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NASA selects its first commercial module for private ISS space travel
NASA has announced via a new press release that Axiom Space out of Houston will be the first company to provide NASA with a commercial destination module for the International Space Station (ISS).
NASA is fast approaching its goal to commercialize the ISS and enable private astronauts to visit the floating laboratory in low-Earth orbit. The press release reveals that NASA has selected Axiom Space as the first company to provide NASA with a module that will attach to the ISS's Node 2 forward port. This is an important milestone for both NASA and the coming low-Earth orbit economy.
‘Golden age of space travel’ is just beginning, aerospace space experts say at El
The United States is in the dawn of a new space age and much of it is driven, like the mission that put a man on the moon, by companies in Southern California, according to George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic, who spoke at a recent forum on the future of space commercialization.
“We've been on an amazing journey to basically revolutionize how humanity interacts with space,” Whitesides said at the Future Forum, hosted by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, at El Segundo’s Cross Campus last week. “We want to democratize space so it moves from a region where it's really a province of government employees to something that’s open to us all.”
'Freezing' our bodies is the key to long-distance space travel — but can we do it?
Long-distance space travel, traveling at sub-light speeds, will require a way to make the journey with a crew of aging humans. While it's possible to avoid some of that through time dilation (a quirk of physics that slows down time for anything that speeds up), humans wouldn't save a large amount of time until the ship reaches 90% of the speed of light.
Assuming we could build ships that can go that fast, we could cut aging in half. At 99.5% light speed, we would age at only ten percent relative to an observer at rest.
REVIEW: 'Avenue 5' takes space travel in new direction | Television | siouxcityjournal.com
Hugh Laurie, left, stars as the captain of "Avenue 5," a luxury spaceship owned by a rich billionaire (Josh Gad).
Before we get a new "Star Trek" series, "Veep's" Armando Iannucci shows up with "Avenue 5," an irreverent look at space travel that could be what "The Orville" was aiming for all along.
Set several decades in the future, the HBO comedy suggests what space travel might be like when profit-minded entrepreneurs are in charge.
A new crew has arrived on " Mars ," at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah, for a rare dual-habitat simulation to see how two different teams tackle emergencies together on the Red Planet.
The MDRS is located in the harsh desert of southern Utah and is the world's largest and longest-running Mars-analog program , which is used to simulate Mars missions for testing, training and educational outreach. The new, 12-member crew — designated Crew 220 — from Mars Academy USA (MAU) arrived at the station last week.
NASA spots dramatic 'field of ice blocks' collapsing on Mars - CNET
The MRO HiRise camera team at the University of Arizona put together a GIF showing the radical change in the landscape. "This animation shows where a section of the slope at right has collapsed since three Mars-years ago and deposited a field of ice blocks," wrote planetary geologist Alfred McEwen for a HiRise image release on Friday.
A Mars-year lasts for 687 Earth days. MRO snapped the second image, the one showing the ice-block remodel, on Dec. 25, 2019.
NASA Mars 2020 Mission: What Will We Name the Next Mars Rover? | Observer
Engineers observed the first driving test for NASA's Mars 2020 rover on Dec. 17, 2019. NASA/JPL-Caltech
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To date, NASA has sent four rovers to the red planet, each tasked with a specific directive. The intrepid explorers have sent back a wealth of data and incredible photos, which have increased our understanding of Mars exponentially, but there's only so much a rover can do.
This is why NASA says that bagging and tagging samples to send back to Earth is the next logical step.
NASA's space exploration is endangered by a Mars fantasy.
Last spring, Mike Pence called for NASA to return astronauts to the moon, pronto. NASA got to work. The program, eventually named Artemis after the twin sister of Apollo, aims to land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024. While the timeline has been called fanciful , Artemis has gained momentum in the past year and secured funding and partnerships . For the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, a lunar landing seemed within reach.
While NASA's Artemis program would aim to send humans to Mars in the late 2030s and 2040s, its current focus is lunar exploration and conducting " meaningful activities " on the moon, including establishing a base and extracting lunar resources. The idea is that sustained presence on the moon will become a bedrock for future exploration.
Carbon dioxide makes up more than 95 percent of Mars's atmosphere, which has a surface pressure of only 0.6 percent that of Earth. One prediction of Leighton's and Murray's theory—with enormous implications for climate change on Mars—is that its atmospheric pressure would swing in value as the planet wobbles on its axis during its orbit around the sun, exposing the poles to more or less sunlight.
