Thursday, May 31, 2018
How to See Saturn Shine Near the Moon Tonight [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
The planet of the moment is no doubt Mars, thanks to its impending closest approach to Earth since 2003, which will occur in late July. But there is another planet making an appearance in the late-evening sky that will likely attract its own share of admirers in the coming months: Saturn.
If your weather is clear, you have a great chance to see Saturn in the sky late tonight (May 31). If you look up at 11 p.m. your local time, Saturn will appear just 2 degrees to the right of the moon (itself just two days past full). Remember: Your clenched fist at arm's length measures approximately 10 degrees of the night sky.
Over the years, countless astronomy neophytes have told me that, while they own a telescope, they have never been able to positively identify Saturn. Venus and Jupiter are unmistakable, thanks to their great brilliance, and Mars is obvious because of its fiery orange hue. But to the unaided eye, Saturn does not appear to stand out against the background stars. [The Brightest Planets in May 2018's Night Sky]
But tonight, Saturn will be the closest and brightest object relative to the moon. How easy is that?
Remember that the configuration you'll be looking at between Saturn and the moon is merely an illusion of perspective. Tonight, the moon is 251,200 miles (404,200 kilometers) from Earth, while Saturn is nearly 3,390 times farther away, at a distance of 851 million miles (1.37 billion km). It just happens that both will be closely aligned to our line of sight this evening.
The "Wow!" factor
I don't know how many of you have had the chance to see Saturn through a telescope, but I'll tell you here and now that if you have not had that pleasure, it is an unforgettable sight. I've always enjoyed showing Saturn off to people who have never seen it through a telescope before, especially kids, who usually end up exclaiming words like "Awesome!" or "Wow!"
Come to think of it, quite a few adults react in a similar manner!
Even assiduous amateur astronomers with many years of skywatching behind them still get a surge of excitement when they gaze at Saturn and its incredible system of rings. Without a doubt, it's the most spectacular planet in the solar system. [Saturn's Glorious Rings in Photos]
According to Murray Paulson, who edits the Planets section in the 2018 Observer's Handbook of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, "The rings are visible even in steadied (or image-stabilized) high-power binoculars and small spotting scopes."
The northern face of Saturn's ring system is currently tilted 25.7 degrees to our line of sight from Earth. For really superb views, use a 4-inch telescope at 100 power or an 8-inch telescope at 200 power. For a really jaw-dropping view, try a 12-inch telescope at 300 power.
Saturn's rings are believed to be composed primarily of billions of icy particles that range in size from tiny crystals to boulders.
Saturn now favors summer
For the next several years, Saturn will appear at its best during the balmy summer season of the Northern Hemisphere.
Saturn is currently located in the constellation Sagittarius, the archer. In the night sky, however, Sagittarius strongly resembles a conventional teapot, complete with a pointed lid, a protruding spout and a handle. Saturn currently sits just to the upper left of the lid.
Saturn is becoming more prominent as the date of its opposition to the sun (which is June 27) approaches. Appearing to the unaided eye as a very bright (magnitude 0.2) yellowish-white "star" shining with a steady, sedate glow, it rises above the east-southeast horizon soon after 10 p.m. local daylight time and stands due south by around 2:45 the following morning.
Among the 21 brightest stars, Saturn would rank eighth in brightness, between Rigel in Orion and Procyon in Canis Minor.
A final note: Should unsettled weather hide Sunday's Saturn-moon pairing, they'll have another get-together less than a month from now, on June 27. That's also the night of Saturn's opposition, and the moon will be full.
Editor's note:If you capture an amazing view of Saturn and the moon and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or image gallery, send comments and images to spacephotos@space.com.
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 Verizon Fios1 News, based in Rye Brook, New York.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40749-see-saturn-near-moon-may-31-2018.html How to See Saturn Shine Near the Moon Tonight
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]How to See Saturn Shine Near the Moon TonightWeight loss diet secret of woman who shed six stone and SEVEN dress sizes [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
A woman who lost six stone and seven dress sizes has revealed how she achieved her weight loss.
Shelly Parks, 34, from Barnsley, is now a stunning body builder, but she was not always in such great shape.
She ballooned to a size 20 after undergoing two gruelling rounds of IVF.
However, now she is preparing for the finals of her first bodybuilding competition.
Failed IVF treatments and years of emotional eating led Shely to become morbidly overweight, weighing in at over 15 stone after giving birth to her son.
However, she now eats clean and works out, and feels better than ever before.
Shelly reached 20 stone eight years ago.
She turned to family sized bags of crisps and multipacks of chocolate bars for comfort after two rounds of failed IVF, and her weight steadily crept up.
She said: “I’d think nothing to polishing off an entire packet of biscuits with a mug of tea in the evenings, or a big share bag of greasy crisps.
“Meal times weren’t much better. We’d sit down to a plate piled high with sausage casserole that had been cooked from a jar, with a huge side of Yorkshire puddings.”
However, making some swaps with the help of Musclefood.com empowered the mother to overhaul her look.
She said: “I swapped big bowls of sugary cereal and pre-packed sandwiches for eggs, chicken, sweet potatoes and veg.
“I also cut my terrible snack habit and instead started eating regular, balanced meals.
“I began ordering a range of lean meats from MuscleFood.com, as well as their healthy meal bags.”
Shelly, who is now a trim and toned size six and weighs a healthy nine stone, eats a lot of lean meat now to keep her body healthy.
She claims ordering healthy meal bags from the diet company has helped her eat well easily.
Celebrity chef Graham Elliot’s weight loss has impressed fans recently.
Not too long ago he weighed in at a staggering 400lbs, but with this simple method he dropped 150lbs and kept it off.
Another weight loss diet helped one man to lose an amazing two stone and create some impressive abs.
Imgur user GallopingAbs has lost an amazing 30lbs or over two stone.
Before and after images show the man having lost a considerable about of fat.
In the second mirror selfie, taken five months later, the internet user is a new man.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/967473/weight-loss-diet-plan-fast-protein-musclefood-transformation-before-after Weight loss diet secret of woman who shed six stone and SEVEN dress sizes
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss diet secret of woman who shed six stone and SEVEN dress sizesWednesday, May 30, 2018
‘Nova Wonders’ Asks ‘What’s the Universe Made Of’ Tonight (Exclusive Clip) [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Ninety-five percent of the universe seems to be made up of mysterious matter and energy scientists don't yet understand — and a new clip from "Nova Wonders: What's the Universe Made Of," premiering tonight (May 30) at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT on PBS, shows a key detection of a violent smashup that could help unlock one of those cosmic mysteries. Scientists will be online to take questions during a live broadcast of the episode on Nova's Facebook page tonight.
When gravitational-wave detectors recorded a distant collision of two neutron stars, astronomers around the world got the call and began to search for visible evidence of the crash. A team in Chile from the Dark Energy Survey — as well as other groups — was able to detect the so-called kilonova's light, providing the first-ever observations of both light and gravitational waves from the same cosmic explosion.
For the Dark Energy Survey crew, these observations will help gauge the universe's expansion rate, aiding their investigation into the mysterious dark energy pushing the universe apart. [First Glimpse of Colliding Neutron Stars Yields Stunning Pics]
"What's the Universe Made Of" digs deep into two cosmic mysteries — dark matter and dark energy — showing how researchers know those entities exist, but also revealing that they are still trying to learn what they're made of and how they work.
Dark matter, which seems to interact with the universe only through gravity, lends its heft to galaxies so their whirling doesn't send stars flying. And dark energy propels the universe's expansion faster and faster. Together, scientists think these two make up 95 percent of the universe, leaving the matter and energy we know and love at a paltry 5 percent. The film tracks the multiple angles scientists explore to pin down the phenomena.
At 1 p.m. today, Space.com will sit down with University of California, Riverside, physicist Flip Tanedo for a live interview about the ongoing search for dark matter and Tanedo's involvement with "Nova Wonders" — tune in on Space.com's Facebook page when the time comes. And if you still wonder about that elusive 95 percent, Tanedo will be among the scientists taking questions tonight when the episode goes live.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40738-nova-wonders-what-universe-made-of.html 'Nova Wonders' Asks 'What's the Universe Made Of' Tonight (Exclusive Clip)
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]‘Nova Wonders’ Asks ‘What’s the Universe Made Of’ Tonight (Exclusive Clip)Man reveals diet plan secret behind over amazing TWO stone weight loss transformation [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
This weight loss transformation, credited to the keto diet, has shocked internet users.
Now the dieter has revealed the diet plan behind his new physique.
Imgur user GallopingAbs has lost an amazing 30lbs or over two stone.
Before and after images show the man having lost a considerable about of fat.
In the second mirror selfie, taken five months later, the internet user is a new man.
The impressive images will have many dying to know what this man’s secret is.
Imgur user GallopingAbs said: “Roughly 5 months of Keto, and a whole lot of lifting. Lost around 30 pounds.”
He also revealed in the comments section that her followed the new craze of intermittent fasting.
Explaing his food and workout routing, he said: “Intermittent fasting + Keto. Eating window of roughly noon to 8pm.
“Mostly followed Fierce Five routine from bodybuilding.com.”
