiency such as food production and regenerative life support. By placing the Habitat Core underground with all the living accommodations, Moon Capital will provide superior protection from the extreme and unforgiving lunar environment.

The habitat core will provide common labs for science and engineering that all crewmembers can use and share. On the lunar surface, the commercial modules cluster around the Surface Access Units to which they can make a pressurized connection.

Second Generation also means that Moon Capital will serve a multigenerational population; the staff can come with their families. Co-locating children with their parents at a lunar base becomes an essential step toward truly breaking the bonds of Earth and becoming a space-faring species.

The commercial activities that Moon Capital will support include:

+ Excavation and construction for the Moon Capital habitation,

+ Deployment and operation of scientific facilities such as a far-side radio telescope or a north-pole far-infrared telescope.

+ Supporting scientific surveys of the surface by providing transportation, field habitats, and operations,

+ Prospecting for minerals,

+ Extraction of resources such as water from polar ice or oxygen from regolith

+ Provision of fuel for surface rovers, lunar ascent vehicles, and interplanetary spacecraft.

+ Growing food,

+ Operating recycling processes and systems,

+ Manufacturing equipment for other commercial entities to use in their proprietary labs modules.

+ This compilation is just a start. Once people settle and live permanently on the moon, the pioneers will think of many more beneficial and profitable activities that they can undertake on Earth's only natural satellite.

www.space-travel.com

NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Ninos Are Growing Stronger

2010-08-27T15:56:00.000+03:00

Deviations from normal sea surface temperatures (left) and sea surface heights (right) at the peak of the 2009-2010 central Pacific El Ninos, as measured by NOAA polar orbiting satellites and NASA's Jason-1 spacecraft, respectively. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels were located in the central equatorial Pacific. Image credit: NASA/JPL-NOAA

by Staff Writers
Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 27, 2010
A relatively new type of El Nino, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Ninos and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.

Lead author Tong Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Michael McPhaden of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, measured changes in El Nino intensity since 1982.

They analyzed NOAA satellite observations of sea surface temperature, checked against and blended with directly-measured ocean temperature data. The strength of each El Nino was gauged by how much its sea surface temperatures deviated from the average. They found the intensity of El Ninos in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.

The scientists say the stronger El Ninos help explain a steady rise in central Pacific sea surface temperatures observed over the past few decades in previous studies--a trend attributed by some to the effects of global warming.

While Lee and McPhaden observed a rise in sea surface temperatures during El Nino years, no significant temperature increases were seen in years when ocean conditions were neutral, or when El Nino's cool water counterpart, La Nina, was present.

"Our study concludes the long-term warming trend seen in the central Pacific is primarily due to more intense El Ninos, rather than a general rise of background temperatures," said Lee.

"These results suggest climate change may already be affecting El Nino by shifting the center of action from the eastern to the central Pacific," said McPhaden.

"El Nino's impact on global weather patterns is different if ocean warming occurs primarily in the central Pacific, instead of the eastern Pacific.

"If the trend we observe continues," McPhaden added, "it could throw a monkey wrench into long-range weather forecasting, which is largely based on our understanding of El Ninos from the latter half of the 20th century."

El Nino, Spanish for "the little boy," is the oceanic component of a climate pattern called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, which appears in the tropical Pacific Ocean on average every three to five years. The most dominant year-to-year fluctuating pattern in Earth's climate system, El Ninos have a powerful impact on the ocean and atmosphere, as well as important socioeconomic consequences.

They can influence global weather patterns and the occurrence and frequency of hurricanes, droughts and floods; and can even raise or lower global temperatures by as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

During a "classic" El Nino episode, the normally strong easterly trade winds in the tropical eastern Pacific weaken. That weakening suppresses the normal upward movement of cold subsurface waters and allows warm surface water from the central Pacific to shift toward the Americas. In these situations, unusually warm surface water occupies much of the tropical Pacific, with the maximum ocean warming remaining in the eastern-equatorial Pacific.

Since the early 1990s, however, scientists have noted a new type of El Nino that has been occurring with greater frequency. Known variously as "central-Pacific El Nino," "warm-pool El Nino," "dateline El Nino" or "El Nino Modoki" (Japanese for "similar but different"), the maximum ocean warming from such El Ninos is found in the central-equatorial, rather than eastern, Pacific.

