What?: August 2016

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Robot Technology Is Making Beer Brewing Better Now [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

S.S. Alan Poindexter: Orbital ATK Freighter Named for Late Shuttle Astronaut [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft S.S. Alan Poindexter is shown being prepared for the OA-5 mission to resupply the International Space Station at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Credit: NASA

A NASA space shuttle commander who died in a 2012 water sports accident is being remembered with the naming of a space station-bound resupply vehicle, the company behind the spacecraft has announced.

“[The] OA-5 Cygnus [cargo spacecraft] will be named after former NASA astronaut and naval officer Alan Poindexter,” Orbital ATK announced last month.

The S.S. Alan Poindexter will launch on Orbital ATK’s sixth NASA-contracted mission to deliver scientific experiments, supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. The uncrewed, solar-powered capsule will be the first to fly on the company’s redesigned Antares 230 rocket since an earlier Cygnus freighter was destroyed in a launch failure in October 2014.

The Antares 230 rocket will fly using Russian-sourced RD-181 engines, enhancing performance and flexibility, Orbital ATK officials said.

Orbital ATK flew two interim Cygnus missions atop United Launch Alliance Atlas V boosters from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The OA-5 launch will mark the company’s return to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The launch of the S.S. Alan Poindexter is currently targeted for no earlier than August.

“Poindexter’s intersecting career with several members of [the] Orbital ATK management, his connection to Maryland and the Eastern Shore and his distinguished military and spaceflight career make him an ideal honoree for the OA-5 mission,” the company stated.

Born in 1961, Alan Goodwin “Dex” Poindexter grew up in Rockville, Maryland. A U.S. Navy veteran, he flew combat missions during Desert Storm with Kent Rominger, another future astronaut who today serves as the vice president for strategy and business development at Orbital ATK.

Astronaut Alan “Dex” Poindexter works on the aft flight deck of the space shuttle Atlantis during his first spaceflight in 2008.

Credit: NASA

Poindexter was named to NASA’s astronaut corps in 1998 and flew twice into space. In 2008, he piloted space shuttle Atlantis on the STS-122 mission, delivering the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory to the space station. The flight also returned to Earth Daniel Tani, an Expedition 16 flight engineer who is now Orbital ATK’s senior director for mission and cargo operations.

Two year later in 2010, Poindexter commanded the space shuttle Discovery on its penultimate spaceflight. The STS-131 mission transported 13,000 pounds (5,900 kilograms) of crew supplies and spare equipment to the space station. By comparison, the Cygnus bearing Poindexter’s name will launch 5,300 pounds (2,400 kg) of logistics to the orbiting outpost.

“Orbital ATK, wonderful way to honor Dex, his dedication and accomplishments for NASA,” wrote STS-131 mission specialist Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger on Twitter.

“Thanks for recognizing my [1998 NASA] classmate and our STS-131 commander,” wrote Clay Anderson, who also flew on Discovery as a mission specialist.

In total, Poindexter logged 27 days and 21 hours in space over the course of his two missions.

On July 1, 2012, Poindexter, 50, died of injuries sustained in a recreational jet ski accident. He is survived by his wife, Lisa, and their two sons, Zach and Samuel.

The naming of the S.S. Alan Poindexter continues Orbital ATK’s tradition of christening its cargo spacecraft for late astronauts who made contributions to the company’s goals or to the construction of the space station.

Previous ships were named for astronauts G. David Low, C. Gordon Fullerton, Janice Voss and Deke Slayton.

The most recent Cygnus, the S.S. Rick Husband, named for the commander of the 2003 ill-fated flight of the space shuttle Columbia, arrived at the station in March. It was released from the orbital complex on June 14 and supported an onboard combustion experiment before being destroyed during its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere a week later.

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http://www.space.com/33376-resupply-ship-named-for-alan-poindexter.html S.S. Alan Poindexter: Orbital ATK Freighter Named for Late Shuttle Astronaut

[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]S.S. Alan Poindexter: Orbital ATK Freighter Named for Late Shuttle Astronaut

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3 New Crewmembers Reach Space Station After 2-Day Journey [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three crewmembers approaches the International Space Station on July 9, 2016.

Credit: NASA TV

Three astronauts docked with the International Space Station early this morning (July 9) in an upgraded Russian Soyuz spacecraft, after a two-day journey from Earth spent testing out the new craft’s systems.

