NASA Road-Tests (Ocean-Tests?) New Moonship

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For the
first time since the Apollo era of the 1960s, NASA is testing a new moonship “in the
turbulent waves of the open ocean,” according to Space.com. The agency is testing a life-sized mock-up of its Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern coast of
central Florida, in an attempt to see how it does with a water-landing.

“During the
tests, teams of divers and engineers are practicing recovery
techniques
to retrieve an Orion capsule after splashdown, as well as
testing how the spacecraft performs in open water,” the report said. “The sea trials are the first
in which recovery teams attempted to attach a flotation collar around the Orion
craft while it bobbed up in down with the ocean waves.”

The Orion
crew capsule is NASA’s
planned replacement
for its three aging space shuttles, which are due to
retire at the end of next year, according to the report. The capsules can carry six astronauts to the ISS, or four astronauts to the moon and back. Each capsule is about 15 feet wide and weighs 18,000 pounds–about six Honda Accords, essentially.

Inventors develop transistor to change color of any surface, your face notwithstanding

Color shifting has been a pipe dream for about as long as alchemists have claimed their studies to be legitimate, but now a brilliant team from the New University of Lisbon can finally say a breakthrough has been found. Essentially, these inventors have conjured up a transistor that changes the color of practically any surface (paper, glass, plastics, ceramics and metals, just to name a few). For what it’s worth, this same team already has quite a bit of display cred, as it has developed technology currently used within Samsung panels. With the help of a few good men and woman at the University of Texas at Austin, the team was able to register for a patent right here in the US, and with any luck, they’ll be giving OLEDs and e-paper a run for their money before we can snap our fingers twice and run around the block. Check a video (narrated in Portuguese) after the break.

[Thanks, Nelson]

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One Way to Describe Black Holes: Dark Gulping

NASA_Hubble_Black_Hole_M64.jpgBlack holes are still one of the thorniest problems in physics–ultra-cool computer simulations and Stephen Hawking‘s life work notwithstanding. Scientists still don’t know how dark holes began or grew so massive, for example. But a new computer model is suggesting that ‘dark gulping’ is one possible answer, Space.com reports–an answer that involves invisible dark matter, that elusive material astronomers know exists because they can detect its gravitational effects on galaxies.

The theory goes like this: a large cloud of dark matter could interact with gas to create a dense central mass, the report said. This mass could be unstable, so a small disturbance could make the whole thing collapse quickly, “gulping itself down” to make a black hole. At the beginning, it would be invisible. But eventually, as it ate other matter and gas, and it all swirls around and becomes superheated and luminous, it becomes visible, according to the article.

“It’s a viable, possible scenario,” Kinwah Wu, an astrophysicist at University College
London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, who built the model with another colleague, said in the article.
“The model works, but it doesn’t mean that nature behaves like that. We need more observational proof or disproof of this.” (Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))

Scientist: Static Cling Makes Lunar Dust a Huge Problem

NASA_Astronaut.jpgStatic cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.

Astronomers Discover Mystery Blob Near Beginning of Time

Space_Himiko_Masami_Ouchi.jpgAstronomers have discovered a primordial “mystery blob,” dubbed Himiko, that could be one of the oldest objects ever observed–12.9 billion years old, to be exact. That would place the gas cloud roughly 800 million years after the dawn of the universe, and signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation, according to Space.com.

“I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance,” said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif., in the article. “It’s kind of record-breaking.”


The report said that Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as
the next largest object found in the early universe. They estimate that
its mass is approximately the same as 40 billion suns, while it spans
55,000 light-years across (about half the size of our entire Milky Way
Galaxy). It could be either a gaseous halo around a super-massive black
hole, or a cooling gas cloud from an early galaxy, the report said.

Hubble Captures Huge Galaxy Collision

Hubble_Arp_194_NASA_ESA.jpgHubble has picked up a galaxy collision here or there over the past 19 years, but none stranger than the one pictured here. Called Arp 194, the trio of galaxies give the impression that one of them has sprung a leak, as ScienceDaily reports.

