Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

Exoplanet discovered around  a neighbouring star

By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website

14 November 2018

Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun.

Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes.

The planet's mass is thought to be more than three times that of our own, placing it in a category of the world know as "super-Earths".

It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away.

Writing in the journal Nature, Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's.

"We think that this is what we call a Super-Earth - that would be possibly a mostly rocky planet with a massive atmosphere. It's probably very rich in volatiles like water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide - things like this. Many of them are frozen on the surface," Dr. Anglada Escudé, from the Queen Mary University of London, told BBC News.

The Sun's closest neighbors

Dr Anglada Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, added: "The closest analogue we may have in the Solar System might be the moon of Saturn called Titan, which also has a very thick atmosphere and is made of hydrocarbons. It has rain and lakes made of methane."

The planet, Barnard's Star b, is about as far away from its star as Mercury is from the Sun. It's the next nearest star to the Sun after Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri - which are much better known.

Barnard's Star is an extremely dim object known as a "red dwarf"; it's about 3% as bright as the Sun, emitting far less solar energy.

The planet orbits beyond a boundary called the "snow line", which is past the traditional habitable zone, where water can remain liquid on the surface.

On distance alone, it's estimated that temperatures would be about -150C on the planet's surface. However, a massive atmosphere could potentially warm the planet, making conditions more hospitable to life

The researchers used the radial velocity method to detect the new planet. This technique detects "wobbles" in a star which are likely to be caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

These wobbles affect the light coming from the star. As the star moves towards the Earth its spectrum appears slightly shifted towards the blue and, as it moves away, it is shifted towards the red.

Team members re-examined archive data obtained over a 20-year period and added new observations with the Carmenes spectrometer in Spain, the Eso/Harps instrument in Chile and the Harps-N instrument in the Canary Islands.

This wealth of data provided the accuracy needed to identify the planet to a high degree of certainty. This is the first time this technique has been used to detect a planet this small so far away from its host star.

When the new generation of telescopes come online, scientists will be able to characterize the planet's properties. This will probably include a search for gases like oxygen and methane in the planet's atmosphere, which might be markers for biology.

"The James Webb Space Telescope might not help in this case, because it was not designed for what's called high contrast imaging. But in the US, they are also developing WFirst - a small telescope that's also used for cosmology," said Dr Anglada Escudé.

"If you take the specs of how it should perform, it should easily image this planet. When we have the image we can then start to do spectroscopy - looking at different wavelengths, in the optical, in the infrared, looking at whether light is absorbed at different colors meaning there are different things in the atmosphere."

This is not the first time there have been claims about the discovery of a planet around Barnard's Star. In the 1960s, the Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp, working in the US, published his evidence for a planetary companion, based on perturbations in the motion of the star.

However, van de Kamp's claims proved controversial, as other scientists were not able to reproduce his finding.

The star is named after the American astronomer E E Barnard, who measured properties of its motion in 1916.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46196279

Edited March 3, 2019 by CaaC - John

[CaaC (John)+]

 

RIP Kepler: NASA sends final 'goodnight' command to shut down planet-hunting spacecraft that discovered 2,600 exoplanets

Mark Prigg and Cheyenne Macdonald      11 hrs ago

 

NASA has finally shut down its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft.

The space agency confirmed on the evening of Thursday, Nov. 15, Kepler received its final set of commands to disconnect communications with Earth - nine years after it blasted off.

The 'goodnight' commands finalize the spacecraft's transition into retirement, which began on Oct. 30 with NASA's announcement that Kepler had run out of fuel and could no longer conduct science.

Kepler's 'goodnight' falls on the same date as the 388-year anniversary of the death of its namesake, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion and passed away on Nov. 15, 1630. 

The final commands were sent over NASA's Deep Space Network from Kepler's operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

LASP runs the spacecraft's operations on behalf of NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.

 

 

 

Kepler's team disabled the safety modes that could inadvertently turn systems back on, and severed communications by shutting down the transmitters. 

Because the spacecraft is slowly spinning, the Kepler team had to carefully time the commands so that instructions would reach the spacecraft during periods of viable communication. 

The team will monitor the spacecraft to ensure that the commands were successful.

The spacecraft is now drifting in a safe orbit around the Sun, 94 million miles away from Earth.

© Provided by Associated Newspapers Limited Kepler was the first spacecraft to survey the planets in our own galaxy, and over the years its observations confirmed the existence of more than 2,600 exoplanets - many of which could be key targets in the search for alien life

Kepler, which launched back in 2009, came to be known by its team as 'the little spacecraft that could,' going above and beyond the expectations NASA had for it.

It was the first spacecraft to survey the planets in our own galaxy, and over the years its observations confirmed the existence of more than 2,600 exoplanets - many of which could be key targets in the search for alien life. 

Before Kepler, we'd never found any planets outside of our solar system.  

'As NASA's first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,' said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. 

'Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm,' Zurbuchen said. 

© Provided by Associated Newspapers Limited NASA predicted Kepler would run out of fuel sometime in the near future ¿ but, exactly when this would happen was unclear. The agency has now confirmed the spacecraft is officially dead

'Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.'

