Mar 26

NASA Spacecraft Finds Hundreds of Asteroids Each Day

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili

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NASA’s newest space telescope, the $230 million Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has been busy discovering hundreds of asteroids every single day–all of which were in our solar system undetected all this time, Space.com reports.
NASA designed WISE to find “dark” objects, like asteroids, brown dwarf stars, and vast dust clouds, the report said, though it’s been busy finding darker asteroids that visible light telescopes have missed in passed surveys.
“Our instrument is finding hundreds of asteroids every day that were never detected before,” said Ned Wright, principal investigator for WISE and a physicist at the University of California in Los Angeles, in the article. “WISE is very good at this kind of work.”
NASA launched WISE in December 2009, and will operate through October, at which point its supply of frozen coolant will run out. (Image credit: NASA/WISE)
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Mar 25

NASA Upgrades Mars Rovers Brain

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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If it’s too expensive to fly humans to Mars, maybe we can train robots to make human-like decisions.
So goes the thinking at NASA, which has upgraded its Mars Rover Opportunity’s control software, so that the rover can let it make its own decisions about which rocks to focus on.
NASA’s new AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) system lets the rover check out images taken with its wide-angle navigation camera, search for rocks that “meet specific criteria,” and then flick on its narrower-angle panoramic camera to snap photos of the rock.
So far, Opportunity has chosen a football-sized layered rock from a nearby impact crater, following NASA’s criteria of “large and dark.” Currently, the rover is en route to Endeavor, a large crater about 13.7 miles across. It has drive over 12 miles during the past six years. (Image credit: NASA)

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Mar 23

Lunar Rover Found on Moon After 37 Years

Posted in: gaming, NASA, science, space, Today's Chili

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Seek ye, the rover of kings: Scientists have spotted Lunokhod 2, a Russian space vehicle that landed on the moon in 1973 and stopped working that same year, after a 37-year period where no one knew where the thing was, NPR reports.
What makes Lunokhod 2 even more interesting is that it belongs to Richard Garriott, of Ultima and Origin Systems fame. Garriott purchased the rover at a 1993 Sotheby’s auction for $68,500, making him the world’s only private owner of an object on a celestial body aside from Earth.
Garriott said in the report that he’s thrilled to finally have photos of his “private flag sitting on the moon.”
“My rover has traveled over 40 kilometers. It has tilled the soil or turned the soil with its wheels and it has surveyed land as far as the eye can see — or as far as its cameras can see,” he said.
In 2008, Richard Garriott became the latest of a series of space tourists to visit the International Space Station.
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Mar 18

Scientists Discover Jupiter-Like Alien World

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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It’s not quite Earth-like. But scientists have discovered a “normal” exoplanet, dubbed CoRoT-9b, that resembles other planets in our Solar System.
The planet appears to be orbiting its star about as close as our own Mercury, and yet is the approximate size of Jupiter, Space.com reports. Still, it’s a lot further away than other “hot Jupiter” exoplanets, and likely has a much more temperate climate, the report said.
CoRoT-9b is likely made of hydrogen and helium, just like Jupiter and Saturn. The planet is named after the French space agency CNES’s CoRoT satellite, which first picked up the light signature of the planet passing in front of its star.
To date, astronomers have discovered over 430 exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, orbiting other stars–with the expectation that there are many, many more out there. (Image credit: ESO/L. Calcada)
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Mar 12

CERN Plans One-Year LHC Shutdown for 2012

Posted in: science, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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The Large Hadron Collider will close down at the end of next year for up to 12 months for modifications to the design, according to BBC News.
Everything is still on track to power up the LHC to begin smashing together particles at 7 trillion electron volts (7 TeV) later this month. But after a year and a half of that, LHC director Dr. Steve Myers said in the report that the faults prevent the machine from hitting its full potential of 14 TeV for two years.
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Mar 11

