Monday, October 28, 2019

A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in Orbit | WIRED

The old space shuttle landing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission! Videos for A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After 1:10 Watch the X-37B Space Plane 's Nighttime Landing After Record 780 Days in Orbit YouTube!! For the last 780 days, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the space plane as an orbital platform for classified experiments! 0:45 Air Force X-37B spaceplane successfully returns to earth after 780-day mission MSN!! These experiments tested technologies ranging from avionics to advanced propulsion systems, and deployed a few small satellites.

We'll probably never know exactly what sorts of experiments were being done up there, but the Air Force called the mission a big success. "The X-37B continues to demonstrate the importance of a reusable space plane," Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in a statement. "Each successive mission advances our nation's space capabilities."

The X-37B looks like a small-scale version of NASA's space shuttle. At just under 29 feet in length and with a 14-foot wingspan, it's hardly bigger than a school bus, but it provides more than enough room for the Air Force to test new tech in microgravity! A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in ...record...'The plane ' spent 780 continuous days in orbit conducting classified experiments for the US Air Force before autonomously landing itself. I...StolenHistory.ORG. Menu. Home. What's new Latest activity Authors. Forums. ...A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in Orbit. Thread starter Timeshifter;!! Although Boeing floated the idea for an X-37C space plane capable of carrying up to six astronauts to and from orbit back in 2011, there have been no updates on these plans since! A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in ...record...The old space shuttle landing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission. For the last 780 days, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the space plane as an orbital platform for classified experiments.!! The Air Force did not respond to WIRED's request for comment about the status of the X-37C program.

Publisher: Wired
Author: Condé Nast
Twitter: @wired
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Were you following this:

Virgin Orbit to add extra rocket stage to LauncherOne for interplanetary missions - SpaceNews.com

WASHINGTON — Virgin Orbit, while preparing for the first flight of its LauncherOne smallsat rocket, is in the process of choosing an engine for a three-stage variant that would be capable of sending payloads to other planets.

John Fuller, Virgin Orbit advanced concepts director, said the company is deciding between three "highly energetic third stage" options for LauncherOne that would enable the rocket to launch up to 50 kilograms to Mars or 70 kilograms to Venus. The "Exploration 3-Stage Variant" of LauncherOne would also have the ability to launch around 100 kilograms to the moon or toward Lagrange points, he said.

"What we do is we take that third stage and bring the overall impulse of the vehicle up to a point where we can reach very high energies to launch to cis-lunar, interplanetary or even asteroid targets," Fuller said Oct. 24 at the 70th International Astronautical Congress here.

Publisher: SpaceNews.com
Date: 2019-10-24T22:54:53+00:00
Author:
Twitter: @SpaceNews_Inc
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Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole? - MIT Technology Review

Interstellar holds a special place for science fiction fans. The film's executive producer and scientific advisor was Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who vowed that nothing in the film would violate the laws of physics and that any wild speculation would stem from science.

Various planets orbit Gargantuan. So NASA sends a number of missions to survey the planets in the hope of finding one that is habitable.

Much has been written about the scientific accuracy of the film, its depiction of black holes, and so on, most of it full of praise! A Secret Space Plane Just Landed After a Record Stay in ...www.reddit.com /.../comments/doby23/ ..._a_record r/Wired_Top_Stories: This is a subreddit auto-filled with Wired Top Stories RSS Feed!! The physicist Michio Kaku said it was the gold standard by which future science fiction films will be judged.

But one question has yet to be addressed—is it possible for a habitable planet to orbit a supermassive black hole at all? And today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Jeremy Schnittman at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Publisher: MIT Technology Review
Date: 2019-10-09T11:26:49-04:00
Author: Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Twitter: @techreview
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Nobel prize in physics for discovery of exoplanet orbiting a star | New Scientist

The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos.

One half of the award went to James Peebles at Princeton University for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, and the other half was jointly awarded to Michel Mayor at the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz at the universities of Geneva and Cambridge for their discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.

Peebles' research over two decades has formed the basis for our understanding of the universe's history after the big bang. He made theoretical predictions about the shape of the universe and the matter and energy that it contains. These were later validated by measurements of background radiation.

Publisher: New Scientist
Author: Donna Lu
Twitter: @newscientist
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While you're here, how about this:

Understanding of How Planets Form Challenged by Giant Exoplanet Around Tiny Star

This illustration shows a red dwarf star orbited by a hypothetical exoplanet. Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STScI)

An international team of researchers with participation from the University of Göttingen has discovered the first large gas giant orbiting a small star. The planet was found orbiting the nearby red dwarf star GJ 3512. This discovery challenges scientists’ very understanding of how planets form: low-mass stars should have less available material to form planets. Moreover, this new gas giant is on an eccentric orbit, which suggests the presence of another massive planet, which may have been ejected from the system in a chaotic interaction. The results were published in Science .

* * *

The Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen calibrated the data, a task that is fundamental to understanding the minute affect the motion of the planet or planets exert on a star. The Institute is also responsible for the analysis of the enormous amount of complex data sent from the observatory. Every day, fresh information arrives at the institute and is converted into numbers that the CARMENES consortium scientists can then interpret as stellar motion.

Publisher: SciTechDaily
Date: 2019-10-27T12:37:59-07:00
Author: Mike O
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The Nobel Prize in physics has gone to the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a star - MIT

The history: In 1995, Mayor and Queloz identified a planet orbiting the sun-like star 51 Pegasi, over 50 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The pair used a spectroscope to detect tiny wobbles in the light emitted by the host star. These changes turned out to be induced by the gravitational effects of a large, hot, gaseous exoplanet orbiting the star 4.3 million miles away. That exoplanet, later named 51 Pegasi b, was confirmed a week later by another team using the Lick Observatory in California.

Although the first exoplanet detection was made in 1992 (with the discovery of a pair of planets orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light-years away), 51 Pegasi b was the first exoplanet to be found orbiting a sun-like star.

Publisher: MIT Technology Review
Date: 2019-10-08T14:45:23-04:00
Twitter: @techreview
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