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Mars Base

Recent Satellite Crashes Bring Space Junk Problem Into Public Eye | Space Junk & Orbita... - 0 views

www.space.com/shes-public-consciousness.html

scibyte29 satellite crash multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 12 January 2012
  • news that a failed Russian Mars probe will come crashing back to Earth in the next few days
  • public perception that the sky is falling —
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • huge pieces of space junk could rain down on us at any moment.
  • Phobos-Grunt spacecraft
  • re-enter the atmosphere sometime between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16).
  • the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months
  • claims are handled on a case-by-case basis, you might be surprised to learn damage from satellite debris, aka space junk, likely would be covered under most insurance policies
  • Farmers Insurance, aired a commercial during this winter's college football bowl games offering similar assurances to its current and potential customers.
  • Experts predict that Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will crash back to Earth in mid-January 2012. This artist's concept shows fuel burning from a ruptured fuel tank as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.CREDIT: Michael Carroll
  • NASA estimates that our planet's orbital debris cloud contains more than 500,000 pieces larger than a marble and more than 20,000 at least as big as a softball
  • space junk poses little threat to people on the ground. Most pieces of falling satellites burn up the atmosphere
  • the bits that make it through are likely to land harmlessly in the ocean or on uninhabited land
  • To date, nobody is known to have been injured by a chunk of falling debris.
  • poses a real threat to the craft that orbit and observe our planet and provide navigation and telecommunications services
  • 2009, for example, the Iridium 33 communications satellite was destroyed when it slammed into a defunct Russian satellite.
  • This computer illustration depicts the density of space junk around Earth in low-Earth orbit.CREDIT: ESA
Mars Base

NASA Moon Probes' Impact Craters Spotted from Space | Grail Mission | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-grail-moon-probes-graves.html

scibyte87 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) snapped a series of photographs of the two 16.5-foot-wide (5 meters) craters, which mark where the space agency's twin Grail probes ended their gravity-mapping mission, and their operational lives, on Dec. 17.
  • It's a bit of a surprise that the LROC team was able to find the craters at all
  • the craters are small, nondescript features on a body riddled with impact scars
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The two Grail spacecraft — known as Ebb and Flow — slammed into a mountain near the lunar north pole at 3,771 mph (6,070 km/h), striking the surface about 20 seconds apart.
  • The Grail craters first showed up in LROC photos from January, but images taken on Feb. 28 show them in much greater detail
  • used these later photos to produce a topographic map of the impact zone
  • This map revealed that the two craters are separated by about 7,250 feet (2,210 m) in straight-line distance and 985 feet (300 m) in altitude
  • the crashes ejected material that appears darker than the surrounding lunar dirt.
  • these may be dark due to spacecraft material being mixed with the ejecta
  • may be residual fuel left in the probes' lines, or bits of their carbon-fiber bodies
  • LRO didn't get any images of the actual crashes, which occurred in the dark.
  • ultraviolet imaging spectrograph did see emissions from mercury and atomic hydrogen in the ejected plumes when they rose high enough to reach sunlight
  • The analysis of the Grail impact plumes is ongoing
  • The probes' measurements have allowed scientists to create the best-ever gravity map of any celestial body
  • And that map is getting better all the time, as researchers continue to analyze the data
  • The twin probes, which were each about the size of a washing machine, zipped around the moon at an average altitude of just 7 miles (11 km) in their final days
Mars Base

Moon Probes' Crash Site Named After Sally Ride | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ail-moon-crash-sally-ride.html

scibyte75 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The spot on the lunar surface where NASA intentionally crashed its twin gravity-mapping moon probes
  • Dec. 17) has been named after the late Sally Ride, America's first woman in space
  • Ebb and Flow, slammed into a crater rim near the moon's north pole at 5:28 p.m. EST (2228 GMT)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • f Sally Ride, who played a key role in Grail's education and outreach efforts
  • Ride had led Grail's MoonKAM project, which allowed schoolkids around the world to select lunar sites for Ebb and Flow to photograph
Mars Base