Virgin Galactic Lands Legal Protection Against Space Tourists

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Enter at your own risk–or so should read a sign on the door of every passenger spaceship in the future.
Space tourism operators like Virgin Galactic have won a legal reprieve against potential litigation by surviving family members in the event of passenger injuries or death during flight, according to Space.com.
“This helps give us a really solid insurance foundation” for the business, Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn said in the report regarding the new legislation, which was signed into law on February 27 by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. “It includes the principle of informed consent. Participants will be required to sign a waiver before flight.”
The possibility of lawsuits with staggering sums attached is only higher in the space tourism industry’s early years, thanks to the high costs that will invariably draw enthusiasts with very high net worth statements. The law won’t hold in the event that the space tourism operator is found guilty of gross negligence or willful misconduct, according to the report.
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Mar 10

Hubble IMAX 3D: The Next Best Thing to Being in Space

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili

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Astronaut Andrew Feustel spacewalks to perform repairs on the Hubble; click to enlarge.

Take a number of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most stunning images, give them a 3D look, and display them on an IMAX screen–what’s not to love? Yet Hubble 3D, an IMAX and Warner Brothers film made in cooperation with NASA, manages to go far beyond that.

Much of the film focuses on last May’s mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-125) to repair the Hubble. The astronauts brought an IMAX 3D camera with which they were able to capture spectacular sequences of the grueling and dangerous spacewalks the crew undertook to conduct the repairs. Coupled with stunning views of Earth, this section of Hubble 3D provides an immersive experience that astronauts who have seen the video have termed the closest thing yet to actually being in orbit. Hubble 3D will open in selected IMAX theaters March 19, but we were fortunate enough to get a preview this week.

The movie, narrated by Leonardo Dicaprio, opens with the STS-125 crew suiting up and talking about the importance of the mission and their growing excitement about it in the hours before liftoff. Among them is Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike), who on that mission became the first astronaut to tweet from space. The film cuts away to a history of Hubble and a tour of its images (some of which you’ll find after the jump) but always returns to the saga of the repair mission.

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Mar 09

All Systems Go for Worlds Largest Particle Accelerator

Posted in: science, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Astronomers and physicists have said for years that we only know and understand five percent of the universe–but that may soon change.
CERN research center head Rolf-Dieter Heuer (pictured) said that the Large Hadron Collider may soon unveil dark matter, which makes up 25 percent of the remainder; the remaining 70 percent is dark energy, which we also know little about, as Reuters reports.
“Our Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe,” Heuer said in the article. “We are opening the door to New Physics, to a discovery period.”
What’s new now is that the LHC is on schedule to collide particles at 7 tera-electron volts (7 TeV) by the end of the month. That will be the highest energy level ever achieved by mankind. Each collision will produce “mini-Big Bangs” that will yield priceless data for scientists to analyze–and possibly the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that gave mass to matter and enabled the formation of stars, planets, and life as we know it, the report said. (Image credit: CERN)
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Mar 08

Wheres Spock? Physicist Says Warp Speed Will Kill You

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Last year, a group of physicists figured out that achieving warp speed had the potential–depending on how we did it, at least–to create a black hole that would suck up Earth and destroy us all.
Putting aside that cheery bit of news for a moment, another physicist recently said that even if that particular scenario didn’t come to pass, the simple matter of traveling warp speed could kill you–all because of some stray hydrogen atoms.
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Mar 05

NASA Mars Orbiter Transmits 100 Terabits, Still Going

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now transmitted 100 terabits of information back to Earth, as it completes its fourth year circling the Red Planet next week, according to ScienceDaily.
Here’s another way of looking at it: 100 terabits, or 100 trillion bits, is equivalent to three times the amount of data from every other deep-space mission past the moon combined, the report said. It’s also equivalent to about 35 hours of uncompressed, high-definition video–not bad for a planet that’s anywhere from 36 million to 250 million miles away from Earth.
The orbiter’s 10-foot dish antenna can transmit data at 6 megabits per second. The craft contains three main cameras, a radar instrument that can see through the surface, an atmosphere sounder, and a spectrometer for identifying minerals, according to the article.
To date, the orbiter has discovered evidence that water moved across the planet’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. It has also detailed acidic and alkaline watery environments, either of which could indicate past life on the planet (if it ever existed).
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