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Mars Base

MESSENGER Solves Solar Flare Mystery - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ger-solves-solar-flare-mystery

scibyte21 messenger sun

shared by Mars Base on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • the MESSENGER spacecraft was able to capture a average-sized solar flare
  • allowing astronomers to study high-energy solar neutrons at less than 1 astronomical unit (AU) from the sun for the first time
  • Previously, only the neutron bursts from the most powerful solar flares have been recorded on neutron spectrometers on Earth or in near-Earth orbit
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • results help solve a mystery of why some coronal mass ejections produce almost no energetic protons that reach the Earth, while others produce huge amounts
  • inferred the continuous production of protons in the 30-to-100-MeV (million electron volt) range due to the flare
  • MESSENGER’s Neutron Spectrometer was able to record neutrons from this flare over a period of six to ten hours
  • at least some moderate-sized flares continuously produce high-energy neutrons in the solar corona
  • Solar flares spew high-energy neutrons into interplanetary space. Typically, these bursts last about 50 to 60 seconds at the sun.
  • forms an extended seed population in interplanetary space that can be further accelerated by the massive shock waves produced by the flares
  • another population results from the decay of the neutrons near the sun
  • About 90 percent of all ions produced by a solar flare remain locked to the sun on closed magnetic lines
  • It appears that these seed populations of energetic protons near the sun could provide the answer
  • Sometimes they’re in the right place for the shock waves to send them toward Earth
  • seed populations are not evenly distributed
  • at other times they’re in locations where the protons are accelerated in directions that don’t take them near Earth
  • Energetic protons from solar flares can damage Earth-orbiting satellites and endanger astronauts on the International Space Station or on missions to the Moon and Mars.
  • scientists need to know a lot more about the mechanisms that produce flares and which flare events are likely to be dangerous
  • At some point they hope to be able to predict space weather — where precipitation is in the form of radiation — with the same accuracy that forecasters predict rain or snow on Earth.
  • The beauty of MESSENGER is that it’s going to be active from the minimum to the maximum solar activity during Solar Cycle 24
  • observe the rise of a solar cycle much closer to the sun than ever before
Mars Base

Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs boson - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...atest-results-higgs-boson.html

scibyte37 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • New measurements
  • indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered.
  • two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV.
  • claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be due to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 in 740
  • claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.
  • stringent constraints established by earlier direct and indirect measurements made by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the Tevatron, and other accelerators,
  • place the mass of the Higgs boson within the range of 115 to 127 GeV
  • consistent with the December 2011 announcement of excesses seen in that range by LHC experiments, which searched for the Higgs in different decay patterns
  • None of the
  • experiments
  • are strong enough to claim evidence for the Higgs boson
  • This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements
  • the latest result in a decade-long search by teams of physicists at the Tevatron
  • two collaborations independently combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments to arrive at this exciting result
  • Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways.
  • Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles
  • still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists
  • According to the Standard Model, the theory that explains and predicts how nature’s building blocks behave and interact with each other, the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles
  • Physicists have known for a long time that the Higgs or something like it must exist
  • Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles
  • physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal.
  • Tevatron was a proton/anti-proton collider, with a maximum center of mass energy of 2 TeV,
  • LHC is a proton/proton collider that will ultimately reach 14 TeV
  • two accelerators collide different pairs of particles at different energies and produce different types of backgrounds
  • search strategies are different
  • search for the Higgs boson by the Tevatron and LHC experiments is like two people taking a picture of a park from different vantage points
Mars Base