Moon Lander Project to Continue Despite Crash | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/pheus-lander-crash-future.html

scibyte58 Morpheus

shared by Mars Base on 13 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • NASA engineers are forging ahead on work
  • that's part of development, especially lean development
  • also testing out automated hazard-detection technology, which would use lasers to spot dangerous boulders or craters on the surface of another world
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • lander that crashed Thursday is apparently a lost cause. But
  • already begun work on another vehicle, which could be ready for its first tests by early 2013
  • second lander will not pick up where the first left off
  • It would have to work up to a free-flight test, going through a series of tethered flights first
Mars Base

GRAIL First Results Provide Most Precise Lunar Gravity Map Yet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...most-precise-lunar-gravity-map

scibyte74 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • first science results from NASA’s twin GRAIL lunar orbiters provide incredible detail of the Moon’s interior and the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body, including Earth
  • Ebb and Flow, send radio signals to each other and any changes in distance between the two as they circle the Moon are measured, down to changes as small as
  • 1/ 20,000th the velocity that a snail moves
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • new gravity maps reveals an abundance of features such as tectonic structures, volcanic landforms, basin rings, crater central peaks and numerous simple, bowl-shaped craters
  • the moon’s gravity field is unlike that of any terrestrial planet in our solar system.
  • Ninety-eight percent of local gravity is associated with topography, while 2 percent are other gravitational features
  • You can see bull’s-eyes of the lunar mascons, but otherwise we see a smooth inner surface
  • The only way this could happen is if impacts to the early Moon shattered the inner surface
  • also revealed evidence for ancient volcanic activity under the surface of the Moon and strange linear gravitational anomalies
  • identified a large population of linear gravitational anomalies. We don’t see any expression of them on topography maps, so we infer that these are an ancient internal structures
  • Basin, which forms one of the ‘man on moon’s’ eyes, the gravity maps shows a linear feature crossing the basin while topography maps show no such correlating feature
  • the gravity anomaly formed before the impacts
  • Additional data reveal that the Moon’s inner crust in almost completely pulverized
  • Using GRAIL gravity data, we found the average thickness of the crust is 32-34 kilometers which is about 10 km less than previous studies
  • We found the bulk abundance of aluminum on Moon is nearly the same as that of the Earth
  • consistent with a recent hypothesis that the Moon is derived of materials from the Earth when it was formed during a giant impact event
  • GRAIL finishes the primary science mission in May and are currently working in an extended mission where the spacrafts’ altitude was lowered to just 23 km above the surface
  • During its prime mission, the two GRAIL spacecraft orbited just 55 km above the Moon’s surface
  • hearing results from the new data sets soon
  • the team will lower the GRAIL spacecraft down to just 11 km above the lunar surface.
  • extended mission will end soon, in mid-December, and soon after that, the two spacecraft will be crashed intentionally onto the lunar surface
  • they are still formulating ideas for the impact scenario, and looking at the possibility of aiming the crashes so they are within the field-of-view of instruments on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Mars Base

Twin NASA spacecraft deliberately crash into moon - 0 views

phys.org/...cecraft-deliberately-moon.html

scibyte75 Grail

shared by Mars Base on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • By design, the final resting place was far away from the Apollo landing sites and other historical spots on the moon
  • The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon will pass over the mountain and attempt to photograph the skid marks left by the washing machine sized-spacecraft as they hit the surface at 3,800 mph
  • the crash site was in darkness, the final act was not visible from Earth.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • During the primary mission, they flew about 35 miles above the lunar surface. After getting bonus data-collecting time, they lowered their altitude to 14 miles (22 kilometers) above the surface
Mars Base

Norwegian Family Finds Meteorite Crashed Through Their Roof | Fallen Meteorites | Space... - 0 views

www.space.com/teorite-crash-oslo-norway.html

scibyte38 meteor meteorite

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Norwegian family arrived at their cabin in Oslo recently to discover that a meteorite had apparently fallen through their roof
  • after visiting the holiday cabin for the first time all winter,
  • rock may have fallen during a wave of meteor sightings over Norway on March 1
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • hundreds of tips and have been searching for bits of meteorites
  • identified the rock as a rare type of breccia meteorite, which is a conglomerate of smaller fragments of minerals
  • 1.3 pound (585 gram) stone was found split in two
  • Space rocks rarely fall in populated areas, and such a find in Norway is exceedingly special
  • According to Views and News from Norway, only 14 meteorites have been found in the Scandinavian country since 1848.
Mars Base

