Hasta La Gadget!

An Indian rocket yesterday exploded less than a minute after takeoff. The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, GSLV-F06, which was carrying a communications satellite vanished into a cloud of smoke shortly after taking off from Chennai.

“The performance of the (rocket) was normal up to about 50 seconds. Soon after that the vehicle developed large altitude error leading to breaking up of the vehicle,” said K Radhakrishan, the head of India’s Space Research Organization, adding, “but what caused this interruption has to be studied in detail.”

In recent years the company has been looking to increase its involvement in the commercial satellite market. India is also looking to launch its first manned space mission in 2016.

As it turns out, the Universe may not be all that universal.

Everything we know and can see may be but one tapioca ball in a gigantic cosmic bubble tea. That is just one of the possibilities that can be inferred from data collected from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Some background on the cosmic background: When using a traditional optical telescope to look between the stars, the far ends of the observable Universe appear pitch black. However, if you were to switch to a radio telescope, a faint ripply background glow is detected emanating from all directions. This is the CMB (which is strongest in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum, thus the name).

The CMB is often described as the residual energy leftover after the Big Bang. It also represents the farthest observable boundaries of our Universe (and the farthest back in time). Scientists have no direct way to detect what, if anything, is beyond.

However, one guess of what is lies beyond is the theory of “eternal inflation.” Eternal Inflation hypothesizes that our universe is just one fixture of a larger multiverse. The theory speculates that our universe as being a bubble that exists in a larger void among other self-contained universii (other universes which may even follow radically different laws of physics).

If this theory is true, cosmologists might expect to see “bruises” in the CMB where our universe bumped into others. According to a recent report from a team at the University College London, they may have discovered just that, and maybe even as many as four colossal brush-ups. The paper [PDF here] is based on data collected from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP), which has been collecting data from the far reaches of the (known) Universe for the past decade.

However, since no one knows exactly what a cosmos-sized bruise might look like, this remains, for now, just a very intriguing theory. However, scientists are hopeful that a more detailed dataset will come from the European Space Agency’s ongoing Planck mission which launched in 2009.

Crazy.

via PopSci, image credit: ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia

All right, we’ve done pretty much all we’ll have do with the moon, right? Walked around it, played some golf–what’s next on the space exploration list? Might I suggest thee planet filled with diamonds?

Scientists have located a carbon-rich planet they believe may be housing literal diamond mountains. “It’s remarkable,” astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan said in an interview “It’s the first time we’re getting a good look at the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of planets.”

The planet, WASP-12b, is located in the Auriga constellation, 1,200 light years away. The planet is 1.8 times larger than Jupiter. A combination of heavy carbon concentrations and a temperature of around 4199 degrees Fahrenheit lead scientists to believe that the planet may house mountains of diamonds in its core.

Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)’s $300 million Planet-C Venus Climate Orbiter is being pulled toward the sun after falling to successfully enter the planet’s orbit. The probe, nicknamed “Akatsuki” (“Dawn”), was set to monitor climate and volcanic activity on the second planet from the Sun. The probe was set to monitor the planet for two years.

The orbiter approached Venus earlier this week, but ultimately failed to enter its gravitational field, despite an engine reversal implemented by JAXA. Today, the organization told the press that the mission has officially been declared a failure.

“We started the maneuver to put the Venus probe Akatsuki into orbit around Venus at 8:49 am (Tokyo time) on December 7,” JAXA said in a statement, “but have confirmed that we could not put it into the orbit.”

JAXA is still in control of Akatsuki, but it will likely have to wait another six years to do so. Science guy Billy Nye, who is currently an executive director at the U.S.’s Plentary Society told the press solemnly that the organization “regrets that the innovative Akatsuki spacecraft seems to have missed its opportunity to lock into an orbit of Venus. Although Akatsuki has already accomplished some remarkable things on its voyage, this setback reminds us how difficult space exploration can be.”

This is of the weirder files to come out of WWII. The July 23rd 1945 issue of LIFE magazine detailed a secret Nazi plan to concoct a giant space mirror or magnifying glass that would concentrate solar rays to burn whole cities or oceans (Google books link).

Kind of like a super-sized version of using a magnifying glass to burn ants.

In Germany last month, U.S. Army technical experts came up with the
astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a
“sun gun,” a big mirror in space which would focus the sun’s rays to a
scorching point at the earth’s surface. The Germans, the Army reported,
hoped to use such a mirror to burn an enemy city to ashes or to boil
part of an ocean.

Plausible schemes to build a station in space were
engineered on paper long before the war. European rocket enthusiasts,
including Dr. Hermann Oberth, who may have been the designer of the V-2,
had planned to use the space station not as a weapon but as a refueling
point for rockets starting off on journeys into space. … The only major
obstacle: constructing a rocket powerful enough to reach a point where a
space station could be built. If the modern German scientists had been
able to make such a rocket, they might have ben able to set up their sun
gun. Whether the sun gun would have accomplished what they expected,
however, is another matter.”

Even if the Nazis would have maintained power long enough to create a space Reich, it appears this dream of a city-destroying sun gun was far from practical.

Since the sun appears in the sky as a disk and not as a point, the best
any optical system can produce is an image of this disk. At very short
focal lengths, the image is small and hot but as the focal length is
increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler. At the
distance the Germans proposed to set up their mirror (3,100 miles) the
image of the sun cast on the earth would be about 40 miles in diameter
and not hot enough to do any damage.

via Blastr