SciByte

The next big step for the commercial spaceflight company appears to be conducting a full flight test, igniting the rocket in the air.

Once SpaceShipTwo is operational, WhiteKnightTwo will carry the vehicle up to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) before releasing it.

After separation, SpaceShipTwo will accelerate to 2,500 mph (4,000 km/h) and eventually pass an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), the point at which passengers are considered astronauts

The spaceship will reach a peak altitude of 68 miles (110 km), giving the six passengers and two pilots about five minutes of weightlessness

Upon re-entry, SpaceShipTwo will be able to land on a conventional runway

A seat on board a SpaceShipTwo flight costs $200,000. More than 550 people have put down deposits to reserve a spot

In the movie, as the crew faces a deadly buildup of carbon dioxide, a team in mission control builds a new system on the spot that adapts an originally incompatible filter

The solution that they came up with was that they could make a way to use the vacuum cleaner in the command module with some plastic bags cut up and taped to the lithium hydroxide cartridges and blow through it with a vacuum cleaner

there was a simulation for the Apollo 8 mission where a cabin fan was jammed due to a loose screw

Joe [Joseph P.] Kerwin showed up, and we talked about “How did you build that bag and what did you do?”

In the movie, Mattingly spends hours in a simulator putting together the procedures for starting up the cold, dead command module in time to bring the astronauts safely back to Earth

the simulation runs (done by other astronauts, Mattingly said) were more of a verification of already written procedures

they went to the simulator there at JSC [Johnson Space Center], and we handed them these big written procedures and said, “Here. We’re going to call these out to you, and we want you to go through, just like Jack will. We’ll read it up to you. See if there are nomenclatures that we have made confusing or whatever. Just wring it out. See if there’s anything in the process that doesn’t work.”

2012 investigation that pioneered this memory enhancement strategy

The 2012 study showed a significant increase in long-term memory in healthy sea snails

study's co-lead author and a research scientist

has developed a sophisticated mathematical model that can predict when the biochemical processes in the snail's brain are primed for learning

model is based on five training sessions scheduled at different time intervals ranging from 5 to 50 minutes

can generate 10,000 different schedules and identify the schedule most attuned to optimum learning

Memory is due to a change in the strength of the connections among neurons. In many diseases associated with memory deficits, the change is blocked

senior research scientist

simulated a brain disorder in a cell culture by taking sensory cells from the sea snails and blocking the activity of a gene that produces a memory protein

This resulted in a significant impairment in the strength of the neurons' connections, which is responsible for long-term memory

To mimic training sessions, cells were administered a chemical at intervals prescribed by the mathematical model

After five training sessions, which like the earlier study were at irregular intervals, the strength of the connections returned to near normal in the impaired cells

This methodology may apply to humans if we can identify the same biochemical processes in humans

results suggest a new strategy for treatments of cognitive impairment

Mathematical models might help design therapies that optimize the combination of training protocols with traditional drug treatments

Combining these two could enhance

effectiveness

while compensating at least in part for any limitations or undesirable side effects of drugs

two approaches are likely to be more effective together than separately and may have broad generalities in treating individuals with learning and memory deficits."

Made of off-the-shelf electronics and plastic parts printed on an inexpensive 3D printer

Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive

Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines

SkySweeper could be outfitted with induction coils that would harvest energy from the power line itself, making it possible for the robot to stay deployed for weeks or months at a time

strengthening the clamps so they can release from the rope and swing down the line, one end to the other, thereby swinging past cable support points

It was hard to get people to recognize that we do that, but you don’t need to be the nearest five degrees

didn’t solve any problems in the simulator

actually ran those procedures, verified them, made some red lines, I think, brought them back over

They had to take their flight plan and turn it over and tear out pages and write on the back of it. The only thing they had were pencils and ball pens

actually had extra electrical power in the lunar module batteries

Somebody came in and found a way to do a jumper cord and take battery power out of the lunar module and top off the command module and to use that power to help get the command module stuff started so we didn’t use all the power from the batteries. So we ended up with a good margin on the batteries

