The Japanese are going to launch a new solar-powered space ship which will harnass the power of the sun for its energy with huge sails that are thinner than human hair. They are dubbing the project Ikaros. I am assuming this means the engineers only read the first part of the Greek myth before putting it down and assuming everything went well.
Ikaros stands for “Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun.” The name is also a reference to the Greek myth of Icarus, a young man who, with his father Daedalus, attempted to escape exile in Crete by fashioning wings of feathers and wax. According to the myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun, and the heat melted the wax in his wings, causing him to plummet to his death.
Ikaros is scheduled to take to the skies May 18th.
A space plane designed to demonstrate the sustainability of a reusable, military-operated vehicle designed to orbit the earth will launch soon from Cape Canaveral, Florida. What happens after that is not of your GD business.
But whether the X-37 space plane is merely showing off nearly two decades of research and development or is actually a precursor to militarizing the final frontier, is far from clear since the vehicle’s payload is classified. An Air Force official won’t even say when it will return to California or where it will land. But it can “loiter” over the globe for more than nine months.
“In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back,” said Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force’s space programs, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
Is there anyone conspiracy-prone enough to craft an idea of what this launch means?.
Hey space fans, don’t be blue that Mean Ol’ Obama said we aren’t sending men to the moon anytime soon. Because once we get there… our pad is going to be totally sick thanks to a new 3-D printing technology that could turn boring lunar dust and moon rocks into a bomb ass base of operations.
Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.
The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon. But the concept must first prove itself in exploratory tests funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)
“We will make very basic printing trials in a vacuum environment to verify if this is possible,” said Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite UK Ltd and creator of D-Shape.
Dini’s D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time.
After the discovery of Neptune in 1846 astronomers began to wonder if there were other planets beyond its orbit. The discovery of Pluto (now not a planet) seemed to answer the question, but others wondered if even further out a larger earth-sized object could be waiting to be discovered.
Space.com has a fascinating claim made by a planetary scientist, Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute:
“When the solar system’s story is finally written, it’s much more likely that it will have closer to 900 planets rather than the nine that we grew up with.”
900 planets? How could that be possible? Anything Earth or Mars-sized in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune would be visible; but beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Oort Cloud:
Brown and Stern say that the Oort Cloud represents a more likely prospect for worlds the size of Mars or Earth. The Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system with billions of icy bodies at distances as far out as 50,000 times the distance between the sun and Earth.
Now these planets are likely to be colder than Hoth, but who knows what we could do with some extreme terraforming…
According to Spaceflight Now, NASA researchers are about to release new evidence that a Martian meteorite shows evidence for life. The research team originally announced the discovery of the meteorite back in 1996. There was a lot of controversy over what exactly they found. Critics pointed out that the kind of bacterial fossil they claimed to have found was far smaller than any terrestrial example and may have been a product of geology. But the science hasn’t stopped:
Now, 13 years after the Martian meteorite life story emerged, the science team finally feels vindicated. Their data shows the meteorite is no smoking gun but is full of evidence that supports the existence of life on the surface of Mars, or in subsurface water pools, early in the planet’s history.
On August 6, 1996[4] ALH 84001 became newsworthy when it was announced that the meteorite may contain evidence for traces of life from Mars, as published in an article in Science by David McKay of NASA.
The electron microscope revealed chain structures in meteorite fragment ALH84001 Under the scanning electron microscope structures were revealed that may be the remains—in the form of fossils—of bacteria-like lifeforms. The structures found on ALH 84001 are 20-100 nanometres in diameter, similar in size to the theoretical nanobacteria, but smaller than any known cellular life at the time of their discovery. If the structures are really fossilized lifeforms, they would be the first solid evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life, aside from the chance of their origin being terrestrial contamination.
According to NewScientist, Researchers examining the data from 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction are puzzled by what is causing this. One interpretation of the data suggests that we’re looking at the effect of a neighboring universe on our own.
There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe. If the tiny patch of vacuum that inflated to become our universe was quantum entangled with other pieces of vacuum – other universes – they could have exerted a force from beyond the present-day visible horizon.
Would this Universe have the same physical laws as our own? Is it some weird mirror universe where a mirror version of you is reading a blog called Normal Things right now? We must investigate…
In Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel Andromeda Strain (and subsequent film and recent TV mini-series) the premise is about an extra-terrestrial microorganism that threatens to wipe humanity off the planet through truly horrific blood clotting. It was an interesting take on the threat from outer space scenario.
So if we earthbound humans have to worry about space organisms turning our blood into dust, what do astronauts on long term space missions have to stress out about? According to a report in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (via PopSci): Earthborn bacteria mutating into killer diseases.