The Kepler data indicated that there were far more planets in the sky than we'd ever imagined. According to NASA, we now know there are more planets than stars.

Kepler successfully transmitted data from its final observation campaign back to Earth at the beginning of October. All of this is now in the archive and publicly available, the Kepler team says.

During this so-called Deep Space Network time, however, when Kepler was pointed toward Earth to beam its data home, the team learned that the spacecraft had transitioned to its no-fuel-use sleep mode.

At the time, the team said it is assessing the cause and 'evaluating possible next steps.'

But following their investigation, the team concluded it was time to officially retire the craft. 

During its long-running mission, however, the team says Kepler was 'stunningly successful.

© Provided by Associated Newspapers Limited The Kepler data indicated that there were far more planets in the sky than ever imagined. According to NASA, we now know there are more planets than stars. An artist's concept of Kepler-186f, the first known Earth-size planet in the habitable zone, is shown

Kepler showed us that 'we live in a galaxy that's teeming with planets, and we're ready to take the next step to explore those planets,' said Padi Boyd, a scientist with the upcoming TESS mission, which will serve as Kepler's successor.

'It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,' NASA's astrophysics director Paul Hertz said. 

'Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.' 

The Kepler mission ran into complications four years after it launched when mechanical failures temporarily halted its work.

At the time, the spacecraft had already completed its primary mission objectives.

The team ultimately managed to salvage Kepler by switching its field of view roughly every three months, allowing it to move on to an extended mission dubbed K2.

The spacecraft continued to search for possible orbiting planets, looking for dips in brightness as a planet transits its star. 

'It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,' said retired NASA scientist William Boruki, who led the original Kepler science team.

Kepler completed 18 missions after embarking on its K2 phase.

NASA says it 'pushed Kepler to its full potential' before its demise, with multiple observation campaigns and thousands of planet discoveries.

© Provided by Associated Newspapers Limited Before Kepler, we'd never found any planets outside of our solar system. Exoplanet Kepler-1625b with a hypothesized moon is illustrated in the image above

The space agency will use the data from Campaign 19 – Kepler's final observations – to complement that collected by its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, which launched this past April. 

And, given the bountiful data Kepler has collected over the years, the team says there's still much more to learn in the spacecraft's legacy. 

'We know the spacecraft's retirement isn't the end of Kepler's discoveries,' said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 

'I'm excited about the diverse discoveries that are yet to come from our data and how future missions will build upon Kepler's results.'

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/rip-kepler-nasa-sends-final-goodnight-command-to-shut-down-planet-hunting-spacecraft-that-discovered-2600-exoplanets/ar-BBPNdDj?ocid=chromentp

 

 

Edited March 3, 2019 by CaaC - John

[nudge+]

14 hours ago, CaaC - John said:

 

RIP Kepler: NASA sends final 'goodnight' command to shut down planet-hunting spacecraft that discovered 2,600 exoplanets

Mark Prigg and Cheyenne Macdonald For Dailymail.com          11 hrs ago

 

NASA has finally shut down its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft.

The space agency confirmed on the evening of Thursday, Nov. 15, Kepler received its final set of commands to disconnect communications with Earth - nine years after it blasted off.

The 'goodnight' commands finalize the spacecraft's transition into retirement, which began on Oct. 30 with NASA's announcement that Kepler had run out of fuel and could no longer conduct science.

Kepler's 'goodnight' falls on the same date as the 388-year anniversary of the death of its namesake, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion and passed away on Nov. 15, 1630. 

The final commands were sent over NASA's Deep Space Network from Kepler's operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

LASP runs the spacecraft's operations on behalf of NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Kepler's team disabled the safety modes that could inadvertently turn systems back on, and severed communications by shutting down the transmitters. 

Because the spacecraft is slowly spinning, the Kepler team had to carefully time the commands so that instructions would reach the spacecraft during periods of viable communication. 

The team will monitor the spacecraft to ensure that the commands were successful.

The spacecraft is now drifting in a safe orbit around the Sun, 94 million miles away from Earth.

Kepler, which launched back in 2009, came to be known by its team as 'the little spacecraft that could,' going above and beyond the expectations NASA had for it.

It was the first spacecraft to survey the planets in our own galaxy, and over the years its observations confirmed the existence of more than 2,600 exoplanets - many of which could be key targets in the search for alien life. 

Before Kepler, we'd never found any planets outside of our solar system.  

'As NASA's first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,' said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. 

'Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm,' Zurbuchen said. 

'Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.'

The Kepler data indicated that there were far more planets in the sky than we'd ever imagined. According to NASA, we now know there are more planets than stars.

Kepler successfully transmitted data from its final observation campaign back to Earth at the beginning of October. All of this is now in the archive and publicly available, the Kepler team says.

During this so-called Deep Space Network time, however, when Kepler was pointed toward Earth to beam its data home, the team learned that the spacecraft had transitioned to its no-fuel-use sleep mode.

At the time, the team said it is assessing the cause and 'evaluating possible next steps.'

But following their investigation, the team concluded it was time to officially retire the craft. 

