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Mars Base

What a View! Exoplanet Odd Couple Orbit in Close Proximity - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ouple-orbit-in-close-proximity

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The bigger planet is pushing the smaller planet around more, so the smaller planet was harder to find
  • the star is a several billion years older than our Sun, and at this time is known to have just two planets
Mars Base

Shuttle Enterprise Beneath Shelter on NYC Museum Flight Deck | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/le-enterprise-nyc-display.html

scibyte52 shuttle enterprise

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Two weeks after "landing" on top of the aircraft carrier-turned-Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, NASA's prototype space shuttle Enterprise is now underneath the inflatable canopy that will house its public display.
  • Enterprise was covered by the opaque-white fabric shelter on Tuesday (June 19) to protect it from exposure to the elements and to meet NASA's display requirements for a climate-controlled facility
  • Some final work configuring the canopy is still underway however, including the removal of scaffolding that supported the fabric being raised, which led to it being deflated again.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • pressurized enclosure extends over Enterprise's tail, which tops out at 57 feet (17 meters) high, and beyond the shuttle's 78-foot (24-meter) wingspan. It occupies the rear of the Intrepid's flight deck with the shuttle's nose pointed out toward the Hudson River
  • display is set to open to the public on July 19
  • visitors the chance to closely view and circle around the prototype winged orbiter
  • The location for the permanent Enterprise exhibit is still to be decided. Intrepid officials told collectSPACE that they are considering locations across the street from where the aircraft carrier is docked and also alongside the museum on the pier.
Mars Base

Odd Alien Planets So Close Together They See 'Planetrise' | Kepler Mission | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/s-close-orbits-planetrise.html

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have discovered two alien planets around the same star whose orbits come so close together that each rises in the night sky of its sister world
  • ,200 light-years from Earth
  • differ greatly in size and composition but come within just 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) of each other, closer than any other pair of planets known,
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Kepler-36b, appears to be a rocky "super-Earth" 4.5 times as massive as our planet
  • Kepler-36c, is a gaseous, Neptune-size world about eight times as massive as Earth
  • planets meet up every 97 days in a conjunction that would make each dramatically visible in the other's sky.
  • At their closest approach, the two planets are separated by five times the distance between the Earth and the moon
  • as different in density as Earth and Saturn
  • Kepler-36b and c are actually more like 20 times closer together than any two planets in our neck of the woods
  • Kepler-36c, which is about 3.7 times wider than Earth, likely has a rocky core surrounded by a substantial atmosphere filled with lots of hydrogen and helium
  • Kepler-36b, on the other hand, is a super-Earth just 1.5 times wider than our planet. Iron likely constitutes about 30 percent of its mass, water around 15 percent and atmospheric hydrogen and helium less than 1 percent
  • Kepler-36c orbits once every 16 days, at an average distance of 12 million miles (19 million km). Kepler-36b orbits each 14 days and sits about 11 million miles (18 million km) from the star.
  • Kepler-36b probably formed relatively close to the star
  • Kepler-36c likely took shape farther out
  • large-scale migrations that can bring initially far-flung planets much closer together
  • Kepler-36b probably sporting lava flows on its surface
  • orbit roughly three times closer to their host star, known as Kepler-36a, than the hellishly hot planet Mercury does to our sun
  • Kepler-36a is likely a bit hotter than our star
Mars Base

Race is on to lure new SpaceX launchpad - 0 views

phys.org/...-06-lure-spacex-launchpad.html

scibyte52 SpaceX

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • A record-breaking mission to the International Space Station has triggered another space race back on Earth, with Florida competing against Texas and Puerto Rico for the chance to land a new launchpad for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and its ambitious line of Falcon rockets.
  • none of the rivals has made public the incentives each is offering, the numbers are certain to be in the millions of dollars.
  • The stakes are high: hundreds of good-paying jobs at SpaceX and supporting companies that would pop up around its operation, as well as the prestige - at a time when NASA is no longer flying its own rockets - of serving as home to the commercial space industry's most successful startup.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Musk met last week with Texas Gov. Rick Perry to discuss locating a launchpad at the southernmost tip of the Lone Star State.
  • SpaceX has not disclosed what incentives it has been offered or the timing of its decision
  • Musk recently indicated that Texas might have the inside track
  • Florida officials acknowledge the competition is keen. They're hoping to leverage the fact that SpaceX already has one launchpad at Cape Canaveral
  • SpaceX officials said the one Florida pad isn't enough to handle both its government work and flights for commercial customers
  • d a deal with Intelsat, a major satellite operator, for a future launch aboard a massive new rocket that is still under developmen
  • manifest already shows more than a half-dozen commercial flights through 2014 in which SpaceX will carry satellites to orbit.
  • Florida officials also note they have a track record of helping the company. Space Florida, the state's aerospace booster, has invested more than $8.5 million so far to help establish the company at Cape Canaveral.
  • Florida faces one obstacle that has no immediate solution. The Air Force and NASA already use Cape Canaveral for launches - of government satellites and space probes - and SpaceX at times could be forced to wait its turn until the range is clear.
  • autonomous as possible, having
  • Puerto Rican officials are making geography a core argument in their pitch.
  • Puerto Rico is closer to the equator than Cape Canaveral or Brownsville, which means SpaceX rockets would use less fuel (and thus cost less to launch to orbit) because rockets get more of a "boost" from Earth's rotation near the equator.
Mars Base

