Thursday, October 10, 2019

Virgin Orbit plans to launch first commercial small satellites to Mars – TechCrunch

The consortium is working to follow in the footsteps of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s MarCO mission from 2018, which saw two smaller satellites successfully launched to Mars. The group’s early studies have suggested that even satellites as small as 50 kg (around 110 lbs), or potentially even smaller, can provide meaningful and useful research, including imagery collection, from both Mars and its orbiting body, Phobos! Videos for Virgin Orbit Plans To Launch First Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit announces plans to send tiny vehicles to Mars The Verge!! These satellites could provide key info about the atmospheric composition of Mars, or even scouting for underground water, Virgin Orbit says.

Warsaw-based SatRevolution has experience in the commercial space industry, and in April this year sent Poland’s first commercial nano satellite into orbit! 0:27 Space race hots up as Virgin celebrates successful high-altitude satellite launch test YouTube!! The universities involved, which include the AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology and many others, all have experience in space industry research, as well. The plan is to launch the spacecraft developed by the universities and SatRevolution aboard Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket, which takes off from a converted 747-400 Virgin has retrofitted for the process.

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Publisher: TechCrunch
Date: 2019-10-09 12:20:42
Twitter: @techcrunch
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Many things are taking place:

Most Extreme 'Hot Jupiter' Alien Planet Completes 1 Orbit Every 18 Hours | Space

Giant alien worlds known as hot Jupiters get scorchingly close to their host stars, and now astronomers have discovered the most extreme version of such planets to date — one that zips around its star in a little more than 18 hours, a new study finds.

This exoplanet's orbit is likely decaying enough for scientists to actually measure it over the coming decade, researchers added.

In the past two decades or so, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 4,000 worlds outside of Earth's solar system! Virgin Orbit Plans First Satellite Launch in 2 Months www.msn.com /en-us/money/companies/ virgin - orbit - plans - ...launch -in...Virgin Orbit , the rocket-launching sibling to Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic, is now just two months and two flights away from putting its first satellite in orbit .!! These discoveries have revealed that some of these exoplanets , such as hot Jupiters, gas giants that orbit their stars closer than Mercury does the sun, are very different from those seen in Earth's solar system.

Related: The Strangest Alien Planets in Pictures
More: Extremely Hot and Incredibly Close: How Hot Jupiters Defy Theory

Publisher: Space.com
Date: 2019-10-09T11:04:10+00:00
Author: https www facebook com spacecom
Twitter: @SPACEdotcom
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An unexpectedly enormous planet is orbiting a tiny star | New Scientist

Astronomers have spotted an enormous planet orbiting a tiny star about 31 light years away. It is so big that it can’t have formed in the way that we think most planets do.

Juan Carlos Morales at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain and his colleagues spotted the planet, called GJ 3512 b, using a technique called the radial velocity method . This takes advantage of the fact that as a planet orbits its star, the star moves slightly in a way that allows astronomers to determine the planet's mass and orbit.

Using more than two years of observations with the CARMENES exoplanet survey in Spain, the researchers found that GJ 3512 b is at least 46 per cent as massive as Jupiter and orbits its star once every 204 days. The star itself is only 12 per cent as massive as our sun – or about 126 times the mass of Jupiter.

Publisher: New Scientist
Author: Leah Crane
Twitter: @newscientist
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First exoplanet found around a Sun-like star

The discovery of the gas-giant planet — named 51 Pegasi b after its parent star, 51 Pegasi — came as a surprise! Virgin Orbit plans to launch first commercial small ...www.wap5.in/2019/10/ ...small...Richard Bransons-backed small satellite launch operation Virgin Orbit wants to be the first to dedicate a mission to bringing commercial cube sats to the red planet, the company announced today. Working with Polish satellite company SatRevolution, Virgin Orbit has established a consortium along with a group of Polish academic institutions to jointly work on at…!! Gas-giant planets, such as Jupiter, are located in the outer parts of the Solar System! Virgin Orbit plans 2018 first launch - SpaceNews.com spacenews.com/ ...Virgin Orbit plans 2018 first launch . Those launches , the company said in the statement, are now expected to begin in the first half of 2018. Earlier this year, when Virgin Orbit spun out from Virgin Galactic , company officials still believed that an initial launch could take place by the end of 2017.!! The prevailing theory was, and still is, that the formation of these planets requires icy building blocks that are available only in cold regions far away from stars. Yet Mayor and Queloz found 51 Pegasi b to be orbiting about ten times closer to its host star than Mercury is to the Sun (Fig. 1). One possible explanation is that the planet formed farther out and then migrated to its current location.

Figure 1 | The planetary systems of the Sun and of 51 Pegasi. a , In the Solar System, gas-giant planets, such as Jupiter, orbit far from the Sun. In 1995, Mayor and Queloz1 reported the discovery of 51 Pegasi b — a gas-giant planet that is much closer to its host star, 51 Pegasi, than Mercury is to the Sun. The orbital distances of the planets are given in astronomical units (1 AU is the average separation between Earth and the Sun). b , The sizes of all objects are shown approximately to scale.

Date: 2019-10-08
Author: citation_journal_title Nature citation_author M Mayor D Queloz citation_volume 378 citation_publication_date 1995 citation_pages 355 359 citation_doi 10 1038 378355a0 citation_id CR1
Twitter: @nature
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Many things are taking place:

A giant exoplanet orbiting a very-low-mass star challenges planet formation models | Science

M dwarfs, the most common type of star, are low-mass objects that emit most of their faint light in the near-infrared, making it difficult to detect any orbiting exoplanets. Morales et al. have observed the nearby M dwarf GJ 3512 in the optical and near-infrared (see the Perspective by Laughlin). Periodic variations in the star's radial velocity show that it hosts a gas giant exoplanet on an eccentric orbit. The authors use simulations to show that such a large exoplanet around such a small star has implications for models of planet formation.

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Surveys have shown that super-Earth and Neptune-mass exoplanets are more frequent than gas giants around low-mass stars, as predicted by the core accretion theory of planet formation. We report the discovery of a giant planet around the very-low-mass star GJ 3512, as determined by optical and near-infrared radial-velocity observations. The planet has a minimum mass of 0.46 Jupiter masses, very high for such a small host star, and an eccentric 204-day orbit. Dynamical models show that the high eccentricity is most likely due to planet-planet interactions. We use simulations to demonstrate that the GJ 3512 planetary system challenges generally accepted formation theories, and that it puts constraints on the planet accretion and migration rates. Disk instabilities may be more efficient in forming planets than previously thought.

Publisher: Science
Date: 2019-09-27
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Planet 9 could be an ancient black hole orbiting the sun - Business Insider

At the edge of our solar system, some unknown object is manipulating the paths of chunks of ice as they circle the sun.

These objects' oval-shaped orbits all point in the same direction and tilt the same way, suggesting that an unseen force is herding them.

At first, scientists thought the culprit was a mysterious planet, which they dubbed Planet Nine (though some call it Planet X ). But a new paper suggests the gravitational pull could come from a primordial black hole — a type of small black hole that scientists have theorized formed during the Big Bang.

Although the existence of primordial black holes has not been confirmed, some scientists think the universe is teeming with them. If they exist, such black holes could make up the 80% of the universe that scientists can't see. They know this " dark matter " exists because its gravity pulls on things throughout the universe.

Publisher: Business Insider
Date: 2019-09-27
Author: Morgan McFall Johnsen
Twitter: @SciInsider
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