Hasta La Gadget!

Non-profit organization Mars One recently began accepting applications for the chance to travel to Mars in order to colonize the red planet, with the only caveat being that you’ll be living there for the rest of your life. That didn’t stop most applicants, though, as thousands of applications have been sent in to Mars One, one of which is from a Valve engineer.

Jeep Barnett, who already has one of the coolest jobs around, has applied to become an astronaut for Mars One where he could be one of the chosen few to be taken to Mars forever. Barnett is a programmer at Valve, the game studio behind the Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life, and Team Fortress series. He wants to quit his Valve gig and go to Mars full-time.

In his application, Barnett says that he’s always been interested in science fiction, and always grew up believing that such things would eventually turn into reality. A trip to Mars would put Barnett in a first-person experience where he would be able to live his childhood fantasy — traveling to another planet.

Frankly, Barnett would go to Mars ASAP if asked, saying that while such a trip would obviously require years of training, he’d be up for the trip by “next week” if needed. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Barnett hates his job at Valve, but going to Mars is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and Barnett doesn’t seem keen on letting it pass him by.

[via Kotaku]

Valve engineer applies to Mars One program is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Never before seen observations of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way have been made by the Herschel space observatory, revealing unexpectedly huge temperatures as the stellar body chews through gas and dust. Sagittarius A*, the black hole around 26,000 light years from our solar system, had previously been shrouded in too much space debris to clearly make out the processes going on around it; however, thanks to new work by the European Space Agency, new theories around radiation have been spawned to explain the 1,000-degree centigrade heat.

Before these latest observations, astronomers had assumed the interstellar clouds around Sagittarius A* would be much in line with regular clouds, with temperatures dawdling just about absolute zero (-273-degrees C). In actual fact, the black hole is surrounded by incredibly hot molecular gases, in the most central region at least, with only theories to explain why that might be the case.

Contributing to the heat – but unlikely to be responsible for all of it – is the cluster of massive stars around the black hole, the ESA says. Their output of ultraviolet radiation undoubtedly causes some of the unusual temperatures, but is not enough alone.

One theory, Doctor Javier Goicoechea of the Centro de Astrobiología, Spain, suggests, is that “emission from strong shocks in highly-magnetised gas” that also surround Sagittarius A* could be partially responsible. That could be the result of gas cloud collisions, or from the streams of hot gas that are being pulled toward the supermassive black hole.

Sagittarius A* masses around four million times that of our own Sun, and is the closest active black hole to Earth. “Herschel has resolved the far-infrared emission within just 1 light-year of the black hole,” Goicoechea explains of the new findings, “making it possible for the first time at these wavelengths to separate emission due to the central cavity from that of the surrounding dense molecular disc.”

Although black holes have been observed for many years, it’s only with recent advances in equipment that more accurate measurements could be taken. Sometimes those observations come unexpectedly; one black hole suddenly woke and consumed huge quantities of matter from a nearby planet while they had been taking measurements nearby, for instance. Earlier this year, meanwhile, scientists managed to measure a black hole’s spin for the first time.

Herschel space telescope watches our neighborhood black hole feasting is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Back on April 17, we reported on gamma-ray burst GRB 111209A, which was the longest of three unusually long bursts that were first detected back in 2010. Gamma-ray bursts typically only last a few seconds, but these three – and 111209A in particular – lasted into a span of hours, confounding scientists, who eventually identified the phenomenon as being the result of a supergiant star’s death. All three of those bursts have been trumped by GRB 130427A.

Late last month, NASA‘s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Swift Space Telescope both imaged the brightest, most powerful GRB ever spotted. Like the others mentioned, this gamma-ray burst was the result of a dying star, this particular one located 3.6-billion light-years from our planet. The scientists then took the images – one of which is featured above – and turned them into a video.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Julie McEnery said about the images: “We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright. The GRB lasted so long that a record number of telescopes on the ground were able to catch it while space-based observations were still ongoing.”

Of all the gamma-ray bursts that have been detected, GRB 130427A turned out to be the longest that has ever. In addition, it also earned the title of most-powerful (by a factor of three) GRB the Large Area Telescope has ever imaged. The recording of the event started just 60 seconds after the GRB began, and has prompted a hunt for an accompanying supernova.

[via Space.com]

NASA images brightest gamma-ray burst ever is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A manned mission to Mars could take place within the next two decades, NASA and the private sector have agreed, though the race is on to research and fund such the next ambitious step fo the space race. The feasibility of such a mission – and the political, financial, technological, and social problems that would need to be addressed first – is on the agenda of the Humans to Mars (H2M) summit this week, with NASA staffers, researchers, private space agencies, and more all coming together at George Washington University to explore the practicalities of sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s.

“A human mission to Mars is a priority” NASA chief Charles Bolden has committed, Discovery reports, though right now the agency can’t afford to do it all itself. Budgetary limitations, Bolden argues, mean the private and government agencies involved in space travel will have to effectively pool resources in order to get the most bang for their buck.

His strategy is to leave escaping Earth’s gravity well to private contractors, while NASA looks to the bigger picture such as getting from outside the atmosphere to Mars. Modules like SpaceX’s Dragon could be used to go from Earth to low-orbit he suggests, the Washington Post reports, while NASA works on taking the eventual crew further.

Even with those delineated roles – which the private sector may not be entirely happy with anyway – the project isn’t going to blast off any time soon. ““I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready. I don’t have the capability to do it” Bolden conceded. “NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s.”

Firing a pod off to Mars isn’t quite as simple as, say, launching astronauts to the International Space Station. The 250-350m mile journey is not only long but puts humans at risk of high levels of radiation; once the crew reached Mars, if they wanted to land on it they’d need a safe way of decelerating since the planet’s thin atmosphere lacks the friction to brake a capsule.

One possibility is the same sort of sky-crane system as NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab used to deploy Curiosity, the robotic rover that has been drilling samples from the Martian surface. That effectively lowered the rover from beneath a hovering crane; however, the weights involved for a human crew and their kit would make it far more difficult.

In fact, the payload involved could be anywhere around 40x the weight of Curiosity, NASA associate administrator Michael Gazarik told the Post. Curiosity “was a metric ton” he highlights, “the size of a MINI Cooper.” Assuming the team wanted to escape from the Martian surface at some point, they would need to have a return rocket and fuel as well.

Back in 2010, the US government set out a goal to have a human mission “to orbit Mars” though not land on it. NASA’s ambitions go a little further, of course, though there’ll likely be robotic missions before humans even leave Earth in order to test the technology, not to mention private proposals.

H2M is run by a non-profit group, Explore Mars Inc., and co-sponsored by a number of aerospace companies including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It will close on Wednesday with final speech by Buzz Aldrin, second man to walk on the moon.

Manned Mars missions in 20 years say space experts is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week’s tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages.

This week’s After Math appears to have taken on a comic book theme. Want to make your own Thor hammer? How about your very own Atomic Watch — rather than those radio-wave-based excuses of a timepiece? We’ve also got the very real prospect of civilian flights to outer space and, er, Kobe Bryant advertising Lenovo smartphones. Stranger things have happened, right? Join us after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Alt

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