He also added that he drinks a hot beverage before the gym.
GallopingAbs wrote: “I do one (largish) cup of black coffee pre-gym every day.
“Typically just that and water until I break my fast around noon.”
Many will be hoping to emulate this man’s success in the next six weeks before the summer holidays officially begin.
One weight loss food that can help you to lean fast in time for summer is protein.
Scientists have published a link between weight loss and one particular type of protein.
Another woman lost the pounds by following a weight loss diet that incorporated carbohydrates.
She took to the image sharing platform Imgur to talk about her slimming journey.
Posting pictures of her transformation, she wrote: “About a year ago I was pushing 190lbs (13.5 stone) at 5’4.”
“I had previously been a good weight but rapidly gained around 50 to 60lbs (3 to 4 stone) in a few months due to mental health struggles which I prioritised over trying to keep my weight under control.”
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966998/weight-loss-diet-keto-plan-secret-transformation Man reveals diet plan secret behind over amazing TWO stone weight loss transformation
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Man reveals diet plan secret behind over amazing TWO stone weight loss transformationWhat’s the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything? [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.
More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few extra dollars a month you should buy the upgrade. As a theoretical physicist, I'd prefer The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. That's what the Standard Model really is.
Many recall the excitement among scientists and media over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. But that much-ballyhooed event didn't come out of the blue – it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked – and there have been many over the past 50 years – has failed.
In short, the Standard Model answers this question: What is everything made of, and how does it hold together?
The smallest building blocks
You know, of course, that the world around us is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev figured that out in the 1860s and organized all atoms – that is, the elements – into the periodic table that you probably studied in middle school. But there are 118 different chemical elements. There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium … and 114 more.
Physicists like things simple. We want to boil things down to their essence, a few basic building blocks. Over a hundred chemical elements is not simple. The ancients believed that everything is made of just five elements – earth, water, fire, air and aether. Five is much simpler than 118. It's also wrong.
By 1932, scientists knew that all those atoms are made of just three particles – neutrons, protons and electrons. The neutrons and protons are bound together tightly into the nucleus. The electrons, thousands of times lighter, whirl around the nucleus at speeds approaching that of light. Physicists Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger, Heisenberg and friends had invented a new science – quantum mechanics – to explain this motion.
That would have been a satisfying place to stop. Just three particles. Three is even simpler than five. But held together how? The negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound together by electromagnetism. But the protons are all huddled together in the nucleus and their positive charges should be pushing them powerfully apart. The neutral neutrons can't help.
What binds these protons and neutrons together? "Divine intervention" a man on a Toronto street corner told me; he had a pamphlet, I could read all about it. But this scenario seemed like a lot of trouble even for a divine being – keeping tabs on every single one of the universe's 10⁸⁰ protons and neutrons and bending them to its will.
Expanding the zoo of particles
Meanwhile, nature cruelly declined to keep its zoo of particles to just three. Really four, because we should count the photon, the particle of light that Einstein described. Four grew to five when Anderson measured electrons with positive charge – positrons – striking the Earth from outer space. At least Dirac had predicted these first anti-matter particles. Five became six when the pion, which Yukawa predicted would hold the nucleus together, was found.
Then came the muon – 200 times heavier than the electron, but otherwise a twin. "Who ordered that?" I.I. Rabi quipped. That sums it up. Number seven. Not only not simple, redundant.
By the 1960s there were hundreds of "fundamental" particles. In place of the well-organized periodic table, there were just long lists of baryons (heavy particles like protons and neutrons), mesons (like Yukawa's pions) and leptons (light particles like the electron, and the elusive neutrinos) – with no organization and no guiding principles.
Into this breach sidled the Standard Model. It was not an overnight flash of brilliance. No Archimedes leapt out of a bathtub shouting "eureka." Instead, there was a series of crucial insights by a few key individuals in the mid-1960s that transformed this quagmire into a simple theory, and then five decades of experimental verification and theoretical elaboration.
Quarks. They come in six varieties we call flavors. Like ice cream, except not as tasty. Instead of vanilla, chocolate and so on, we have up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. In 1964, Gell-Mann and Zweig taught us the recipes: Mix and match any three quarks to get a baryon. Protons are two ups and a down quark bound together; neutrons are two downs and an up. Choose one quark and one antiquark to get a meson. A pion is an up or a down quark bound to an anti-up or an anti-down. All the material of our daily lives is made of just up and down quarks and anti-quarks and electrons.
Simple. Well, simple-ish, because keeping those quarks bound is a feat. They are tied to one another so tightly that you never ever find a quark or anti-quark on its own. The theory of that binding, and the particles called gluons (chuckle) that are responsible, is called quantum chromodynamics. It's a vital piece of the Standard Model, but mathematically difficult, even posing an unsolved problem of basic mathematics. We physicists do our best to calculate with it, but we're still learning how.
The other aspect of the Standard Model is "A Model of Leptons." That's the name of the landmark 1967 paper by Steven Weinberg that pulled together quantum mechanics with the vital pieces of knowledge of how particles interact and organized the two into a single theory. It incorporated the familiar electromagnetism, joined it with what physicists called "the weak force" that causes certain radioactive decays, and explained that they were different aspects of the same force. It incorporated the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to fundamental particles.
Since then, the Standard Model has predicted the results of experiment after experiment, including the discovery of several varieties of quarks and of the W and Z bosons – heavy particles that are for weak interactions what the photon is for electromagnetism. The possibility that neutrinos aren't massless was overlooked in the 1960s, but slipped easily into the Standard Model in the 1990s, a few decades late to the party.
Discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, long predicted by the Standard Model and long sought after, was a thrill but not a surprise. It was yet another crucial victory for the Standard Model over the dark forces that particle physicists have repeatedly warned loomed over the horizon. Concerned that the Standard Model didn't adequately embody their expectations of simplicity, worried about its mathematical self-consistency, or looking ahead to the eventual necessity to bring the force of gravity into the fold, physicists have made numerous proposals for theories beyond the Standard Model. These bear exciting names like Grand Unified Theories, Supersymmetry, Technicolor, and String Theory.
Sadly, at least for their proponents, beyond-the-Standard-Model theories have not yet successfully predicted any new experimental phenomenon or any experimental discrepancy with the Standard Model.
After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is worthy of celebration as the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything.
Glenn Starkman, Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Case Western Reserve University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40733-standard-model-of-particle-physics.html What's the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything?
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]What’s the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything?Very Large Telescope: Powerful Eyes on the Sky [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Seated in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s Very Large Telescope (VLT) consists of four main telescopes and four smaller telescopes that can be used separately or combined into a single larger instrument powerful enough to distinguish two car headlights at the distance of the moon.
World's most advanced optical instrument
The VLT is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert. The four Unit Telescopes boast 8.2-meter (27 feet) mirrors. Just one of these instruments can spot objects that are 4 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye. According to the ESO's website, the VLT is "the world's most advanced optical telescope."
The first of the four instruments, Unit Telescope 1 (UT1), saw first light on May 25, 1998, and went into scientific operations on April 1, 1999. UT2 saw first light only four days before the observatory's March 5, 1999, inauguration.
The four Unit Telescopes sit in compact, thermally controlled buildings that rotate with the instruments. These buildings minimize adverse effects, such as turbulence in the telescope tube, on observations.
At the inauguration, the four Unit telescopes were given names in the Mapuche language, from an indigenous people living in the area south of Santiago de Chile. Chile's schoolchildren participated in the naming, with an essay by then-17-year-old Jorssy Albanez Castilla unanimously selected by the committee.
- UT1 is known as Antu (an-too), which means the sun.
- UT2 is Kueyen (quay-yen), or the moon.
- UT3 is Melipal (me-li-pal), or the Southern Cross).
- UT4 is Yepun (ye-poon), or the evening star (Venus).
The VLT also contains four moveable 1.8-meter Auxiliary Telescopes. All eight telescopes are currently operational.
Together, the eight telescopes can create a massive interferometer. However, the Unit Telescopes are more often used individually, and are only available to be combined for a limited number of nights each year. The four smaller Auxiliary Telescopes, however, are available to allow the interferometer to operate each night.
In February 2018, the ESPRESSO instrument (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) on the VLT allowed the four Unit Telescopes to combine light from all four telescopes for the first time, making the VLT the largest optical telescope in existence in terms of collecting area. Due to the complexity involved, the light from the four had not been previously combined; only three Unit Telescopes could be combined at once.
"This impressive milestone is the culmination of work by a large team of scientists and engineers over many years," project scientist Paolo Molaro said in a statement. "It is wonderful to see ESPRESSO working with all four Unit Telescopes, and I look forward to the exciting science results to come."
A system of mirrors, prisms and lenses transmits the light from each Unit Telescope to the ESPRESSO instrument up to 226 feet (69 meters) away. ESPRESSO can collect the light from all four Unit Telescopes together, or from each one individually.
"ESO has realized a dream that dates back to the time when the VLT was conceived in the 1980s: bringing the light from all four Unit Telescopes on Cerro Paranal together at an incoherent focus to feed a single instrument!" said ESPRESSO instrument scientist Gaspare Lo Curto.