Now, a new model by Peter Buhler, Ph.D. of JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, and colleagues from Caltech, JPL, and the University of Colorado, provides key evidence to support this. The model was described in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on December 23.
Mars rover to Earth, this red planet has a methane problem
This is puzzling to scientists back on Earth because the Martian methane has been detected by ground-based telescopes. But recent orbital data from Mars shows the minuscule amounts of methane are gone.
In fact, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)—a joint European and Russian mission — which launched in 2016 and was designed to sniff-out trace gases, such as methane, says the Martian air is basically methane-free.
But, NASA's Curiosity rover may have just taken a big step forward in understanding this conundrum.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover photobombed by mysterious 'High Bay Bob' in sunglasses | Space
If you've been paying attention to the space engineers readying NASA's Mars 2020 rover , you may have noticed a recent surprise visitor in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
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But if you were paying close attention, you may have noticed that one of these bunny-suited technicians looks to be frozen in time, standing completely still and wearing a pair of sunglasses. This "worker" stays in that same spot, hour after hour, day or night. Could it be a well-paid (and strangely still) security guard? A worker inexplicably shunned by their Mars 2020 rover teammates?
In The Future, Buildings On Mars May Be Made Of Mushrooms
When we travel to the Moon or Mars, every ounce counts. The more we bring, the more fuel is consumed to take us out of reach of Earth's gravity.
Once we get to Mars, we would stay there for long periods of time. This requires livable space, preferably in buildings that could be deployed on the Martian surface.
In order to grow buildings on Mars, we need oxygen and food sources for the fungi. Dr. Rothschild and her team plan to provide those resources using cyanobacteria, which already generate significant amounts of oxygen here on Earth. Since the fungi would be growing once on Mars, the only weight that needs to be transported are the tiny spores the fungi will grow from.
Black holes, some of the most peculiar objects in the universe, pose a paradox for physicists. Two of our best theories give us two different—and seemingly contradictory—pictures of how these objects work. Many scientists, including myself, have been trying to reconcile these visions, not just to understand black holes themselves, but also to answer deeper questions, such as “What is spacetime?
Here is the problem: From the perspective of general relativity, black holes arise if the density of matter becomes too large and gravity collapses the material all the way toward its central point. When this happens, gravity is so strong in this region that nothing—even light—can escape.
Black holes caught in the act of swallowing stars | Science | AAAS
At the center of nearly every galaxy lies a monster, a giant black hole millions or even billions of times heavier than the Sun. Some, known as quasars or active galactic nuclei, shine brightly from across the universe as they continuously devour surrounding gas. But most are dormant, lurking invisibly for thousands of years—until a star passes too close and is ripped to shreds. That triggers a monthslong tidal disruption event (TDE), which can shine as brightly as a supernova.
Calculating Hawking radiation at the event horizon of a black hole
It is believed impossible to look beyond the event horizon of a black hole because nothing can escape, including particles and radiation. However, Stephen Hawking proved that black holes can "evaporate" by emitting various elementary particles. This means that over time, all the information absorbed by a black hole can disappear, which is contrary to fundamental ideas about information—it is believed that information cannot disappear without a trace.
One of the most promising approaches is the Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet theory with dilaton—it applies quantum components as a correction to the Theory of General Relativity.
Unified Binary Stars Identified as the Bizarre Objects Seen Near the Supermassive Black Hole at
One object in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy (MWG) perplexed astronomers for quite some time. It is thought to be a hydrogen gas cloud on a collision course with a black hole.
The lead scientist, who is Andrea Ghez, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA thinks that it can be identified. By all indications, G2 is a pair of binary stars that are revolving around the black hole but merged into a larger body. It gives off gas and dust as the gravitons of the blackhole affect the unified body of the two stars. As if quantumly entangles on a larger scale than mere particles.
Astronomers Have Mapped The Gas Swirls of a Wildly Fluctuating Black Hole
Black holes are cosmic objects of such fearsome density that even light cannot escape their extreme gravitational clutches. But just because they're invisible, doesn't mean we can't find ways to observe them.
This time, astronomers have mapped the contours of a supermassive vortex in the host galaxy IRAS 13224-3809 , found in the Centaurus constellation some 1 billion light-years from Earth.
To achieve this, researchers relied on the longest-ever observations of an accreting black hole by the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.
Take control of Mac audio with BlackHole virtual audio driver
BlackHole is a free, open-source tool to route audio anywhere on your Mac. You know how the audio from YouTube in Safari comes out the speakers or headphones of your Mac, and that's about it? Well, with BlackHole, you can intercept that audio. Then you can record it, redirect it to another app or do basically anything you like.