During its long-running mission, however, the team says Kepler was 'stunningly successful.

Kepler showed us that 'we live in a galaxy that's teeming with planets, and we're ready to take the next step to explore those planets,' said Padi Boyd, a scientist with the upcoming TESS mission, which will serve as Kepler's successor.

'It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,' NASA's astrophysics director Paul Hertz said. 

'Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.' 

The Kepler mission ran into complications four years after it launched when mechanical failures temporarily halted its work.

At the time, the spacecraft had already completed its primary mission objectives.

The team ultimately managed to salvage Kepler by switching its field of view roughly every three months, allowing it to move on to an extended mission dubbed K2.

The spacecraft continued to search for possible orbiting planets, looking for dips in brightness as a planet transits its star. 

'It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,' said retired NASA scientist William Boruki, who led the original Kepler science team.

Kepler completed 18 missions after embarking on its K2 phase.

NASA says it 'pushed Kepler to its full potential' before its demise, with multiple observation campaigns and thousands of planet discoveries.

The space agency will use the data from Campaign 19 – Kepler's final observations – to complement that collected by its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, which launched this past April. 

And, given the bountiful data Kepler has collected over the years, the team says there's still much more to learn in the spacecraft's legacy. 

'We know the spacecraft's retirement isn't the end of Kepler's discoveries,' said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 

'I'm excited about the diverse discoveries that are yet to come from our data and how future missions will build upon Kepler's results.'

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/rip-kepler-nasa-sends-final-goodnight-command-to-shut-down-planet-hunting-spacecraft-that-discovered-2600-exoplanets/ar-BBPNdDj?ocid=chromentp

 

It did provide a huge amount of new data; over 2600+ exoplanets found during its time of operation I believe... Kepler's follow up mission called TESS has already been launched though, it will explore and analyse an area almost 400 times larger than the one covered by Keppler, and will identify primary targets for James Webb Space Telescope which will hopefully launch in two years.

 

I wish stuff like this was given more attention by media...

[CaaC (John)+]

Strange interstellar object 'Oumuamua is tiny and very reflective

Jon Fingas    8 hrs ago

After no small amount of mystery, we're starting to understand more about 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit the Solar System. A newly published study indicates that the object can't be that large, for one thing. As the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared detection couldn't catch the cigar-shaped entity, that makes it relatively small. It's likely less than half a mile (2,600 feet) at its longest. It also can't have a diameter larger than 1,440 feet, and that figure could be as small as 320 feet.

The research also found something unusual: it's extremely reflective, potentially up to 10 times more than Solar System comets. Just what caused this isn't certain, though. It could be that 'Oumuamua lost a lot of its surface dirt and dust as it passed near the Sun, which (combined with gas from the object itself) left it covered in reflective ice and snow. This happens with local comets, although not necessarily to this degree.

There's one major problem with verifying details: it's likely too late. The object is now roughly as far from the Sun as Saturn, and that puts it too far away for study by current space telescopes. Whatever its exact nature, we may have to wait a long while to get more answers -- if we get any at all.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/strange-interstellar-object-oumuamua-is-tiny-and-very-reflective/ar-BBPRdw4

[nudge+]

13 minutes ago, CaaC - John said:

Strange interstellar object 'Oumuamua is tiny and very reflective

Jon Fingas    8 hrs ago

After no small amount of mystery, we're starting to understand more about 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit the Solar System. A newly published study indicates that the object can't be that large, for one thing. As the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared detection couldn't catch the cigar-shaped entity, that makes it relatively small. It's likely less than half a mile (2,600 feet) at its longest. It also can't have a diameter larger than 1,440 feet, and that figure could be as small as 320 feet.

The research also found something unusual: it's extremely reflective, potentially up to 10 times more than Solar System comets. Just what caused this isn't certain, though. It could be that 'Oumuamua lost a lot of its surface dirt and dust as it passed near the Sun, which (combined with gas from the object itself) left it covered in reflective ice and snow. This happens with local comets, although not necessarily to this degree.

There's one major problem with verifying details: it's likely too late. The object is now roughly as far from the Sun as Saturn, and that puts it too far away for study by current space telescopes. Whatever its exact nature, we may have to wait a long while to get more answers -- if we get any at all.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/strange-interstellar-object-oumuamua-is-tiny-and-very-reflective/ar-BBPRdw4

What a weird shape that thing has! It's like the spaceship from Arthur Clarke's Rendezvouz with Rama  

[CaaC (John)+]

1 hour ago, nudge said:

What a weird shape that thing has! It's like the spaceship from Arthur Clarke's Rendezvouz with Rama  

 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

International Space Station: Twenty facts about the ISS as it celebrates its 20th birthday

Joe Sommerlad   9 hrs ago

 

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited

The International Space Station (ISS) is celebrating its 20th birthday.

Russian space agency Roscosmos kicked off the project to build a successor to the Mir and Skylab stations on 20 November 1998 when it launched its Zarya module from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Two weeks later, Nasa followed suit with its own component, Unity. The pair were joined in low-earth orbit and started a 13-year construction effort that would see a vast artificial satellite produced, serving as an observatory, laboratory and staging post from which mankind could advance its understanding of our own world and those beyond.