The science of the VLT
Over nearly two decades, the VLT has made significant contributions to astronomy, snapping the first image of an exoplanet, capturing the first direct measurements of the atmosphere of a super-Earth, and taking the universe's cosmic temperature. In addition, the observatory's hotel served as a villain's hideout in the James Bond flick, "Quantum of Solace."
In 2004, a team of European and American astronomers studying the TW Hydrae Association, a group of very young stars and other objects, spotted a red speck of light near one of the association's brown dwarfs. The object was more than 100 times fainter than its parent star. Further observations confirmed that it was an exoplanet orbiting its star at 55 times the Earth-sun distance.
"Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system," ESO astronomer Gael Chauvin said in a statement.
In 2008, a team of scientists used the VLT to discover and image an object near the star Beta Pictoris. Most directly imaged exoplanets lie far from their stars, past where Neptune would orbit, where stellar light is dimmer. In contrast, the planet Beta Pictoris b lies much closer, where Saturn would orbit.
"Direct imaging of extrasolar planets is necessary to test the various models of formation and evolution of planetary systems," researcher Daniel Rouan said in a statement. "But such observations are only beginning. Limited today to giant planets around young stars, they will in the future extend to the detection of cooler and older planets, with the forthcoming instruments on the VLT and on the next generation of optical telescopes."
Spin class
Researchers also used the VLT to determine how fast Beta Pictoris b is spinning, clocking the massive planet almost 62,000 mph (100,000 km/h) at its equator. In comparison, Earth's equator spins at only 1,056 mph (1,700 km/h), while Jupiter travels at about 29,000 mph (47,000 km/h). This was the first time an exoplanet's rotation rate had been determined.
"It is not known why some planets spin fast and others more slowly," researcher Remco de Kok said in a statement. "But this first measurement of an exoplanet's rotation shows that the trend seen in the solar system, where the more massive planets spin faster, also holds true for exoplanets. This must be some universal consequence of the way planets form."
The private organization Breakthrough Initiatives has enlisted the help of the VLT to hunt for planets around Earth's closest star, Proxima Centauri. After helping to fund an upgrade to an existing instrument on the VLT, Breakthrough Initiatives will receive time for a "careful search" of the Proxima Centauri system for new planets. The improvement in the VLT Imager and Spectrometer for Mid Infrared instrument will equip it with a coronagraph, which blocks much of the light from a star, as well as an adaptive optics system to correct for distortions in starlight caused by Earth's atmosphere. The upgrade is scheduled to be completed in 2019.
TRAPPIST-1
The VLT was also instrumental in revealing a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years from Earth. The TRAPPIST-1 system boasts seven worlds, six of which appear to be rocky. All seven could potentially boast liquid water on their surface, though the innermost three appear to be too hot to hold onto it on more than a fraction of their surface. After an intriguing observation on the VLT in early 2016, when the system was first announced, researchers used multiple telescopes, including the VLT, to follow-up and observe the seven worlds.
"This is an amazing planetary system — not only because we have found so many planets, but because they are all surprisingly similar in size to the Earth!" said researcher Michaël Gillon of the STAR Institute at the University of Liège in Belgium.
The VLT has also been used to probe exoplanet atmospheres. In 2010, it studied the super-Earth GJ1214b and found an atmosphere dominated by thick clouds or hazes.
"This is the first super-Earth to have its atmosphere analyzed. We've reached a real milestone on the road toward characterizing these worlds," researcher Jacob Bean said in a statement.
In 2008, the VLT took the cosmic temperature of the universe. By detecting carbon monoxide molecules in a galaxy located almost 11 billion light-years away, it allowed astronomers to obtain the most precise measurement of the cosmic temperature at such a remote epoch.
"This is the first time that these three molecules have been detected in absorption in front of a quasar, a detection that has remained elusive for more than a quarter century," Cédric Ledoux, an ESO researcher, said in a statement.
The VLT has played a role in many other lines of research. According to the ESO's website, an average of one paper a day is published in a peer-reviewed journal using the VLT's observations.
Additional resources from the ESO:
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40736-very-large-telescope.html Very Large Telescope: Powerful Eyes on the Sky
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Very Large Telescope: Powerful Eyes on the SkyWeight loss: Woman lost four stone with one simple diet trick which includes eating carbs [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Weight loss often depends on what works for the individual, and while some find eating few carbohydrates can work, others benefit from integrating them into their diet.
This was the case for one woman who lost a massive four stone while still eating carbs as a key staple in her diet.
Before and after pictures show her tremendous transformation: she went from an overweight 13.5 stone to a happy and healthy 9.5 stone.
She took to the image sharing platform Imgur to talk about her slimming journey.
Posting pictures of her transformation, she wrote: “About a year ago I was pushing 190lbs (13.5 stone) at 5’4.”
“I had previously been a good weight but rapidly gained around 50 to 60lbs (3 to 4 stone) in a few months due to mental health struggles which I prioritised over trying to keep my weight under control.”
“In June of 2017 I put on a dress for a baby shower and was absolutely disgusted with myself and decided enough was enough.
“I turned my diet and exercise regimen around completely almost overnight.”
She explained that “complex carbs” played a large role in her daily diet plan.
“I eat two big meals a day of complex carbs and high protein with snacks throughout the day of fruit and health bars.”
Expanding on the “complex carbs” she liked to eat, she said “wholewheat” carbohydrates like wholewheat bread and pasta helped her to feel fully.
“Wholewheat takes more time for your stomach to break down so you’re full for longer,” she said.
As for exercise, she explained that a combination of cardio and weights helped her stay on track.
She said: “I also work out four to five days a week with cardio and strength training.”
Another woman lost weight through counting calories, and her incredible transformation included losing 10 stone.
Posting before and after pictures on image sharing site Imgur, user galaticclass explained how she did it.
She explained that she had “always been a big girl” but gained a lot of weight after living a sedentary lifestyle.
Tackling her weight loss, she downloaded a calorie counting app on her phone and began exercising.
“I started by downloading a calorie counter app on my iPod and using it every day. Then I started riding my bike every day (about 5 miles a day).
“It was just enough for me to lose my first 50 lbs,” she added.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966717/weight-loss-diet-plan-carbs-woman-before-and-after-pictures Weight loss: Woman lost four stone with one simple diet trick which includes eating carbs
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss: Woman lost four stone with one simple diet trick which includes eating carbsTuesday, May 29, 2018
Weight Loss: The 89p cupboard staple that will help you lose weight and get a flat stomach [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
How does it work?
When mixed with a liquid and drunk, baking powder can prove as a powerful weight loss method.
It works by fighting acidity in the body. Acidity in the body can lead to weight gain, especially when consuming certain refined and processed foods.
The simple white powder counteracts the metabolic acidosis and in doing so raises the pH of the body to a more alkaline state.
This technique can also help you battle bulges in those hard-to-shrink areas, including the stomach, arms, thighs and back.
Drinking the white powder is known to have wondrous effects on the fat-burning process, also having a beneficial impact on the wellbeing of whole body.
How to consume it
There are many ways to add the baking essential into your daily routine, with the most popular being drinking a liquid solution on an empty stomach.
Full of antioxidants and vitamin C, lemon juice is also a powerful fat-burning liquid, and can be mixed with baking soda. Combined with just one teaspoon of baking soda the weight loss process will be sped up, helping to achieve a flat stomach.
Another way to consume baking powder for weight loss is in water, but not too hot to too cold.
Adding just half a teaspoon of the powder to water and drinking regularly throughout the day can also reduce heartburn and soothe indigestion, with many of these digestive problems leading to weight gain themselves.
Baking powder can also be consumed in green tea, where both properties mix together to create a fat-burning liquid. Allow the tea to become warm before adding 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and mixing well.
Baking soda is a cost-efficient, simple method for achieving great weight loss results, with the process aided by consuming belly-fat blasting foods.
On top of drinking the powder on an empty stomach, consume foods such as porridge oats, avocados, lean meats and fish and leafy greens.
A combination of baking soda and a balanced diet will see the pounds fall off and a flat stomach emerge.
Another cupboard essential also promising great weight loss results is cumin.
When soaked in water and drunk, the Indian spice can boost fat loss and get rid of belly fat, packed with vitamins and other health benefits.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966623/weight-loss-belly-fat-fast-baking-soda-flat-stomach Weight Loss: The 89p cupboard staple that will help you lose weight and get a flat stomach
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight Loss: The 89p cupboard staple that will help you lose weight and get a flat stomachIs Time Travel Possible? Scientists Explore the Past and Future [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
How would you like to head back to the future in a DeLorean car? Or travel with the crew of the USS Enterprise to save the whales? These two examples (from "Back to the Future" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home") show a very common trope in science fiction — time travel.
We all have things we regret in life, so the concept of turning back time (or in the case of one "Superman" movie, reversing Earth's rotation) is an inviting one. Who wouldn't want to fix the past, or erase a regrettable historical event that negatively impacted humanity? Or for people who are more focused on the future, how about turning time forward to see a neat event — such as the first human landing on Mars?