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Now, any audio you play on your Mac will go to BlackHole instead of out the speakers. Now, open up a recording app, like QuickTime Player, which comes built-in with your Mac. Open a new audio recording window, and in the pop-open menu, choose BlackHole 16ch as the "microphone." Hit record, and you're recording YouTube!
If the nearest star beyond the sun were a black hole, we might not be here - CNET
Black holes are among the most powerful, fascinating and terrifying objects in the universe, gobbling up everything that ventures near. One scientist has run the numbers on what might happen if there were a black hole just beyond our solar system, and it's not pretty.
"The planet, starting from the current heliocentric distance of the Earth, may even impact its star in about 2 to 3 million years," Iorio writes.
M87 is actually 53 million light-years away. The nearest known black hole — Sag A at the center of the Milky Way — is just under 26,000 light-years away. That's a much more comfortable buffer than the single parsec (3.26 light-years) used in Iorio's calculation, which would put the imagined black hole closer to us than Alpha Centauri, the nearest star beyond our sun.
Opinion: Have we solved the black hole information paradox? The answer is maybe. And we may soon have a new underst… https://t.co/kbNM9hROt9sciam (from New York City)Thu Jan 30 21:52:44 +0000 2020
Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can "solve the climate crisis". But th… https://t.co/2otMM2lVNoMikeHudema (from Unceded Squamish Territory)Sat Jan 25 12:22:43 +0000 2020
"We have to realize that this is not playing games… This is an urgent problem that has to be solved and, what's mor… https://t.co/1eKYywXoXtClimateReality (from Washington, DC)Mon Jan 27 15:55:02 +0000 2020
"Moral distress is usually defined as the reaction of any sane human if they feel responsible, but disempowered. In… https://t.co/qn4eD3QCtJbmj_latest (from London Beijing Delhi New York)Tue Jan 28 08:00:43 +0000 2020
WASHINGTON — The commercial spaceflight industry is thriving, and regulators won't get in the way. That's the message that speakers at the 23rd Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington this week want to get out.
NASA is certainly leaning into the push for commercial spaceflight. Just last week, the space agency unveiled 16 scientific experiments and technology demonstrations that will hitch a ride to the moon aboard landers built by two private companies: Astrobotic of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines LLC of Houston. The two landers are slated to launch in July 2021 on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket and Space X's Falcon 9, respectively.
3 supermoons, an extra full moon, a blue moon and a micro-moon all to occur in 2020 - mlive.com
There is a lot going on with the moon this year. Here's a quick rundown of some of the lunar events.
First off, we get an extra full moon this year, but we have to wait until Halloween. Usually each month has a full moon since a full moon occurs every 28 days. With the lunar cycle being shorter than our monthly calendar, there are more full moons than months.
A second full moon in a month is also called a blue moon. The Halloween full moon will be a blue moon. The moon doesn't appear blue. It's just the name it has been given.
'Assembler' robots could build solar arrays and more on the moon | Space
A newly NASA-funded project called The Assemblers envisions a swarm of robots putting together solar arrays on the moon's surface — or doing other joint-assembly projects in space, on the moon or on Mars.
A new video — perhaps you can call it a "robo cam" — shows how the assembly would look from a robot's point of view as it examines a structure and targets certain areas for more work. Several time-lapse video clips show robots moving into different positions. For now, they are doing this under the watchful eye of engineers, but over time they will work more autonomously.
Proposed House Bill Would Delay NASA's Return to the Moon - Scientific American
The bill — designated HR 5666 and introduced by Rep. Kendra Horn, D-Okla., chair of the committee's space subcommittee — stresses that a moon landing in 2028 should be put in the context of a larger moon-to-Mars program. This Red Planet program would put humans in Mars orbit by 2033, followed by surface missions.
HR 5666 further calls for a moon-to-Mars program office that would be established 60 days after the bill passes into law, with a program director who would report both to NASA's associate administrator and the agency's associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations mission directorate.
Moon girls basketball trying to keep pace in rugged Section 1-5A - Trib HSSN
Moon head coach Jody Powell talks with Emma Theodorsson during a game against Chartiers Valley on Jan. 9, 2020, at Moon Area High School.
Moon’s Reilly Sunday drives to the basket between Chartiers Valley’s Megan McConnell and Aislin Malcolm during their game on Jan. 9, 2020, at Moon Area High School.