Russians desperately try to save Mars moon probe (Update) - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...cientists-mars-moon-probe.html

mars scibyte21 Phobos-Grunt

shared by Mars Base on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • A Russian space probe aiming to land on a Mars moon was stuck circling the Earth after equipment failure Wednesday, and scientists raced to fire up its engines before the whole thing came crashing down.
  • successfully launched by a Zenit-2 booster rocket just after midnight Moscow time Wednesday
  • separated from the booster about 11 minutes later and was to fire its engines twice to set out on its path to the Red Planet, but never did
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • probably due to the failure of the craft's orientation system
  • Phobos-Ground was Russia's first interplanetary mission since a botched 1996 robotic mission to Mars, which failed when the probe crashed shortly after the launch due to an engine failure
  • Depending on the actual root of the failure, this is not an impossible challenge
  • the effort to restore control over the probe is hampered by a limited earth-to-space communications network that already forced Russian flight controllers to ask the general public in South America to help find the craft
  • Amateur astronomers were the first to spot the trouble when they detected that the spacecraft was stuck in an Earth orbit
  • About seven tons of nitrogen teroxide and hydrazine, which could freeze before ultimately entering, will make it the most toxic falling satellite ever
  • billed as the heaviest interplanetary probe ever may become one of the heaviest space derelicts to ever fall back to Earth out of control
  • The spacecraft is 13.2 metric tons (14.6 tons), with fuel accounting for a large share of its weight
  • Scientists had hoped that studies of Phobos' surface could help solve the mystery of its origin and shed more light on the genesis of the solar system. Some
Mars Base

Buddhist statue, discovered by Nazi expedition, is made of meteorite, new study reveals - 0 views

phys.org/...ue-nazi-meteorite-reveals.html

scibyte65 meteorite

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • a 1,000 year-old ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analysed by scientists and has been found to be carved from a meteorite
  • statue, known as the Iron Man, weighs 10kg and is believed to represent a stylistic hybrid between the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Bon culture
  • discovered in 1938 by an expedition of German scientists
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • expedition was supported by Nazi SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and the entire expeditionary team were believed to have been SS members.
  • unknown how the statue was discovered
  • believed that the large swastika carved into the centre of the figure may have encouraged the team to take it back to Germany
  • only became available for study following an auction in 2007.
  • first team to study the origins of the statue
  • The team was able to classify it as an ataxite
  • a rare class of iron meteorite with high contents of nickel.
  • statue was chiseled from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago
  • first debris was officially discovered in 1913 by gold prospectors
  • believe that this individual meteorite fragment was collected many centuries before
Mars Base

Scientists report hint of dark matter in first results from $2 billion cosmic ray detec... - 0 views

