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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

Comets Disintegrate Faster on Deeper Dives Into Sun | Sun-Diving Comets | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/iving-comets-solar-system.html

scibyte41

shared by Mars Base on 02 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Comets skimming past the sun may seem like ill-fated cosmic snowballs, and a team of scientists is trying to figure out what makes some fizzle and others explode as they make their solar death dives
  • may yield clues
  • origins of the solar system
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • shed light on the potential risks the comet deaths on the sun could pose for us on Earth
  • In recent decades, astronomers have witnessed even dramatic interactions between comets and the sun
  • researchers are analyzing how these so-called sun-diving comets lose their mass and energy depending on how close they get to the star.
  • Such data can show us for the first time what is inside a comet
  • All other data to date, apart from Jupiter impacts like Shoemaker-Levy 9, are only from the surface layers."
  • the sun's lower atmosphere. This lies about 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) above the top of the photosphere, the sun's brightest visible layer.
  • sunskimmer" comets — ones that dive toward the sun but not into its lower atmosphere — can slowly get vaporized by sunlight in deaths that last hundreds to thousands of seconds, depending on their mass
  • scientists calculated that the comets should emit weak but detectable extreme ultraviolet radiation.
  • sunplunger" comets that get even closer to the sun will meet their demise in only a few seconds, as they collide with the dense layers of the sun's lower atmosphere
  • most massive comets smashed into the sun, they would produce dramatic explosions just above the photosphere
  • To create their model, the scientists looked at the first direct observations of sunskimmer comets, captured last year by NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
  • comet, C/2011 N3, was completely destroyed after passing about 62,000 miles (100,000 km) above the photosphere
  • comet, Lovejoy (C/2011 W3), survived a close approach to a similar distance of 87,000 miles (140,000 km), although it lost a significant fraction of its mass in the process
  • Both events were in line with the predictions of the researchers' new model.
  • corona is hot, but its density is so small that the heat Lovejoy experienced "would be quite safe even on our skin
  • Comet Lovejoy did pass through the sun's million-degree corona
  • Comets might help serve as probes of the sun's atmosphere and magnetic field, helping to uncover its secrets
  • cometary flares that the very largest comets might release if they slammed into the sun can be 100 times more energetic than the largest solar flares ever observed
  • Such comets are, however, very, very rare today, though they may have been commoner in the early system
Mars Base

Giant Feathered Tyrannosaur Found in China | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...yutyrannus-huali-feathers

scibyte41 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Artist's impression of Yutyrannus and the smaller Beipiaosaurus. Image: Brian Choo
  • covered from head to tail in downy feathers.
  • 30 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds, Y. huali wasn’t so large as T. rex,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • found in the Yixian Formation, a fossil deposit in northeastern China that over the last two decades has yielded dozens of dinosaur skeletons so finely preserved that it’s possible to discern feather-like structures.
  • early feathered members of the tyrannosaur family have been found, they were very smal
  • If the primary purpose of feathers was insulation, a possibility suggested by the feathers’ down-like shape, then larger tyrannosaurs might not have needed them. Thanks to small surface-to-volume body ratios, large-bodied animals tend to maintain heat easily.
  • didn’t know whether these larger-bodied forms would show as many.”
  • significance of Y. huali is its body size and the apparent density of feather-like structures
  • Yutyrannus skull. Image: Zang Hailong
  • What were tyrannosaur feathers used for? Might the king of dinosaurs have strutted like a peacock?
  • At this point we don’t have any data on the coloration of the plumage
Mars Base

How One Faulty Nitrogen-Purge Valve Forced SpaceX to Abort | Autopia | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...cex-nitrogen-purge-valve-abort

scibyte47 SpaceX PrivateSpaceTravel iss

shared by Mars Base on 22 May 12 - No Cached
  • SpaceX engineers were able to trace the high-pressure problem to a valve that controls the flow of nitrogen used to purge the engine before ignition
  • check valve that allows the nitrogen purge prior to ignition in the Merlin engine was stuck open just before launch
  • stuck valve allowed “liquid oxygen to flow from the main injector [for the rocket engine itself] into the gas generator injector
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • stuck valve meant the liquid oxygen flowed into the gas generator injector, which led to the high pressure in engine five’s combustion chamber. The high pressure caused the flight computer to shutdown the engines, aborting the launch
  • the Falcon 9 may have been okay even if it had launched with the high pressure
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

Scientist: Russia's Failed Mars Moon Probe Worth a Second Try | Russia Phobos-Grunt Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/bos-grunt-spacecraft-life.html