Time travel is the focus of Episode 6 of "AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which airs during a two-hour finale tonight (May 25) at 9 p.m. EDT/PDT (8 p.m. CDT) as part of the show's 2-hour season finale. [How Time Travel Works in Science Fiction (Infographic)]
As one scientist points out, we all constantly time travel — but it's in only one direction. We're inevitably moving 1 second at a time into the future, and we could go faster if we wanted.
"Indeed, we can jump forward into the future as much as we want. It's only a matter of going really, really fast," Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, told Space.com in an email. He began by citing evidence from Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, which shows that time is relative depending on how fast you are moving.
"The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. We've been able to measure this with ultra-precise atomic clocks in jet airplanes, and the precision offered by the GPS system needs to take this into account. Sci-fi always seem to require complicated contraptions to jump in time, when all you need is a very large rocket," Sutter wrote.
This means that astronauts, for example, are already time travelers of a sort. That's because they go into space and live on the International Space Station, sometimes for months at a time. At a speed of about 5 miles (8 kilometers) a second, astronauts on the space station are moving faster than we are on Earth. This means that on the station, astronauts age just a tiny bit slower than they would on the planet's surface. (And that when astronaut Scott Kelly came back from a year in space, the age gap with his slightly older identical twin, Mark, widened by just a little bit.)
Jumping into the past
But many sci-fi franchises focus on time travel to the past. Such travel raises neat questions, such as whether you can go back in time and kill your own grandparent (a puzzle sometimes referred to as "the grandfather paradox").
Sutter pointed out that the physics of our universe appear to forbid this situation, at least as far as we can see. But surprisingly, some of Einstein's equations from the theory of general relativity may allow time travel into the past. (That theory basically discusses how huge objects distort space-time, which we feel as gravity.)
So how could Einstein's theory make time travel possible? Well, one way would be to break the cosmic speed limit and go faster than the speed of light — but that likely wouldn't work, because an object going at that speed would have infinite mass. Another possibility would be to form "wormholes" between points in space-time, although this would likely work for only small particles. There are even more exotic possibilities out there, such as using black holes, huge cylinders or cosmic strings to play with the fabric of space-time.
"When it comes to the past," Sutter said, "the mathematics of general relativity does allow a few strange scenarios where you can end up in your own past. But all of these scenarios end up violating other known physics, like requiring negative mass or infinitely long rotating cylinders. Why does general relativity allow past time travel, but other physics always jump in to spoil the fun? We honestly don't know."
But that doesn't mean that scientists are giving up. In 2015, Ali Övgün of Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus said wormholes might be possible in zones with dark matter. (This is a theoretical form of matter that cannot be seen or otherwise sensed with telescopes, but does show itself in its gravitational effects on other bodies.) While his equations show wormholes could occur in these regions, Övgün said he is still searching for proof. "It is only mathematical proof," he said. "I hope one day it will be possible to also find direct experimental evidence."
Even the world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was entranced by the idea of time travel before his death this year, when he discussed in the Daily Mail how a black hole could make it possible. "Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be traveling through time," he wrote in 2010. However, physicist Amos Iron at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, said a machine circling a black hole would probably disintegrate before moving that quickly.
A Look Back at This Series:
This story was inspired by Episode 6 of "AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which airs during a two-hour finale tonight at 10 p.m. EDT/PDT (9 p.m. CDT). A companion book is available on Amazon.com.
Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40716-time-travel-science-fiction-reality.html Is Time Travel Possible? Scientists Explore the Past and Future
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Is Time Travel Possible? Scientists Explore the Past and FutureWeight loss: The foods that will reduce belly fat and help you lose weight FAST [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Vicerol fat, or belly fat, is one of the most stubborn forms of fat on the body, and even with exercise and a calorie-controlled diet, it can sometimes seem impossible to shift.
With summer almost here many Britons will be looking for a quick weight-loss solution, and that doesn’t mean hours of slogging away in the gym.
Many everyday foods are packed with weight-loss potential, with some using more calories to digest than they contain alone.
While some foods such as green, leafy vegetables and fruit are already a firm favourite with dieters, some other weight-loss aiding foods will surprise even the most seasoned of dieters.
Carbs, high-fat foods, meats and dairy are now all on the agenda for reducing belly fat and losing weight fast.
Negative calorie foods
Some foods exist that actually burn more calories in the digestion process than they carry alone, decreasing your calorie intake with each bite.
Water-packed vegetables and fruits such as celery, cucumber, watermelon and lettuce are all predominantly made up of water, and all packed with fibre, antioxidants and a range of vitamins essential to wellbeing.
Along with salad-friendly veggies, grapefruit is also ideal for weight loss, containing 60 per cent water and the other 40 per cent packed with digestion boosting fibre.
A natural metabolism booster, adding a few slices each day of grapefruit into your diet can also help your body burn calories at a faster rate, helping to achieve that summer body faster.
Other negative calorie foods include cruciferous vegetables, carrots and berries. Aiding with high blood pressure, carrots are low in cholesterol and saturated fats, whereas berries are packed with antioxidants, weighing in at just 32 calories per half cup.
Learn to love fat
Despite being packed with calories, high-fat foods such as avocados, salmon, olive oil and nuts are actually loaded with fats that boost weight loss and reduce belly fat.
Opt for coconut oil instead of vegetable or sunflower when cooking, as it contains a combination of fatty acids with powerful effects on the metabolism.
According to a study of women with large amount of belly fat by Pub Med, coconut oil can actively reduce the stubborn fat. As it’s still high in calories, make sure to swap out another cooking fat or oil for coconut oil.
Carbs aren’t all bad.
When focused on reducing belly fat and losing weight, many Britons opt for cutting out carbs. However, unprocessed ‘carbs’ can you make you feel fuller for longer, aiding in a decreased food intake.
Possibly one of the best options for a fat-burning breakfast, a half cup of oats contains 4.6 grams of resistant starch, a healthy carb that boosts metabolism and burns fat.
Other carbs with resistant starch include brown rice and boiled potatoes. Despite gaining a bad rep with dieters the world over, potatoes when boiled and left to cool will form large amounts of resistant starch, making you feel fuller for longer and boosting weight loss.
Don’t forget meat and dairy
When it comes to losing weight, meat and dairy products are a key part of your diet. Lean, low-calorie fish such as canned tuna is popular amongst the fitness community, being high in protein and low in fat.
Dairy products are high in protein and calcium which both aid in the fat-brining process, with one of the best sources being low-calorie cottage cheese.
Another food set to burn belly fat and help you lose weight fast is natural yoghurt. Stay clear from low-fat yoghurts that are packed with sugar and instead opt for full-fat or Greek style, that will make you feel fuller for longer while being packed with calcium and protein.
On top of adding these fat-burning foods to your diet, another way to lose weight fast is by consuming apple cider vinegar. Loved by the global heath community, the natural vinegar stabilises blood sugar and aids in weight loss.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966061/weight-loss-belly-fat-best-foods Weight loss: The foods that will reduce belly fat and help you lose weight FAST
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss: The foods that will reduce belly fat and help you lose weight FASTWeight loss: Add THIS food to your diet plan to get lean fast in time for summer [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Weight loss diets are tricky, and most involve forgoing food.
But, adding one supplement to your food regimen can help women in particular to get lean fast in time for summer.
Much has been written about the benefits of eating more protein in your diet when it comes to weight loss.
Now scientists have published a link between weight loss and one particular type of protein.
The study found that whey protein could lead to an increase in lean mass or muscle mass.
Whey is a liquid created from milk during the cheese making process.
It is particularly high in the nutrient, which is credited for muscle growth in the body.
Protein has already been pointed to by scientists as a key factor in weight loss.
Plant protein especially has been credited to helping dieters to shed weight.
A scientist who led the study, Robert Bergia, a Purdue graduate research assistant, said: “Although more research is needed to specifically assess the effects of varying states of energy sufficiency and exercise training, the overall findings support that consuming whey protein supplements may aid women seeking to modestly improve body composition, especially when they are reducing energy intake to lose body weight.”
So adding whey protein to your calories restricted diet could help you lose extra pounds before your holiday.
Experts drew they conclusion from 13 suitable studies that all tested for body mass changes after taking whey protein supplements for a minimum of six weeks.
How to lose weight without getting hungry is another bug bear of dieters.
Again, according to experts protein can solve the problem.
Protein is said to help keep you fuller for longer.
And there are other weight loss foods that can help you look slimmer for summer.
Carbs, high-fat foods, meats and dairy are now all on the agenda for reducing belly fat and losing weight fast.
Despite being packed with calories, high-fat foods such as avocados, salmon, olive oil and nuts are actually loaded with fats that boost weight loss and reduce belly fat.
A woman recently lost 10 stone with one easy diet trick.
She explained that she had “always been a big girl” but gained a lot of weight after living a sedentary lifestyle.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966471/weight-loss-diet-plan-protein-whey-news-latest-lose-fat-how-to-fast Weight loss: Add THIS food to your diet plan to get lean fast in time for summer
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss: Add THIS food to your diet plan to get lean fast in time for summerMonday, May 28, 2018
Decoding Alien Messages Could Be the Biggest Citizen-Science Project Ever [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Stay sharp! You may be needed to help decode a message from intelligent aliens someday.
