Hasta La Gadget!

Got $150m, a taste for space travel and sufficient trust in a 1970s Soviet capsule to ride it to the moon? British space holiday start-up Excalibur Almaz thinks it has the round-trip for you, then, having invested in four three-crew Almaz program capsules and two Salyut-class space station pressure vessels to begin – after some outfitting, naturally – flights in 2015.

Those refurbs will take 24 to 30 months, company founder and CEO Art Dula reckons, though Excalibur Almaz is already looking to take bookings now. “At $100 million to 150 million [per passenger, we can sell] up to 29 seats in the next ten years, and that is a conservative estimate” Dula said at the Royal Aeronautical Society’s space tourism conference last month.

According to the company’s plans, the reusable return vehicles (RRVs) would be launched by a Soyuz-FG rocket, then dock with the Salyut-class space station launched using a Proton rocket. Together, the two would make a lunar flight using a group of electric hall-effect thrusters.

Tourism isn’t Excalibur Almaz’s only goal. The company is also looking at offering unnamed research missions, including deep space flights for $150m apiece, as well as delivering payloads to the surface of the mood for $350m. It’s also hoping to bid in a future round of NASA International Space Station service missions, such as will be undertaken by SpaceX.

[via Christian Science Monitor]

Excalibur Almaz to offer $150m Moon trips in 2015 is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It was Bret Easton Ellis who coined the phrase, “The better you look, the more you see,” and it appears the folks down at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab agree. In what’s considered a “first,” the agency’s latest space-scouring probe, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, has turned on its X-ray vision to capture focused images of a black hole, dubbed Cygnus X-1, feeding on a nearby giant star. By tuning into these high-energy frequencies, scientists are getting a peak into a previously unseen side of the heavens at 100 times the sensitivity and 10 times the resolution of any preceding tech. The space agency plans to use the observatory’s powerful sight to suss out other known areas of mass X-ray activity like 3C273, an active quasar located two billion light years away and even explore G21.5-0.9, the fallout from a supernova within the Milky Way galaxy. NuSTAR’s first tour of galactic duty will span two year’s time, during which it’ll attempt to record imagery from “the most energetic objects in the universe, ” as well as track the existence of black holes throughout the cosmos. Impressed? Yeah, us too.

Continue reading NASA’s NuSTAR probe snaps first X-ray image of feeding black hole

NASA’s NuSTAR probe snaps first X-ray image of feeding black hole originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Behold a double rainbow from space! Well, technically, it’s called glory, but it just looks like a double rainbow from the top. The optical phenomenon was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite, orbiting over Baja California. More »

Stoked about the gigabit speeds your new 802.11ac WiFi router is pumping out? One group of scientists hailing from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and universities in the US, Israel and China isn’t so impressed, having generated a wireless signal clocking in at 2.56Tbps. Proof of the feat was published in Nature Photonics, which details their use of orbital angular momentum (OAM) to make the magic happen. Current wireless protocols alter the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves to hold info, and by combining both methods the team was able to pack eight data steams into a single signal, resulting in the mouth-watering number noted above. The best part is, applying different levels of OAM twist to SAM-based transmissions theoretically allows an infinite number of streams per signal, meaning seriously increased bandwidth without the need for additional frequency. So far the wireless tests have only been conducted over a measly 1m, but the scientists reckon it’ll work at distances up to 1km and that the concept could also be used to boost speeds in existing fiber-optic cables. As with many scientific advances, it’s unlikely hardware capable of such speeds will be available any time soon, so 802.11ac will have to suffice… for now.

New wireless transmission tech hits 2.56Tbps, leaves WiFi feeling inadequate originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week the folks at NASA have let loose a video showing the challenges they face in getting to Mars, specifically with the Mars rover Curiosity and how it will be landing on August 5th of this year. The video shows the engineers to designed not only the entry and descent of the new Curiosity mission but the landing system as well, with candid talk on how they have zero – that’s zero – margin for error in this mission. 3D models and projections of the future are also included for full visualization of the situation.

From the top of the atmosphere to the surface you’ve got 7 minutes, with 14 minutes sitting between the signals being sent from the craft back to earth. This means that as these engineers get word that the craft has begun hitting the atmosphere, the craft will have been on the ground in-tact or completely obliterated for 7 minutes already. Beware the ultra-epic music of this film on the Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) of the craft landing on Mars later this year.

You’ll find 1600 degrees encapsulating the craft as its guided downward toward the planet, Mars having a 100 times thinner atmosphere than Earth – this means that as it’s essentially on fire, the craft is going 1,000 miles per hour and relying on a supersonic parachute to slow it down. After the parachute pulls, the craft still goes 200 miles per house, so the lander exits the rest of the craft and uses rockets to push back up and land with a lot less speed. The rover is then set down on the planet to explore – watch all the action above.

[via NASA]

Mars Curiosity landing sequence demonstrated by NASA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.