The ISS was also a landmark act of co-operation between the United States and Russia, the old Cold War foes definitively laying to rest decades of nuclear tensions to share the expertise both sides had accumulated during and after the Space Race of the 1960s to further the common good. 

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this extraordinary project, intended to last another 10 years at least, here are 20 facts you might not know about the ISS:

 

 

 

1. Sixteen nations were involved in its construction. In addition to the US and Russia, those were: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

2. No fewer than 136 space flights from seven different types of craft were deployed to deliver parts to the engineers. The large modules were delivered on 42 assembly flights: 37 on US shuttles, five on Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets.

3. The result is the largest manned object in space, 357ft long — just a yard short of a full-length American football field.

4. The ISS weighs 419,725kg including the weight of spacecrafts, of which it can accommodate as many as six at any one time.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited space.jpg

5. It is the single most expensive object ever built at £93.4bn.

6. It is the third brightest object in the night sky after the moon and Venus.

7. The ISS travels at a speed of 4.791 miles per second, fast enough to go to the moon and back in a single day.

8. At that pace it orbits the earth approximately once every 90 minutes or 16 times in a 24-hour period, meaning it passes through 16 sunsets and sunrises per day. It passes over 90 percent of the earth’s population in the course of its orbital path.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited astronaut-space-flight.jpg

9. The space station has more living space than a six-bedroom house, offering six sleeping quarters, a gym and a 360-degree bay window, but only two bathrooms. There are no chairs either — astronauts taking time out to eat their three square meals a day of canned and dehydrated food have to float gently in zero gravity. The atmosphere aboard is aboard is described as having a “metallic-ionization-type smell”.

10. So far 230 people from 18 nations have visited the ISS and it has been continuously occupied since November 2000.

11. Nasa’s Peggy Whitson set the record for the longest time living and working in space at 665 days on 2 September 2017, before returning to earth the next day.

12. Astronauts aboard have completed 205 spacewalks since 1998 to carry out construction jobs, maintenance and repairs.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited pope-francis-iss.jpg

13. The physical toll all this takes on astronauts is considerable: crew members need to work out in the station's gym for at least two hours a day to mitigate the loss of bone and muscle mass and maintain the normal bodily health they would experience on terra firma.

14. Four different delivery craft supply the crew with food and equipment: Orbital ATK’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon, JAXA’s HTV and the Russian Progress.

15. A Water Recovery System onboard reduces the astronauts' dependence on these cargo crafts by 65 percent through recycling. Even urine is reused.

16. Oxygen is generated by a process of electrolysis: current captured from the station’s acre of solar panels is used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

17. The ISS's internal pressurised volume is 32,333 cubic feet, which is roughly equivalent to that of a Boeing 747 passenger jet.

18. Software on board the ISS monitors 350,000 sensors checking in on crew health and safety. The station meanwhile carries 50 computers and eight miles of wire, enough to run around the perimeter of Central Park in New York City.

19. The ISS provided the set for the first music video ever shot outside of our atmosphere when commander Chris Hadfield made a short film set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” up there in May 2013.

20. To mark its turning 20, the ISS is getting a Refabricator for a birthday present. The device is a hybrid recycler and 3D printer that melts plastics down so that new tools can be created.

rent delivery craft supply the crew with food and equipment: Orbital ATK’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon, JAXA’s HTV and the Russian Progress.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/international-space-station-twenty-facts-about-the-iss-as-it-celebrates-its-20th-birthday/ar-BBPSKsp?ocid=chromentp

 

5

Edited November 20, 2018 by CaaC - John

[nudge+]

56 minutes ago, CaaC - John said:

International Space Station: Twenty facts about the ISS as it celebrates its 20th birthday

Joe Sommerlad   9 hrs ago

 

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited

The International Space Station (ISS) is celebrating its 20th birthday.

Russian space agency Roscosmos kicked off the project to build a successor to the Mir and Skylab stations on 20 November 1998 when it launched its Zarya module from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Two weeks later, Nasa followed suit with its own component, Unity. The pair were joined in low-earth orbit and started a 13-year construction effort that would see a vast artificial satellite produced, serving as an observatory, laboratory and staging post from which mankind could advance its understanding of our own world and those beyond.

The ISS was also a landmark act of co-operation between the United States and Russia, the old Cold War foes definitively laying to rest decades of nuclear tensions to share the expertise both sides had accumulated during and after the Space Race of the 1960s to further the common good. 

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this extraordinary project, intended to last another 10 years at least, here are 20 facts you might not know about the ISS:

 

  Hide contents

 

1. Sixteen nations were involved in its construction. In addition to the US and Russia, those were: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

2. No fewer than 136 space flights from seven different types of craft were deployed to deliver parts to the engineers. The large modules were delivered on 42 assembly flights: 37 on US shuttles, five on Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets.

3. The result is the largest manned object in space, 357ft long — just a yard short of a full-length American football field.