The work of professional linguists, mathematicians and scientists "is probably not going to be enough" to unravel a cosmic mystery missive, said Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguist at Bowling Green University in Ohio who also serves on the board of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a San Francisco-based nonprofit.
"We have to have all hands on deck," Wells-Jensen told Space.com. "We're going to need everybody, and we're going to need to generate multiple sets of meanings for a message that we get." [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
An experiment performed recently by Wells-Jensen shows why we may need the power of the human hive-mind. She presented college students with several puzzles that had been coded in the manner of Lincos, a constructed language designed to be understood by intelligent extraterrestrials. The students figured out the simple stuff, such as basic mathematical functions, quite well — but things got dicey when the concepts got more complicated.
For example, Wells-Jensen gave the students the equation for the circumference of a circle, as well as a lightly coded representation of "pi" (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter).
"And I said, 'OK, what is this real word?' And they came up with all kinds of crazy things," she said. "Some made poetic jumps and said, 'world'; some of them made an opposite poetic jump and said, 'infinity.' Some of them thought that I meant that the diameter of the circle ended at a wall, and said 'prison.'"
And that's for a message drawn up by a fellow human. It will doubtless be much tougher to decode something devised by creatures from a distant solar system who share no cultural or evolutionary history with us, who may rely upon different senses to perceive their environment and to communicate, and who are probably far more advanced technologically than we are.
So, we'll likely need to marshal the collective wisdom of the world, in a massive citizen-science project, to identify (and agree upon) the "right" answer, Wells-Jensen said. And our chances of success in this endeavor would be greatly increased if we all hit the books a little, to increase our critical-thinking skills and our understanding of nature and how it works, she added.
"One of the goals of METI — and I really think it should be a goal of all of us — is to work on this science-literacy problem," Wells-Jensen said.
The linguist was originally scheduled to present her results on Saturday (May 26), during a workshop at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) 2018 in Los Angeles. But she nixed that after running out of time. Wells-Jensen has been pretty busy; she chaired the workshop, which is called "Language in the Cosmos," and she co-authored another workshop study.
The daylong workshop, which was organized by METI, explored the possibility that language — or at least certain essential elements of language — might be universal throughout the cosmos.
Famed linguist Noam "Chomsky has often said that if a Martian visited Earth, it would think we all speak dialects of the same language, because all terrestrial languages share a common underlying structure," METI President Doug Vakoch, who also presented a paper at the workshop, said in a statement. "But if aliens have language, would it be similar to ours? That's the big question."
Two workshop papers, including one co-authored by Chomsky, expressed optimism about this. Wells-Jensen said she's more skeptical, citing our lack of knowledge about the origins of human language and the difficulty of extrapolating from a sample size of one. (However, whale languages might be complex enough to boost our planet's sample to two, she added.)
"I don't think we know, but this is a nice hypothesis to play with," she said of the language-universality idea.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40717-decoding-alien-messages-citizen-science.html Decoding Alien Messages Could Be the Biggest Citizen-Science Project Ever
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Decoding Alien Messages Could Be the Biggest Citizen-Science Project EverStudy Offers Pessimistic Outlook for Commercial Space Stations [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
WASHINGTON — As NASA formally requests proposals for studies on the commercialization of low Earth orbit, another study presented at a congressional hearing May 17 concludes commercial space stations are unlikely to be financially viable in the mid-2020s.
In testimony at a House Science Committee hearing on America's future in low Earth orbit, Bhavya Lal of the Institute for Defense Analysis' Science and Technology Policy Institute said a study performed by her organization found it unlikely that a commercial space station could generate a profit in 2025, the year NASA plans to end federal funding of the International Space Station.
The study looked at four different scenarios for a commercial station, with low and high costs and revenues. Only in one case, with high projected revenues and low operating costs, did the facility generate a profit. In a second case, with low costs and revenues, the facility had a small loss, but in the case of high costs the commercial station suffered large annual losses regardless of revenue. [In Pictures: Private Space Stations of the Future Imagined ]
"Overall, our analysis showed that it is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025," Lal said.
Those outcomes, she said, came even with the use of "aggressive" assumptions such as transportation cost reductions of 50 to 75 percent from current levels. She said some applications for a commercial space station could experience faster growth than expected, generating increased revenue. However, some projected markets may turn out not to be lucrative.
The report found that the three most promising markets for a commercial space station were production of "exotic" optical fibers, satellite assembly and hosting "sovereign astronauts," or those from other national space agencies. The study, though, found wide ranges of potential revenues from those markets: from $7 to 359 million per year in the case of on-orbit satellite assembly.
That uncertainty in revenues, along with the pessimistic models, is unlikely to attract venture capitalist investors, Lal said. "Venture capitalists we spoke to indicated that projected revenue streams are too far in the future and too uncertain to warrant making significant investments today," she said.
Lal offered several alternatives if a commercial space station isn't viable by 2025. The ISS itself could be extended to at least 2028, albeit at a cost to NASA of $3–4 billion a year that could take money away from exploration initiatives. Some of all of the ISS could be privatized, she said, with a company operating the station for NASA at a potential, but not assured, discount over the current model.
A third option Lal offered could be for NASA to subsidize a commercial space station in exchange for use of it. A payment of $2 billion a year should be enough to cover the costs of operating a commercial station, she said, even if there is no other revenue.
The testimony came the same day that NASA formally released a research announcement for studies of LEO commercialization. In a statement, NASA said it was interested in "industry concepts detailing business plans and viability for habitable platforms, whether using the International Space Station or a separate free-flying structure, that would enable a space economy in low Earth orbit in which NASA is one of many customers."
Proposals are due in 30 days, and NASA anticipates making multiple awards of up to $1 million each in July for studies to be completed by the end of the calendar year.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said at the hearing that the studies will help NASA provide more details about its ISS transition plan, including maintaining a post-ISS presence of some kind in LEO.
"We see a need for a continued activity in low Earth orbit for an extended period of time," he said. Asked by committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) how much that would cost, he said the studies will help determine that.
"We need to take serious steps forward," he said. "We're going to ask commercial companies for studies to come back, show us their business plan, show us their market analysis, show us what we think the cost would be for operations in low Earth orbit for NASA's defined needs."
Unlike a May 16 hearing by the Senate's space subcommittee, where senators criticized plans to end NASA funding of the ISS in 2025, House members appeared more willing to reserve judgement until NASA provides more details, in part through the upcoming studies.
"This is a bold proposal, and one that raises a lot of questions," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), ranking member of the science committee, said in her opening statement of NASA's ISS transition plans. "As members of the science committee, we need to roll up our sleeves, ask the right questions and focus on the core issues needing our attention."
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40664-commercial-space-stations-pessimistic-outlook.html Study Offers Pessimistic Outlook for Commercial Space Stations
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Study Offers Pessimistic Outlook for Commercial Space StationsWeight loss: Woman lost a life-changing 13 stone by eating more of THIS food every day [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Weight loss is never easy, but it is particularly daunting when you have an extreme amount of weight to lose.
One woman who lost weight dropped 13 stone in total – going from a starting weight of 22 stone.
She dropped down to a slim and healthy weight of just under ten stone, and before and after pictures show her transformation.
Like many extreme weight loss patients, the woman opted to have a gastric sleeve procedure in order to reduce her stomach size.
However, the procedure does not work for every patient, and it is the woman’s hard work which helped her lose the weight.
Sharing her transformation on Imgur, she said: “My starting weight was 142kg/313lbs and my goal weight is around 70kg/150lbs but would be awesome to go under that!”.
She later posted pictures and said she had lost a total of 80kg (13 stone) – thanks to a protein rich diet.
She said: “I eat 6 small meals a day mostly protein packed and I also have 2 protein shakes a day.”
In another post, the woman spoke about her gastric sleeve surgery in 2016.
She wrote: “I got gastric sleeve surgery in October 2016 and it’s the best decision I ever made, I’m still losing weight weekly and when I’m at a healthy weight I’ll maintain it.”
Speaking of the surgery’s limitation, she added: “I might have had surgery to start my weight loss but it stopped helping a long time ago.
“The surgery only helps me control how much food I eat not what kind.”
She also added that she had been “eating less, better food and exercising”.
As for how she gained the weight in the first place, the woman confessed she “loved food” including sugar.
“I always had excuses to why I was so big but it was because I loved food, that was it. I was addicted to eating. Sugar mainly.”
One woman lost weight through counting calories, and her incredible transformation included losing 10 stone.
Posting before and after pictures on image sharing site Imgur, user galaticclass explained how she did it.
She explained that she had “always been a big girl” but gained a lot of weight after living a sedentary lifestyle.
“I have always been a big girl – been off and on for a while. But i gained a lot. I didn’t do anything – slept all day, ate all day, etc.”
Tackling her weight loss, she downloaded a calorie counting app on her phone and began exercising.
