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Mars Base

'Space Selfie' Telescope Could Hunt Alien Planets … If It Raises A Cool $2M - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...planets-if-it-raises-a-cool-2m

scibyte98 CrowdSourcing Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A crowdfunded telescope
  • is now considering a search for alien planets.
  • Planetary Resources Inc. (the proposed asteroid miners) announced a new “stretch goal” for its asteroid-hunting Arkyd-100 telescope.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If the company can raise $2 million — double its original goal — it promises to equip the Arkyd telescope to look at star systems for exoplanets
  • partnering with exoplanet researchers at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Arkyd would use two methods to hunt down planets
  • Transiting, or seeing the dip in a star’s brightness when a planet passes in front of it;
  • Gravitational microlensing, or finding planets by measuring how the gravity of the star (and its planets) distorts light from stars and galaxies behind
  • If it can raise $1.3 million, Planetary Resources proposes to build a ground station at an undisclosed “educational partner” that would double the download speed of data from the orbiting observatory
  • Two more stretch goals will be revealed if Arkyd receives 11,000 backers and 15,000 backers
Mars Base

Asteroid Miners' Crowdfunded Space Telescope May Hunt Exoplanets | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/pace-telescope-exoplanets.html

scibyte98 CrowdSourcing Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • the company announced today (June 11) that it would upgrade the Arkyd to hunt for alien planets if the campaign nets $2 million by the deadline
  • Giving the Arkyd this ability would require improving its stability systems and devoting time to study candidate stars
Mars Base

Video Transcript: Curiosity's Cameras - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - 0 views

www.jpl.nasa.gov/...video-transcript.php

scibyte98 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • received a lot of questions about the cameras on the rovers and we're here to answer some of those questions
  • The Curiosity rover actually has 17 cameras on it, which is the most of any NASA planetary mission ever.
  • took pictures as the rover was landing on Mars
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • MARDI, or the Mars Descent Imager,
  • is the camera mounted on the end of the arm, and that takes close-up, high-resolution color photos
  • MAHLI
  • hazard avoidance cameras, or the HazCams. There are four of these in the front and four in the back, and they're used to take pictures of the terrain near the wheels and nearby the rover
  • Navigation Cameras, which take pictures that are used to drive the rover
  • Mast Cameras, which are color imagers, which are used to do geology investigations
  • the remote microscopic imager, which is part of the ChemCam laser instrument. And that's used to document the laser spots, that the rover makes on the surface
  • Many of the black and white images that come back from the rover are
  • black and white, or gray scale as we call it, is because that's all the rover really needs in order to detect rocks and other obstacles
  • Other cameras are color, such as the Mastcam imager, and the reason that they're color is because the scientists use the color information to learn about the soil and the rocks
  • There are 1-megapixel black and white imagers for the engineering cameras and 2-megapixel color imagers for the science cameras
  • In addition to the video that we took when the rover descending on to the surface, we've taken movies of the soil being shaken in the scoop.
  • files are pretty large and because we have a limited downlink each day, the scientists prefer to take still images of new targets
Mars Base

LEGO to Roll Out Mars Rover Curiosity as Toy Model | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/over-curiosity-lego-model.html

scibyte98 lego Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The Denmark-based LEGO Group chose a fan-built model of the car-size rover to be the next release in its CUUSOO line of building brick toys.
  • Pakbaz designed the model to feature many of the details of the real Mars rover, including its "rocker-bogie" wheel suspension that enables Curiosity to navigate the Martian surface
  • He separately built a model of the rover's "sky crane" descent stage, which lowered Curiosity down into the crater, although whether that component will make it into the final product is not yet known
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  • The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover will be the fifth model in the LEGO CUUSOO line and the second to feature a space theme
  • In March 2012, LEGO released a model of Japan's Hayabusa asteroid-sampling probe as designed and suggested by LEGO fan Daisuke Okubo
Mars Base

Results of the Fall 2012 LEGO® Review - The Official LEGO® CUUSOO Blog - 0 views

blog.lego.cuusoo.com/...results-fall-2012-lego-review

scibyte98 lego Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The final product is still in development. Exact pricing and availability is still being determined
Mars Base

Mars Rover Opportunity Nears Nebulous Off-Planet Driving Record | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/pportunity-driving-record.html

scibyte97 scibyte98 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The all-time mark is held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled about 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the moon back in 1973
  • Opportunity
  • racked up 22.75 miles (36.61 km) on Mars
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  • it's unclear
  • the old moon rover's mark is imprecise
  • 37 kilometers is highly uncertain
  • Scientists now have high-quality images of the moon taken by spacecraft such as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and some of these photos even show Lunokhod 2's tracks
  • researchers could nail down the longstanding off-planet driving record if they wanted to
  • But he and his fellow Opportunity team members have no plans to do this work themselves
Mars Base

Antarctic's Mountains Revealed By Sharpest Map Yet - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...unken-mountains-antarctica-ice

scibyte97 scibyte98

shared by Mars Base on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • the British Antarctic Survey, Bedmap2 drew upon millions of new measurements of the frozen continent's surface elevation, ice thickness, and bedrock topography from a wide variety of sources collected over several decades
  • the original Bedmap relied mostly on ground-based measurements, which limited the scientists in terms of how much land they could cover
  • a NASA program called Operation IceBridge sends out airplanes that fly over the entire continent. The airplanes are equipped with lasers that measure the surface mountains' heights and other features, as well as ice-penetrating radar that maps subglacial bedrock—"giving [scientists] a more 3-D picture of the ice sheet itself
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  • the new data has revealed several smaller features—both on Antarctica's surface and buried under the ice—that were missed in the previous Bedmap effort
  • scientists want to know the shapes of mountains and rocks to model how fast ice will move across these features on its way to the ocean, where the ice can melt and contribute to sea level rise
Mars Base