At 12:06 a.m. EDT (0406 GMT) this morning, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi arrived at the space station, docking smoothly at the station’s Rassvet module.

“Docking confirmed,” a NASA commentator said as the Soyuz linked up. “Three new crewmembers have arrived at the International Space Station after a perfect shakedown mission for this upgraded Soyuz vehicle.”

The hatches between the Soyuz and the station are scheduled to open at around 2:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT) this morning, when the spacefliers will be greeted by the station’s three current occupants. Then, the new arrivals will have the chance to speak with their families on the ground. Both Rubins and Onishi are first-time space travelers.

During their two-day flight commanded by Ivanishin, the new crewmembers tested out the improved communications systems and thruster configuration on the Soyuz-MS spacecraft. They are the first humans to ride in the upgraded craft, which launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

As the Soyuz cruised toward the orbiting lab, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, the space station’s current commander; as well as Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, were hard at work. According to NASA officials, yesterday, Williams installed lab gear for an incoming life-sciences experiment and configured a meteor-hunting observation rack brought up on a recent Cygnus supply-craft delivery.

The full Expedition 48 crew of six has a busy few months ahead — they are scheduled to receive and install an international docking adapter, which will provide automated docking for future crewed and uncrewed spacecraft, including planned Boeing and SpaceX missions to bring astronauts to the space station.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo craft will deliver that adaptor, and the crew will also see Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft (on its Antares rocket’s return-to-flight mission) and two Russian Progress spacecraft, all of which will bring additional supplies and gear.

The three new crewmembers are scheduled to remain on the station for about four months, and they will be joined toward the end of September by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Russian cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Sergey Ryzhikov.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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http://www.space.com/33377-three-crewmembers-arrive-space-station.html 3 New Crewmembers Reach Space Station After 2-Day Journey

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Amber Rose Opens Up About Her New Show, Feminism and Why Black Lives Matter [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Mr. Robot Season 2 Premiere Released Early Across Social Media [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Review: The New Ghostbusters, Modern and Vital, Goes for the Gusto [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

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‘Red Dead Redemption’ May Be Worth Picking Up an Xbox One to Play [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

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Image of the Day [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Tuesday, April 5, 2016: Zodiacal light rising from the horizon, red airglow along the horizon, and the Milky Way all appear in this photo taken in the Chilean desert. Zodiacal light results from cosmic dust floating in the ecliptic, the plane of Earth’s orbit, scattering sunlight. Airglow arises from upper atmosphere processess, including cosmic rays, recombining photoionized atoms, and chemical reactions between oxygen, nitrogen, hydroxyl, sodium, and lithium atoms. Billlions of stars glow in the Milky Way, our galaxy, high above. Image released April 4, 2016.

— Tom Chao

http://www.space.com/34-image-day.html Image of the Day

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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

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See Emma Watson Embrace the New Hermione Actress Noma Dumezweni [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Kim Kardashian West: ‘I Want My Children to Grow Up Knowing That Their Lives Matter’ [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

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Jay Z Addresses Police Brutality in Powerful New Song ‘Spiritual’ [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

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The Spice Girls Tease a Major Reunion in New Video [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

See Jupiter and the Moon Team Up in Friday’s Night Sky [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Jupiter will shine brightly near the crescent moon on the evening of July 8, 2016. Here, it’s shown over New York City at 9:30 p.m. local time.

Credit: Starry Night

If the weather is clear on Friday evening, check out the west-southwest sky around mid-twilight — about an hour after sunset — to see the moon and Jupiter in an eye-catching tableau.

About one-quarter of the way up from the horizon to the overhead point, you’ll spot a lovely crescent moon with what looks like a brilliant silvery-white “star” about 4 degrees to its upper left. This isn’t a star, however, but rather the planet identified with the supreme sky god: Jupiter. To judge how far apart they will appear in the sky, recall that your clenched fist, correctly held, will measure 10 degrees. So you can use your fist to make a reasonable estimate of degrees either horizontally or vertically.