“I started by downloading a calorie counter app on my iPod and using it every day. It was just enough for me to lose my first 50 lbs,” she added.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/966027/weight-loss-lose-weight-diet-protein-before-and-after-pictures Weight loss: Woman lost a life-changing 13 stone by eating more of THIS food every day
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss: Woman lost a life-changing 13 stone by eating more of THIS food every dayFormer Google Lunar X Prize Teams Focused on Commercial and Government Opportunities [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
PASADENA, Calif. — Companies that one competed for the Google Lunar X Prize now expect to fly their first lunar landers in the next two years to serve the needs of commercial and government customers, including NASA.
In presentations at the Space Tech Expo here May 24, four companies that, at one time, were vying for a $20 million grand prize for landing a commercial spacecraft on the moon now say they're motivated by what they see is a growing interest in lunar exploration and commercialization.
"It's really exciting to see that the moon's time has come," said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development for Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company developing lunar landers. "We've been waiting for a moment like this one for some time and we're really excited and thrilled to be serving this new re-posture to the moon that the United States and many other countries around the world have engaged in." [The Google Lunar X Prize Teams in Photos]
That enthusiasm is bolstered by a shift in national space policy in the United States that has put a return to the moon on the path to eventual human missions to Mars. NASA has since unveiled plans for its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, where the agency will buy payload space on small commercial lunar landers for carrying scientific instruments and other experiments.
"We hope to be selected and be part of that program," he said. While Astrobotic has 12 customers for its first lunar lander mission in 2020, ranging from the Mexican Space Agency to Arch Mission Foundation, which announced plans May 15 to fly a copy of Wikipedia on the lander, NASA is not yet a customer. "It's really a good news story for the industry and for the program."
Moon Express is also pressing ahead with its lunar lander missions, planning for its first mission in 2019, said Alain Berinstain, vice president of global development at the Florida-based company. Like Hendrickson, he praised NASA's lunar initiatives like CLPS. "It helps companies like ours move forward in a stable environment and really thrive," he said.
The company became a finalist for the Google Lunar X Prize after signing a contract in 2015 for several launches on Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. Berinstain said that contract is still in place, but he left the door open to using a different vehicle on the company's first mission.
"If our manifest requires a performance for the spacecraft that is beyond the Electron's, then we may need to use a different launch vehicle," he said. He did not specify any alternative vehicles under consideration. "We are committed to using the Electron for those missions where it makes sense."
Germany company PTScientists is hiring staff in preparation for its first lunar lander mission, scheduled to launch in late 2019. "We started 10 years ago as a group of scientists and engineers, six people," said Robert Boehme, founder and chief executive of PTScientists. The company is now up to 46 people, he said. "We've become quite a big team."
That mission is scheduled to go to the Taurus-Littrow region of the moon, near the Apollo 17 landing site. That mission is the first of several PTScientists has planned, including one in cooperation with the European Space agency later in the 2020s to test the ability to access and use water ice resources at the lunar poles.
PTScientists has been working in partnership with a number of major companies outside the space industry on its mission, from Audi to Vodaphone. The company, he said, is relying heavily on technologies developed elsewhere for the lander. "We basically just see ourselves as a system integrator," he said.
India's TeamIndus is working on a series of lunar lander missions as well for sending payloads to the moon inexpensively. "The key to creating this market is to bring the cost down by an order of magnitude. You have to think about exponential reductions in cost for this market to really come online," said Rahul Narayan, founder and chief executive of TeamIndus.
TeamIndus is planning an annual series of lunar lander missions, starting in mid-2019. The company has completed a set of tests on a qualification model of the lander, and Narayan said they were ready to develop flight hardware for the lander.
Those effort continue even though the Google Lunar X Prize has expired, with Google deciding not to renew its title sponsorship of the competition. The X Prize Foundation has continued the competition, but without a prize purse as it has not found a new sponsor to provide the prize purse.
Moon Express' Berinstain, though, argued that the competition's legacy lives on in the form of companies like his that are pursuing various customers for commercial landers. "It really helped get people's heads around the challenge of doing what we and others are trying to do," he said. "It helped get people thinking and moving and moving fast."
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40708-google-lunar-x-prize-teams-new-opportunities.html Former Google Lunar X Prize Teams Focused on Commercial and Government Opportunities
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Former Google Lunar X Prize Teams Focused on Commercial and Government OpportunitiesWeight loss: Woman lost a whopping 10 stone by doing THIS easy diet trick on her phone [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Weight loss is something many of us would like to achieve, and many do this through counting calories.
One woman lost weight through doing just this, and her incredible transformation included losing 10 stone.
Posting before and after pictures on image sharing site Imgur, user galaticclass explained how she did it.
She explained that she had “always been a big girl” but gained a lot of weight after living a sedentary lifestyle.
“I have always been a big girl – been off and on for a while. But i gained a lot. I didn’t do anything – slept all day, ate all day, etc.”
Tackling her weight loss, she downloaded a calorie counting app on her phone and began exercising.
“I started by downloading a calorie counter app on my iPod and using it every day. Then I started riding my bike every day (about 5 miles a day).
“It was just enough for me to lose my first 50 lbs,” she added.
The woman then had to up her exercise routine in order to drop more of the weight.
“After that I lost weight very slowly. I stopped exercising, but kept the calorie counting app and did wii fit (when that was a thing).
“Once I got to college (and the college parties) I never felt confident when I went out. So I went to work once again.
“This time with Weight Watchers and a more vigorous workout schedule (about 30 minutes to two hours a day, five days a week, depending on what I felt like.”
However, she also said that she never went on a “strict diet” while she was losing the weight.
“The key was I never went on a strict diet or pushed myself over the edge.
“I allowed eating less and exercising to become a habit before pushing myself harder.
“I didn’t want to end up rebelling, getting fed up and eating everything in sight and giving up completely.”
Last month, one woman had a weight loss of over six stone by taking up weight lifting.
She said: “More exercise and more nutritional knowledge was what helped me most.
“Incorporating more lifting and less cardio helped with fat loss.”
She also revealed that she had looked at her “macros” – which means she monitored her levels of food groups such as proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
“Macros also helped with nutrition-didn’t have to “diet” anymore.”
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/965410/weight-loss-lose-weight-calories-before-and-after-pictures Weight loss: Woman lost a whopping 10 stone by doing THIS easy diet trick on her phone
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Weight loss: Woman lost a whopping 10 stone by doing THIS easy diet trick on her phoneDawn French weight loss: Little Big Shots presenter dropped eight stone thanks to THIS [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Dawn French, 60, who is currently presenting ITV show Little Big Shots, has historically been known for her larger than life television personality.
However, she has achieved an astounding eight stone weight loss in recent years, with before and after pictures showing a huge transformation.
The British actress, writer, comedian and presenter, who starred in The Vicar of Dibley and is one half of comedy duo French & Saunders, first slimmed down in 2014.
It appears she has kept the weight off, with recent pictures showing a slimmed down version of Dawn compared to when she was first in the public eye.
But how did she lose the weight? It would appear a “walking” habit was one of her key strategies.
Speaking about her weight loss during her 30 Million Minutes tour, Dawn described her weight loss as a “practical” decision.
She explained it was necessary in order for her to undergo keyhole surgery for a hysterectomy.
She said: “When I was due to have my hysterectomy the doctor told me that if I could lose some weight before the op, they would be able to do it via keyhole, and I would recover in three weeks or so.
“Otherwise it would be big open surgery, and three months to recover.
“So, I set about dropping a few stone. No magic wand, just tiny, joyless low-cal eating and lots more walking for weeks and weeks.
“It was grim. I lost seven-and-a-half stone. I could have the keyhole surgery. Great. That’s all it was, practical.”
More recently, Dawn told ITV’s Loose Women that she has taken a more relaxed approach to her weight in recent years.
She said: “’I shed the weight a long time ago, I go up a bit, down a bit, feel no different.
“I’m still Dawn, I liked the old Dawn, I may go there again, depends how many doughnuts I decide to eat.”
Another example of a celebrity slimming down is chef Jamie Oliver’s weight loss.
The famous chef, who has managed a three stone weight loss in recent years, attributes his slimmed down figure to eating a certain weird health food.
Jamie, who is 5ft 10 in, has undergone a noticeable body transformation while he has been in the public eye.
He called himself “chunky” when he entered his 30s, but slimmed down – dropping three stone in two months, he told This Morning.
So how did Jamie lose the weight? He revealed that seaweed, a Japanese delicacy, helped him slim down.
“I thought seaweed was hippy, globetrotting stuff but our ancestors ate seaweed,” he told Mail Online.
“It has got a load of iodine and is the most nutritious vegetable in the world.”
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/diets/965784/dawn-french-weight-loss-before-and-after-pictures Dawn French weight loss: Little Big Shots presenter dropped eight stone thanks to THIS
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Dawn French weight loss: Little Big Shots presenter dropped eight stone thanks to THISThe Most Amazing Space Photos This Week! [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Two days after the new moon of May, a thin sliver of the waning crescent moon joined the bright planet Venus in the evening sky. Astrophotographer Victor Rogus captured this photo of their conjunction from Arcadia, Florida, on the night of May 17 as the moon passed about 6 degrees south of Venus. “The pair struggled for my attention through mostly cloudy Florida skies,” Rogus said. “Still, a very beautiful sight in the west as the sky darkened.” [View more of the album]
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/32252-amazing-images.html The Most Amazing Space Photos This Week!