A Gamma-Ray Burst as Music - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...a-gamma-ray-burst-as-music

scibyte52 MusicalScience

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • members of the team that work with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) have translated gamma-ray measurements into musical notes
  • musical notes we assigned the photons to be “played” by different instruments (harp, cello, or piano) based on the probabilities that they came from the burst
Mars Base

Google sets out to save dying languages - 0 views

phys.org/...06-google-dying-languages.html

scibyte52 language google

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In an alliance with scholars and linguists, the Internet powerhouse on Wednesday introduced an Endangered Languages Project website where people can find, share, and store information about dialects in danger of disappearing.
  • diverse group of collaborators have already begun to contribute content ranging from 18th-century manuscripts to modern teaching tools like video and audio language samples and knowledge-sharing articles
  • endangeredlanguages.com is designed to let users upload video, audio, or text files and encourages them to memorialize recordings of rare dialects.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Only half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to survive past the end of this century
  • Technology can strengthen these efforts, by helping people create high-quality recordings of their elders (often the last speakers of a language),
  • Google's philanthropic arm seeded the project, leadership of which will be ceded in coming months to the First People's Cultural Council and the Institute for Language Information and Technology at Eastern Michigan University.
  • Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat), sponsored by the University of Hawaii, will also be contributing to the project.
Mars Base

Muscle reconstruction reveals how dinosaurs stood - 0 views

phys.org/...n-reveals-dinosaurs-stood.html

scibyte52 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Much is known about the dinosaurs that walked on 4 legs like Stegosaurus and Triceratops, but their stance has been a topic of debate
  • reconstructed the muscles on dinosaur limb bones and combined this with what is already known about their skeletons to get a truer picture of how they stood.
  • team looked at the horned dinosaurs (ceratopsids), the armoured dinosaurs (stegosaurs), and the duck-billed dinosaurs (hadrosaurs), 3 groups of ornithischian dinosaurs.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • studied more than 200 dinosaur fossil bone specimens, looking at how muscles and soft tissue attach to forelimbs, hind limbs, hip bones and vertebrae
  • results suggest the front limbs of the ceratopsids and the stegosaurs had elbows that were bent and held slightly out from the sides of the body
  • hadrosaurs held their forelimbs quite close together.
  • 'If a muscle is present in birds, and it is also present in crocodiles, then we can be quite sure it was also present in the dinosaurs,' says Maidment. 'By looking at all of the limb muscles in crocodiles and birds through dissection, we can build up a picture of the limb muscles in the dinosaurs.'
  • scientists use data from the dinosaurs' closest living relatives, birds and crocodiles.
  • Although their skeletons were very similar, the team found that the muscles were different
  • more diverse methods of locomotion than previously thought.
  • the shape of the bones alone does not tell the full story
  • We've already begun doing this and are producing 3D computational models of the limbs to look at how the muscles worked as the animals moved
  • Mars Base on 21 Jun 12
     
    The results suggest the front limbs of the ceratopsids and the stegosaurs had elbows that were bent and held slightly out from the sides of the body (as though it was half-way through a press up). In comparison the hadrosaurs held their forelimbs quite close together. Until now, scientists have just used the fossil skeletons to reconstruct what a dinosaur looked like. However, the team says the skeleton alone isn't a good predictor of how the animal stood, and it is crucial to look at the soft tissue as well. This also has implications for scientists who study behaviour an
Mars Base