Even though they won’t appear particularly close together, the moon and Jupiter will likely attract the attention of even nonstargazers. The duo will appear to descend in the western sky, finally disappearing beyond the western horizon — first the moon, at about 11:15 p.m. local daylight time, followed by Jupiter about 15 minutes later. [Find Jupiter and Other Skywatching Objects in July 2016 (Video)]

Jupiter is currently the brightest star-like object in the evening sky and the first to come out each night at dusk, outshining the brightest true stars. Just over a month ago, yellow-orange Mars nearly equaled it in brightness, but since Memorial Day, Mars, which can be found glowing in the south-southeast at dusk, has been rapidly receding from Earth and now shines with only about half of Jupiter’s radiance.

During July, Jupiter will slip farther down into the glow of evening twilight in the western sky, and by the end of February, it will be setting right around the time evening twilight ends. This month, Jupiter is falling far behind Earth in the never-ending planetary race around the sun, and it continues to move slowly eastward among the stars. Because Jupiter takes nearly 12 years to circle the sun and there are 12 zodiacal constellations, Jupiter spends roughly one year in each of the 12 zodiacal signs.

Currently, Jupiter is in the constellation Leo, the lion. It officially moved into Leo’s boundaries on June 10, 2015, and it will depart Leo and move into Virgo on Aug. 9.

If you have binoculars, take note of the much dimmer (magnitude 4.1) star Sigma Leonis shining to the upper left of Jupiter. They will be closest together, with the star appearing one-half of a degree above Jupiter, on July 13.

Jupiter still reigns supreme as the brightest evening planet, but in a few weeks, it will face competition from the dazzling queen of the night, Venus. Venus will appear much lower in the sky during sunset than Jupiter through most of August. However, Venus will be nearly eight times brighter, and it will gain prominence as it works its way slowly upward toward Jupiter as the weeks go by. They finally will meet in a very close conjunction on Aug. 27, when they’ll be less than 0.1 degrees apart as seen from the eastern half of North America. This event will be worth a special trip with binoculars to someplace commanding a scenic view of the western horizon.

In the interim, enjoy Jupiter’s visit with the moon on Friday evening.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer’s Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 in Westchester, New York. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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WATCH LIVE @ 11:30pm ET: New Crew Arrives at Space Station [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

After a two-day journey, three space travelers will dock with the International Space Station and finally make their way onboard tonight (July 8) with coverage starting at 11:30 p.m. EDT (0330 GMT on July 9). The docking will occur early July 9, at 12:12 a.m. EDT (0412 GMT), and the new crew will open the hatch and board at about 2:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT), with coverage beginning at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT). You can watch live in the window below, courtesy of NASA TV.

The trio launched Wednesday night (July 7), and will have flown 34 loops around the Earth before docking as they caught up with the space station’s orbit and tested out upgraded systems on their Soyuz MS spacecraft.

From NASA:

“The arrival of Rubins, Ivanishin and Onishi returns the station’s crew complement to six. The three will join Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos. The Expedition 48 crew members will spend four months conducting more than 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences, and technology development.

“Rubins, who holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and a doctorate in cancer biology, Ivanishin and Onishi are scheduled to remain aboard the station until late October. Williams, Skripochka and Ovchinin will return to Earth in September.”

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http://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html WATCH LIVE @ 11:30pm ET: New Crew Arrives at Space Station

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New Equation Tallies Odds of Life Beginning [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

A new equation combines information about a given exoplanet and the formation of life to describe the probability of life forming on an exoplanet over time. Planets Kepler-36b and Kepler-36c are depicted in this artist’s illustration.

Credit: David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence — and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be.

The creators of the equation hope it can connect diverse areas of research that aim to answer long-standing questions about the origins of life, much like how the famous Drake equation pulled together research concerning communications from intelligent life.

“The idea of the equation, at some level, is to try to connect the unknown, presumably microscopic events that … give rise to the first thing that we would call a living system — to connect those microscopic components to the macroscopic fact of whether a planet has life starting on it,” Caleb Scharf, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and lead author of the new work, told Space.com. [8 Newfound Alien Worlds Could Potentially Support Life]

The Drake equation, originally penned by astronomer Frank Drake in the 1960s, laid out a series of terms estimating how many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations likely exist in the Milky Way. The equation takes into account factors such as the rate of star formation in the galaxy, the fraction of planets where life emerges, and the fraction of that life that gains intelligence and the capability to broadcast its presence into space. Over the years, the equation has acted as a road map for researchers searching for communications signals created by intelligent civilizations beyond Earth. Scharf and his co-author Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, hope to provide a similar road map to researchers trying to work out how — and how often — life forms on a given planet.