Phobos-Grunt

shared by Mars Base on 09 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • 08 December 2011
  • European Space Agency to resume tracking Phobos-Grunt this week, after calling off tracking last Friday (Dec. 2),
  • the probe was said to have shown signs of uncontrolled tumbling, yet reports in recent days suggest that its attitude control may now be working
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • unless Phobos-Grunt not only can be contacted, but can be made to accept commands to boost its orbit, the spacecraft will reenter the atmosphere in early January.
  • it is possible that the vibrations and tumbling that will set in as the speeding craft begins interacting significantly with mesospheric air will dislodge the vehicle's most famous component — the return capsule that was to carry a 200-gram sample from the Phobosian surface back to Earth —  sparing it a fiery death
  • the capsule might make a survivable reentry trajectory, miss the oceans, and come down on land, just as it was designed to do
Mars Base

Astronomers Discover 18 Huge New Alien Planets | Alien Planets & Solar Systems | Gas Gi... - 0 views

www.space.com/en-planets-keck-telescope.html

scibyte24

shared by Mars Base on 03 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have found 18 new alien planets, all of them Jupiter-size gas giants that circle stars bigger than our sun
  • increase the number of known planets orbiting massive stars by 50 percent
  • should also help astronomers better understand how giant planets form and grow
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • just a few months after a different team of researchers announced the discovery of 50 newfound alien worlds
  • including one rocky planet that could be a good candidate for life
  • list of known alien planets is now well over 700 and climbing fast
  • researchers surveyed about 300 stars using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and instruments in Texas and Arizona
  • focused on so-called "retired" type A stars that are at least 1.5 times more massive than our own sun
  • just beyond the main stage of life — hence the name "retired"
  • ballooning out to become what's known as subgiant stars
  • scrutinized these stars, looking for slight wobbles caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets
  • revealed 18 new alien worlds
  • All 18 planets also orbit relatively far from their stars, at a distance of at least 0.7 times the span from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers
  • the new finds lend support to one of two theories that attempt to explain the formation and evolution of planets
  • core accretion, posits that planets grow as gas and dust glom onto seed particles in a protoplanetary disk.
  • predicts that the characteristics of a planetary system — the number and size of planets, for example — depend strongly on the mass of the star
  • competing theory, called gravitational collapse, holds that planets form when big clouds of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into clumps that become planets
  • According to this idea, stellar mass should have little impact on planet size, number and other characteristics
  • it seems that stellar mass does in fact play an important role
Mars Base

NASA - Space Station Astronaut Will Answer Video Questions From Public - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...HQ_11-406_Ask_the_Crew.html

scibyte29 SpaceStation

shared by Mars Base on 03 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • unique opportunity to ask the commander of the International Space Station a question about his role on the orbiting outpost
  • Commander Dan Burbank will answer videotaped questions from the public during a live event tentatively set for Friday, Jan. 20
  • video questions must be less than 30 seconds
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Submitters should introduce themselves and mention their location
  • Questions must be posted as responses to a video Burbank recorded on YouTube at: http://go.nasa.gov/sDYpzP
  • Burbank launched to the station on Nov. 13
  • conduct a variety of science experiments and perform station maintenance during his nearly six-month stay on the outpost
  • Burbank will answer questions during the time available
  • airing live on NASA TV
  • answers will be posted to YouTube
  • http://twitter.com/AstroCoastie
  • Expedition 30 and the exact time of the event, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station
Mars Base

Long-lived NASA Rover Begins Probing Interior of Mars | NASA & Mars Rover Opportunity |... - 0 views

www.space.com/pportunity-winter-science.html

scibyte30 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • rover is allowing scientists to begin investigating the mysterious interior of the Red Planet
  • beaming radio signals home to Earth
  • analyzing these signals, researchers hope to get "a handle on the structure of the interior of the planet
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • distribution of mass, and perhaps how large the core might be
  • the rover won't sleep
  • , it will investigate the rocks at Greeley Haven, take panoramic photos of its surroundings
  • most important — send radio signals back to Earth.
  • mission team will track those signals
  • using Opportunity's motion relative to Earth as a proxy for the rotation of Mars
  • Scientists should thus be able to get very precise measurements of the planet's spin.
  • learning how Mars' spin axis has changed, or precessed, since NASA's Viking mission made similar measurements back in the mid-1970s
  • Knowing the precession rate should allow scientists to get a much better handle on the Red Planet's interior structure
  • keen to study Mars' nutation, which is a smaller-period variation in the planet's rotation. Such information might help reveal whether the Red Planet's core is solid or liquid
  • mission team will be tracking Opportunity's radio signals almost daily. After three to six months, researchers expect to have enough data to start getting an in-depth picture of the Martian interior
Mars Base