Large Hadron Collider team announces beginning of restart - 0 views

phys.org/...ron-collider-team-restart.html

scibyte126 LargeHadronCollider

shared by Mars Base on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • scientists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility has reported
  • that the process of restarting the massive experimental mechanism has begun
  • though it won't finish until sometime next year
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • will have to be restarted in pieces to ensure that each is operating properly before the next can be brought online
  • the facility is in the process of an upgrade, which has been in the planning stages for several years and will include upgrades to several pieces and parts of the facility that support the LHC as well as the main accelerator itself
  • The team recognized that the facility had begun to suffer from diminishing returns
  • many parts could be improved due to the development of new technology and improvements on old ways of doing things.
  • the team has successfully restarted the part they call the source—the piece of equipment responsible for stripping electrons off of hydrogen atoms for use in producing protons.
  • Next up the team plans to fire up Linac2, an accelerator whose job it is to give protons their initial push
  • After that a booster will be started that will be used to push the protons even faster
  • For the LHC to be used in its proper context, it must receive protons that are already moving exceedingly fast.
  • Team members have made much of the complete upgrade to the control system
  • that integrates all of the systems and which of course will be central to a successful reboot.
  • In addition to swapping out parts for new and improved technology, technicians will also be replacing worn cables or other minor but necessary components
  • If all goes well, the LHC should be ready and back in business sometime early next year.
Mars Base

Planck's most detailed map ever reveals an almost perfect Universe - 0 views

phys.org/...3-planck-reveals-universe.html

scibyte87 PlanckConstant

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background
  • the relic radiation from the Big Bang
  • was released
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • revealing the existence of features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe
  • The image is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck and is the mission's first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old.
  • At that time, the young Universe was filled with a hot dense soup of interacting protons, electrons and photons at about 2700ºC
  • protons and electrons joined to form hydrogen atoms, the light was set free
  • As the Universe has expanded, this light today has been stretched out to microwave wavelengths, equivalent to a temperature of just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.
  • that correspond to regions of slightly different densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today
  • According to the standard model of cosmology, the fluctuations arose immediately after the Big Bang and were stretched to cosmologically large scales during a brief period of accelerated expansion known as inflation.
  • Planck was designed to map these fluctuations across the whole sky with greater resolution and sensitivity than ever before
  • By analysing the nature and distribution of the seeds in Planck's CMB image, we can determine the composition and evolution of the Universe from its birth to the present day
  • because precision of Planck's map is so high, it also made it possible to reveal some peculiar unexplained features that may well require new physics to be understood
  • Since the release of Planck's first all-sky image in 2010, we have been carefully extracting and analysing all of the foreground emissions that lie between us and the Universe's first light
  • revealing the cosmic microwave background in the greatest detail yet
  • One of the most surprising findings is that the fluctuations in the CMB temperatures at large angular scales do not match those predicted by the standard model
  • their signals are not as strong as expected from the smaller scale structure
  • Another is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky
  • This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look
  • a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.
  • The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck's predecessor
  • NASA's WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin
  • One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe
  • In this scenario, the light rays from the CMB may have taken a more complicated route through the Universe than previously understood, resulting in some of the unusual patterns observed today.
  • ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together
  • we don't know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed
  • the Planck data conform spectacularly well to the expectations of a rather simple model of the Universe, allowing scientists to extract the most refined values yet for its ingredients
  • dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, accounts for less than previously thought.
  • Normal matter that makes up stars and galaxies contributes just 4.9% of the mass/energy density of the Universe
  • Dark matter, which has thus far only been detected indirectly by its gravitational influence, makes up 26.8%, nearly a fifth more than the previous estimate.
  • Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, known as the Hubble constant
  • At 67.15 kilometres per second per megaparsec, this is significantly less than the current standard value in astronomy
  • The data imply that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years.
  • We see an almost perfect fit to the standard model of cosmology, but with intriguing features that force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions
Mars Base

Dark matter detector reports hints of WIMPs | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...etector_reports_hints_of_WIMPs

