What?: February 2017

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Hillary Clinton Jokes That She Takes Style Inspiration From Death Row Records [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Classified Shuttle Missions: Secrets in Space [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

STS-39 Mission Specialist Charles L. Veach monitors an AFP-675 panel on Discovery’s aft flight deck.

The space shuttle was NASA’s primary option for transporting astronauts to Earth orbit between 1981 and 2011. The five shuttles that went into space flew 135 missions. Crews deployed satellites, conducted experiments and studied the Earth. A handful of the missions were classified, and little is known about these secret missions, even 30 years after the fact.

Joint operations

In the early days of the space shuttle program, some of the missions were run jointly by NASA and the military. This was in part because the National Reconnaissance Office had successfully requested the shuttle’s payload bay — the part of the shuttle that carried satellites be carried into space — be enlarged to accommodate large military satellites, according to Air & Space Magazine.

NRO also wanted polar shuttle missions, since polar missions make it possible to see the Earth’s entire surface below (as opposed to equatorial missions, which are limited.) The Air Force went so far as to create a launch pad in Vandenberg, California for polar-orbiting space shuttle missions, but after the Challenger incident, plans to use the pad were permanently mothballed.

After the Challenger disaster on Jan. 28, 1986, U.S. policy changed to allow the Department of Defense to use expendable, uncrewed rockets again. Classified shuttle flights continued with payloads that could not be shifted to the Titan IV rocket, the magazine added. The astronauts encountered considerable challenges in keeping information secret since the shuttle did not have secure information channels, and their movements and training operations had to be somehow kept separate in a normally open public agency.

Here is some of what we know about the missions with DOD.

STS-4 Columbia (Launched June 27, 1982)

The classified payload was known as Cryogenic Infrared Radiance Instrument for Shuttle (CIRRIS), which was supposed to test infrared sensors for a future surveillance satellite called Teal Ruby, according to America Space. The lens cap on CIRRIS failed to open, and the experiment failed. America Space added that Teal Ruby ended up being cancelled after the Challenger incident, which delayed shuttle flights by several years.

“Teal Ruby was first shifted onto STS-39 and finally cancelled,” the publication said. “By the time STS-39 lifted off in April 1991, it carried not Teal Ruby … but an updated version of CIRRIS. Apparently, by the time it would have been ready to launch, the Teal Ruby technology — considered ‘advanced’ in the late 1970s — would be virtually obsolete, because sensor technology was advancing rapidly.”

STS-51C Discovery (Launched Jan. 24, 1985)

Little is known about STS-51C’s payload officially besides this terse line on the NASA website: “The U.S. Air Force Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster was deployed and met the mission objectives.”

Multiple sources suggest that the satellite deployed was called Magnum/ORION ELINT, a signals intelligence program about which little is known. Before launch, no pre-flight commentary was available until nine minutes before liftoff — a first in the shuttle program.

STS-51J Atlantis (Launched Oct. 3, 1985)

Two Defense Satellite Communications System satellites were released on this mission, according to NASA. The system is intended to support secure data and voice transmissions for military users from across the globe.

STS-62A Discovery (Cancelled)

This mission was supposed to be the first one using the Air Force pad in Vandenberg, Calif., but it was cancelled after the Challenger explosion. Its main mission was to put Teal Ruby into orbit, according to NASASpaceflight.com.

STS-27 Atlantis (Launched Dec. 2, 1988)

It’s probable that the crew released a satellite called ONYX, which had radar on board capable of observing targets on the ground through any kind of weather or cloud cover. According to Air&Space Magazine, one of the satellite’s antenna dishes did not open and the crew possibly — although it’s not confirmed officially — did a spacewalk to fix the issue.

STS-28 Columbia (Launched Aug. 8, 1989)

Air&Space Magazine reports that STS-28 hauled the Satellite Data System spacecraft into orbit; SDS was supposed to relay imagery from other military satellites. The magazine got confirmation on this from an Air Force officer, who was not named in the story.

STS-33 Discovery (Launched Nov. 22, 1989)

NASA’s website simply says this was a Department of Defense mission. The payload has not been confirmed.

STS-36 Atlantis (Launched Feb. 28, 1990)

There are many theories as to what STS-36 carried, but nothing has been officially confirmed. The shuttle’s ground track took it as high as 62 degrees, which is a record for the shuttle program.