Because all our procedures were based on two practical rules. One of them is, structural things don’t break. Actually, that drove everything. Fluid lines and structural—you know, joints can leak, shorts can happen to wires, but physical structure doesn’t break

if you admitted to that, then the number of things that you could have to prepare for is infinite.

had done a lot of testing of this, a lot of margin of safety in the hardware, so we never looked at those kinds of implications

Got in the car to drive back up. This is two days, I think, two days before launch, I think. I’m driving up the road, turned the radio on, and they interrupt the news announcement that this afternoon NASA has announced that they have changed and substituted Jack Swigert for me.

Gene says, “Sy, didn’t Jim say that he looked out the window and there’s stuff out in the sky and he heard something?” He says, “Does that sound like instrumentation to you?”

thanks to the kind of simulation training program we had, maybe the things weren’t exactly the same or in an exactly the same order, but everything we ended up doing had been done somewhere.

somewhere in an earlier sim, there had been an occasion to do what they call LM lifeboat, which meant you had to get the crew out of the command module and into the lunar module, and they stayed there

when you get out in space, that all those black spots in between the stars are filled with stars, and those constellations are nowhere near as obvious as they were

The guys in the lunar module electrical system had calculated how much time we had, and the two numbers didn’t match. So bringing on this platform is probably the biggest energy user in the spacecraft. Didn’t want to do it

They had a capability to maneuver, and they knew where they were, and now they could figure out what to do

a big debate about what to do next, as I recall, the books and the movies and all don’t really capture.

That debate of what to do next was also rather charged because there was one group of people that said, “You know, this has really been a bad day. We don’t know the condition of any piece of hardware we’ve got. We don’t want to do anything. Don’t touch anything. Let’s just figure this out.”

There’s others that said, “There’s only this much electricity and water in the lunar module. We need to turn around and come home as fast as possible.

Somewhere in there—I don’t remember all the details—we found out that a family that had gone to a picnic with Charlie and his family over the weekend, one of their kids had the measles, and Charlie was considered exposed

One of the many lessons out of all this is starting on day one it was from the very first moment, assume you’re going to succeed and don’t do anything that gets in the way.

you had to write down all the numbers in the command module, put them on a list, and then do some math, and then punch the numbers into the lunar module computer

you could get a very good alignment so that now you could go in with the lunar module and make a little tweak to tighten up the alignment

to get back before the batteries run out

while

debating what to do with this inertial unit in the command module we had to bring up from scratch, these units are very, very delicate

they were allowed to run at a temperature of like 70 plus or minus one. They were tested to see that they would work at plus or minus 10.

had one that we don’t know what its temperature is, but we know it’s below freezing

didn’t do any testing at those kind of temperatures

semi-apocryphal story is that one of the employees at the company

had a snowstorm

last winter

had an IMU in the back of the station wagon

took it inside

hooked it up and ran it, and they didn’t have any trouble

they had had a problem down on the spacecraft, some kind of a problem with detanking the oxygen from the service module

took all night and a good bit of the next day

to review

they’d seen a problem like this before, and even though the regular drain system wasn’t working, they could boil the oxygen out

the oxygen tank that we discussed prior to launch was, in fact, the culprit in the explosion. It was damaged in the process that we used in ways that we didn’t anticipate

Kepler-62e and f take 122 and 267 days, respectively, to complete one orbit around their star, which is just 20 percent as bright as the sun

The telescope needs to observe three transits to flag a planet candidate, so detecting a potentially habitable world in a relatively distant orbit can take several years