Such central Pacific El Nino events were observed in 1991-92, 1994-95, 2002-03, 2004-05 and 2009-10. A recent study found many climate models predict such events will become much more frequent under projected global warming scenarios.

Lee said further research is needed to evaluate the impacts of these increasingly intense El Ninos and determine why these changes are occurring.

"It is important to know if the increasing intensity and frequency of these central Pacific El Ninos are due to natural variations in climate or to climate change caused by human-produced greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

/www.spacedaily.com

China Launches New Mapping Satellite

2010-08-26T09:18:00.000+03:00

A mapping satellite, "Mapping Satellite - I," is launched from the northwestern Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, at 3:10 p.m. (Beijing time) on Aug. 24, 2010. The satellite, which was launched on a Long March 2-D carrier rocket, had entered into the preset orbit, according to the center. (Xinhua/Liang Jie)

by Staff Writers
Jiuquan, Gansu (XNA) Aug 26, 2010
China successfully launched a mapping satellite, "Mapping Satellite - I," from the northwestern Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 3:10 p.m. (Beijing time) Tuesday.

The satellite, which was launched on a Long March 2-D carrier rocket, had entered into the preset orbit, according to the center.

The satellite, developed by a company under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), would be mainly used to conduct scientific experiments, carry out surveys on land resources, and mapping, said a statement on the Ministry of National Defense website

The remote sensing information and test results from the satellite would promote the country's scientific research and economic development, said the statement.

The launch was the 128th for China's Long March series of rockets since April 24, 1970, when a Long March-1 rocket successfully sent the country's first satellite Dongfanghong-1 into the space.

www.spacedaily.com

British bacteria are hardy space travelers

2010-08-25T15:47:00.001+03:00

disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only

by Staff Writers
London (UPI) Aug 23, 2010
Bacteria from cliffs on the south coast of England have proved themselves hardy astronauts, surviving a year and a half as space travelers, researchers say.

Taken from the cliffs near the small fishing village of Beer in Devon, the bacteria were placed on the outside of the International Space Station to see how they would deal with harsh conditions in Earth orbit, the BBC reported.

The bacteria were sent up still sitting on, and in, small chunks of cliff rock. They were placed in experiment boxes on the outside of the station, exposed to the vacuum of space.

Scientists inspecting the bugs after a year and a half exposure to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays and dramatic shifts in temperature say many were still alive.

The survivors, brought back to Earth, are thriving in a laboratory at the Open University in Milton Keynes, the BBC reported.

The experiment was intended to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who leave Earth orbit to explore the rest of the solar system

"It has been proposed that bacteria could be used in life-support systems to recycle everything," OU researcher Karen Olsson-Francis said.

www.spacedaily.com

Weighing The Planets, From Mercury To Saturn

2010-08-24T09:20:00.000+03:00

The new measurement technique is sensitive to a mass difference of two hundred thousand million million tons - just 0.003% of the mass of the Earth, and one ten-millionth of Jupiter's mass. In the short term, spacecraft will continue to make the most accurate measurements for individual planets, but the pulsar technique will be the best for planets not being visited by spacecraft, and for measuring the combined masses of planets and their moons. Repeating the measurements would improve the values even more.

by Staff Writers
Bonn, Germany (SPX) Aug 24, 2010
An international research team led by David Champion, now at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, with researchers from Australia, Germany, the U.S., U.K. and Canada, has come up with a new way to weigh the planets in our Solar System, using radio signals from pulsars. Data from a set of four pulsars have been used to weigh Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with their moons and rings.

The new measurement technique is sensitive to just 0.003% of the mass of the Earth, and one ten-millionth of Jupiter's mass (corresponding to a mass difference of two hundred thousand million million tons). The results are described in an article for the "Astrophysical Journal", which is publicly accessible via preprint-server.

Until now, astronomers have weighed planets by measuring the orbits of their moons or of spacecraft flying past them. That's because mass creates gravity, and a planet's gravitational pull determines the orbit of anything that goes around it - both the size of the orbit and how long it takes to complete.

The new method is based on corrections astronomers make to signals from pulsars, small spinning stars that deliver regular "blips" of radio waves. Measurements of planet masses made this new way could feed into data needed for future space missions.