Mars Snowflakes Are as Tiny as Red Blood Cells | Mars Weather | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/mars-snowflakes-tiny-snow.html

scibyte52 mars

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Snowflakes on Mars are smaller than their Earth counterparts, having roughly the same diameter as a human red blood cell, a new study reports.
  • analyzed observations made by two Mars-orbiting spacecraft to calculate the size of snowflakes
  • composed of carbon dioxide rather than water
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • team looked at temperature and pressure profiles taken by MRO to determine where and when conditions would allow carbon dioxide snow particles to form
  • analyzed measurements from MGS' laser altimeter, which gauged the topography of Mars by timing how long laser pulses took to bounce back from the planet's surface
  • Occasionally, the laser beam returned faster than anticipated, after ricocheting off cloud particles in the Martian atmosphere.
  • analyzing how much light these clouds reflected, the researchers were able to calculate the density of carbon dioxide in each one.
  • figured out the total mass of snow particles hovering above Mars' poles by examining earlier measurements of tiny, seasonal shifts in the planet's gravitational field.
  • put all of this information together to calculate the number and size of individual snow particles in the polar clouds at various times
  • found that particle size differed from pole to pole, with flakes in the north measuring between 8 to 22 microns and those in the south just 4 to 13 microns.
  • about comparable to the width of a human red blood cell, the researches said.
Mars Base

Photos of rare Amur tiger give hope to NE China's tiger recovery efforts - 0 views

phys.org/...photos-rare-amur-tiger-ne.html

scibyte52 CameraTrap

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Photos of a rare Amur tiger, caught on film for the first time in Wangqing Nature Reserve in northeast China’s Changbai mountains, are giving hope to tiger recovery efforts in the region.
  • captured two photos of the tiger in April
  • provide evidence of the extension of the Amur tiger’s range
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • footprints of the Amur tiger have been discovered many times in Wangqing since 2008, this is the first time that a camera trap set up in the reserve has captured photos of the rare species
  • Experts will try to identify the individual tiger photographed by comparing it with photos of Amur tigers taken previously in Hunchun.
  • Amur tigers were once widespread in northeast China
  • Estimates put the current wild Amur tiger population in Northeast China
  • between 18-24 individuals
  • The adjacent forested habitat of the Russian Far East holds more, between 430-500 tigers.
Mars Base

Could 'Mirror Neutrons' Account for Unobservable Dark Matter? - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...t-for-unobservable-dark-matter

scibyte52 DarkMatter neutron

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter
  • new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter
  • Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • reanalyzed the experimental data
  • which showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied.
  • oscillations between the parallel worlds could occur within a timescale of a few seconds
  • This isn’t the first time the existence of mirror matter has been suggested and has been predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic field such as Earth’s
Mars Base

Two 'Weird' Alien Planets Found Around Bright, Distant Stars | Space.com - 1 views

www.space.com/ets-kelt-telescope-aas220.html

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using a small ground-based telescope have discovered two unusual alien planets around extremely bright, distant stars.
  • detected using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) in southern Arizona, which has a lens that is roughly as powerful as a high-end digital camera
  • slightly more diminutive than Kepler
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • KELT-1b, is a massive world that is both incredibly hot and dense. The alien planet, which is mostly metallic hydrogen, is slightly larger than Jupiter, but contains a whopping 27 times the mass
  • completes one orbit in a mere 29 hours
  • surface temperature is likely above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 2,200 degrees Celsius
  • receiving 6,000 times the amount of radiation that Earth receives from the sun
  • located approximately 825 light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda
  • massive enough that KELT-1 has raised tides on its parent star and actually spun it
  • both KELT-1 and its parent star are locked in each other's gaze as they go around."
  • KELT-2Ab, and is located about 360 light-years away in the constellation of Auriga
  • 30 percent larger than Jupiter with 50 percent more mass.
  • KELT-2Ab's parent star is so bright it can be seen from Earth through binoculars
  • the star is so luminous that researchers will be able to make direct observations of the planet's atmosphere by examining light that shines through it when the star passes within KELT North's field of view again in November.
  • Follow-up observations are also being planned
  • as well as several space observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.
  • orbits a star that is slightly bigger than the sun, within a binary system
  • one star is slightly bigger than our sun, and the other star is slightly smaller. KELT-2Ab orbits the bigger star, which is bright enough to be seen from Earth with binoculars
  • using the so-called transit method, which involves watching for tiny dips in the star's light that could indicate a planet is crossing, or transiting
  • Rather than staring at a small group of stars at high resolution, the twin KELT North and KELT South telescopes observe millions of very bright stars at low resolution,
  • KELT North scans the northern sky from Arizona
  • KELT South covers the southern sky from Cape Town, South Africa.
  • small ground-based KELT telescopes provide a low-cost alternative for exoplanet hunters by primarily using off-the-shelf technology. The hardware for a KELT telescope costs less than $75,000
Mars Base