Kepler cannot search for signs of life on worlds like Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, but the telescope is paving the way for future missions that should do just that

a sun-like star located 2,700 light-years away,

As of April 2013, Kepler data has uncovered more than 2,700 potential planets, with about 120 of them having been confirmed to date

mission scientists expect that more than 90 percent of the planets detected are real and not illusions in the data

early evidence supports the optimistic view that at least 62f is rocky

biggest uncertainty about both planets is their composition

an astronomer at the University of Washington

not involved in the research

Kepler-62e

may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life

if 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, with one half of its surface always illuminated and the other perpetually dark

Kepler 62 is about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler

Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars

harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns

another study

led by

NASA Ames Research Center

identified two planets around a sunlike star called Kepler-69, some 2,700 light-years away

One of the planets is 1.7 times the size of Earth and teeters on the inner edge of the habitable zone

probably too hot for life

almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth

even a planet 75 percent larger than Earth is potentially habitable

Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth

The curves show the mass-radius-relation (average density) for different types of planets

The blue line indicates

planets made mostly (75%) of water, the black line that of planets like our Earth that consist almost exclusively of rock (

estimate of their mass places them in a region (blue areas) where it is highly probable for them to be earth-like planets, that is: planets with a solid (if possibly covered in water) surface

the empirical habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet if that planet has sufficient cloud cover. In the narrow habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface even without the presence of a cloud cover

while the sizes of Kepler 62e and 62f are known, their mass and densities are not.

every planet found in their size range so far has been rocky, like Earth

Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy

life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us

Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth according to computer models

More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean

Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions

Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly

the two would exhibit distinctly different colors and make our search for signatures of life easier on such planets in the near future

planets in the habitable zone were until now discovered by what is known as the radial velocity method

gives you a lower limit for the planet’s mass, but no information about its radius

What makes Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f so exciting is

We know their radius, which indicates that these are indeed rocky planets, and they orbit their star in the habitable zone

makes it difficult to assess whether or not a planet is rocky, like the Earth. A small radius (less than 2 Earth radii), on the other hand, is a strong indicator that a planet around is indeed rocky – unless we are talking about a planet around a very young star

New research continues to question our original understanding of how the Sun’s life may end.

while the binary interaction model explains some of the anomalies associated with the observed planetary nebula population, this theory awaits final confirmation

The traditional theory

does not provide a natural explanation for the non-spherical

observed for the great majority

a silicon solar cell can never generate more than one electron from a single photon

severely limit the conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells, and scientists have spent decades looking for work-arounds

the key to greater solar efficiency might be an organic dye called pentacene

a photovoltaic cell based on pentacene can generate two electrons from a single photon—more electricity from the same amount of sun.

The key is a phenomenon called singlet-exciton fission, in which an arriving photon generates two “excitons” (excited states) that can be made to yield two electrons.

Previous researchers had accomplished similar tricks using quantum dots (tiny pieces of matter that behave like atoms) and deep-ultraviolet light

Why it works is still not particularly clear, and for now, the pentacene cell works only with an extremely narrow band of visible light

it should be possible to create a pentacene coating for silicon solar cells that boosts the total conversion efficiency from today’s 25 percent to a shade over 30 percent—a significant jump

and tiny scrapes on the hard surface of the hole walls

April 22

plans to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023

permanent human colony on the Red Planet, with new crews arriving every two years thereafter

Human explorers

will doubtless contaminate whatever site is chosen for the settlement

so the organization will try to pick a place unlikely to host indigenous life

localize the pollution

Mars One is working with experts to minimize the risks its colonization effort may pose to potential Red Planet lifeforms

While Mars One hasn't picked a precise location for its settlement yet, the organization is targeting a swath of the Red Planet between 40 and 45 degrees north latitude

Mars One astronauts will not necessarily be scientists

Anyone over the age of 18 is eligible to apply, with the selection committee prizing traits such as intelligence, resourcefulness, determination and psychological stability over academic background

Science is

not the main focus of what we are doing

Crewmembers will take some scientific gear with them

but Mars One officials won't dictate what the experiments should be.

There will of course be a budget for equipment that they want to take for scientific research