This Tron-esque glowing blue ring isn’t the latest designer lamp. In fact, it’s NASA’s cutting-edge solar-electric propulsion thruster, being tested in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Read more…
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This Is NASA’s Solar Propulsion Engine of the Future
In a manner of speaking, Albert Einstein just helped an international team of astronomers find a hot Jupiter that’s 2,000 light-years away. It’s the first time in history that the theory of relativity was used to locate another planet. Read more…
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We just used the theory of relativity to discover a new planet
Astronaut Chris Hadfield — the tweeting , tumbling Canadian astronaut who’s a one-dude astro-ambassador from the space programme to the Internet — has produced and released a video of his own performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (AKA the “Major Tom song”) on the ISS. He adapts the lyrics a bit to his own situation — and changes out the whole dying-in-space chorous — but is otherwise pretty faithful. From the credits, it appears that David Bowie gave permission for this, though that’s not entirely clear. I would think that not even a major record label would be hamfisted and cack-handed enough to send a takedown notice over this one (it’s been suggested for Boing Boing more than any other link in my memory), but I’m prepared to be surprised. Space Oddity
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Astronaut Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the ISS
Good news, spacefans: the image up top is real. Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane made history this morning, igniting its engines for the first time and hitting supersonic speeds. The achievement brings would-be passengers one step closer to a trip to the edge of space. Read more…
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Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has made its first powered test flight!
NASA has spent a lot of time and money resurrecting the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn V back in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ars recently spent a week at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to get the inside scoop on how the effort came to be . But there’s a very practical reason why NASA is putting old rocket parts up on a test stand and firing them off: its latest launch vehicle might be powered by engines that look, sound, and work a whole lot like the legendary F-1. This new launch vehicle, known as the Space Launch System , or SLS, is currently taking shape on NASA drawing boards. However, as is its mandate, NASA won’t be building the rocket itself—it will allow private industry to bid for the rights to build various components. One potential design wrinkle in SLS is that instead of using Space Shuttle-style solid rocket boosters, SLS could instead use liquid-fueled rocket motors, which would make it the United States’ first human-rated rocket in more than 30 years not to use solid-fuel boosters. The contest to suss this out is the Advanced Booster Competition , and one of the companies that has been down-selected as a final competitor is Huntsville-based Dynetics . Dynetics has partnered with Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne (designers of the Saturn V’s F-1 engine, among others) to propose a liquid-fueled booster featuring an engine based heavily on the design of the famous F-1. The booster is tentatively named Pyrios , after one of the fiery horses that pulled the god Apollo’s chariot; the engine is being called the F-1B. Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust
Many have lamented the seeming decline of the US space program. While we’re not expecting an immediate return to the halcyon days, the President’s proposed federal budget for fiscal 2014 could see some renewed ambition. NASA’s slice of the pie includes a plan that would improve detection of near-Earth asteroids, send a solar-powered robot ship (like the NASA concept above) to capture one of the space rocks and tow it back to a stable orbit near Earth, where researchers could study it up close. The agency would have humans setting foot on the asteroid by 2025, or even as soon as 2021. It’s a grand goal to say the least, but we’d potentially learn more about solar propulsion and defenses against asteroid collisions. If NASA’s plans mostly involve the future, the US Air Force budget is looking into the past. It’s setting aside $35 million for a long-discussed resurrection of the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, also known as DSCOVR — a vehicle that was scuppered in 2001 due to cost overruns, among other factors. Run by NOAA once aloft, the modernized satellite would focus on warning the Earth about incoming solar winds. That’s just one of the satellite’s original missions, but the November 2014 launch target is relatively realistic — and we’ll need it when the satellite currently fulfilling the role is overdue for a replacement. Filed under: Robots , Science Comments Via: Space.com Source: NASA , AP (Yahoo)
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US budget has NASA planning to capture an asteroid, USAF reviving DSCOVR (video)
Though we’ve seen plenty of our beautiful blue marble from space before, here’s what Earth looks like from a hundred million miles away. That’s roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Sun. More »
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What Earth Looks Like from a 100 Million Miles Away
The European Space Agency’s Planck satellite has been gathering data since its launch in 2009, slowly building up a map of the cosmic microwave background radiation — a distant remnant of the Big Bang. The resulting image, seen above, is the most detailed ever put together of the cold glow that uniformly covers the universe, taking us all the way back to just a 380,000 years after the explosive inflation that gave birth to all matter, energy and time. There were some surprises, including more extreme temperature fluctuations between hemispheres than predicted by the standard model and confirmation of a pronounced cold spot that can no longer be dismissed as an artifact of previous satellite instruments. For more about just what Planck has taught us, along with a few more visualizations, check out the source link. Filed under: Science , Alt Comments Via: Wired Source: European Space Agency
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Planck satellite creates most detailed map ever of cosmic microwave background radiation
When it comes to detecting and cataloguing exoplanets, astronomers have only just begun. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that an entirely new class of planets may have been discovered — Neptune-like planets that were stripped of their outer gaseous layers after venturing too close to their sun. Several years ago, astronomers involved in NASA’s Kepler program discovered celestial bodies that appeared too heavy for their size. Some of these planets were Earth-like in size, but featured densities greater than pure iron. No existing theory could explain these observations, but Olivier Grasset, a geophysicist at the University of Nantes in France, has just come up with a possible explanation. Nature News reports : Grasset and his collaborators now say that the strange bodies could be the “fossil cores” of planets that were once much larger, an idea that was first proposed by researchers in 20111. These planets would have been ice giants that formed in the outer parts of a star system and then migrated inwards — as their orbits were affected by interactions with surrounding gas and dust — perhaps getting as close to their suns as Mercury is to ours. The hotter temperatures closer to the stars, Grasset explains, would evaporate the outer layers of the planets, which are made mainly of volatile components such as hydrogen, helium and water. The leftover cores would consist of rock and metal, just like the bulk of Earth, and could weigh up to several times as much as our planet, making them what scientists call super-Earths. But these cores formed under the weight of their planets’ outer layers, under pressures of around 500 gigapascals — 5 million times atmospheric pressure on Earth — and typical temperatures of about 6,000 kelvin. As a result, the materials in these cores should be more compacted, and denser, than Earth. The results were recently presented at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London. Read Davide Castelvecchi’s entire article to learn more. Image: NASA/ESA/C.CARREAU.
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This crazy-dense planet could be of an entirely new type