"This is first time anyone has weighed entire planetary systems-planets with their moons and rings," says team leader Dr. David Champion of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. "In addition, we can provide an independent check on previous results, which is great for planetary science."

The Earth is travelling around the Sun, and this movement affects exactly when pulsar signals arrive here. To remove this effect, astronomers calculate when the pulses would have arrived at the Solar System's center of mass, or barycenter, the rotation center for all the planets. Because the arrangement of the planets around the Sun changes with time, the barycenter moves around too (relative to the sun).

To work out its position, astronomers use both a table with the positions of the planets in the sky (called an ephemeris), and the values for their masses that have already been measured. If these figures are slightly wrong, and the position of the barycenter is slightly wrong, then a regular, repeating pattern of timing errors appears in the pulsar data.

"For instance, if the mass of Jupiter and its moons is wrong, we see a pattern of timing errors that repeats over 12 years, the time Jupiter takes to orbit the Sun," says Dr. Dick Manchester of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science. But if the mass of Jupiter and its moons is corrected, the timing errors disappear. This is the feedback process that the astronomers have used to determine the planets' masses.

Data from a set of four pulsars have been used to weigh Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with their moons and rings. Most of these data were recorded by CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia, with data contributed by the Effelsberg telescope in Germany and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

The masses were consistent with those measured by spacecraft. The mass of the Jovian system (Jupiter and its moons), 0.0009547921(2) times the mass of the Sun, is significantly more accurate than the mass determined from the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and consistent with, but less accurate than, the value from the Galileo spacecraft.

If astronomers observed a set of 20 pulsars over seven years they'd weigh Jupiter more accurately than spacecraft have. Doing the same for Saturn would take 13 years.

"Astronomers need this accurate timing because they're using pulsars to hunt for gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity", says Prof. Michael Kramer, head of the "Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy" research group at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

"Finding these waves depends on spotting minute changes in the timing of pulsar signals, and so all other sources of timing error must be accounted for, including the traces of solar system planets."

www.spacedaily.com

NASA's Marks 35th Anniversary Of Mars Viking Mission

2010-08-23T15:09:00.001+03:00

This is the first photograph ever taken on the surface of the planet Mars and was obtained by Viking 1 just minutes after the spacecraft landed successfully. Image Credit: NASA

by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 23, 2010
Mars. Roman god of war. The Red Planet. From the perennial Mars hoax to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, no other body in our solar system has so captured the human imagination. Throughout history mankind has gazed into the night sky wondering what civilizations awaited those who landed on the Red Planet's surface. The novels of Burroughs and others tout the planet's allure and films have warned humanity of its dangers.

In 1965, the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent the first images of another planet to waiting scientists on Earth. Since that image, the Red Planet has revealed a world strangely familiar, yet challenging. Each time scientists feel close to understanding Mars, new discoveries send them back to the drawing board to revise existing theories.

In the 35 years since NASA launched Viking 1 on Aug. 20, 1975, the ambitious mission only whetted the scientific world and public's enthusiasm for future space exploration.

In the ensuing years, NASA has launched the Phoenix Mars Lander, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Exploration Rovers, among others. Perhaps the most successful of these missions is Mars Exploration Rovers. Launched in June and July 2003, respectively, Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars each for a 90-day mission that continues after more than 6 years.

For centuries, scientists wondered if Mars might be covered with vegetation - or even inhabited by intelligent beings. Today, we know Mars to be quite different. It is a frozen desert world with now silent volcanoes and deep canyons. Polar ice caps expand and contract with the Martian seasons.

While the story began years earlier, it culminated in August and September 1975 with the launch of two large, nearly identical spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Fl. Vikings 1 and 2, named for the fearless Nordic explorers of Earth, finally give humans a close-up look at this alien world.

Viking 1 and 2, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, became the first space probes to obtain high resolution images of the Martian surface; characterize the structure and composition of the atmosphere and surface; and conduct on-the-spot biological tests for life on another planet.

Among the discoveries about Mars over the years, one stands out above all others: the possible presence of liquid water, either in its ancient past or preserved in the subsurface today.

Water is key because almost everywhere water is found on Earth, so is life. If Mars once had liquid water, or still does today, it's compelling to ask whether any microscopic life forms could have developed on its surface.