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]The Most Amazing Space Photos This Week!Sunday, May 27, 2018
Defense Department Turning Over Space Traffic Control to Commerce, But Details Unclear [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
WASHINGTON — A new policy said to be on President Trump's desk for final approval would designate the Department of Commerce as the public face of space traffic management.
The job of policing space currently is performed by the Department of Defense. It involves answering queries from private citizens, corporations and foreign governments about the position of satellites on orbit, and warning agencies and commercial satellite operators of potential orbital collisions.
For the past several years the Pentagon had prepared to turn these responsibilities over to the Federal Aviation Administration but the Trump administration decided Commerce was a better fit in light of the booming private space economy.
Although there is overall agreement on the transfer of responsibilities, the specifics of who will do what may take years to sort out. DoD has deep expertise in "space situational awareness," or SSA, whereas Commerce faces a steep learning curve.
DoD holds the SSA authority and public service responsibility under section 2274 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code
In advance of the president signing off on the new policy, the House Armed Services Committee is weighing in. The chairman's mark of the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act unveiled on Monday (May 7) includes language that lays a path for the implementation.
Section 1603 of the HASC chairman's bill — titled "Space Situational Awareness Services and Information" — would amend section 2274 by "terminating the authority of the Department of Defense to provide space situational awareness data to commercial and foreign entities on January 1, 2024."
This section also would require the secretary of defense to hire a federally funded research and development center to assess which department or departments should assume the authorities of section 2274 of title 10. The secretary of defense would have to develop a plan to "ensure that one or more departments may provide space situational awareness services to foreign governments."
Doug Loverro, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy during the Obama administration, said this language "suggests that Congress is looking for a smooth transition without a break in service." This provision is not inconsistent with the administration's plan to move SSA services to Commerce, Loverro told SpaceNews. "The good news is that several years ago this same committee was clearly against DoD ever losing control of this vital function. So I would say that this represents true progress in moving this inherently civil function to a civil agency."
The decision to assign space traffic management to the Commerce Department was revealed by Vice President Mike Pence last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. He said Commerce will be instructed to "provide a basic level of space situational awareness for public and private use, based on the space catalog compiled by the Department of Defense, so that our military leaders can focus on protecting and defending our national security assets in space."
The space catalog is maintained by the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is part of U.S. Strategic Command. The center operates the Space Surveillance Network, a worldwide system of ground-based radars along with ground-based and orbital telescopes.
SSA mission is complex
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Stephen Kitay said the White House directive is an "important step forward in light the increased commercial activity in space and the need for DoD to focus on its war fighting missions."
"We're excited about the new partnership with Commerce on space traffic management," Kitay said last week at a Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill.
Kitay cautioned he did not want to get ahead of the White House and would not discuss specifics of the transition. He noted that SSA is a complex mission. There are 1,500 active satellites on orbit today. DoD monitors about 20,000 objects in space that are 10 cm or larger. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of objects that are smaller.
The clutter could soon reach alarming proportions. "You've seen the business plans coming forward. If they come to fruition, people are discussing constellations of thousands of satellites. These objects are moving at thousands of miles per hour. Some of these small satellites may not have active propulsion on them," said Kitay. "How do we think about the long term safety, sustainability of this domain so we can all benefit from it? This is an area that is going to require a lot of attention."
The Pentagon will remain closely involved in this mission, even with Commerce as the public face of SSA, Kitay said. "Our partnership with Commerce is not going to be us saying, 'Commerce, this is now yours, and SSA is your problem.' SSA is a critical mission for us, and we will continue to maintain those resources and sensors."
A number of details will have to be worked out over time, Kitay noted, including the role of the private sector in SSA.
"A lot is happening out there with companies," he said. "We want to make sure we take advantage of advances in commercial technology."
Private space surveillance companies are enthused by the transition of SSA to Commerce, said Travis Langster, vice president of business development at AGI Inc., a provider of space data and analytical tools. Companies in this sector for years have been frustrated by DoD's resistance to opening up the market to the private sector.
"Moving to Commerce is a good thing," Langster said in an interview. "The FAA took it as far as they could." Commerce has said it wants to promote innovation, he said. "That is a big mantra for companies like us that provide commercial SSA services."
DoD today offers a "basic level of service, which needs to be enhanced," said Langster. "The space traffic management is not adequate for commercial use." The industry would like to see this policy executed in a way that advances, not stifles, the progress of technology, Langster said. "The current model pits the commercial SSA marketplace against the DoD, and does not allow the commercial SSA market to fully form."
The DoD catalog is "critical for national security," said Langster. "But there is an opportunity to enhance that catalog with other types of information."
DoD and Commerce will have different SSA priorities, said John Monahan, senior vice president of Kratos Defense. The company provides radio-frequency monitoring services for military SSA. "DoD is going to have to continue being involved in space traffic management," he said. "Commerce is going to have to have an SSA tool but they will not completely own the SSA mission. SSA is too critical and too deeply integrated. It's a warfighting mission. Both organizations are going to need it, but each has different needs."
When Commerce takes over SSA duties, there will be much greater appetite for use of commercial sensors, said Greg Caicedo, Kratos' vice president of data and network solutions. The population of data and analysis vendors is starting to expand in the United States and internationally, he said. And many countries increasingly worry about how they will be able to detect nefarious acts in space. "What is the intent? How do we tell commercial activity from aggression?" Those are some of the questions being asked, said Caicedo. "By having a civilian agency take over space traffic management we can have greater international cooperation and transparent communications."
Debate goes back years
Loverro recalled that the debate over space traffic management started to pick up steam about five years ago. "The plan had been to go ahead and eventually transfer the responsibility to the FAA." Pilot programs were kicked off to figure out a transition. But at one point the FAA decided it didn't want this job and Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross thought it made sense for his agency to take it.
There are still questions on who will perform specific duties such as operating sensors, Loverro noted. When there are two satellites coming close to each other, somebody has to "task" a sensor to go take measurements and calculate distances between objects. "That kind of back and forth between the calculations and the tasking has to happen," he said. "How that's mechanized we don't know yet. Commerce will have access to the data but will they be able to task DoD sensors around the world, or will they hire commercial firms that have sensors?"
Loverro said Commerce could outsource these duties, as companies do this type of work routinely. "Whether or not that's the direction Commerce will go remains to be seen."
Earl Comstock, director of the Commerce Department's Office of Policy and Strategic Planning, said DoD has "done a fantastic job providing a public service tracking objects in space." Now there are more actors, and they would like to have a civilian agency to undertake that responsibility, he said at a recent Hudson Institute conference on space policy.
"They'll continue to be involved," Comstock said of DoD. "They have the resources to track these capabilities. But the public face of this should be a civilian agency." The National Space Council will work on many of the transition details, said Comstock. The challenge: "How do we maintain the DoD's resources but relieve them of the burden of having to interface so much with the public?"
The reality is that Commerce or any other civilian department the White House might pick doesn't have the resources to do SSA, said Comstock. "DoD will continue to do that, but Commerce believes it should interface with the public and the industry as a means of attracting people to the United States as a place to come and do business," he said. "We also want to set a standard for the rest of the world … and unite the club of 'responsible actors.'"
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40523-space-traffic-management-commerce-department-details.html Defense Department Turning Over Space Traffic Control to Commerce, But Details Unclear
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Defense Department Turning Over Space Traffic Control to Commerce, But Details UnclearHere’s What We Know About Russia’s Hypersonic Waverider Weapon [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
Warnings of a Russian hypersonic weapon that the U.S. can't defend against may have had you running for the bomb shelter last week. But what, exactly, is this weapon, and how does it work?
Russian President Vladimir Putin first announced the hypersonic weapon, code-named Avangard, in a speech in March. Last week, U.S. intelligence sources told CNBC that the weapon had been successfully tested a number of times and could be operational by 2020.
The Russians have released few concrete details about the weapon, but from the information available, it appears the weapon is a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle, said Thomas Juliano, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in hypersonic flight.
Putin has claimed that the vehicle is capable of reaching speeds of Mach 20 — or 20 times the speed of sound — and could evade current U.S. missile defense systems. Worryingly, the vehicle can supposedly carry a nuclear warhead, according to the intelligence sources. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]
Rather than generating its own power to reach hypersonic speeds, the glide vehicle catches a ride atop an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Typically, these rockets fly to space on an arcing trajectory before releasing warheads near the top of the parabola, and these warheads drop back down onto the target at hypersonic speeds under the power of gravity.
Rather than falling back to Earth, though, Avangard reenters the atmosphere at an angle and its aerodynamic shape generates lift that lets it glide down at hypersonic speeds, says Juliano, which allows it to travel further farther and maneuver as it descends.
Hyper engineering
The vehicle appears to follow a design known as a "waverider," Juliano said. Waveriders are hypersonic aircraft that have wedge-shaped fuselages specially designed to generate lift by surfing on the shock wave generated as its own aircraft punches through the air at a high speed.