“It came out of a moment in the field where we were trying to bring some cohesion to this study of origins of life,” which is notorious for its disparate areas of focus, Scharf said. “To my mind, what this equation is trying to do, or at least trying to prompt people to think about, is how you make that connection — how do you go from some story about how life may have originated on Earth to a quantitative assessment of the probability that that happened, and what that means for life elsewhere in the universe,” he said.

Series of steps

The new equation breaks down the process of abiogenesis — the formation of life from nonliving components — into a series of simpler factors. Those factors incorporate the planet’s conditions, the ingredients needed to form life and the likelihood of those ingredients getting into the right configuration for life to emerge. As with the Drake equation, each of the terms is straightforward to describe, but each hides additional complexity and room for new research.

Here is the equation:

The average number of origin-of-life events for a given planet = (number of building blocks on planet) × 1/(average [mean] number of building blocks needed per “organism”) × (availability of building blocks during time t) × (probability of assembly in a given time) × time.

Credit: Caleb Scharf and Lee Cronin

On the left, the equation considers the average (mean) expected number of origin-of-life events for a given planet. To get there, it takes into account the number of potential “building blocks” for life on the planet, the average number of building blocks needed to create a living system, the availability of those building blocks during a given time and the probability of that assembly happening during that time.

On Earth, building blocks for life take the form of amino acids, lipids and certain essential metals. Somewhere else, though, an entirely different set of ingredients could create enough complexity to form life — the equation doesn’t assume any specific set is necessary.

“We’re being kind of sneaky,” Scharf said. “I think it’s one of the beautiful things about it: If you write the equation this way, you don’t necessarily have to worry about all the fine, fine details, but what you do do is, you start to break open the factors that you might be able to put some numbers to.”

For instance, if you know the size of a planet and its composition, you can begin to estimate how many potential building blocks for life there are on the planet. To calculate whether those building blocks are actually available to form life, you’d have to know more about the conditions on the planet, such as its temperature, which could render some of the blocks unusable or inaccessible. For example, these blocks could be unusable or inaccessible if they’re always in gaseous form or if water is not readily available — although future research might show that life could emerge in more scenarios than scientists currently know about.

In that way, the equation “links where people in exoplanetary science may actually begin to get some data, on the size of planets, the composition, and so on, to the piece that we still don’t really understand but we know must have some kind of probability of happening”: how it is that life first begins, Scharf said.

A trillion test tubes

The value P_a, which is the probability that life will assemble out of those particular building blocks over a given time, is murkier — and much more interesting. If the value of P_a is very low, it’s extremely unlikely that life will form even when the ingredients are there — potentially explaining why humans haven’t yet happened to create life in the lab, even if scientists have used the right ingredients, Scharf said. But a planet-wide “lab” would increase the odds that life-creating events will occur.

“We might have to wait 100 million years for it to fall into place just in a test tube,” Scharf said. “Whereas on a planet scale, you’ve got a trillion test tubes — probably even more than that. It’s conceivable that, using this equation, playing these games, is hinting at a possible explanation for why we haven’t seen life miraculously appearing in our laboratories, that … there’s some subtle thing that has to happen that really doesn’t happen often.”

And if the scale is larger than planetary, Scharf said, that could further increase the likelihood of life forming. Early Earth and Mars, for example, were cultivating their own, separate chemistries, but the early solar system was chaotic; impacts with other solar system bodies could have resulted in material exchanges between the two planets. That would have led to even more “test tubes” — the chemical mixing could have allowed even more interactions to occur, potentially hitting the right combination, Scharf said.

If multiple planets exchange materials, it could lead to a sort of “chemical amplification [that] could, in principle, be hugely important,” he said. “It could be all the difference between getting life to occur or not, especially when we’re dealing with such tiny, tiny probabilities on the microscopic scale of something going right,” he added.

Factoring our ignorance

Scharf hopes that the new equation can bring together the different areas of research that relate to each of the equation’s terms. For instance, the equation provides an opportunity to combine detailed examinations of far-off exoplanets, chemical research about how different molecules in different physical states can interact to generate complexity, and investigations of the smallest possible units that can exhibit living traits. Combining these areas of research, in turn, could help to link scientists’ large-scale understanding of exoplanets to the microscopic chemical interactions, Scharf said.