Viking 1 arrived at Mars on June 19, 1976. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter and touched down at Chryse Planitia. Viking 2 was launched Sept. 9, 1975, and entered Mars orbit Aug. 7, 1976. The Viking 2 lander touched down at Utopia Planitia on Sept. 3, 1976.

www.marsdaily.com

Mud Volcanoes On Mars

2010-08-20T11:23:00.000+03:00

The mounds shown here, located in the Southern Acidalia Planitia, range in size between 20 and 500 meters in diameter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

by Anuradha K. Herath
for Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Aug 20, 2010
If life does - or did - exist on Mars, signs of such life might well be found in a region in the northern plains called Acidalia Planitia, according to a new study.

The region appears to be dotted with what scientists believe are geological structures known as mud volcanoes, spewing out muddy sediments from underground. These sediments might contain organic materials that could be biosignatures of possible past and present life.

"If there was life on Mars, it probably developed in a fluid-rich environment," said lead author Dorothy Oehler, a research scientist at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

"Mud volcanoes themselves are an indicator of a fluid-rich subsurface, and they bring up material from relatively deep parts of the subsurface that we might not have a chance to see otherwise."

In a study published in the August issue of Icarus, Oehler and her co-author Carlton Allen mapped, for the first time, more than 18,000 of these circular mounds. Their estimate is that more than 40,000 mud volcanoes could be found in that region if the mapping continued.

"The Oehler paper adds to [previous studies] by documenting in much greater detail [the] number and distribution [of the mud volcanoes] and analyzes more deeply their origin and possible implications as paleo-habitats," said Kenneth Tanaka, a scientist at the Astrogeology Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Oehler and Allen analyzed images obtained from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which allowed them to take a closer look at the structure of some of the mounds and their flow-like features. More data from the imaging spectrometer known as CRISM provided new information on the mineralogy of the mud volcano-like mounds.

Through these assessments, the two scientists were able to rule out the possibility that the mounds were caused by other processes. The paper provides a detailed explanation of why the mounds cannot be impact structures, ice-cored mounds, evaporation deposits or structures caused by lava flow.

Scientists first observed the mounds in Acidalia using imagery obtained from the Viking mission in the late 1970s. However, it was more recently that these mounds were thought to represent mud volcanoes. Tanaka was one of the first to make that suggestion.

"I also thought that these features, which also occur elsewhere in the northern plains of Mars, were good places to search for signs of life," Tanaka said.

Mud volcanoes are geological structures in which a mixture of gas, liquid and fine-grained rock (or mud) is forced to the surface from several meters or kilometers underground. On Earth, mud volcanoes have specific significance to the oil industry. Those found on land have been found to play a significant role in predicting petroleum reservoirs.

Offshore, they can also be a "huge drilling hazard," according to Oehler, because the earth around a mud volcano is unstable and the activity inside is somewhat unpredictable. It is difficult to predetermine how much mud will surface and whether the process will be a quiet one or an explosive one.

The size of mud volcanoes can range up to about ten of kilometers in diameter and several hundred meters in height. The mud flows in an upward direction because the muddy mixture is more buoyant than the surrounding rocks.

One of the major goals of the Mars exploration program is to try to understand if life ever evolved on the planet. In that hunt, astrobiologists are searching for biosignatures that would indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life.

While the surface of Mars is thought to be inhospitable to life, microbial life possibly could exist underground. Mud volcanoes bring materials from great depths to the surface, providing samples from deep inside the planetary body that, on a place like Mars, would otherwise be completely inaccessible to scientists.

"If life were present in the subsurface, the water and slurries involved in forming the mud volcanoes would have brought it to the surface," Tanaka explained. "While life may not have survived at the surface, it at least could have been brought there by this process."

Studies such as this could help identify regions on the Red Planet that may have been the most suitable places for life to take hold. Missions could use this information to target sites that would be the most likely to have organic biosignatures.

"None of the previous landers or rovers on Mars has tested any structure interpreted as a possible mud volcano," Oehler said. "So the mounds in Acidalia represent an entirely new, and untested, class of exploration target for Mars."

However, Tanaka said the age of the mud volcanoes, which could be two to three billion years old, might make them less suitable locations for finding signs of life.