This is important at higher altitudes, where air density is low, making it difficult to generate lift with conventional wing designs. And because it doesn't need large wings, the vehicle is more streamlined, and the reduced drag allows it to maintain its speed over a much longer distance, Juliano said.
Building a vehicle that can tolerate hypersonic speeds and the temperatures they generate is no easy feat, Juliano said. But the design the Russians have opted for circumvents one of the major challenges: propulsion. [Photos: Hypersonic Jet Could Fly 10 Times the Speed of Sound]
"Designing a successful propulsion system at Mach 10 or above is extraordinarily challenging," he said. "By putting the glider on top of an ICBM, you avoid the need to design a successful hypersonic air-breathing engine."
Controlling a vehicle at such high speeds is still incredibly tricky, though.The Russians claim that Avangard is highly maneuverable, and based on computer-generated video included in Putin's address, it appears to have several flaps similar to the aerofoils used by planes to change direction.
Adjusting the aerofoils at hypersonic speeds is not a trivial task, because the shock wave can have complex interactions with the air flowing over the vehicle's surfaces, resulting in "nonlinear" behavior, Juliano said.
That means tiny adjustments can have outsize impacts, which makes it very tricky to calculate how much to move a flap or aerofoil. "It has to be precise, it has to operate quickly and it's a much harder environment to predict," he said.
Nonetheless, Juliano thinks the Russian claims are credible, as the technology has been in development for some time. The U.S. tested its own version, dubbed Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, in 2010 and 2011, but both flights were failures. And China also has an experimental system, code-named DF-ZF.
What is it for?
Russian efforts to develop hypersonic glide vehicles are explicitly aimed at evading U.S. missile defense systems, said Pavel Podvig, an independent analyst who specializes in Russia's nuclear arsenal. [Could the US Stop Nuclear Weapons?]
Current U.S. defenses are designed to take out conventional warheads from ICBMs on predictable ballistic trajectories while they are still in space; these defenses are not well suited to intercept weapons coming in on a high-speed glide in the atmosphere, Podvig said. And unlike traditional warheads, the vehicles will be capable of maneuvering around defenses.
But Podvig said it's not clear if the weapons really provide useful additional military capabilities. "It has been described as a weapon in search of a mission," he told Live Science. "My take is, you don't really need this kind of capability. It doesn't really change much in terms of ability to hit targets."
Podvig pointed out that the ICBM that carried the Avangard during testing, the SS-19, normally carries six conventional warheads. If the goal is to counter missile defense systems, it would be just as easy to overwhelm them with a greater number of standard warheads, he said.
But such weapons could breed dangerous uncertainty, Podvig said, because they aren't covered by arms-control treaties such as New START, which require countries to report the number, type and location of nuclear-capable weapons like ICBMs. In addition, the capabilities and potential uses of hypersonic gliders are still unclear.
"These systemscreate greater risks of miscalculation," Podvig said, "and it's not clear if we can effectively deal with those risks."
In an effort to reduce some of that uncertainty, the Pentagon is reportedly considering fielding space-based sensors to spot hypersonic weapons, according to Space News. The approach would require a costly constellation of satellites, but would be better at spotting weapons gliding in the upper atmosphere and could also see farther than land-based systems limited by the horizon.
Podvig says a properly designed system of this kind should be able to detect hypersonic weapons in flight, but it's not clear this would make it any easier to intercept such fast and maneuverable vehicles.
Originally published on Live Science.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40704-russia-hypersonic-weapons.html Here's What We Know About Russia's Hypersonic Waverider Weapon
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Here’s What We Know About Russia’s Hypersonic Waverider WeaponChang’e-4: Visiting the Far Side of the Moon [bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]
When China's Chang'e-4 mission reaches the lunar surface in December 2018, it will become the first mission to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. The combination lander-rover will explore the several aspects of the so-called "dark" side, as well as study the universe's radio sky.
A key element of the mission was the May 2018 launch of the Queqiao relay satellite, which will pass information from Chang'e-4 (CE-4) back to Earth. Both missions are led by the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The Chang'e program was named after the Chinese goddess of the moon, and "Queqio" means "bridge of magpies." According to China's state-run Xinhua news service, Queqio is based on a Chinese folktale, where "magpies form a bridge with their wings on the seventh night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar to enable Zhi Nu, the seventh daughter of the goddess of heaven, to cross and meet her beloved husband, separated from her by the Milky Way."
Previous Chang'e missions set the stage for Chang'e-4:
[Inforgraphic: China's Moon Missions Explained]
On the far side
While satellites and astronauts have flown by and observed the far side of the moon, no mission has yet managed to touch down on its surface. But that's not because scientists aren't interested; retrieving a sample from the far side of the moon was an important goal in the 2013-2022 Planetary Science Decadal Survey.
Because the moon isn't tidally locked to the Earth, those of us bound to the planet can only catch a glimpse through satellite imagery. But, despite pop culture references to the contrary, the far side isn't dark; it receives solar light when the moon sits between Earth and the sun.
The far side contains the South Pole-Aitken basin, an impact site over 1,553 miles (2,500 kilometers) across that exposes the deepest parts of the lunar crust. The enormous basin is the oldest impact feature on the moon, as well as the deepest, with a rim-to-floor distance of almost 8 miles (13 km), more than 6 times as deep as the Grand Canyon.
CE-4's landing site will be the southern floor of the Von Karman crater, a crater 112 miles (180 km) across lying within the South Pole-Aitken impact basin. The crater was named after a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist.
The spacecraft will carry a suite of international payloads from Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden. Many of these are similar to the instruments found on Chang'e-3, since CE-4 was originally designed as a backup.
"Chang'e 3 lunar probe used a slow and arc-shaped landing, while as for Chang'e 4 lunar probe, we have to adopt a steep and almost vertical landing," Zhao Xiaojin, a senior official at the China Serospace Science and Technology, explained to China Central Television in 2018. "Chang'e 4 lunar probe will have huge improvements on its capabilities, because we have adopted new technologies and new products. For example, Chang'e 3 lunar probe could not work during the night, but Chang'e 4 lunar probe can do some measurement work at night."
The lander will carry a landing camera and topographic camera on the lander, similar to those found on CE-3. New instruments include:
- Lunar Dust Analyser, to study the physical characteristics of dust
- Electric Field Analyser to measure the magnitude of the electric field at various heights
- Plasma and Magnetic Field Observation Package
- Lunar Seismometer to study the interior of the moon
Another new feature is a Very Low Frequency (VLF) Radio Interferometer, which will be able to study the universe at extremely low wavelengths while the moon shields it from Earth's radio noise. This instrument will be helpful for future plans for putting a radio observatory on the moon, something often talked about but not yet planned by any country.
The lander will also carry payload created by students across China. A lunar mini biosphere experiment designed by 28 Chinese educational institutions led by Chongqing University was one of more than 200 submissions. The 7-lb. experiment will attempt to germinate seeds from potatoes and Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard. Silkworm eggs may also hitch a ride. The biosphere package will contain water, air and nutrients capable of sustaining the seeds and eggs within their protective dome. A tiny camera will allow researchers to observe the experiment back on Earth.
"Why potato and Arabidopsis? Because the growth period of Arabidopsis is short and convenient to observe. And potato could become a major source of food for future space travelers," Liu Hanlong, chief director of the experiment and vice president of Chongqing University, said in a statement. "Our experiment might help accumulate knowledge for building a lunar base and long-term residence on the moon."
The rover will carry three of the four instruments found on CE-3, including a panoramic camera, a ground-penetrating radar and an infrared spectrometer. It will also carry an Active Source Hammer for active source seismic experiments, and a second VLF radio receiver. The rover will also boast an energetic neutral atom analyzer.
"Obtaining the first direct measurements of the surface of the far side, as well as getting our first look at the low-frequency radio sky — key to understanding the early history of the universe — is potentially breakthrough science," Paul Spudis, a researcher at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, wrote in an article for Air & Space magazine.
A two-step approach
One of the biggest reasons the far side has received so little exploration comes from geometry. Missions to the far side can't communicate through the massive body of the moon, so they have faced silence when out of sight of Earth. The launch of Queqiao should solve that problem.
Queqiao will sit at the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 (L2), a special spot in the system where it will be able to see both worlds. L2 is a gravitationally stable spot located 40,000 miles (64,000 km) beyond the lunar far side. Its unique position will allow the satellite to relay messages from CE-4 to Earth, and from Earth to CE-4.
The relay satellite was carried to space atop a Long March 4C rocket on May 20, 2018, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province, China.
Queqiao's orbit may prove a boon to missions beyond CE-4.
"We will make efforts to enable the relay satellite to work as long as possible to serve other probes, including those from other countries," Ye Peijian, a leading Chinese aerospace expert and consultant to China's lunar exploration program, said in a statement.
That includes China's planned Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission, set to launch in 2019. Chinese officials have also declared their intent to put people on the surface of the moon before the end of the 2030s.
Additional resources
Follow Nola Taylor Redd at @NolaTRedd, Facebook, or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
https://www.space.com/40715-change-4-mission.html Chang'e-4: Visiting the Far Side of the Moon
[bestandroiddoubledinheadunit950.blogspot.com]Chang’e-4: Visiting the Far Side of the Moon