4. The ISS weighs 419,725kg including the weight of spacecrafts, of which it can accommodate as many as six at any one time.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited space.jpg

5. It is the single most expensive object ever built at £93.4bn.

6. It is the third brightest object in the night sky after the moon and Venus.

7. The ISS travels at a speed of 4.791 miles per second, fast enough to go to the moon and back in a single day.

8. At that pace it orbits the earth approximately once every 90 minutes or 16 times in a 24-hour period, meaning it passes through 16 sunsets and sunrises per day. It passes over 90 percent of the earth’s population in the course of its orbital path.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited astronaut-space-flight.jpg

9. The space station has more living space than a six-bedroom house, offering six sleeping quarters, a gym and a 360-degree bay window, but only two bathrooms. There are no chairs either — astronauts taking time out to eat their three square meals a day of canned and dehydrated food have to float gently in zero gravity. The atmosphere aboard is aboard is described as having a “metallic-ionization-type smell”.

10. So far 230 people from 18 nations have visited the ISS and it has been continuously occupied since November 2000.

11. Nasa’s Peggy Whitson set the record for the longest time living and working in space at 665 days on 2 September 2017, before returning to earth the next day.

12. Astronauts aboard have completed 205 spacewalks since 1998 to carry out construction jobs, maintenance and repairs.

© Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited pope-francis-iss.jpg

13. The physical toll all this takes on astronauts is considerable: crew members need to work out in the station's gym for at least two hours a day to mitigate the loss of bone and muscle mass and maintain the normal bodily health they would experience on terra firma.

14. Four different delivery craft supply the crew with food and equipment: Orbital ATK’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon, JAXA’s HTV and the Russian Progress.

15. A Water Recovery System onboard reduces the astronauts' dependence on these cargo crafts by 65 percent through recycling. Even urine is reused.

 

16. Oxygen is generated by a process of electrolysis: current captured from the station’s acre of solar panels is used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

17. The ISS's internal pressurised volume is 32,333 cubic feet, which is roughly equivalent to that of a Boeing 747 passenger jet.

18. Software on board the ISS monitors 350,000 sensors checking in on crew health and safety. The station meanwhile carries 50 computers and eight miles of wire, enough to run around the perimeter of Central Park in New York City.

19. The ISS provided the set for the first music video ever shot outside of our atmosphere when commander Chris Hadfield made a short film set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” up there in May 2013.

20. To mark its turning 20, the ISS is getting a Refabricator for a birthday present. The device is a hybrid recycler and 3D printer that melts plastics down so that new tools can be created.

rent delivery craft supply the crew with food and equipment: Orbital ATK’s Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon, JAXA’s HTV and the Russian Progress.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/international-space-station-twenty-facts-about-the-iss-as-it-celebrates-its-20th-birthday/ar-BBPSKsp?ocid=chromentp

 

Probably the most complex structure ever built by humans which is slowly approaching its retirement... I wonder if we'll replace it with another constantly manned outpost in space. Bigelow Commercial Space Station seems to be the closest replacement for ISS; after all they have been testing an experimental module for over two years now and it's expected to stay attached to ISS for two more years at least. Axiom Space are also working on a similar autonomous space station. Once viable and affordable launch vehicles are readily available (SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing reusable rocket ships), there will be a big breakthrough especially when it comes to commercial space flight and commercial space stations. However, there are by far more interesting concepts and ideas being developed as the potential "next step". There are plans for a Deep Space Gateway, a lunar orbit space station which is intended to be used a jumping point to the exploration of the solar system. Going to the Moon itself is another big one, with various governments and private agencies and corporations planning to do that in the near future, and it's possible that we'll have a permanent Moon base relatively soon. Asteroid mining. Manned missions to Mars. I think we're entering the new golden age of Space Exploration at last; along with the usual suspects (i.e. USA, Europe, Russia), other countries have high ambitions and plans in development too, especially China and India. So exciting.

[CaaC (John)+]

24 minutes ago, nudge said:

There are plans for a Deep Space Gateway, a lunar orbit space station which is intended to be used a jumping point to the exploration of the solar system. Going to the Moon itself is another big one, with various governments and private agencies and corporations planning to do that in the near future, and it's possible that we'll have a permanent Moon base relatively soon. Asteroid mining. Manned missions to Mars. I think we're entering the new golden age of Space Exploration at last; along with the usual suspects (i.e. USA, Europe, Russia), other countries have high ambitions and plans in development too, especially China and India. So exciting.

 

I am a Star Trek fan and the Next Generation with Captain Picard and Data is my favourite but I have watched Star Trek TNG, Voyager and Deep Space Nine and just imagine if we did have a Space Station like that in the future [which we will], the mind boggles and when I pass away I want to be reincarnated to about 200 years from now and grow up and hopefully see all that.  

 

 

Edited November 20, 2018 by CaaC - John

[nudge+]

2 hours ago, CaaC - John said:

I am a Star Trek fan and the Next Generation with Captain Picard and Data is my favourite but I have watched Star Trek TNG, Voyager and Deep Space Nine and just imagine if we did have a Space Station like that in the future [which we will], the mind boggles and when I pass away I want to be reincarnated to about 200 years from now and grow up and hopefully see all that.  