STS-38 Atlantis (Launched Nov. 15, 1990)

NASA’s website only says that this was a Department of Defense mission. No confirmed information about the payload is available.

STS-39 Discovery (Launched April 28, 1991)

The Air Force partially declassified this mission before launch. The unclassified payload was known as Air Force Program-675 (AFP-675), which was an updated version of CIRRIS. According to NASA, the classified payload “consisted of Multi-Purpose Release Canister (MPEC),” but no further information appears to be available.

STS-53 Discovery (Launched Dec. 2, 1992)

The main payload for this mission remains classified, with little information about what it could be.

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http://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html Classified Shuttle Missions: Secrets in Space

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Giant Metallic Asteroid Psyche May Have Water [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Artist’s concept of a spacecraft studying the huge metal asteroid Psyche from orbit.

The largest metallic asteroid in the solar system may have water on its surface, astronomers have found.

This SPACE.com infographic takes a look at the strange magnetic asteroid Psyche, which may be all that remains of what was once a protoplanet in the early solar system. <a href="http://www.space.com/24284-asteroid-psyche-magnetic-metal-space-rock-infographic.html">See the full Psyche asteroid explainer infographic here</a>.

Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist

The asteroid, called 16 Psyche, is one of the most massive in the asteroid belt. Researchers think the 186-mile-wide (300 kilometers) body, made of almost pure nickel-iron, might be the core of a world whose outer layers were blasted off by impacts billions of years ago.

Previous observations of Psyche showed no water on the surface. But according to Vishnu Reddy, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, new data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility show evidence for water or hydroxyl, a molecule with one hydrogen atom bound to one oxygen atom, on Psyche’s surface. Hydroxyl exists on Earth, but it is very reactive and tends to combine with other compounds — and in fact can remove those compounds from the air.

“We did not expect a metallic asteroid like Psyche to be covered by water and/or hydroxyl,” Reddy said in a statement. “Metal-rich asteroids like Psyche are thought to have formed under dry conditions without the presence of water or hydroxyl, so we were puzzled by our observations at first.”

Reddy presented his results Wednesday (Oct. 20) at the 48th meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences and 11th European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.

The water could have reached Psyche via past impacts from smaller asteroids that contain volatiles such as carbon, hydrogen and water, Reddy said.

NASA is currently reviewing a proposed mission to Psyche, which could tell astronomers whether the signal from the surface comes from water or hydroxyl.

The new research, co-authored by Reddy and led by Driss Takir at the U.S. Geological Survey, has been accepted to the Astronomical Journal, and can be read online here.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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11 Spooky Movies to Stream This Halloween [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

These Epic Game of Thrones Halloween Costumes Will Blow Your Mind [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Supermoon November 2016: When, Where & How to See It [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

This year, the full moons of October, November and December all take place when the moon is at its closest point of approach in its orbit around Earth — a so-called supermoon.

October’s supermoon occurred on Oct. 16. The next supermoon will be November’s full Beaver Moon, which is expected to reach the peak of its full phase on the morning of Nov. 14, at 8:52 a.m. EST (1352 GMT).

This full moon will be not only the closest and brightest supermoon of 2016 but also the largest since 1948, Bob Berman, an astronomer at the Slooh Community Observatory, told Space.com. What’s more, the full moon won’t come this close to Earth again until Nov. 25, 2034, according to a statement from NASA. [Full Moon: Why Does It Happen? (Video)]

A full moon occurs each month when the sun, Earth and moon line up, with the moon on the side of the Earth opposite to the sun. The term “supermoon” is used to describe a full moon at its perigee — the point in the moon’s orbit when it is closest to Earth, causing it to appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter in the sky, NASA officials said in the statement.

Naming the full moon

Supermoons can appear 30 percent brighter and up to 14 percent larger than typical full moons. <a href="http://www.space.com/11161-supermoon-full-moon-science-infographic.html">Learn what makes a big full moon a true 'supermoon' in this Space.com infographic</a>.

Credit: Karl Tate/SPACE.com

November’s full moon is also called the Beaver Moon because it arrives at the time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere) when hunters would set traps before the waters froze over, to ensure they had enough warm furs for the winter.