"There has been a great amount of time [for UV radiation and other surface processes] to destroy possible microfossils in surface rocks and soils," Tanaka said. "For this reason, it is unclear if these features are the best places to search for preserved life. Better places might include recent crater impacts and deposits from younger flood discharges."

Tanaka points to a Martian valley called Athabasca Valles as a good alternative location for astrobiologists to search for biosignatures. Scientists estimate its age to be in the range of two to 30 million years, making it the youngest channel on the planet. The younger the geological structure, the greater likelihood of finding better-preserved biosignatures.

Meanwhile, Oehler and her colleagues are hoping to continue analyzing the MRO imagery to provide further evidence that the circular structures in Acidalia are in fact mud volcanoes. They plan on analyzing their distribution on the surface, and how the shapes of the different structures vary. This analysis could provide more information about the subsurface conditions in the Acidalia region.

"We do believe that Acidalia is a place where life could have been abundant because of long-lived water sources," Oehler said. "It is one of the better places to look for evidence of life - if life ever developed on Mars."

www.marsdaily.com

Galaxies' Glory Days Revealed

2010-08-19T14:24:00.000+03:00

This sensitive exposure captures galaxies that are relatively local along side some that date back almost 10 billion years, soon after the Big Bang. The most distant galaxies stand out clearly in the infrared, rendered here in green and red. Image credit:NASA/JPL/Caltech/Texas A and M. For a larger version of this image please go here.

by Staff Writers
Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 19, 2010
Astronomers have experienced the galactic equivalent of discovering pictures of a mild-mannered grandmother partying as a wild youth. New observations from NASA's Spitzer SpaceTelescope reveal the early "wild" days of galaxy clusters - a time when the galaxies were bursting with new stars.

What is particularly striking is the fact that the stellar birth rate is higher in the cluster's center than at its edges - the exact opposite of what happens in our local portion of the universe, where the cores of galaxy clusters are known to be galactic graveyards.

The discovery, made by an international team of researchers led by Kim-Vy Tran of Texas A and M University, College Station, could ultimately reveal more about how such massive galaxies form.

Tran and her team spent the past four months analyzing images taken by Spitzer, essentially looking back in time nearly 10 billion years at a distant galaxy cluster known as CLG J02182-05102.

Mere months after first discovering the cluster and the fact that it is shockingly "modern" in its appearance and size for its age, the team was able to determine that the galaxy cluster produces hundreds to thousands of new stars every year.

That is a far higher birth rate than that of galaxies relatively near to us.

"We have revealed between the active galaxies and the quiescent behemoths that live in the local universe," said Tran.

www.spacedaily.com

Astronaut Muscles Waste In Space

2010-08-19T09:25:00.001+03:00

The study - the first cellular analysis of the effects of long duration space flight on human muscle - took calf biopsies of nine astronauts and cosmonauts before and immediately following 180 days on the International Space Station (ISS). The findings show substantial loss of fibre mass, force and power in this muscle group.

by Staff Writers
Milwaukee WI (SPX) Aug 19, 2010
Astronaut muscles waste away on long space flights reducing their capacity for physical work by more than 40%, according to research published online in the Journal of Physiology.

This is the equivalent of a 30- to 50-year-old crew member's muscles deteriorating to that of an 80-year-old. The destructive effects of extended weightlessness to skeletal muscle - despite in-flight exercise - pose a significant safety risk for future manned missions to Mars and elsewhere in the Universe.

An American study, led by Robert Fitts of Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), was recently published online by The Journal of Physiology and will be in the September printed issue.

It comes at a time of renewed interest in Mars and increased evidence of early life on the planet. NASA currently estimates it would take a crew 10 months to reach Mars, with a 1 year stay, or a total mission of approximately 3 years.

Fitts, Chair and Professor of Biological Sciences at Marquette, believes if astronauts were to travel to Mars today their ability to perform work would be compromised and, with the most affected muscles such as the calf, the decline could approach 50%. Crew members would fatigue more rapidly and have difficulty performing even routine work in a space suit.

Even more dangerous would be their return to Earth, where they'd be physically incapable of evacuating quickly in case of an emergency landing.

Unfortunately starting the journey in better physical condition did not help. Ironically, one of the study's findings was that crew members who began with the biggest muscles also showed the greatest decline.