 

 

I tried but I just can't get into Star Trek... The original series and The New Generation at least, as I've never even watched the others. I appreciate the idea behind it, but its realisation just doesn't work with me. I hear that first two seasons of TNG are bad and then the show actually becomes good from season three onward, but I seriously can't get through the first two anyway  

[CaaC (John)+]

24 minutes ago, nudge said:

I tried but I just can't get into Star Trek... The original series and The New Generation at least, as I've never even watched the others. I appreciate the idea behind it, but its realisation just doesn't work with me. I hear that first two seasons of TNG are bad and then the show actually becomes good from season three onward, but I seriously can't get through the first two anyway  

The first series and episodes of TNG were a bit amateurish but they got better as they went along but I guess everybody has different tastes in shows.     

[CaaC (John)+]

Don't think I would like to travel in his spacecraft with Musk!!  

"He also found himself in another controversy after appearing on a podcast while smoking marijuana"

 

Elon Musk renames his BFR spacecraft Starship

20 November 2018

Elon Musk has changed the name of his forthcoming passenger spaceship from Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to Starship.

The entrepreneur would not reveal why he had renamed the craft, which has not yet been built, but added its rocket booster will be called Super Heavy.

In September, Mr. Musk's SpaceX company announced that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had signed up to be the first passenger to travel on the ship.

The mission is planned for 2023 if the spaceship is built by that time.

It is the craft's fourth name - it started out as Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) and then became Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) before becoming BFR.

Over the weekend, Mr. Musk tweeted that the spaceship was being redesigned, saying the new version was "very exciting. Delightfully counter-intuitive".

Starship is due to replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles eventually and will cost an estimated $5bn (£3.9bn) to build.

• Insight: Mission to the heart of Mars
• The weird and wonderful life of Elon Musk
• Elon Musk makes another space tourism promise

Mr. Musk's plan is for Starship to take people into space on commercial flights around the Moon and Mr. Maezawa would be his first "moon tourist".

However, he will not land on the Moon but will travel on what is called a "free return trajectory", which will bring Starship back to Earth after it has gone around the far side of the Moon.

Only 24 humans have visited the Moon - all of them Americans; 12 of them landed on the moon. Nasa's Apollo 17 in December 1972 marked the last time humans landed on the Moon or went beyond low-Earth orbit.

Mr. Musk's longer-term plans are to take people to Mars and colonize the planet.

He did not reveal any details of the new design for the craft but had previously said it would be able to transport up to 100 passengers to Mars.

Mr. Musk has had a troubled year.

In September, he was ordered to step down as chairman of electric car maker Tesla and pay a $20m fine, in a deal struck with US regulators over tweets he posted about taking the firm private.

He also found himself in another controversy after appearing on a podcast while smoking marijuana. Although the drug is legal in California, where the podcast was recorded, shares in Tesla fell more than 9% after his appearance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46274158

 

[nudge+]

The more private companies cooperate with governmental agencies to contribute to space exploration, the better. SpaceX have a crazy idea with a crazy schedule for its realisation, not sure it will work without accidents but I sure appreciate the effort and any attempt to promote spaceflight. But damn I can't stand Musk... 

Also BIG FUCKING ROCKET (BFR) was a way better name; there was no need to change it to the generic "Starship"...  

[CaaC (John)+]

8 minutes ago, nudge said:

Also BIG FUCKING ROCKET (BFR) was a way better name; there was no need to change it to the generic "Starship"...  

Musk on holiday on the moon  

 

[Faithcore]

On 20/11/2018 at 13:27, nudge said:

Probably the most complex structure ever built by humans which is slowly approaching its retirement... I wonder if we'll replace it with another constantly manned outpost in space. Bigelow Commercial Space Station seems to be the closest replacement for ISS; after all they have been testing an experimental module for over two years now and it's expected to stay attached to ISS for two more years at least. Axiom Space are also working on a similar autonomous space station. Once viable and affordable launch vehicles are readily available (SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing reusable rocket ships), there will be a big breakthrough especially when it comes to commercial space flight and commercial space stations. However, there are by far more interesting concepts and ideas being developed as the potential "next step". There are plans for a Deep Space Gateway, a lunar orbit space station which is intended to be used a jumping point to the exploration of the solar system. Going to the Moon itself is another big one, with various governments and private agencies and corporations planning to do that in the near future, and it's possible that we'll have a permanent Moon base relatively soon. Asteroid mining. Manned missions to Mars. I think we're entering the new golden age of Space Exploration at last; along with the usual suspects (i.e. USA, Europe, Russia), other countries have high ambitions and plans in development too, especially China and India. So exciting.

Who's gonna pay for that?

[nudge+]

3 minutes ago, Faithcore said:

Who's gonna pay for that?

For what exactly?

Commercial Space Stations are being developed and financed by private companies and corporations, potentially in cooperation with various governmental agencies.
Deep Space Gateway is being developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group which consists of numerous governmental and intergovernmental space agencies (led by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, CSA, JAXA) in cooperation with some commercial partners.
Various missions to Moon and Mars are being planned by numerous countries, state-owned enterprises and private companies alike.
Asteroid mining is currently at a very early staged and is mostly being tested (as a concept) by private startups.