The Beaver Moon follows the full Hunter’s Moon of October and the full Harvest Moon of September — both of which are also named for seasonal changes that marked times when people would begin to prepare for the colder months ahead. November’s full moon also has been referred to as the full Frost Moon, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The Slooh Community Observatory will offer a live broadcast for November’s full moon on Nov. 13 at 7:00 p.m. EST (0000 GMT on Nov. 14). You can also watch it live on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.

Back-to-back supermoons

To round out the trifecta of supermoons for 2016, December will see its full Cold Moon peak on Dec. 13 at 7:05 p.m. EST (0005 GMT on Dec. 14).

“The supermoon of December 14 is remarkable for a different reason: It’s going to wipe out the view of the Geminid meteor shower,” NASA officials said in the statement. “Bright moonlight will reduce the visibility of faint meteors five- to ten-fold, transforming the usually fantastic Geminids into an astronomical footnote. Sky watchers will be lucky to see a dozen Geminids per hour when the shower peaks.”

Editor’s note: If you snap an awesome photo of the moon that you’d like to share with Space.com and our news partners for a potential story or gallery, send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom,Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Is This a Photo of Shiny Legs or Legs With White Paint? [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Samantha Bee to Interview President Obama on Full Frontal [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Now You Can Get Your Caffeine Fix with a Gilmore Girls Coffee Subscription [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Why The Great British Bake Off Is Like Brexit (No, Really) [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Justin Timberlake: ‘Get Out and Vote, But Don’t Take a Picture of Yourself in There’ [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Newspaper Obituary Demands Justice for The Walking Dead’s Glenn [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Nat Geo’s ‘Mars’ Invades NYC with Immersive Red Planet Exhibit [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

National Geographic set up a Mars experiential exhibit in New York City to celebrate the premiere of the new docudrama mini-series, “Mars.”

NEW YORK — National Geographic is bringing Mars down to Earth this week. New Yorkers can visit the Mars experiential dome in lower Manhattan to get a taste of what it would be like to go to the Red Planet.

Visitors have the opportunity to experience Mars by putting on virtual reality headsets and climbing into a cable robot motion simulator that mimics a spaceship landing on the Red Planet. In another room, guests can hop onto an anti-gravity treadmill to feel what it would be like to walk on Mars, which has just 38 percent of the gravity on Earth — all while wearing a VR headset to get the full experience, of course.

The new Mars exhibit opened yesterday (Oct. 26) to celebrate the world premiere of the National Geographic Channel’s new miniseries, “Mars,” a docudrama about humankind’s first journey to Mars, imagined to take place in the year 2033. Episode 1 airs on television on Nov. 14. It will air in 171 countries in 45 different languages. [Trailer: ‘Mars’ by the National Geographic Channel]

In a unique storytelling format, science experts join the science fiction story by providing commentary throughout each episode. These “big thinkers,” as the National Geographic crew calls them, include people like NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and several former astronauts, including Mae Jemison, the first female African-American to go to space. Jemison trained the actors in the series on how to walk, talk and behave like astronauts.

A guest experiences what it’s like to walk on Mars with this antigravity treadmill at National Geographic’s Mars dome in New York City

Credit: Jemal Countess / Stringer

For this week only, space fans can experience what it’s like to be one of those astronauts, on a mission to Mars. Admission to the Mars Experiential Dome is free, and the exhibit is open until Saturday (Oct. 29) at 5 p.m. EDT. It is located in Duarte Square in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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http://www.space.com/34524-mars-virtual-reality-nyc-national-geographic.html Nat Geo's 'Mars' Invades NYC with Immersive Red Planet Exhibit

[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Nat Geo’s ‘Mars’ Invades NYC with Immersive Red Planet Exhibit

John Oliver Says Donald Trump Has ‘No Clear Understanding’ of Women’s Bodies [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Elijah Wood Is Sick and Tired Of Being Mistaken for Daniel Radcliffe [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Hillary Clinton on Adele’s Endorsement: ‘It Meant a Lot to Me’ [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

NASA’s Jupiter Probe Back in Action After Glitch [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Juno spacecraft flying by Jupiter.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has bounced back from the glitch that prevented it from gathering any data during its flyby of Jupiter last week, agency officials said.

