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Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.

ARCA is the romanian google X prize competitor.

I like the 4 stage system. But how did they solve the plume issue ?

The plume issue is not that difficult. I think they used something similar on Apollo LES. The problem is stabilizing the entire system, which is extremely difficult. The entire system will most likely plummet down after the solar balloon phase (which is the only phase they tested before). At least they are not using government money :).

A few years ago we did not even know if there was any planets outside the solar system. Now we know some of the stuff that happens on them. Wonder how long it takes until we discover life somewhere else!

I do not know what is yetto come, but I am looking forward to the "starshade" Sara Seager's team wants to couple to a telescope: "The star shade and the telescope have to be aligned perfectly at 125,000 miles away. Once aligned, the system will observe a distant star, and then move to another distant star and re-align. This is technologically speaking, unchartered territory." http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G68sqgRhP2E

The habitable zones of single stars are larger and wider as the temperatures increase. Although hotter stars have the widest regions where water can lie on the surface, they also have short lifetimes that limit the ability of life to evolve. Moons in close binary solar systems have a better chance of hosting life than those in single-star systems, new research has shown.

looks like the study Aurélie wanted to do ...

Luzi: no critical comment on this? would love to hear your opinion ...

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity (GR), has been tested precisely within the Solar System. However, it has been difficult to test GR on the scale of an individual galaxy. Collett et al. exploited a nearby gravitational lens system, in which light from a distant galaxy (the source) is bent by a foreground galaxy (the lens). Mass distribution in the lens was compared with the curvature of space-time around the lens, independently determined from the distorted image of the source. The result supports GR and eliminates some alternative theories of gravity.

The International Space Apps Challenge is now over, it is interesting to have a look at the solutions ...

what sort of "app" is this e.g. http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/brightest-night/solution/132 "We started of by trying to set our camera in raw mode, howsoever this can't be done for current logitech modules and without a high risk of permanently destroying the camera (reflashing the EEPROM). we use a logitech c920 and captured a raw image from it using guvcview on ArchLinux we then wrote some python code to calculate the average BGR value of our Image. We are currently workin on automiztion, but this will take much longer as there will be a lot of reverse engineering of the USB-Protocol needed."

c'mon really! To name a few: - Tour of the Solar System ... that is one of the numerous specialities of the ACT. - Satellite data correlation tool ... solution is flawed, but I really like the idea. Lot of added value. I definitely think are interestung stuffs to do there for cheap. - Aurora project: Model & Data ... space weather not interesting?! - Kepler ... a classic Do not expect the solutions to be tremendous just after 3 days of work, but the proposed list of challenges are "seeds" for innovation to me.

The dwarf planet Ceres, one of the most intriguing objects in the solar system, is gushing water vapour from its unusual ice-covered surface, scientists said on Wednesday in a finding that raises the question of whether it might be hospitable to life.

Despite the benefits of low-temperature fuel cell technologies, they cannot directly use biomass as a fuel because of the lack of an effective catalyst system. However, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a low-temperature fuel cell that directly converts a wide variety of biomass sources to electricity. Possible application areas are local electricity supply in developing countries

NASA answer to the big data hype

"The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.

They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.

IceCube detects a neutrino in about every 6 minutes but most are from within the solar system. A small number of very high energy neutrinos have been found though which have energies that cannot be produced by the sun or on Earth.

Nice overview and animation of what that means for the Solar system.

antihydrogen propulsion...?

didn't roger write an assessment of antimatter propulsion when he was in the ACT?

yeah the problem is the amount of antimatter you can get and more specifically how to trap it. I found that you would need around one gram to go to the outer Solar System. So we are far from that, but finding an efficient way to trap it, with an electromagnetic trap rather than solid walls is a first step !

Is it really true?

Article 1011.6263 doesn't exist

ha it's back! Yes they are talking about GAP since some time in France, and lobbying to put it on a planetary mission.