The results highlight the need to design and test more effective exercise countermeasures on the ISS before embarking on distant space journeys. New exercise programmes will need to employ high resistance and a wide variety of motion to mimic the range occurring in Earth's atmosphere.

Fitts doesn't feel scientists should give up on extended space travel. 'Manned missions to Mars represent the next frontier, as the Western Hemisphere of our planet was 800 years ago,' says Fitts. 'Without exploration we will stagnate and fail to advance our understanding of the Universe.'

In the shorter term, Fitts believes efforts should be on fully utilizing the International Space Station so that better methods to protect muscle and bone can be developed.

'NASA and ESA need to develop a vehicle to replace the shuttle so that at least six crew members can stay on the ISS for 6-9 months,' recommends Fitts. 'Ideally, the vehicle should be able to dock at the ISS for the duration of the mission so that, in an emergency, all crew could evacuate the station.'

www.space-travel.com

Astronauts make third space foray to fix ISS cooling pump

2010-08-18T09:17:00.000+03:00

Flight Engineers Tracy Caldwell Dyson (left) and Doug Wheelock work to set up the ammonia spare pump module after it was installed on the S1 Truss. Credit: NASA TV

by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Aug 16, 2010
Astronauts from the International Space Station on Monday wrapped up a third and final spacewalk to replace a busted cooling unit on the orbiting outpost, NASA said.

Spacewalkers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson began installing a replacement ammonia pump module on the ISS at 6:20 am (1020 GMT) Monday and finished at 1:40 pm (1740 GMT) -- a seven hour, 20 minute space foray, according to the US space agency.

Flight Engineer Shannon Walker assisted the effort from inside the ISS by operating the station's robotic arm and space officials reported no detectable ammonia leaks.

The cooling unit's nearly 800-pound (360 kilo) ammonia pump failed unexpectedly on July 31 and was removed from the 100-billion dollar orbiting station during a spacewalk last Wednesday.

The pump is critical to keep the station from overheating. The six-member crew has relied on a single backup since the malfunctioning pump failed during a power surge.

The incident set off alarms on the station, although officials have said that the crew of three Russians and three Americans were never seriously in danger.

A first spacewalk to begin repairs on the malfunctioning cooling system took place on August 7 and lasted eight hours, three minutes, with a follow-up second spacewalk on August 11.

www.space-travel.com

IBEX Spacecraft Finds Discoveries Close To Home

2010-08-17T15:31:00.001+03:00

IBEX found that Energetic Neutral Atoms, or ENAs, are coming from a region just outside Earth's magnetopause where nearly stationary protons from the solar wind interact with the tenuous cloud of hydrogen atoms in Earth's exosphere. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

by Kelly Beatty
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 17, 2010
Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. Our home planet gleams below, a majestic whorl of color and texture. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space.

But looks can be deceiving.

In reality, you've unknowingly jumped into an invisible mosh pit of electromagnetic mayhem - the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet. Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it.

Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost to a stop as they pile up along its outer boundary, the magnetopause, before getting diverted sideways.

Space physicists have had a general sense of these dynamic goings-on for decades. But it wasn't until the advent of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX, a NASA spacecraft launched in October 2008, that they've been able to see what the human eye cannot: the first-ever images of this electromagnetic crash scene.

They can now witness how some of the solar wind's charged particles are being neutralized by gas escaping from Earth's atmosphere.

A New Way to See Atoms
IBEX wasn't designed to keep tabs on Earth's magnetosphere. Instead, its job is to map interactions occurring far beyond the planets, 8 to 10 billion miles away, where the Sun's own magnetic bubble, the heliosphere, meets interstellar space.

Only two spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2, have ventured far enough to probe this region directly. IBEX, which travels in a looping, 8-day-long orbit around Earth, stays much closer to home, but it carries a pair of detectors that can observe the interaction region from afar.

Here's how: When fast-moving protons in the solar wind reach the edge of the heliosphere, they sometimes grab electrons from the slower-moving interstellar atoms around them, like batons getting passed between relay runners.

This charge exchange creates electrically neutral hydrogen atoms that are no longer controlled by magnetic fields. Suddenly, they're free to go wherever they want - and because they're still moving fast, they quickly zip away from the interstellar boundary in all directions.