Juno went into a protective “safe mode” on Oct. 19, the same day the probe made its second-ever close flyby of the giant planet. (The first close encounter occurred July 4, when Juno arrived at Jupiter; the spacecraft is in a 53-day orbit, so the next flyby will take place Dec. 11.)

But mission team members commanded Juno to come out of safe mode Monday (Oct. 24), and everything appears to be working well now. [Awesome Jupiter Photos by NASA’s Juno]

“Juno exited safe mode as expected, is healthy and is responding to all our commands,” Juno project manager Rick Nybakken, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Tuesday (Oct. 25). “We anticipate we will be turning on the instruments in early November to get ready for our December flyby.”

NASA's Juno spacecraft is a 21st century orbiter to study the largest planet in our solar system. <a href="http://www.space.com/12472-juno-probe-spacecraft-jupiter-nasa.html">See how Juno will study Jupiter here</a>.

Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com

Juno went into safe mode when a software-performance monitor caused the spacecraft’s computer to reboot. The mission team is still investigating exactly why this happened, NASA officials said.

That’s not the only hiccup Juno has experienced. The probe was supposed to perform a lengthy engine burn during the Oct. 19 flyby, to shift from its current 53-day orbit into a 14-day path around Jupiter — the mission’s final science orbit. But an issue with a set of valves in Juno’s main propulsion system forced this burn to be delayed; the earliest it can now occur is Dec. 11, during the next flyby.

To help get ready for that encounter, Juno performed an “orbital trim maneuver” Tuesday, firing its smaller thrusters for 31 minutes to change its velocity by about 5.8 mph (9.3 km/h), NASA officials said.

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011. The solar-powered spacecraft is using its nine science instruments to study Jupiter’s structure, composition and gravitational and magnetic fields, to help researchers better understand the giant planet’s formation and evolution. Juno gathers the vast majority of its data during its close Jupiter flybys.

“We are all excited and eagerly anticipating this next pass close to Jupiter,” Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in the same statement. “The science collected so far has been truly amazing.”

The mission is currently scheduled to continue through February 2018.

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

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Iron-Loving Bacteria a Model For Mars Life [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

A computer-assisted model of the Mars 2020 rover, which is expected to look for signs of habitable environments on the Red Planet. It also will cache samples for possible return to Earth by another mission.

Single-celled microbes are considered a living example of the kind of life that might exist elsewhere in the universe, as they are able to survive some of the extreme conditions that exist on other worlds.

New research on the bacterium Tepidibacillus decaturensis shows that it could be a model organism for what might live on Mars, should any creature inhabit the Red Planet. This microorganism, found in water more than a mile underground in the Illinois Basin in a formation known as Mount Simon Sandstone, has been shown to be moderately tolerant of heat and salt and able to persist in an anoxic environment. Mars itself is believed to harbor similarly briny surface water without the presence of oxygen.

A paper based on this research, entitled “Tepidibacillus decaturensissp. nov.: a microaerophilic, moderately thermophilic iron-reducing bacterium isolated from a depth of 1.7 km in the Illinois Basin, USA,” was published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. [The Life on Mars Search: Photo Timeline]

The research was led by Yiran Dong, a research scientist at the Carl R. Woese Institute of Genomic Biology, Robert Sanford, a geomicrobiologist and research associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Bruce W. Fouke, a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was co-funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Drilling for CO₂ sequestration

The research team piggybacked on drilling activity completed by the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC), which includes the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS) and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Supported by the Department of Energy, this project is evaluating locations for storing carbon underground to sequester the enormous volume of CO₂ emissions being produced by ADM industrial food production, Sanford explained.

An image of recurring slope lineae on Mars, which are believed to represent the movement of briny water on the Red Planet’s surface. These areas may be hospitable to microbes.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The research team participated in two drill sessions that were completed on the grounds of the ADM facility in Decatur, Illinois. Both wells are within 1,000 feet of one another and clean deep, subsurface groundwater was collected at a variety of depths. The target lithology of the Mount Simon sandstone in this central portion of the Illinois Basin ranges from 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles) to 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles) in burial depth. This habitat also happens to have iron oxide minerals coating the sandstone grains, which is also true of much of the surface of Mars.

“There have been some iron-reducers [bacteria] found at deep subsurface environments,” Sanford said. “These organisms have respiratory functions for reducing iron; they are reducing iron like we use oxygen. They use ferric iron to breathe.”