scibyte91 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 16 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ultracold crystals designed to catch particles of dark matter deep underground have come up with three potential detections
  • The researchers do not have enough evidence to say they have discovered dark matter particles
  • Theoretical physicists have put forth some ideas for particles that might constitute dark matter, including one called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • The experiment that made the newly reported detections is designed to pick up the signal of a WIMP as Earth passes through the galaxy
  • The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search consists of a network of silicon and germanium crystals cooled to near absolute zero
  • in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, a former iron mine more than 700 meters beneath the surface
  • If WIMPs exist, one should very occasionally slam into the nucleus of a silicon or germanium atom, causing a release of energy and a detectable vibration in the crystal
  • The hundreds of meters of earth above the experiment prevent other particles, such as protons and neutrons, from reaching the crystals and triggering a false positive
  • between July 2007 and September 2008, two of the experiment’s 11 silicon crystal detectors picked up three signals consistent with those expected from WIMP interactions
  • If the signals were caused by WIMPs
  • estimates the dark matter particle would weigh in at about 10 times the mass of the proton, well below many theoretical estimates
  • While the crystals’ underground setup provides plenty of shielding, some non-WIMP particles, such as electrons on the crystals’ surface, can cloud the results
  • it’s extremely unlikely that three events would show up from non-WIMP sources.
  • the energy released by the potential WIMPs is at the very lower limit of the detectors’ sensitivity
  • making erroneous WIMP detections more likely
  • concerns that the two crystals that picked up the signal could be more susceptible to false positives than the rest
  • In 2009, CDMS published a paper reporting that its germanium detectors had snagged two potential WIMPs, but further analysis revealed them to be surface electrons
  • more convinced if the detectors had picked up 10 or 12 signs of WIMPs, rather than just three
  • definitive detection would require multiple experiments worldwide to converge on the same characteristics for a dark matter particl
  • One in Italy called DAMA, short for Dark Matter, has made bold claims of dark matter detection that have drawn skepticism from many scientists
  • Other experiments have claimed to find signals at masses similar to this latest CDMS calculation but have not definitively said they have observed WIMPs
  • each experiment uses a different detection technique and has its own protocol for distinguishing WIMPs from background noise, making it hard to compare results
  • As for CDMS, the silicon detectors that found these signals are no longer collecting data
  • Researchers recently upgraded the Soudan facility with supersensitive germanium detectors
  • Over the next few years, the germanium detectors will move to a new, deeper underground home in Sudbury, Ontario, about 2 kilometers below the surface
Mars Base

Scientists sense breakthroughs in dark-matter mystery - 0 views

phys.org/...oughs-dark-matter-mystery.html

scibyte82 scibyte83 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 19 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Dark matter throws down the gauntlet to the so-called Standard Model of physics.
  • Elegant and useful for identifying the stable of particles and forces that regulate our daily life, the Standard Model only tells part of the cosmic story
  • it does not explain gravity, although we know how to measure gravity and exploit it for our needs
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the Standard Model has been found to account for only around four or five percent of the stuff in the Universe
  • dark matter, making up 23 percent, and dark energy, an enigmatic force that appears to drive the expansion of the Universe, which accounts for around 72 or 73 percent.
  • The dark matter theory was born 80 years ago when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky discovered that there was not enough mass in observable stars or galaxies to allow the force of gravity to hold them together
  • why dark matter has six times the energy that is in ordinary matter
  • could be 10 trillions times bigger
  • first results will be published in two to three weeks
  • High-powered instruments track cosmic particles
  • To track these phantom particles, physicists rely on several methods and tools
  • One is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which captures gamma rays coming from collisions of dark matter particles.
  • only suggesting that these highly anticipated results would give humans a better idea about the nature of dark matter
  • Another tool used by the scientists is the South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which tracks subatomic particles known as neutrinos, which, according to physicists, are created when dark matter passes through the Sun and interacts with protons
  • Another
  • is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, the biggest particle smasher in the world
Mars Base

After Higgs Boson, scientists prepare for next quantum leap - 0 views

phys.org/...-boson-scientists-quantum.html

scibyte82 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 16 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Seven months after its scientists made a landmark discovery that may explain the mysteries of mass, Europe's top physics lab will take a break from smashing invisible particles to recharge for the next leap
  • From Thursday, the cutting-edge facilities at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will begin winding down, then go offline on Saturday for an 18-month upgrade
  • scientists said they were 99.9 percent certain they had found the elusive Higgs Boson,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The upgrade will boost the LHC's energy capacity, essential for CERN to confirm definitively that its boson is the Higgs, and allow it to probe new dimensions such as supersymmetry and dark matter
  • We need to increase the energy to look at more physics.
  • Over the past three years, CERN has slammed protons together more than six million billion times
  • espite the shutdown, CERN's researchers won't be taking a breather, as they must trawl through a vast mound of data
  • think a year from now, we'll have more information on the data accumulated over the past three years
  • Last year, the LHC achieved a collision energy level of eight teraelectron volts, an energy measure used in particle physics—up from seven in 2011
  • After it comes back online in 2015, the goal is to take that level to 13 or even 14, with the LHC expected to run for three or four years before another shutdown.
Mars Base