Some of these "energetic neutral atoms," or ENAs, zip past Earth, where they're recorded by IBEX. Its two detectors don't take pictures with conventional optics.

Instead, they record the number and energy of atoms arriving from small spots of sky about 7 degrees across (the apparent size of a tennis ball held at arm's length). Because its spin axis always points at the Sun, the spacecraft slowly turns throughout Earth's orbit and its detectors scan overlapping strips that create a complete 360 degrees map every six months.

A Collision Zone Near Earth
Because IBEX is orbiting Earth, it also has a front-row seat for observing the chaotic pileup of solar-wind particles occurring along the "nose" of Earth's magnetopause, about 35,000 miles out. ENAs are created there too, as solar-wind protons wrest electrons from hydrogen atoms in the outermost vestiges of our atmosphere, the exosphere.

Other spacecraft have attempted to measure the density of the dayside exosphere, without much success. NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft probably detected ENAs from this region a decade ago, but its detectors didn't have the sensitivity to pinpoint or measure the source.

Now, thanks to IBEX, we know just how tenuous the outer exosphere really is. "Where the interaction is strongest, there are only about eight hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter," explains Stephen A. Fuselier, the Lockheed Martin Space Systems researcher who led the mapping effort. His team's results appear in the July 8 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The key observations were made in March and April 2009, when IBEX was located far from Earth - about halfway to the Moon's orbit - and its detectors could scan the region directly in front of the magnetopause.

During some of the March observations, the European Space Agency's Cluster 3 spacecraft was positioned just in front of the magnetopause, where it measured the number of deflected solar-wind protons directly. "Cluster played a very important role in this study," Fuselier explains. "It was in the right place at the right time."

The new IBEX maps show that the ENAs thin out at locations away from the point of peak intensity. This falloff makes sense, Fuselier says, because Earth's magnetopause isn't spherical.

Instead, it has a teardrop shape that's closest to Earth at its nose but farther away everywhere else. So at locations well away from the magnetopause's centerline, even fewer of the exosphere's hydrogen atoms are hanging around to interact with the solar wind. "No exosphere, no ENAs," he explains.

A Versatile Spacecraft
Since its launch, IBEX has also scanned another nearby world, with surprising results. The moon has no atmosphere or magnetosphere, so the solar wind slams unimpeded into its desolate surface. Most of those particles get absorbed by lunar dust.

In fact, space visionaries wonder if the moon's rubbly surface has captured enough helium-3, an isotope present in tiny amounts in the Sun's outflow, to serve as a fuel for future explorers.

Yet cosmic chemists have long thought that some solar-wind protons must be bouncing off the lunar surface, becoming ENAs through charge exchange as they do. So does the moon glow in IBEX's scans? Indeed it does, says David J. McComas of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who serves as the mission's Principal Investigator.

In a report published last year in Geophysical Research Letters, McComas and other researchers conclude that about 10 percent of the solar-wind particles striking the Moon escape to space as ENAs detectable by IBEX. That amounts to roughly 150 tons of recycled hydrogen atoms per year.

Meanwhile, the squat, eight-sided spacecraft continues its primary task of mapping the interactions between the outermost heliosphere and the interstellar medium that lies beyond. McComas and his team are especially eager to learn more about the mysterious and unexpected "ribbon" of ENAs that turned up in the spacecraft's initial all-sky map.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., IBEX Mission Scientist Robert MacDowall says the spacecraft should be able to continue its observations through at least 2012. "We weren't sure those heliospheric interactions would vary with time, but they do," he explains, "and it's great that IBEX will be able to record them for years to come."

www.spacedaily.com

ISS Could Last Another Decade - Roscosmos

2010-08-17T09:25:00.000+03:00

File image

by Staff Writers
Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) Aug 17, 2010
The International Space Station (ISS), which has been in orbit for 10 years, could continue work for another decade, the head of the Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said on Monday.

The service life of the ISS ends in 2015 but participants of the project are currently discussing ways to extend its operation until 2020.

"It has great potential," Anatoly Perminov said in an interview with Golos Rossii radio station, adding that the ISS had not yet fulfilled all of its missions.

He said the ISS was and remained a successful project.

"All five countries [Canada, the European Union, Japan, Russia and the United States] participating in the creation and operation of this station have always honored their obligations," he said.