phys.org/...hint-dark-results-billion.html

scibyte89 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • A $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the footprint of something that could be dark matter
  • the evidence isn't enough to declare the case closed
  • And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • the first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, known by its acronym AMS,
  • show evidence of new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown dark matter or could be energy that originates from pulsars
  • expects a more definitive answer in a matter of months
  • Unraveling the mystery of dark matter could help scientists better understand the composition of our universe and, more particularly, what holds galaxies together
  • The 7-ton detector with a 3-foot magnet ring at its core was sent into space in 2011
  • The device is transmitting its data to CERN, where it is being analyzed
  • For 80 years scientists have theorized the existence of dark matter but have never actually observed it directly
  • They have looked for it in accelerators that smash particles together at high speed
  • deep underground with special detectors
  • no luck
  • there's a third way: looking in space for the results of rare dark matter collisions
  • If particles of dark matter crash and annihilate each other, they should leave a footprint of positrons—the anti-matter version of electrons—at high energy levels
  • found some. But they could also be signs of pulsars
  • What's key is the curve of the plot of those positrons. If the curve is one shape, it points to dark matter. If it's another, it points to pulsars
  • they should know the curve—and the suspect—soon
  • since its installation on 19 May 2011 it has measured over 30 billion cosmic rays at energies up to trillions of electron volts
  • Its permanent magnet and array of precision particle detectors collect and identify charged cosmic rays passing through AMS from the far reaches of space
  • Over its long duration mission on the ISS, AMS will record signals from 16 billion cosmic rays every year and transmit them to Earth for analysis by the AMS Collaboration.
  • In the initial 18 month period of space operations, from 19 May 2011 to 10 December 2012, AMS analyzed 25 billion primary cosmic ray events
  • Of these,
  • 6.8 million, were unambiguously identified as electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons.
  • Positrons are clearly distinguished from this background through the robust rejection power of AMS of more than one in one million
  • Currently, the total number of positrons identified by AMS, in excess of 400,000, is the largest number of energetic antimatter particles directly measured and analyzed from space
  • The exact shape of the spectrum, as shown in Figure 2, extended to higher energies, will ultimately determine whether this spectrum originates from the collision of dark matter particles or from pulsars in the galaxy
  • by measuring the ratio between positrons and electrons and by studying the behavior of any excess across the energy spectrum, a better understanding of the origin of dark matter and other physics phenomena can be obtained
Mars Base

Study of friction reveals clues about arthritis - 0 views

phys.org/...n-reveals-clues-arthritis.html

scibyte80 arthritis

shared by Mars Base on 30 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • A new, noninvasive, and low-cost method for the early detection and monitoring of osteoarthritis (arthritis caused by wear and tear) may be on its way
  • By studying patterns of friction between cartilage pads, the researchers discovered a different type of friction that is more likely to cause wear and damage
  • work suggests ways to detect this friction, and points to new research directions for getting to the root cause of arthritis
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Imagine going to the doctor for your aching knees
  • what if your doctor could actually listen to your body, monitoring the way your knees sound as they bend and flex
  • an instrument called a Surface Forces Apparatus (SFA), a device that measures the adhesion and friction forces between surfaces—in this case cartilage, the pad of tissue that covers the ends of bones at a joint.
  • degeneration of cartilage is the most common cause of osteoarthritis: The pads wear away, leaving bone grinding against bone
  • researchers found is that it isn't just any kind of friction that leads to the irreversible wear and tear on the material
  • currently believed that a high-friction force, or 'coefficient of friction,' is the primary factor in surface wear and damage
  • found is that this is not the case
  • The critical feature is not a high-friction force, but what is known as "stick-slip" friction, or, sometimes, "stiction."
  • Both are characterized by surfaces that initially stick together, and then accelerate away quickly once the static friction force is overcome
  • With stick-slip friction, the surfaces eventually pull slightly apart and slide across each other, stick again, and pull apart, causing jerky movements.
  • That's when things get damaged microscopically
  • Stick-slip is a common phenomenon. It is responsible for everything from computer hard drive crashes and automobile failures, to squeaking doors and music
  • same thing happens with a violin string
  • Even if you're pulling the bow steadily, it's moving in hundreds or thousands of little jerks per second, which determine the sound you hear
  • Each little jerk, no matter how submicroscopic, is an impact, and over time the accumulation of these impacts can deform surfaces, causing irreparable damage—first microscopically, then growing to macroscopic
  • it's not easy to tell the difference between types of friction at the microscopic level
  • Smooth-sliding joints might feel the same as those undergoing stiction, or the even more harmful stick-slip, especially in the early stages of arthritis
  • when measured with an ultra-sensitive and high-resolution instrument like the SFA, each type of friction revealed its own characteristic profile
  • Smooth-sliding joints yielded an almost smooth constant line (friction force or friction trace
  • with stiction showed up as a peak, as the "sticking" was being overcome, followed by a relatively smooth line
  • stick-slip shows the jagged saw-tooth profile of two surfaces repeatedly pulling apart, sticking, and pulling apart again
  • these measurements could be recorded by placing an acoustic or electric sensing device around joints, giving a signal similar to an EKG.
  • this could be a good way to measure and diagnose damage to the cartilage
  • to measure the progression, or even the early detection of symptoms related to arthritis
  • Early detection of conditions like arthritis has been a priority for many years
  • the functioning of joints is more complicated
  • scientists will continue their work by studying synovial fluid—the lubricating fluid between two cartilage surfaces in joints
  • plays a major role in whether or not the surfaces wear and tear, and the synergistic roles of the different molecules (proteins, lipids, and polymers
  • all involved in lubricating and preventing damage to our joints.
  • a number of directions to take, both fundamental and practical
  • it looks as if we need to focus our research on finding ways to prevent stick-slip motion, rather than lowering the friction force
Mars Base