End of the World: 10 Disasters That Could End It All At Any Given Second - Best of the ... - 0 views

botw.org/endworld.html

scibyte75 End-of-the-World

shared by Mars Base on 13 Dec 12 - Cached
  • Gamma-Ray Burst
  • Gamma-ray bursts are extremely powerful, estimated to have 10 quadrillion times more energy than our sun
  • They are created by the collision of two collapsed stars
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • it is almost impossible to visualize collapsed stars making it even more difficult to predict the location of a gamma-ray burst
  • A burst 1,000 light years from the earth (further away than most of our stars) would create an explosion as bright as our sun and bring a hasty destruction to earth
  • atmosphere and the ozone would provide protection at first it would soon be cooked away by the radiation. UV rays would kill the photosynthetic plankton in the ocean, which provide most of the earth's oxygen
  • At least one burst can be seen each day when watching our sky with gamma-ray vision; it can't be too long before there is one closer to home
  • earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the consequences of these potentially lethal flares
  • The sun emits solar flares, also known as coronal mass ejections, towards earth frequently
  • These flares are large magnetic outbursts which contain high-speed subatomic particles
  • evidence has been found that sun-like stars far from our solar system can briefly increase in brightness by 20 times
  • hypothesized that these increases are caused by super-flares, which are millions of times more powerful than the common solar flare
  • If our sun were to emit one of these super-flares it would literally fry the earth
  • if our sun's activity were to decrease by a mere 1% (which has been known to happen to many sun-like stars) we would be flung back into another ice age
  • Solar Activity (Super-Flares and Decreased Activity)
  • Particle Accelerators
  • When electric fields are used to accelerate protons they could collide at speed fast enough to create black holes or bits of altered matter
  • These small black holes would slowly engulf our planet
  • pieces of altered matter, called strangeletes, would destroy any ordinary matter they came in contact with, eventually annihilating the entire planet
  • most scientists assure that none of the particle accelerators being used at the present are strong enough to bring about these events
Mars Base

Voyager 1 may have left the solar system - 0 views

phys.org/...012-10-voyager-left-solar.html

scibyte67 Voyager1

shared by Mars Base on 11 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • there's no official word from NASA
  • the buzz
  • is that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • evidence comes from this graph, above, which shows the number of particles, mainly protons, from the Sun hitting Voyager 1 across time
  • uge drop at the end of August hints that Voyager 1 may now be in interstellar space
  • on July 28, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our Solar System dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels. But then the bottom dropped out at the end of August.
  • Voyager team has said they have been seeing two of three key signs of changes expected to occur at the boundary of interstellar space
  • drop in particles from the Sun
  • jump in the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our Solar System.
  • third key sign would be the direction of the magnetic field
  • No word on that yet, but scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction
  • Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space.
  • Voyager project scientist for the entire mission, who was quoted in early August. "We are certainly in a new region at the edge of the solar system where things are changing rapidly. But we are not yet able to say that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space."
  • the data are changing in ways that the team didn't expect, "but Voyager has always surprised us with new discoveries."
  • Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, is approximately 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) from the Sun
  • Voyager 2, which launched on Aug. 20, 1977, is close behind, at 15 billion km (9.3 billion miles) from the Sun.
Mars Base

Japanese Team Claims Discovery Of Elusive Element 113, And May Get To Name It | Popular... - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...lement-113-and-may-get-name-it

scibyte65 elements

shared by Mars Base on 30 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Japanese researchers claim they’ve seen conclusive evidence of the long-sought element 113, a super-heavy, super-unstable element near the bottom of the periodic table
  • not yet verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
  • if the IUPAC grants its blessing, the researchers could be the first team from Asia to name one of nature’s fundamental atoms.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Super-heavy elements do not occur in nature and have to be discovered in the lab, using particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, ion separators and other complex equipment
  • Science have been hunting for 113 for nine years, and have claimed to see it a few times already — but the evidence has never been this clear,
  • the team used a customized gas-filled recoil ion separator paired with a semiconductor detector that can pick out atomic reaction products
  • created element 113 by speeding zinc ions through a linear accelerator until they reached 10 percent of the speed of light.
  • ions then smashed into a piece of bismuth. When the zinc and bismuth atoms fused, they produced an atom with 113 protons
Mars Base