So basically space exploration is a joint (inter)governmental and commercial venture, financed both by taxpayers of the countries involved and investments of various private entities. 

[Faithcore]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

For what exactly?

Commercial Space Stations are being developed and financed by private companies and corporations, potentially in cooperation with various governmental agencies.
Deep Space Gateway is being developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group which consists of numerous governmental and intergovernmental space agencies (led by NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, CSA, JAXA) in cooperation with some commercial partners.
Various missions to Moon and Mars are being planned by numerous countries, state-owned enterprises and private companies alike.
Asteroid mining is currently at a very early staged and is mostly being tested (as a concept) by private startups.

So basically space exploration is a joint (inter)governmental and commercial venture, financed both by taxpayers of the countries involved and investments of various private entities. 

Now you made me feel bad. I must admit didn't read your post at all, i just asked a smart question

[CaaC (John)+]

Just now, Faithcore said:

Now you made me feel bad. I must admit didn't read your post at all, i just asked a smart question

Never question a lady.  

[CaaC (John)+]

I think you will like this @nudge , I liked slide 23' Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula'.

 

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 winners

14 hrs ago

(31 slides)

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/photos/astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-2018-winners/ss-BBPZrML?ocid=chromentp#image=23

 

'Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula'

Photographer: Mario Cogo (Italy)

Category: Stars and Nebulae (runner-up)

[nudge+]

42 minutes ago, CaaC - John said:

I think you will like this @nudge , I liked slide 23' Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula'.

 

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 winners

14 hrs ago

(31 slides)

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/photos/astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-2018-winners/ss-BBPZrML?ocid=chromentp#image=23

 

'Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula'

Photographer: Mario Cogo (Italy)

Category: Stars and Nebulae (runner-up)

Those are all brilliant... I'm a hobby photographer and have a huge interest in astronomy, but I only managed to take a half decent photo of the Milky Way once and a few of the star trails; nothing special at any case. Would absolutely love to try proper astrophotography with proper equipment... big respect to those who took all of these... My favourites at this moment (not in order):

That NGC 3521 Galaxy image is something out of this world  

[CaaC (John)+]

Of all the Astronomy photos over the years, I have seen this is one of my favourites next to the Pillars of Creation.

The Butterfly Nebula from Hubble 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Reprocessing & Copyright: Jesús M.Vargas & Maritxu Poyal

Pillars of Creation 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)

[Stan]

Astronomy counts as science...so this is fucking cool.

 

[nudge+]

 

[nudge+]

Quote

 

Report: NASA and Yuri Milner Working Together on Life-Hunting Mission to Enceladus

It looks like NASA will offer billionaire entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner help on the first private deep-space mission: a journey designed to detect life, if it exists, on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, according to documents acquired by New Scientist.

New Scientist’s Mark Harris reports:

"Agreements signed by NASA and Milner’s non-profit Breakthrough Starshot Foundation in September show that the organisations are working on scientific, technical and financial plans for the ambitious mission. NASA has committed over $70,000 to help produce a concept study for a flyby mission. The funds won’t be paid to Breakthrough but represent the agency’s own staffing costs on the project."

The teams will be working in the project plan and concepts through next year, New Scientist reports.

Icy moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are intriguing candidates for alien life. Jupiter’s moon Europa has evidence of water in the form of plumes spewing water vapor out of cracks in its icy surface. Representative John Culberson (R-Texas), who was recently voted out of office, was a strong proponent for a NASA mission to this icy world.

Enceladus specifically has evidence of a warm ocean and complex organic molecules, according to Cassini data, though it orbits Saturn, which is farther from Earth and Jupiter. Perhaps life has evolved beneath the ice around heat spewed from volcanic vents, as some animals have done in Earth’s deep oceans.

The Breakthrough Initiatives project seeks to answer the deepest questions about space, including whether we’re alone in the universe. Its board includes billionaires Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, and formerly physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in March. It lists mission concepts like a solar sail to reach nearby stars, developing the technology to find Earth-like exoplanets, and sending out a message meant for aliens, similar to the Arecibo message.

New Scientist reports that Breakthrough Initiatives would lead and pay for an Enceladus fly-by mission, with consulting from NASA.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/report-nasa-and-yuri-milner-working-together-on-life-h-1830309201

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

We finally know how bright the universe is

Charlie Wood            3 hrs ago

 

The Earth glows faintly with the bustle of humanity. From far away you can’t pick out individual homes, or even cities, but by tracking the collective photons that our spotlights and streetlights throw out over time, you might be able to get a rough sense of the rise of technological civilization—and you might notice if all of the lights started going out.

The same story applies to the universe at large.

Stars are the ultimate light bulbs, and while some of their rays dead-end into dust-particles, others get away intact. Space has a reputation for being cold and dark, but out in the comparatively empty void between galaxies, these escaped particles of light collectively produce a diffuse glimmer everywhere. This glow tells you what’s out there without the hassle of counting all the stars and galaxies one by one. Borrowing tools from particle physics, an international team of astrophysicists has carried out the most accurate and sweeping measurement yet of this light, the collective shining of all the universe’s stars.