Moon’s Emma Theodorsson takes a shot as time expires during a game against Chartiers Valley on Jan. 9, 2020, at Moon Area High School.
Thoughts on a moon causing a ruckus: The opposite of knowing what’s right for you isn’t knowing what’s wrong for you, it’s uncertainty. Wrongness is easy and obvious. You just avoid it. But something that’s a little right and a little wrong in spots — that’s the kind of thing that needs to be sorted out and decided so it doesn’t waste your time indefinitely.
ARIES (March 21-April 19). When you feel like the world is yours, it is. The reason you don’t feel this way all of the time is that you have a conscience that disallows you from missing out on the most important thing a human can do, which is to grow.
These twin rovers might explore the moon together one day | Space
As humans work toward returning to the moon with initiatives such as NASA 's Artemis program , which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, researchers are developing the robots that will explore with these astronauts. And these robots will have to collaborate, too.
In a move intended to support the future of robotic exploration, the European Space Agency 's (ESA) Technology Development Element (TDE) program has entered a contract with French technology company Comex to develop a two-year project called Trailer, which will test how well two robots could work together on a future lunar mission.
Scientists Search for Deltas on Saturn's Largest Moon - Eos
Fifteen years ago this month, a small spacecraft gently touched down on a strange, new world. The European Space Agency's Huygens lander had hitched a ride to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, on the back of NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn for more than a decade.
Huygens gave earthlings an unprecedented view of a world much like—and unlike—our own. Titan is the only other place in the solar system with liquid raining from clouds and pooling on its surface in lakes and rivers, but that liquid is composed primarily of methane and ethane, not water. Titan's weather patterns refuse to match our models, and its atmosphere remains mysteriously replenished by large, complex, organic molecules.
NASA unveils 16 payloads that private lunar landers will take to the moon https://t.co/nbXxYtiOSl https://t.co/gPApXf4PGbSPACEdotcom (from NYC)Fri Jan 31 12:11:03 +0000 2020
Asteroid news: We're sitting ducks warns Britain's leading asteroid hunter | Science |
Mr Tate is the director of The Spaceguard Centre – Britain’s only independent near-Earth object (NEO) tracking facility in Powys, Wales.
Unlike volcanic eruptions and devastating earthquakes, Mr Tate told Express.co.uk asteroids are the one threat that is certain but also one that can be certainly dealt with.
He said: “It’s the one natural hazard that we know of that could remove our species from existence, basically at any time in the space of about 90 minutes.
What is the Probability of a Huge World-Ending Asteroid Impact?
Fear of huge asteroid impacts is a little similar to the fear of flying. The probability of anything happening is very small, but it's the vivid thought of such a catastrophic event happening that can make some of us magnify the probability in our minds leading us to have an irrational fear of such an event.
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Space debris burns up in our atmosphere every day. Any space rock with a diameter of about 10 -meters ( 33 feet), will be destroyed in the Earth's atmosphere during thermal explosions.
Asteroid impact: Asteroid travelling at 50,000km per hour explodes above Puerto Rico | Science |
In a video of the unexpected asteroid, a bright streak of light can be seen before a small explosion occurs at the end of its trail.
According to calculations from the IMO, the small asteroid was about a metre in diameter, and entered the atmosphere at a staggering speed of 14 kilometres per second, or 50,400 kilometres per hour.
The IMO said: “On Friday, January 17 2020 Puerto Rico was witness to yet another extreme event. Just north of the island a small asteroid created a bright fireball in the sky.
Bad Astronomy | Tracing a bright fireball back to its parent: the potentially hazardous asteroid
In 2017, a bright fireball burned up over Japan. If you had been standing right under it you would've seen it zip across the sky in a few seconds, getting as bright as Venus to the eye.
That's fairly typical for very bright meteors, but this one gets more interesting . It was caught on camera by 12 of the 27 cameras making up the SonotaCo Network, which watch the skies over Japan for just such an event. Astronomers then used all that data to backtrack the trajectory of the meteoroid * , which can then be used to calculate its orbital path before it hit us. What they found is a near-perfect match to the orbit of a small asteroid called 2003 YT1 !
Publisher: SYFY WIRE
Date: 2020-01-29T09:00:00-05:00
Author: https www facebook com Phil Plait 251070648641
Asteroid shock: 'Significant chance' asteroid will hit Earth expert warns | Science | News |
While the chances of a major asteroid hitting Earth are small – NASA believes there is a one in 300,000 chance every year that a space rock which could cause regional damage will hit – the devastating prospect is not impossible.