“The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of
newborn blue stars,” the report said. “This typically happens when two galaxies interact
and gravitationally tug at [each other].” In fact, all of the galaxies pictured were likely distorted already from a prior collision, according to the article.

In addition, it turns out that what appears to be the third galaxy in the trio is actually further away and in the distance–something that Hubble’s resolution alone can help astronomers sort out. Arp 194 is located in the constellation of Cepheus and is about 600 million light-years away from Earth, the report said. To date, Hubble has taken over 570,000 photos of 29,000 celestial objects. (Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

Earth-Like Exoplanet Could Have Liquid Oceans

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There may be another contender for most Earth-like exoplanet found so far. New measurements of Gliese 581d’s orbit indicate a range where conditions would be right for liquid water, and thus life as we
know it, Geneva University in
Switzerland astronomer Michel Mayor announced today, according to National Geographic.

“It lies in the [life-supporting] habitable zone, and it could have an
ocean at its surface,” Mayor said at the European Week of Astronomy
and Space Science conference, which is taking place at the University of
Hertfordshire in the U.K.
this week.

Mars Rovers at 5: One Ailing, the Other Strong

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NASA originally projected that the Mars Exploration Rovers would last 90 days once on the surface of the red planet. Today, both rovers are still doing science five years after their arrival. Spirit is now driving on a plateau called Home Plate in the
Inner Basin valley, according to the Washington Post, while Opportunity has left
Victoria Crater on the other side of the planet, and is motoring toward
a much larger crater called
Endeavour.

Spirit, the less-healthy of the two, has a bunch of minor to moderate issues. They include a broken wheel, some flaky sensors and software, and enough dust on its solar panels to limit its power to 30 percent of normal, the report said. Each night, the two rovers sleep to conserve energy since there is little sunlight–but from April 9th to 11th, Spirit wouldn’t wake up. It’s working again, though scientists working on the program may never find out what happened.

That’s not necessarily a problem. When Spirit’s wheel broke three years ago, the other five wheels dragged the broken one across the surface, which gouged a trench along the way–revealing a silica that proved to be evidence of ancient hot springs, according to the article. “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the report.

NASA to Bring Ethernet into Deep Space

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NASA has signed an agreement with TTTech, a German Ethernet vendor, to construct “highly fault-tolerant networks for space-based applications,” according to NetworkWorld. TTTech builds a series of time-triggered products called TTEthernet that sits on top of standard IEEE802.3 Ethernet, the report said. The goal is to enable reliable, synchronous, embedded computing and networking, and be tolerant of multiple faults, according to the company.

Essentially, the goal is to be able to send critical data back and forth into space without having to worry about network congestion or dropouts. In fact, NASA already uses some of the technology in its Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (pictured). The report said that ultimately, NASA and TTTech will collaborate on space network standards that will lead to an open
space Ethernet standard–one that’s suitable for deployment with upcoming NASA programs.

Scientists Uncover Lightning Inside Volcano

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When Alaska’s Mount Redoubt volcano erupted last month, scientists figured out a way to “see” and track lightning inside the plumes of ash coming out, LiveScience reports.

Here’s what happened: A team of researchers scrambled to set up a system, called a Lightning
Mapping Array, that could see through the dust and gas of an eruption and reveal the lightning storm happening within the tumultuous clouds, the report said. Meteorologists use these arrays to issue storm warnings, but they’re rarely used for volcanic eruptions–and this is the first time researchers were able to set it up beforehand in time to catch the initial lightning.

“The lightning activity was as strong or stronger than we have seen in
large Midwestern thunderstorms,” said physicist Paul Krehbiel of New Mexico Tech in the article. “The radio frequency
noise was so strong and continuous that people living in the area would
not have been able to watch broadcast VHF television stations.”