Europe OKs Funding for Mars Mission with Russia | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/mars-mars-mission-funding.html

scibyte39 mars

shared by Mars Base on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • European Space Agency (ESA
  • agreed to continue funding a Mars telecommunications orbiter and atmospheric gas analyzer mission for launch in 2016
  • Russian Proton rocket donated by the Russian space agency
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • ExoMars is a two-mission project that is considered as a single program at ESA
  • council decision removes an immediate problem for ExoMars, it does not solve the longer-term funding issue that has dogged the project for years
  • ESA wants to have a high-resolution imager on their 2016 mission, but the hitch is they need a commitment from NASA
  • ESA official said that with ExoMars now taking on more scientific instruments, many provided by Russia
Mars Base

Physicists On Alert For Higgs Announcement - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...n_alert_for_Higgs_announcement

scibyte53 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Rumors of an impending Very Important Higgs Announcement
  • The two teams searching for the elusive particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, are keeping quiet.
  • people work day and night including weekends to reach a scientifically validated result
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • is morphing almost constantly
  • A Higgs produced from the energy of the colliding protons remains intact for so short a time that it can’t be observed direct
  • Instead, scientists infer its presence from the rubble produced when it falls apart
  • The Higgs boson *does* give particles mass
Mars Base

New Particle at World's Largest Atom Smasher is Likely Higgs Boson | LHC | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/son-particle-lhc-findings.html

scibyte53 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 04 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Physicists are more than 99 percent sure that they've found a new elementary particle that is likely the long-sought Higgs boson.
  • they'd seen a particle weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton
  • it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The Higgs
  • is thought to hold the key to one of the mysteries of the universe: Why do things have mass?
  • statistics reach a level called 5 sigma, meaning that there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal isn't real.
  • data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV
  • GeV stands for gigaelecton volts
  • Today's findings come from the two general-purpose experiments at LHC, ATLAS and CMS. Both observed particle collisions independently and analyzed their observations separately
  • scientists from each team were not allowed to tell each other what they found until today, for fear their results would bias the other experiment's researchers toward looking for the same results.
Mars Base

At Long Last, Physicists Discover Famed Higgs Boson - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...-last-physicists-discover.html

scibyte53 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 04 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Both the CMS (top) and the ATLAS (bottom) detectors see evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of photons in the form of a peak in a so-called mass plot. The agreement of the two peaks and other data clinch the discovery of the Higgs.
  • CMS detector see clear signs of the Higgs decaying into two photons
  • From the energies of the two photons, physicists can infer the mass of their supposed parent particle
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • peak atop a background produced by random photon pairs
  • signals the presence of a Higgs-like particle with a mass of 125 giga-electron volts (GeV) or about 133 times the mass of the proton
  • CMS researchers also see evidence of the Higgs decaying to a pair of particles called W bosons or a pair of particles called Z bosons
  • ATLAS team sees a similar peak in the mass plot for Higgses decaying into photon pairs
  • ATLAS researchers also see the Higgs decaying into Z bosons and other combinations of particles
  • Taken together, ATLAS's signals just meet the 5 sigma standard of discovery, Gianotti reported, earning immediate applause
  • in 1970, theorists predicted the existence of a particle called the charm quark; two experimenters independently discovered the particle in 1974, for which they received the Nobel Prize in physics 2 years later
  • In 1968, theorists predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons; in 1983, those particles were also discovered
  • won the Nobel Prize in
  • won it in 1984
  • Physicists say that conceptual holes in the standard model strongly suggest that the theory is incomplete
  • in the standard model interactions between the Higgs and the other particles ought to force the mass of the Higgs to skyrocket to a value a trillion times larger
  • that doesn't happen
  • most physicists suspect there are new particles out there that somehow counteract ballooning of the Higgs mass.
  • But will such particles have low enough masses to be discovered with any conceivable human-made atom smasher? "There's absolutely no guarantee,"
  • Peter Higgs
Mars Base