It turns out that bacteria that we’ve evolved pretty good defenses for could overwhelm our immune systems if we’re cooped up together on long term space voyages. So add that to the already growing list of space hazards including radiation, zero-g bone loss, space madness and your holodeck trying to kill you.
Despite its gusty reputation as a “gas giant,” Jupiter’s blood-red clouds hide a dense, rocky core that’s perhaps 20 times as massive as Earth. That core blocks any spacecraft’s passage through the center of the planet, but even a detour through the clouds would be a disaster.
Oh really Sally? Maybe you should try telling that to this man. He drove a car through a mountain. A mountain. Have you ever done that? Nope. Didn’t think so.
Of course Buckaroo Banzai also opened a gateway into the 8th Dimension and narrowly averted an invasion from the Lectoids of Planet X. But he fixed it! For someone that awesome, flying through Jupiter would be a cinch. We demand a retraction.
Ever wonder what it looks like to see a spacecraft land in the middle of a field? Wonder no more. NASA has posted a great Flickr set of photos showing the return to earth of Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté and Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Michael Barratt in their Soyuz craft.
The details of the event itself are sketchy and vague, though the meteorite reportedly left a scar on the boy’s hand before drilling a crater into the ground. We talked to Astronomer Phil Plait about the incident. He gives a great breakdown of the case on his website Bad Astronomy.
Us: So do you think it is at all likely that the kid was hit with a meteorite?
Phil: It’s possible, but there are too many holes in the story. I’m pretty suspicious of this for the obvious reasons — it’s pretty unlikely — but a lot of the story doesn’t add up. He was on his way to school on what’s obviously a suburban street, but no one else saw the flash, the bang, him getting hit? Plus, the Telegraph article misquotes the scientist, so it seems like this is less and less likely the more and more I look at it.”
The Bad astronomer alerted us to the existence of photographs of the boy, crater and meteorite on a German Newspaper’s website. He believes that the impact crater in the photo is probably a fake.
But if confirmed, this incident will be one of the only known direct meteorite strikes that has occurred since Ann Hodges was struck with a grapefruit size meteorite in 1954, the first known incident in human history. We aren’t holding our breaths just yet.
In November 1980, planetary scientists eagerly examined transmissions received from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it sped past Saturn. And with good reason! Amid those transmissions was the first image of Saturn’s North Pole – a region that’s virtually impossible to see from Earth, and, depending on the degree by which Saturn is tilted, can be cloaked in darkness for up to 15 years at a time (and you thought your last winter was never going to end).
What those scientists saw, and later missions confirmed, was a decidedly bizarre feature in the gas giant’s atmosphere directly above the North Pole: a 15,000-mile-wide hexagon.
A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…
In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?
If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?
Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).
A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…
Time Travel stories generally suck. There are some noteworthy exceptions – specifically stories that deal with the problems of time travel and not just time travel as a plot device (Primer, Back to the Future, to name a few).
Star Trek has done some great and some very bad time travel stories. Story merits aside, there’s one big problem with most time travel stories; Transmitting people back in time (information) has no theoretical basis: It’s impossible. For every worm hole propped open with exotic matter or giant Tippler tube, someone always finds an equation to show how the universe corrects itself with quantum screams, bubbles or other annoyances that get in the way of us correcting that horrible thing that happened in 6th grade or saving the whales.
Assuming for a moment that the killjoys at MIT and Princeton who relish in pointing out that time travel as we understand it is impossible, then what? How can we tell scientifically literate time travel stories? (more…)
A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…
The transporters in Star Trek are an exciting concept. Recent developments in quantum physics have made the possibility of teleporting matter a theoretical possibility while warp drive still remains a fantasy concept. However, the amount of energy required to move a person and all the other problems that go with it (engineering and ethical) leave quantum teleportation a bit to be desired for practical use. Crazy things can happen, but in the event that quantum teleportation doesn’t scale up or people are upset by the idea of their atoms being destroyed so copies can take their place, here are some slightly (we think) more practical solutions for teleportation that use way less energy and preserve your atoms:
Calls poured in to 911 dispatchers in Virginia on Sunday describing an unexplained loud boom and a streak of light across the sky. A space.com article published Monday called a Russian rocket falling back to earth the culprit:
The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.
But according to a livescience.com article published today, the Virginia boom couldn’t have been the Russian Rocket:
U.S. Strategic Command has since reported that the rocket re-entered Earth’s atmosphere near Taiwan, on the other side of the world, several hours after the reports of the fireball. So both its timing and entry location rule out the rocket as the explanation for the fireball.
Astronomers now believe that it was a meteor, but with only eye-witness testimony to go on, who knows what it was?