The bacterium they were studying, however, is a fermentative organism. Another example of this kind of organism is yeast, a fungus that converts sugar to alcohol through enzymes. Tepidibacillus decaturensis does not use iron to breathe, but it uses iron to sustain its metabolism in a very similar fashion to how yeast produce ethanol to sustain theirs.

Further research

The team is analyzing the genomic composition of Tepidibacillus decaturensis. Luckily, they have found another, separate iron-reducing bacterium from the same geological formation called Orenia metallireducens, the first known bacterial species in genus Orenia that reduces ferric to ferrous iron. (A study based on this finding was recently accepted in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.)

The combination of these two iron-reducing bacteria will allow the scientists to conduct comparative studies of their metabolisms and ecology, permitting them to further explore these novel metal-reducing mechanisms. Two iron-dependent organisms in a similar environment provide valuable comparisons to understand how life behaves in these deep, hostile environments.

Aqua satellite image of the states of Illinois and Missouri. The Illinois Basin underlies much of the area.

Credit: LANCE MODIS Rapid Response

In previous work published in the journal Genome Announcements earlier in 2016, the team presented the first sequenced genome of Tepidibacillus decaturensis. They found nearly 3,000 protein-coding genes and 52 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes; tRNA is used to decode messenger RNA sequences into proteins.

“We are trying to see whether there are some new [gene] features to set up experiments to test them, and thus explore for the first time the deep evolutionary history of these organisms on Earth and potentially Mars,” Dong said of the ongoing work.

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Paralympian Wins Halloween (Again) With Beauty and the Beast Costume [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Future Asteroid Miners Seek Solid Space Rock Plan [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

Scattered across our solar system are small celestial bodies packed with water ice. Yes, our planet is covered in the stuff, but water is heavy and therefore expensive to launch into space. Therefore, to supply humans in space, where you have to bring everything you need with you, it makes sense to not use a terrestrial supply and utilize the water that’s already out there.

Fortunately, as our technologies become more sophisticated, the trend these days is to envision exploiting in-situ resources if we are to establish a colony. That means that you live “off the land,” so to speak, extracting the resources you need to survive. In the case of water, it is abundant in asteroids and comets across the solar system and researchers say asteroids could be the answer to the future of space exploration.

At the Asteroid Science Intersections with In-Space Mine Engineering, or ASIME 2016, that was held in Luxembourg in late September space mining startups were brought together for the first time with the scientists who actually study asteroids. The workshop aimed to answer science and engineering questions about asteroid mining and soon a white paper will be created to discuss the meeting’s main talking points.

RELATED: Looting Asteroids’ Water Will Make Launches Cheaper

According to Phil Metzger, an associate in planetary science research with the Florida State Institute, past mining conferences have been focused on advocacy. With this one, however, the community was “organizing the process of getting it started,” he told Seeker.

“It wasn’t a bunch of people saying we ought to do it; that wasn’t discussed because we are doing it now,” he said. “We were focused on how do we do the job? The mining companies had come up with a list of questions for planetary scientists to understand the geology and the physics of asteroids, so that they can make their mining plans more specific and concrete.”

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission, which is on the way to asteroid Bennu.

Credit: NASA

Part of the spur in the community’s side is Luxembourg’s funding of several space mining companies, which Metzger says is likely due to their heritage in communications satellite investments. To save on fuel, there are proposals to have a space tug bring communications satellites into high Earth orbit — rather than using a rocket stage or other means — while the space tug is on its way to pick up the resources from a mined asteroid stored at an in-space propellant depot.

But this is all in a very early stage. The space mining startups in attendance at the conference were Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries and TransAstra, which all made presentations on what they are working on today.

“Being a planetary geologist by training, it was exciting to interact with other planetary scientists to get outside perspectives on the types of data that would be necessary in a prospecting mission to sufficiently characterize an asteroid for later mining,” Elizabeth Frank, who is at Planetary Resources, told Seeker.

RELATED: Asteroid Mining: Booming 21st Century Gold Rush?

Earlier this year, the company raised $21.1 million in Series A funding to implement an Earth observation program, which will use similar sensors to what will be used for asteroid mining. Planetary Resources is also launching demonstration satellites to test avionics, software and other items in space, close to home, before venturing out in the solar system. Luxembourg and Planetary Resources have also signed a memorandum of agreement to co-operate on work such as space hardware development and space services.