Their results, published Thursday in Science, tell an epic tale covering most of the universe’s history and even poke at the veil of the cosmos’s first billion years—an epoch invisible to traditional astronomers. “I would have never believed that a measurement of this kind would be possible,” says Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University and the team’s leader.

To find the Extragalactic Background Light, as those in the know call it, you can’t just point your telescope at a patch of black sky and count photons: you’ll have no way of telling local sunbeams from truly external rays of light. Rather, the team took advantage of hundreds of cosmic accidents.

Huge black holes lie in the center of most galaxies, and some of the most monstrous let unimaginably violent jets of gamma rays rip into space—an area smaller than our solar system slinging out as much energy as our whole galaxy. When these jets happen to be pointed straight at Earth, astronomers call them blazars. They are some of nature’s most powerful particle accelerators, and NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope is one of humanity’s best gamma-ray detectors.

“Thanks to Fermi and our work, we can combine two different fields, high energy physics and classical astronomy,” says Alberto Domínguez, an astronomer at the Computense University of Madrid in Spain and coauthor.

The team analyzed nine years of Fermi data containing the light from more than 700 blazars and one gamma ray burst and found that the rays were getting weaker as they travelled, plowing through the background light that fills the universe like headlights cutting through the fog. The thicker the fog, the dimmer the headlights, so comparing blazars near and far revealed the brightness of the interfering background light. And since the gamma rays took billions of years to get here, the team could also see the background light as it appeared throughout the past. “We go back pretty far, which is really one of the breakthroughs,” Domínguez says. “We were able to cover 90 per cent of the history of the universe.”

While all the galaxies ever have unsurprisingly spit quite a few photons into the void over the eons, that light doesn’t shine all that brightly. If you could turn off all the lights on Earth and wink out all of the stars in the Milky Way, the sky wouldn’t go quite dark. It would glow with the brightness of a 60-watt light bulb viewed from 2.5 miles away, according to Ajello. Its dimness speaks to a classic paradox in cosmology: if there are stars everywhere you look, why is the night sky not blindingly bright all the time? Part of the answer, according to modern cosmologists—and Edgar Allan Poe, who somehow solved the puzzle first—is that the universe’s explosive expansion has diluted light as it spreads out through space.

And so, as galaxies fight to light up the expanding darkness, the resulting modest glimmer has tracked the universe’s activity over the ages. Domínguez expects that the new measurement will illuminate mysteries from the cosmos’s obscured origins to its expansion-driven future, but first, the team focused on settling a debate regarding the 13-odd billion years in the middle: did we miss any major characters in our story of how stars and galaxies came to be?

Past studies of star formation peered deep into space and measured the ultraviolet light from the massive stars that tend to live fast and die young, but no one could be sure these surveys weren’t missing galaxies that were too faint to see. But the cosmic fog represents light from all galaxies no matter how small, and the team’s reconstructed timeline provides an entirely new line of evidence supporting the commonly accepted arc. Stars formed slowly at first and then faster and faster until peaking about three to four billion years after the big bang, and then falling off as star-stuff ran low and galaxies moved farther apart. Today the Milky Way births about 7 new stars per year, so similar galaxies in the universe’s youth may have produced 70 or 80. “Our universe was lit up like a Christmas tree,” Ajello says.

The new result doesn’t include any light that hit dust particles and was re-emitted as heat in the infrared—which represents about half of the energy of the background light—but Domínguez says they’ve accounted for this blind spot in their reconstruction of star formation.

Ajello’s team is not the first to probe the cosmic fog between galaxies. Their work builds on decades of theoretical estimates and both ground- and space-based attempts to catch the photons directly. But with light from the sun bouncing off local dust particles outnumbering the background light 100 to 1, it was like hunting for fireflies at noon. “You've got to get out of the galaxy,” says Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of Santa Cruz who was not a member of Ajello’s team, but has played a role in developing the theory underlying the measurement. “How are you going to get out of the galaxy? The answer is, these gamma rays.”

Measuring the fog by its interference with gamma rays only became possible thanks to a better understanding of blazars in recent years. Dominguez, Ajello and many others proved the idea feasible using Fermi data in 2012, but the new work uses a wider range of sources and upgraded software to push from four billion years after the big bang back to the ultimate target—the first billion years. “We always want to look where we cannot,” says Ajello.

This era remains hidden from modern astronomers because a thick haze of hydrogen atoms blocked light from moving around, and cosmologists wonder exactly what emitted the ultraviolet light that turned the universe clear—starry galaxies or black hole jets, for example. Fermi can’t resolve distant enough blazars to settle the debate conclusively, but the team’s background light measurement does keep starry galaxies in the running.

Ajello hopes that catching more distant—yet more fleeting—gamma-ray bursts could push even further back into these early days. “You need to be very quick and rotate a large optical telescope while they are still bright,” he says. “That would be spectacular.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/we-finally-know-how-bright-the-universe-is/ar-BBQkE32?ocid=chromentp