Megapixels: Car Airbags That Could Save A Cyclist's Life | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...at-could-save-a-cyclists-life+

scibyte79 AirBags

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle
  • In the Netherlands, which has only 1/18 of the U.S.’s population, that number is close to 26 percent
  • With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • is working on a car airbag that deploys outside the vehicle to reduce bicyclist injuries
  • Upon impact, the airbag, housed under the hood, inflates to cover parts of the windshield and cushion a biker
  • In tests last November, engineers drove a track-guided car into a dummy on a bike at 25 mph, the average speed of a crash
  • Accelerometers in the dummy’s head and neck and pressure sensors embedded in its limbs indicated brain damage and broken bones
  • Dummies in collisions with the airbag had fewer and less severe injuries up to 45 percent of the time
Mars Base

Meteorite smashed through Oslo roof : Views and News from Norway - 0 views

www.newsinenglish.no/...rite-smashed-through-oslo-roof

scibyte38 meteor meteorite

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • sure when the meteorite actually crashed through the cabin’s roof, because the cabin had been closed during the winter.
  • cross-section that it contains bits of many different particles that are compressed together
  • indicates that another, larger meteorite smashed rock on another planet before the meteorite found in Oslo was propelled into outer space
Mars Base

LEGO Figures Flying On NASA Jupiter Probe | NASA Juno Spacecraft & LEGOs In Space | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/s-jupiter-juno-spacecraft.html

scibyte38 lego Jupiter

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • three more "very special" LEGO figurines are set to fly to the planet Jupiter with NASA's Juno spacecraft
  • specially-constructed LEGO Minifigures are of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno, and "father of science" Galileo Galilei.
  • part of the Bricks in Space project
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • joint outreach and educational program developed as part of the collaboration between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
  • NASA has a long-standing partnership with the LEGO company
  • Juno and the minifigures are scheduled to arrive in July 2016 and orbit Jupiter for a year (33 revolutions) before intentionally crashing into the giant gas planet
  • 04 August 2011
  • The trio resemble the typical small toys that LEGO sells, but are made out of metal.
  • Jupiter (who was the equivalent of "Zeus" to the Greeks) drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief
  • Juno was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature
  • Juno spacecraft will also look beneath the clouds to help NASA understand the planet's structure and history.
  • Juno holds a magnifying glass "to signify her search for the truth,"
  • husband holds a lightning bolt
  • third LEGO crew member, Galileo Galilei, made several important discoveries about Jupiter
  • first to point a telescope at the sky to make astronomical observations and discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter — named the Galilean moons in his honor.
  • minifigure Galileo has his telescope with him for the journey to Jupiter.
  • basically the size of the normal LEGO figures
  • made out of aluminum, very special aluminum and they have been prepared in a very special way
  • space-grade aluminum
  • testing to make sure that they fit on our spacecraft in a way that is like our other science instruments."
  • mini-metal statues are joined on the spacecraft by another "special passenger," one
  • 2.8-inch by 2-inch (71 mm by 51 mm) plaque also made of flight-grade aluminum is bonded to Juno's propulsion bay with a spacecraft-grade epoxy. The graphic on the plaque shows a self-portrait of Galileo. The plaque also includes — in Galileo's own hand — a passage he made in 1610 of observations of Jupite
  • Galileo's text included on the plaque reads as follows: "On the 11th it was in this formation -- and the star closest to Jupiter was half the size than the other and very close to the other so that during the previous nights all of the three observed stars looked of the same dimension and among them equally afar; so that it is evident that around Jupiter there are three moving stars invisible till this time to everyone."
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