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Mars Base

Space Shuttle Discovery Enters Smithsonian for Museum Display | NASA Shuttle Retirement... - 0 views

www.space.com/covery-smithsonian-museum.html

scibyte43 shuttle discovery AprMedia

shared by Mars Base on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Mars Base on 20 Apr 12
     
    ted with technological and scientific achievements, including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in 1990 and the deployment of the Ulysses solar probe the same year. The fleet leader, Discovery also returned the space shuttle program to flight after the losses of Challenger and Columbia in 1986 and 2003, respectively.
Mars Base

Gone perhaps, but Kepler won't soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._Kepler_wont_soon_be_forgotten

scibyte95 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • When scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scheduled a conference called “Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era,” they figured that era would still be several years away
  • . When
  • Kepler into space
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
  • Kepler’s then spent four years
  • added nearly 3,000 planets
  • It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
  • Kepler engineers
  • strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
  • astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
  • NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is scheduled for a 2017 launch
  • Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
  • s TESS
  • while less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
  • Astronomers
  • Other astronomers
  • are still optimistic. They have a year of data from the telescope left to analyze
  • quite possibly including an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance suitable for life
  • Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
  • Several years ago
  • radial velocity, could pick out only hulking planets that delivered a hard yank to their stars
  • lately the technology has improved so drastically that in October 2012, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument
  • spotted what appears to be a planet only slightly heavier than Earth tightly orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sunlike star a mere 4.4 light-years away
  • Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy
  • have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but
  • actually determining that number
Mars Base

Jeff Bezos Plans to Recover Apollo 11 Rocket Engines From Ocean Floor | Wired Science |... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...jeff-bezos-apollo-11-engines

scibyte40 apollo

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Billionaire Jeff Bezos announced plans to recover from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at least one of the F-1 engines that carried the Apollo 11 rocket into space
  • If one engine is raised, he imagines the agency would make it available to the public at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C
  • Should he recover more than one, he has asked NASA to consider making the second one available at the Museum of Flight in Seattle
Mars Base

Apollo 11′s Rocket Engines Found on the Bottom of the Ocean - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...und-on-the-bottom-of-the-ocean

scibyte40 Apollo

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has located the Apollo 11 F-1 rocket engines and plans to recover them
  • using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface
  • making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in
  • they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years
  • The Saturn V used five F-1 engines in the first stage
  • F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed
  • producing one and a half million pounds of thrust, burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second
  • On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was launched and the five F-1s burned for just a few minutes, and then plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean.
  • the engines remain the property of NASA
  • hopes that the space agency would allow the recovered engines to be displayed at the Smithsonian or another museum
  • no public funding will be used to attempt to raise and recover the engines, as it’s being undertaken by him privately
Chris Fisher

Scientists Discover That Mars is Full of Water | Surprising Science | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...hat-mars-is-full-of-water.html

mars water

shared by Chris Fisher on 26 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Now, according to an article published yesterday in the journal Geology, there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its interior as well.
  • The amount of water in the meteorites suggested that the Martian mantle contains somewhere between 70 and 300 parts per million of water—an amount strikingly similar to Earth’s own mantle. Because both the samples contained roughly the same water content despite their different geological histories on Mars, the researchers believe that the planet incorporated this water long ago, during the early stages of its formation. The paper also provides us with an answer for how underground water may have made its way to the Martian surface: volcanic activity.
Mars Base

Chasing Atlantis: An Upcoming Film about the Shuttle's Legacy - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...film-about-the-shuttles-legacy

scibyte60 shuttle

shared by Mars Base on 22 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Five Canadians made the trek to Florida to watch the final shuttle launch last year. They are wrapping up filming and interviews — which included astronauts and sci-fi stars — to discuss the legacy of the program.
  • How did you get down there?
  • drove the entire journey from Toronto to the Titusville/Cocoa Beach area
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • stopped at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to shoot prototype shuttle Enterprise before it was moved to New York City
  • we had written the Chasing Atlantis Twitter account and site URL on our cars
  • A NASA software engineer, Ryan Horan, saw our car with Paul shooting out the window as we passed by the sign for the Kennedy Space Center. He was interested in our project and sent us a tweet.
  • arranged
  • to join one of the first tours following the reopening of the Vehicle Assembly Building to the public.
  • The building is monstrously huge. It will generate its own weather system inside, sometimes producing micro-rain clouds.
  • The film was completely self-funded
  • posting an Indie-Go-Go or Kickstarter profile up in hopes of helping to cover the post-production costs
Mars Base

Students: Asteroid 1999 RQ36 Needs a New Name! - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...oid-1999-rq36-needs-a-new-name

scibyte62 Asteroid

shared by Mars Base on 06 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • NASA and the Planetary Society are giving students worldwide the opportunity to name an asteroid
  • an upcoming NASA mission will return samples of this asteroid to Earth
  • Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) will be heading to an asteroid, currently named (101955) 1999 RQ36
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Scheduled to launch in 2016
  • NASA also is planning a crewed mission to an asteroid by 2025
  • competition is open to students under age 18 from anywhere in the world
  • Each contestant can submit one name, up to 16 characters long
  • must include a short explanation and rationale for the name
  • Submissions must be made by an adult on behalf of the student. The contest deadline is Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012
  • sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington; and the University of Arizona in Tucson
  • A panel will review proposed asteroid names. First prize will be awarded to the student who recommends a name that is approved by the International Astronomical Union Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature
  • asteroid was discovered in 1999
  • received its designation of (101955) 1999 RQ36 from the Minor Planet Center, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Mars Base

First hints of gravitational waves in the Big Bang's afterglow - 0 views

phys.org/...avitational-big-afterglow.html

scibyte124 Inflation

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As the last untested prediction of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, finding gravitational waves is a big deal.
  • Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US have announced
  • what they believe is the indirect detection of gravitational waves in the afterglow of the Big Bang.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The BICEP discovery provides further indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves
  • the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor for finding a double pulsar that strongly supported these "ripples" in spacetime
  • Before this announcement
  • we could measure the universe back to about a minute after the Big Bang.
  • The finding
  • has allowed us to study the universe when it was a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old
  • tiny changes in temperature that were discovered by the COBE satellite (winning the 2006 Nobel Prize)
  • Alternative theories to inflation do not produce gravitational waves so
  • is strong evidence not only of the gravitational wave background but also inflation itself.
  • there has still been no direct detection of the gravitational radiation.
  • The first direct detection should follow in a few months
  • It is envisaged that the experiment will directly detect gravitational radiation coming from astrophysical sources from nearby galaxies
Mars Base

Global "Selfie" to Be Beamed to Outer Space - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...fie-message-new-horizons-space

scibyte131 NewHorizons NewHorizonsMessage

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • This summer, you will get that chance to send a message to other worlds.
  • leaders of an initiative called New Horizons Message Initiative, announced
  • at the Smithsonian Future Is Here Festival in Washington, D.C., that NASA has agreed to upload a digital crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons spacecraft
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project
  • The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects
  • If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.
  • it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way
  • The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).
  • When New Horizons' journey was being planned
  • other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight
  • didn't have the bandwidth for
  • the message
  • . "Now
  • It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes
  • Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally
  • In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.
  • Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support
  • This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago
  • The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands
  • Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)
  • Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include
  • "Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."
  • , a National Geographic emerging explorer
  • will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.
  • the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years
  • The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year
  • "The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."
  • Pluto may not be the final mission target
  • hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system
  • If that happens, the message upload will be delayed
  • As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it
  • cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory
  • The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will
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