[embedded content]

Similarly, Luxembourg is supporting the privately-funded Deep Space Industries as the company develops its own suite of spacecraft for prospecting asteroids. The company plans to launch an experimental small satellite called Prospector-X next year. It’s also developing a spacecraft lander called Prospector-1, which could launch between 2019 and 2022 if the schedule holds.

TransAstra — whose CEO, Joel Sercel, receives some funding from NASA for various projects — discussed its optical mining asteroid resource extraction technology. Essentially, the way this mining would work is to enclose an asteroid in a large bag. Then, a solar concentrator would direct energy from the sun onto the asteroid. This would boil off water from the surface, which would be trapped inside the bag. This could later be collected and stored as ice.

Also, the company presented a rocket engine concept called Omnivore, which is designed to use almost any volatile gas or liquid as propellant, Sercel said in an e-mail to Seeker.

RELATED: Mining Asteroids: Not Mankind’s Silver Bullet

Testing the technology is one challenge, but the conference participants were also focused on figuring out the “to-do list” to define what is needed to make asteroid mining a reality, said conference participant Andy Rivkin, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Research Laboratory who focuses on near-infrared spectroscopy of asteroids.

Close-up of the asteroid Vesta, as seen by NASA’s Dawn mission. Vesta may be partly composed of water ice.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Rivkin likened the process to what the planetary science community does every decade or so to figure out what to research next. Typically, when NASA looks into funding a particular mission (for example) it will look at the National Science Council’s decadal survey to see what the priorities are. Europa was identified as a priority in the last decadal survey, which is helping to fuel NASA’s interest in developing a Jupiter orbiter that will make several flybys of Europa in the 2030s, if it is approved for launch.

“NASA has also asked asteroid scientists to help define ‘strategic knowledge gaps’ in human exploration — things we need to know in order to safely send astronauts to asteroids but don’t yet know,” Rivkin told Seeker.

“Something similar for asteroid mining could be developed with community input, though obviously the nuances of how to handle proprietary work and do this to help for-profit companies would need to be worked out. I also suspect we’ll try to have another meeting in the next year or two, after the mining companies have digested the presentations from this one and have developed the next set of questions they need answered.”

Originally published on Discovery News.

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Monday, February 27, 2017

Martha Stewart Reveals New Evidence of a Life Well-Lived to Ellen DeGeneres [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

It’s Triplets! 3 Newborn Stars Spotted in Forming System [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

A new image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of the forming star system L1448 IRS3B reveals three protostars and a spiral structure in the system’s disk of dust and debris. The image covers an area about eight times the size of Earth’s solar system.

For the first time, a litter of newborn stars has been spotted emerging from the same disk of gas and dust, creating a tightly packed stellar family.

The data, from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, supports a theorized process in which the whirling disk of gas and dust around a forming star, called a circumstellar disk, splits up to form orbiting companion stars.

More than half of stars with masses like the sun’s form with a sibling or two (or more) in multistar systems. Previous observations of mature multistar systems had suggested that stellar companions either cluster tightly together, within 500 times the Earth-sun distance of one another, or spread more than 1,000 times that distance, the new work’s researchers said in a statement. But earlier researchers who imaged stellar precursors, called protostars, have seen only the latter scenario, in which members of a multistar system form far apart in a big gas cloud. [Amazing Star Birth Photos from ALMA Telescope]

“This new work directly supports the conclusion that there are two mechanisms that produce multiple star systems — fragmentation of circumstellar disks, such as we see here, and fragmentation of the larger cloud of gas and dust from which young stars are formed,” John Tobin, a researcher at University of Oklahoma and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said in a statement.

Tobin is lead author on the new work, which was published today (Oct. 26) in the journal Nature.

On the left, an artist’s concept shows the triple star system forming from the disk of material orbiting a newborn star. On the right, a view of how the mature star system might orbit.

Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

The forming star system is called L1448 IRS3B, and it’s 750 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus. Although the system’s three protostars share an origin, they are not identical: The bright protostar at the center has one companion separated by 61 times the distance from Earth to the sun, and a third protostar circles out on a spiral arm in the dust cloud, at 183 times the Earth-sun distance. Combined, the two central protostars likely match the mass of the sun, and the third has a minimum mass of 0.085 times the sun’s, the paper said.

