Group items tagged

Crowd-funded LightSail is sailing in space!

remember our recent discussion about this?

Rover Curiosity finds man-made shiny material on Mars. It seems the rover is littering plastic on the planet!

Their planetary protection officers will have some interesting questions to ask ...

An hypothesis for explaining missing shoreline traces of ancient water ocean on mars: Some 3.4 billion years ago, giant meteoroids slammed into a frigid ocean covering Mars's northern hemisphere. The impacts kicked up enormous waves that raced across the water and swamped the shoreline, research suggests. On the scale of planetary catastrophes, such tsunamis would have dwarfed most Earthly ones.

If you've ever flown an R/C plane, you know how nerve wracking it can be. Navigating in three dimensions opens up the possibility to run into so many things, and a single crash could be your last. Now, a team from EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems has been working on a UAV called the AirBurr.

An approach to robot design that makes sense. I can see applications to planetary explorers here.

nice images...

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is once again searching planetary systems for signals that would be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Among its first targets are some of the exoplanet candidates recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope.

The most astounding fact about Kepler-78b is that it shouldn't even exist, according to our current knowledge of planetary formation. It is extremely close to its star at only 550,000 miles (900,000 kilometers). As a comparison, Mercury only gets within 28.5 million miles (45.9 million kilometers) of the sun in the nearest point of orbit. With that proximity, it isn't clear how the planet could have formed as the star was much larger when the planet formed. With its current distance, that would mean it formed inside the star, which is impossible as far as we know.

With its exceeding small perihelion (passing the 28th of nov), there is an off chance that it will be visible by the naked eye in the nights sky around the 10th of november http://www.universetoday.com/102976/will-comet-ison-dazzle-our-skies-an-expert-weighs-in/

Some sort of organic carbon has been detected by the sampling of Curiosity; the contamination source was isolated and the signal persists. The scientists suggest as a source meteorites transporting interstellar matter, or maybe some sort of ancient life whose biomass production only survived cosmic radiation as it was buried underground. a big deal: six relevant articles were published simultaneously online: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml?utm_content=&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=Science&utm_source=shortener

bacteria apparently specialised in space clean rooms ...

I'm trying to read the abstract, but I simply can't manage...

Open questions in geoscience. Food for thought

Lasers + diamonds --> simulate pressure of thousands of atmospheres on planetary cores!

As a side note, this is also being used as method to create a hypothetical substance called 'metallic hydrogen'. At such high pressures, hydrogen itself should become superconducting at room temperature and thus of tremendous interest...

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.

Cool video...

tried to find the original science paper but could not .... the only one I found was this one: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1210/2

"Plan 9 from outer space" quote confirmed : atmospheric conditions in outer space stall communications! Wonder how many more facts of the movie will prove right in the end...

very interesting study. Although it is not so much a surprise, they cite many papers on planetary formation that predicted this, and the only paper on degassing they cite is from our rather unpopular french ex-minister of research c. allegre, who refuses the fact that humans have an impact on climate...

dark matter :-) ?? could there be loads of them?

well a bit misleading title...