In 2013, a 65ft (20m) meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, smashing windows and caused injuries to more than 1,000 people.
Experts had not anticipated the incident, leading to fears Earth could be surprised by a more devastating asteroid strike in the future.
Asteroid news: NASA reveals risk of extinction event space rock hitting Earth | Science | News |
According to the space agency, as reported by Interesting Engineering, there is a 0.000001 percentage chance of such a large asteroid hitting Earth each year. NASA searches for asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth via its Near Earth Object program.
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According to Interesting Engineering any rock less than 10 meters long will be destroyed by a thermal explosion.
Properties in Connecticut and Alabama have also taken damage from space rocks over the past century.
What happens if a space telescope weighing more than a ton collides with a 10-pound experimental satellite about 600 miles above Pittsburgh?
“You probably wouldn’t see anything here at all,” National Weather Service meteorologist Lee Hendricks said.
The gloomy, overcast cloud cover is expected to continue through 6:39 p.m. Wednesday, when the two orbiting objects are expected to pass between 50 and 100 feet of each other, according to LeoLabs , a California tech firm that monitors satellite and spacecraft in orbit to prevent collisions.
What's up with a demolition derby in orbital space? | TheHill
For most of this period, satellites were the primary preserve of large governments, mainly because of their great cost/complexity and military implications. Although a few U.S. and European companies either manufactured or operated communications satellites, these were either closely regulated or actually controlled by governments.
Through the 1990s, communications and many other types of satellites were placed in a very high orbit of 23,000 miles directly above the equator, where they would orbit the Earth at the same speed the Earth itself was rotating. This "geostationary (GEO) orbit" would make any satellite appear to be stationary in the sky so it could serve as a suspended relay tower for TV, telephone, and data across the oceans and continents.
12,000 Satellites Orbiting Earth In The Next 6 Years! | wfmynews2.com
The Falcon 9 rocket took the satellites to space at approximately 9:06 this morning. The mission is part of a program aimed at putting thousands of satellites in low orbit in a network style web.
The lower orbit will allow internet service to reach all corners of the US and Canada through the satellites.
Space X has more than 20 missions like this planned through the end of the year with the goal of getting to a total somewhere between 600 and 800 of them by the end of the year.
A cubesat deployed a de-orbiting tether and now it's losing altitude 24 times faster than before
The Terminator Tape is a compact lightweight module—less than 1 kilogram—that attaches to CubeSats, NanoSats and Small MicroSats. It has a small footprint and its operation poses no risk to the operation of the satellite, according to Tethers Unlimited.
The tape can be deployed by command or by timer, and consists of a long, conductive tape with two optional solar cells. When deployed, it "generates neutral particle drag and passive electromagnetics drag to hasten the de-orbit," according to Tethers Unlimited's website.
Date: A cubesat deployed a de-orbiting tether and now it
U.K. Sails Out of EU's Orbit and Toward America's Embrace - WSJ
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to have a good relationship with President Trump. Photo: christian hartmann/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
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LONDON—British governments have struggled since World War II to balance their skepticism and anxieties about European economic and political integration with their worries about excessive strategic dependence on the U.S.
Britain's departure from the European Union on Friday will mark the next stage of that struggle, one likely to push the country deeper into the arms of the U.S. The question for London is what kind of partner the U.S. will be in the age of Donald Trump.
Here's how robots could repair or dispose of broken satellites in orbit - The Verge
These days, building and launching your own satellite means creating a sophisticated piece of technology — and then flinging it into space where you'll never see it again. That means if anything breaks on the satellite, there's not much you can do to fix it.
"Once you launch a mission, as soon as it leaves the pad, it's never going to be touched again by human or robotic hands," Jonathan Goff, president and CEO of Altius Space Machines, tells The Verge . "Which means that if anything goes wrong and you can't fix it with a software update, you're out of luck. There's not much you can do."
There may be a hidden planet orbiting a nearby star
Besides the Sun, the nearest star to Earth is a big flaming orb known as Proxima Centauri. As far as we know, there's at least one planet orbiting the star, which astronomers have named Proxima Centauri b, but a new study suggests that the known exoplanet around the star might not be flying solo .
According to the study, which was published in Science Advances , a planet now known as Proxima Centauri c may also be hanging out around the star. Even more exciting, scientists think that the planet orbits its star at a distance of around one astronomical unit, which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, suggesting that it may be temperate.