“It’s not an answer; it’s a new tool for trying to think about the issues involved,” Ed Turner, an astronomer at Princeton University, told Space.com. Turner was not involved in the work, but the paper’s definition of the left-hand probability — the expected number of origin-of-life events — draws heavily from his work to allow for incorporating scientists’ uncertainty about the origins of life based on observations of life on Earth (and how much weight to give those observations).

“To really put numbers on those, to think very specifically about a lot of the factors in their equation, will require a lot more knowledge about exoplanets than we have now,” Turner said. “We may be decades off from being able to talk about things like the total mass of building blocks on a planet’s surface and things like that.”

Turner pointed out that the same was true about the Drake equation: Scientists have been able to quantify only some of the terms recently, such as the number of potentially habitable planets. Therefore, the equation could become more useful as the science progresses, he said. In the meantime, it can act to “divide our ignorance into different factors” and focus research on those different components, Turner added. [The Father of SETI: Q&A with Astronomer Frank Drake]

But some of the factors — especially biological ones, such as the switch from nonliving to living organisms — may not be understood anytime soon, he said.

Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study, also said that the term that incorporates the probability of nonlife becoming life will be among the hardest to define.

“We don’t know the mechanism whereby nonlife turns into life, so we have no way of estimating the odds … It may be one in a trillion trillion (it’s easy to imagine that), in which case, Earth life may be unique in the observable universe,” Davies told Space.com in an email. “But P_a may be quite large. We simply can’t say.”

“Setting that aside, I think the remaining terms are discussed in a very useful way as a conceptual framework for research,” he added.

To get a grip on that probability, humanity would have to encounter another instance of life’s emergence beyond our own for comparison. Future observatories that can see exoplanets in more detail, like the James Webb Space Telescope, may be able to detect signatures from life in earlier forms than Drake might have thought we’d spot — life on the microscopic scale rather than life actively communicating with humanity. That kind of data could help illustrate what other forms life can take.

The work also mentions the possibility of life arising multiple times using different building blocks — for instance, that some form of life that previously existed on Earth, or one that exists currently but is unknown to science, came into being separately from our brand of life with a totally different chemical vocabulary. Davies said that a good step toward narrowing down the likelihood would be to investigate Earth’s own organisms for evidence of this possibility.

“We just need one other sample of life (second genesis) and the field is transformed, because we would know P_a can’t be exceedingly small,” Davies said. “And that sample might be right here on Earth. Frankly, almost nobody has looked.”

The new work was detailed July 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Wakey Wakey! Juno Spacecraft Turns on Science Gear at Jupiter [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Juno probe at Jupiter.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is opening its eyes to prepare for its first good look at Jupiter.

Juno’s nine science instruments were off when the probe entered orbit around the solar system’s largest planet Monday (July 4), to reduce complications during that night’s make-or-break orbit-insertion engine burn.

The mission team powered up five of those instruments Wednesday (July 6) and plans to turn on the other four before the end of the month, NASA officials said. So Juno should be ready to gather some science data when Juno makes its next close pass by the huge planet on Aug. 27. (The probe is currently in a 53-day orbit around Jupiter.)

“Next time around, we will have our eyes and ears open,” Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement today (July 8). “You can expect us to release some information about our findings around Sept. 1.”

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and aims to help scientists better understand Jupiter’s magnetic and gravitational fields, composition and interior structure — in particular, whether the huge planet harbors a core of heavy elements.

The probe’s observations should shed light on when, where and how Jupiter — and, by extension, the solar system as a whole — came together, mission team members have said.

Juno will make most of its measurements from its highly elliptical 14-day science orbit, which will bring it within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) of Jupiter’s cloud tops at its closest approach. The spacecraft will perform a 22-minute engine burn on Oct. 19 to achieve that orbit. (Juno’s main engine will also fire up on July 13 for a brief “trajectory-correction maneuver,” NASA officials said.)

In total, Juno will loop around Jupiter 37 times before ending its life with an intentional death dive into Jupiter’s thick atmosphere in February 2018. This final maneuver is designed to ensure that Earth microbes don’t contaminate the Jovian moon Europa, which scientists think might be capable of supporting life.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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