Engineers build 50 gigapixel camera - 0 views

phys.org/...2012-06-gigapixel-camera.html

scibyte52 camera

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • resolution is five times better than 20/20 human vision over a 120 degree horizontal field.
  • capture up to 50 gigapixels of data, which is 50,000 megapixels
  • most consumer cameras
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • ranging from 8 to 40 megapixels
  • researchers believe that within five years
  • gigapixel cameras should be available to the general public
  • Traditionally, one way of making better optics has been to add more glass elements, which increases complexity
  • camera was developed by
  • Duke's Pratt School of Engineering
  • University of Arizona
  • University of California
  • Distant Focus Corp
  • The camera is so large now because of the electronic control boards and the need to add components to keep it from overheating
  • prototype camera itself is two-and-half feet square and 20 inches dee
  • only about three percent of the camera is made of the optical elements
  • arrange for some overlap
Mars Base

ScienceShot: Get Ready for Gigapixels - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...ceshot-get-ready-for-giga.html

scibyte52 camera

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Researchers have developed a prototype "supercamera" that stitches together images from 98 individual cameras
  • to create a 960-million-pixel image with enough resolution to spot a 3.8-centimeter-wide object 1 kilometer away
  • Applied to a 120°-wide, near-fisheye view of the Seattle skyline
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the 93-kilogram camera (inset, upper left) captured enough detail to read the fine print on signs as much as two blocks away
  • camera's optics occupy only 3% of the volume of its 75-centimeter-by-75-centimeter-by-50- centimeter frame
  • needed both to contain the camera's circuit boards and to keep them from overheating
  • other camera systems can generate gigapixel-and-larger images, those composite views are stitched together from individual images taken sequentially with one camera as it is panned across the scene
  • new system takes all 98 images simultaneously, providing a "stop action" view of a scene
Mars Base

Carrots, not sticks, motivate workers - 0 views

phys.org/...2012-06-carrots-workers.html

scibyte52 Motivation

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • new study co-authored by a Michigan State University business scholar says it's the carrot – and not the stick – that drives productivity.
  • challenges previous research that says the threat of penalty is more effective for getting increased effort
  • findings show what carrots work better than sticks – in other words, workers respond better to bonuses than penalties
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • conducted a scientific experiment in which participants played the role of supervisor and employee
  • Some employees were subjected to a bonus program implemented by the supervisor
  • others worked under a penalty system.
  • Employees subjected to the bonus exhibited more effort and this was driven by greater trust in the supervisor
  • the study is the first to identify this trust factor.
  • those subjected to penalties tend to distrust the supervisor and, because of that, work less hard
  • employees who receive bonuses for their efforts will work even harder, increasing productivity and potentially bolstering profits
  • Examples of penalties in the business world include pay reduction, demotion and sanction or other disciplinary action, such as a salesperson with lower performance getting less territory to work.
Mars Base

Early Black Holes were Grazers Rather than Glutonous Eaters - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...s-rather-than-glutonous-eaters

scibyte52 black holes

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Black holes powering distant quasars in the early Universe grazed on patches of gas or passing galaxies rather than glutting themselves in dramatic collisions according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes
  • A black hole doesn’t need much gas to satisfy its hunger and turn into a quasar
  • Quasars are distant and brilliant galactic powerhouses. These far-off objects are powered by black holes that glut themselves on captured material; this in turn heats the matter to millions of degrees making it super luminous
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • team studied 30 quasars with NASA’s orbiting telescopes Hubble and Spitzer
  • These quasars, glowing extremely bright in the infrared images
  • telltale sign that resident black holes are actively scooping up gas and dust into their gravitational whirlpool
  • formed during a time of peak black-hole growth between eight and twelve billion years
  • supports evidence that the creation of the most massive black holes in the early Universe was fueled not by dramatic bursts of major mergers but by smaller, long-term events
  • found 26 of the host galaxies
  • about the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy, showed no signs of collisions
  • Quasars that are products of galaxy collisions are very bright
  • the process powering the quasars and their black holes lies below the detection of Hubble
  • prime targets for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, a large infrared orbiting observatory scheduled for launch in 2018
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