Scientists turning to crowdsourcing to gather more information about earthquakes - 1 views

www.physorg.com/...crowdsourcing-earthquakes.html

scibyte30 crowdsourcing earthquakes

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • In the past, seismologists have had to rely on information provided by just a few sensors in the vicinity of an earthquake to get information about it
  • afterwards, on anecdotal evidence provided by people that had experienced the quake first hand
  • new sources of data are becoming available that are giving scientists much more information about an earthquake,
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • example is Twitter. Because it’s a public system, scientists can use filters to pinpoint messages being sent about a specific topic, in this case earthquakes
  • researchers can watch in real time as people send messages about it, outpacing the quake itself
  • new sources of data are becoming available as well as more people become interested in helping scientists gather data
  • Seismic monitors can now be purchased by ordinary citizens, for example, and attached to buildings, private or public where they send data via WiFi to designated research facilities
  • Other new sources of data are becoming available as well as more people become interested in helping scientists gather
  • Smartphone apps are now available as well that can be used to turn a phone into a vibration sensing device during times when the phone is not being carried.
  • earthquake scientists have also begun to set up websites with query forms that people can fill in to add what they know about an earthquake to an existing database
  • seismologists are able to create a far more detailed picture of an earthquake
  • helps in understanding what led to it occurring and the more detailed information scientists receive the more accurate their prediction models should become
  • Citizens have long participated in earthquake science through the reporting, collection, and analysis of individual experiences
  • Today's communications infrastructure has taken citizen engagement to a new level
Mars Base

NASA - NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...epler_Smallest_Exoplanets.html

scibyte29 Kepler exoplanet small

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • using data from NASA's Kepler mission
  • discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun
  • smallest is about the size of Mars
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • thought to be rocky like Earth, but orbit close to their star
  • too hot to be in the habitable zone
  • Kepler
  • continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars
  • latest discovery comes from a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena
  • used data publicly released by the Kepler mission, along with follow-up observations from the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii
  • measurements dramatically revised the sizes of the planets from what originally was estimated.
  • more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system
  • Jan. 11, 2012
Mars Base

Tiny Worlds Around a Tiny Star (Infographic) | Smallest Alien Planets & KOI-961 Solar S... - 0 views

www.space.com/ets-tiny-star-infographic.html

scibyte29 exoplanet small Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 11 January 2012
  • astronomers announced the discovery of a miniature solar system made up of three tiny planets - all of them smaller than Earth
  • 130 light-years from Earth
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • using NASA's Kepler
Mars Base

NASA Honors Fallen Astronauts in Solemn Ceremony | Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger &... - 0 views

www.space.com/-ceremony-space-tragedies.html

scibyte31

shared by Mars Base on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Mars Base on 27 Jan 12
     
    Gus" Grisson
Mars Base

Battered Asteroid Lutetia a Rare Relic of Earth's Birth | Asteroids & Comets | Earth Fo... - 0 views

www.space.com/eroid-lutetia-earth-birth.html

scibyte21 Lutetia

shared by Mars Base on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The oddball asteroid Lutetia is a rocky remnant of the material that formed Earth, Venus and Mercury about 4.5 billion years ago, a new study suggests
  • Its composition suggests it likely formed close to the sun in the same cloud of material that eventually coalesced into the inner solar system's rocky planets.
  • then it was booted out to its current location in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, most likely after a run-in with a young planet
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Lutetia, which is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) across
  • Lutetia's spectrum matched that of one particular class of meteorite called enstatite chondrites, which are known to date from the early solar system
  • Enstatite chondrites are thought to have formed close to the sun and to have served as building blocks for the rocky planets, especially Earth, Venus and Mercury, researchers said.
  • The implication is that Lutetia also originated close to the sun, not out in the main asteroid belt where it currently sits
  • Lutetia's birthplace makes the space rock pretty special. Astronomers have estimated that just 2 percent of the bodies that formed where it likely did ended up in the main asteroid belt.
Mars Base

Outlook Grim for Stranded Russian Mars Moon Probe | Russia Phobos-Grunt Mars Moon Missi... - 0 views

www.space.com/n-mars-moon-probe-outlook.html

scibyte21 Phobos-Grunt

shared by Mars Base on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Attempts to contact the beleaguered Phobos-Grunt spacecraft overnight Thursday (Nov. 10) have failed
  • the spacecraft could fall back to Earth around Dec. 3
  • translated from its original Russian, suggested that if Phobos-Grunt does fall back to Earth, it would likely not fall over Russia
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • spacecraft's orbit carries it between the latitudes of 51.4 degrees north and south of the equator, a region that includes the United States, China, Africa, Japan, Ukraine and parts of southwestern Europe
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