“This whole system probably is less than 150,000 years old,” Kaitlin Kratter, a researcher at the University of Arizona and co-author on the work, said in the statement. “Our analysis indicates that the disk is unstable, and the most widely separated of the three protostars may have formed only in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years.”

A view from the Very Large Array, showing light with wavelengths of 8 millimeters, reveals the three stars forming in L1448 IRS3B.

Credit: John Tobin from data obtained with the VLA telescope

The disk’s spiral structure, and the hierarchical pattern of the protostars — with one forming close to the central star and another farther out — supports the idea that they formed via gravitational instability, collapsing all at once out of the dust, the researchers said. This is similar to a suggested model for how some large gas giants form around newborn stars.

Protostars are much cooler and lower-mass than mature stars, and they can appear very close together — making them challenging to discern from far away. Only recently have arrays of radio telescopes been sensitive enough to spot multistar systems’ early days.

“This complicated structure was revealed thanks to the 10-times-higher sensitivity and two-times-higher resolution provided by ALMA compared with previous observations,” Adele Plunkett, a researcher at the European Southern Observatory in Chile who was not an author on the study, wrote in a News & Views piece accompanying the new paper.

“Fragmenting disks like the one observed by Tobin and colleagues are probably not rare — rather, they are waiting to be studied in more detail using the powerful (sub-)millimeter-wavelength telescopes that are now available,” she added.

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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Proxima b Might Be a Habitable ‘Ocean Planet’ [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]

This image is an artist’s impression of the surface of the planet Proxima b, which orbits a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri — the closest star to the solar system.

The entire surface of Proxima b — the possibly Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri — may be covered in a liquid ocean, according to a new study.

While there is still much to learn about the solar system’s newfound neighbor, previous research found that Proxima b has two key features in common with Earth: it orbits within the habitable zone of its star — meaning it could have the right surface temperature to allow for the presence of liquid water— and it has a mass 1.3 times that of Earth.

Using this information, a team led by researchers at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory in France, developed different models to help discover what the conditions might be like on the rocky exoplanet, according to a statement from NASA. [Proxima b: Closest Earth-Like Planet Discovery in Pictures]

The new findings suggest Proxima b could have a large liquid ocean covering its entire surface and stretching 124 miles (200 kilometers) deep, as well as a thin gas atmosphere much like that found on Earth. These features favor the planet’s potential for supporting life, according to the statement.

Scientists have proposed different ideas about Proxima b’s composition and surface conditions, and the new models provide more information that could help inform those ideas, NASA officials said in the statement. Some of those ideas “involve a completely dry planet, while others permit the presence of a significant amount of water in its composition,” according to the statement.

Using the planet’s known mass (1.3 times that of Earth), the authors of the new research simulated different potential compositions for Proxima b and then estimated the radius of the planet for each of those scenarios. The study revealed that Proxima b could have a radius anywhere between 0.94 and 1.4 times that of Earth, according to the NASA statement.

For one of the potential composition models, the researchers found Proxima b may be an “ocean planet” similar to some of the icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn that harbor subsurface oceans. In this water-world scenario, the planet would have a radius of 5,543 miles (8,920 km), which is 1.4 times the radius of Earth. It would be composed of about 50 percent rock and 50 percent water. The pressure beneath this massive, deep ocean would be so strong that a layer of high-pressure ice would form, according to the NASA statement.

Another model developed in the study suggests Proxima b would have an internal composition similar to the planet Mercury, with a minimum radius of 3,722 miles (5,990 km), or 0.94 times the radius of the Earth. In this scenario, the planet would be incredibly dense, with a metal core accounting for 65 percent of the planet’s mass. The rest of the planet would be composed of a rocky silicate mantle, and liquid water oceans accounting for less than 0.05 percent of the planet’s mass (similar to that seen on Earth), according to the statement.

However, ultraviolet and X-rays from Proxima Centauri could leave the water on Proxima b prone to evaporation. To account for this, the researchers also calculated the radius of Proxima b with a completely dry composition.

“Future observations of Proxima Centauri will refine this study,” NASA officials said in the statement. In particular, by measuring the abundance of certain heavy elements in the star system, scientists can further deduce the planet’s likely composition, and its radius.

The study findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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