Physicists to Make Major 'God Particle' Announcement Next Week | Higgs Boson & Particle... - 0 views

www.space.com/article-announcement-week.html

scibyte25 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 09 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • cautioned that LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments have not accrued enough data to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, an as yet undetected particle thought to give all other particles their mass
  • particle is thought to have a mass of between 114 and 185 gigaelectronvolts, or GeVs. (One GeV is equivalent to the mass of a proton, the positively charged particle in the nucleus of an atom
  • Tantalizing data spikes between 120 and 140 GeV suggest that the Higgs mass might lie in that range, the LHC teams reported in July
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the data at that stage was not reliable enough to make any scientific claims
Mars Base

10 Amazing Things NASA's Huge Mars Rover Can Do | NASA, Mars Science Laboratory & Curio... - 0 views

www.space.com/s-rover-curiosity-science.html

scibyte22 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 20 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Mast Camera (MastCam)
  • capture high-resolution color pictures and video of the Martian landscape, which scientists will study and laypeople will gawk at
  • Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI)
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • will function much like a high-powered magnifying glass
  • instrument will take color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns — smaller than the width of a human hair
  • MAHLI sits on the end of Curiosity's five-jointed, 7-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm
  • Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)
  • small camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent to the Martian surface
  • will click on a mile or two above the ground, as soon as Curiosity jettisons its heat shield. The instrument will then take video at five frames per second until the rover touches down. The footage will help the MSL team plan Curiosity's Red Planet rovings, and it should also provide information about the geological context of the landing site, the 100-mile-wide
  • Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM)
  • makes up about half of the rover's science payload.
  • a suite of three separate instruments — a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer
  • will search for carbon-containing compounds, the building blocks of life as we know it
  • look for other elements associated with life on Earth, such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen
  • The rover's robotic arm will drop samples into SAM via an inlet on the rover's exterior
  • Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin)
  • CheMin will identify different types of minerals on Mars and quantify their abundance
  • will help scientists better understand past environmental conditions on the Red Planet
  • CheMin has an inlet on Curiosity's exterior to accept samples delivered by the rover's robotic arm
  • will shine a fine X-ray beam through the sample, identifying minerals' crystalline structures based on how the X-rays diffract
  • Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam)
  • This instrument will fire a laser at Martian rocks from up to 30 feet (9 meters) away and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits
  • help the mission team determine from afar whether or not they want to send the rover over to investigate a particular landform
  • The laser sits on Curiosity's mast, along with a camera and a small telescope
  • Three spectrographs sit in the rover's body, connected to the mast components by fiber optics
  • spectrographs will analyze the light emitted by excited electrons in the vaporized rock samples
  • Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)
  • sits at the end of Curiosity's arm, will measure the abundances of various chemical elements in Martian rocks and dirt
  • APXS will shoot out X-rays and helium nuclei. This barrage will knock electrons in the sample out of their orbits, causing a release of X-rays. Scientists will be able to identify elements based on the characteristic energies of these emitted X-rays
  • Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN)
  • located near the back of Curiosity's main body, will help the rover search for ice and water-logged minerals beneath the Martian surface
  • The instrument will fire beams of neutrons at the ground, then note the speed at which these particles travel when they bounce back. Hydrogen atoms tend to slow neutrons down, so an abundance of sluggish neutrons would signal underground water or ice
  • should be able to map out water concentrations as low as 0.1 percent at depths up to 6 feet (2 m).
  • Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD)
  • instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays
  • designed specifically to help prepare for future human exploration of Mars
  • will allow scientists to determine just how much radiation an astronaut would be exposed to on Mars
  • Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS)
  • partway up Curiosity's mast, is a Martian weather station
  • measure atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation.
  • integrated into daily and seasonal reports
  • MSL Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation (MEDLI)
  • MEDLI isn't one of Curiosity's 10 instruments
  • will measure the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky
  • will tell engineers how well the heat shield, and their models of the spacecraft's trajectory, performed
  • data to improve designs for future Mars-bound spacecraft
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