Nontoxic cancer therapy proves effective against metastatic cancer - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...rapy-effective-metastatic.html

scibyte98 Cancer

shared by Mars Base on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A combination of nontoxic dietary and hyperbaric oxygen therapies effectively increased survival time in a mouse model of aggressive metastatic cancer
  • a research team from the Hyperbaric Biomedical Research Laboratory at the University of South Florida has found.
  • the research shows the effects of combining two nontoxic adjuvant cancer therapies, the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in a mouse model of late-stage, metastatic cancer
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  • demonstrates the potential of these cost-effective, nontoxic therapies to contribute to current cancer treatment regimens
  • Metastasis, the spreading of cancer from the primary tumor to distant spots, is responsible for over 90 percent of cancer-related deaths in humans
  • In the study, mice with advanced metastatic cancer were fed either a standard high carbohydrate diet or carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diet
  • Mice on both diets also received hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which uses a special chamber to increase the amount of oxygen in the tissues
  • The ketogenic diet forces a physiological shift in substrate utilization from glucose to fatty acids and ketone bodies for energy
  • Normal healthy cells readily adapt to using ketone bodies for fuel, but cancer cells lack this metabolic flexibility, and thus become selectively vulnerable to reduced glucose availability
  • Solid tumors also have areas of low oxygen, which promotes tumor growth and metastatic spread
  • Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves breathing 100 percent oxygen at elevated barometric pressure, saturating the tumors with oxygen
  • When administered properly, both the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are non-toxic and may even protect healthy tissues while simultaneously damaging cancer cells
  • both therapies slowed disease progression independently, animals receiving the combined ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy lived 78 percent longer than mice fed a standard high-carbohydrate diet
Mars Base

Concentrator solar cell with world's highest conversion efficiency of 44.4% - 0 views

phys.org/...-world-highest-conversion.html

scibyte98 scibyte99 SolarPower

shared by Mars Base on 16 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Sharp Corporation has achieved the world's highest solar cell conversion efficiency of 44.4%, using a concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell
  • Measurement of the value—which sets a record for the world's highest concentrating conversion efficiency—was confirmed
  • Compound solar cells typically offer high conversion efficiency while utilizing photo-absorption layers made from compounds of multiple elements, such as indium and gallium
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • triple-junction compound solar cells use a proprietary technology that enables the efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity by means of a stack of three photo-absorption layers
  • o achieve a concentrating conversion efficiency of 44.4%, Sharp worked to widen the effective concentrator cell surface and ensure uniformity of width at the interface of the connecting concentrator cell and electrodes.
  • Because of their high conversion efficiency, compound solar cells have thus far been used primarily on space satellites
Mars Base

Should This Alien World Even Exist? This Young Disk Could Challenge Planet-Formation Th... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...enge-planet-formation-theories

scibyte98 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • gap in the cloud? That could be a planet being born some 176 light-years away from Earth
  • small planet, only 6 to 28 times Earth’s mass.
  • This alien world, if we can confirm it, shouldn’t be there according to conventional planet-forming theory
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The gap in the image above — taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — probably arose when a planet under construction swept through the dust and debris in its orbit
  • That’s not much of a surprise (at first blush) given what we think we know about planet formation
  • You start with a cloud of debris and gas swirling around a star, then gradually the bits and pieces start colliding, sticking together and growing bigger into small rocks, bigger ones and eventually, planets or gas giant planet cores
  • this planet is a heck of a long way from its star, TW Hydrae, about twice Pluto’s distance from the sun
  • Given that alien systems’ age, that world shouldn’t have formed so quickly.
  • Astronomers believe that Jupiter took about 10 million years to form at its distance away from the sun
  • This planet near TW Hydrae should take 200 times longer to form because the alien world is moving slower, and has less debris to pick up
  • because TW Hydrae‘s system is believed to be only 8 million years old.
  • TW Hydrae is only 55 percent as massive as our sun
  • astronomers are seriously investigating other theories
  • One alternative brought up in the press release: perhaps part of the disc collapsed due to gravitational instability
  • If that is the case, a planet could come to be in only a few thousand years, instead of several million
  • add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out
  • If we can actually confirm that there’s a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties
  • direct collapse” theory, though: astronomers believe it takes a bunch of matter that is one to two times more massive than Jupiter before a collapse can occur to form a planet
  • this world is no more than 28 times the mass of Earth, as best as we can figure
  • Jupiter itself is 318 times more massive than Earth
  • There are also intriguing results about the gap
  • dust grains in this system, orbiting nearby the gap, are still smaller than the size of a grain of sand
  • Astronomers plan to use ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope, which should launch in 2018, to get a better look
Mars Base

Distantly Orbiting Alien World May Challenge Planet-Formation Theories | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/tantly-orbiting-exoplanet.html

scibyte98 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • red dwarf star TW Hydrae, which lies about 176 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra
  • if there is a planet and there is no dust larger than a grain of sand farther out, that would be a huge challenge to traditional planet formation models
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