Apr 28

NASA Broadens Space Station Lab Research

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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NASA announced that it is seeking research ideas from private entities that may want to perform experiments on board the International Space Station, according to NetworkWorld.
The agency wants to expand the ISS’s role in technology development, basic and applied research, and industrial processing for commercial firms, non-profits, and academia, the report said.
Specifically, NASA listed two areas of expansion: Payload Integration and Operations Support Services, and Support Equipment and Instrumentation. The goal is to aid development of applications in biotechnology, energy, engineering, and remote sensing, according to the article.
The subtext here is that NASA is looking to give the ISS more to do. So far, during the course of nine years of ISS-based research, about 550 experiments have either already been completed or are still underway.
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Apr 27

ESO Chooses Location for Extremely Large Telescope

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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The European Southern Observatory organization has chosen Cerro Armazones, a nearly 10,000-foot mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert, for its next-generation observatory, BBC News reports, a location that should be good for 320 days of clear observing per year.
The E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) will feature a primary mirror that’s 187 feet (not inches) in diameter. Each of its 984 hexagonal segments will be 57 inches wide; all will combine with four smaller mirrors to generate each final image.
The resulting telescope will be five times the width of today’s best optical telescopes, and can gather 15 times more light. It’s expected to take images that are 15 times sharper than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, according to the article.
The $1 billion euro E-ELT will also feature improved optics techniques that correct for atmospheric distortions, the report said; construction could start as early as 2011, with the telescope going online sometime in 2018.
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Apr 26

Hawking: Avoid Contact With Alien Life

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Fabled astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned in a new Discovery Network series last night that humans shouldn’t try and make contact with alien lifeforms.
Like many astronomers before him, Hawking believes there is indeed extraterrestrial life out there somewhere. But given the way humans tend to behave, he said it wouldn’t be a good idea to communicate with them, especially since a given species could be millions of years more advanced than our own society.
For example, Hawking said aliens may have figured out how to capture the energy from a star like our Sun–which we need in tip-top working condition, the last time I checked.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out so well for the Native Americans,” Hawkings said in the debut episode, which aired at 9 PM EST on the Discovery Channel. (Image credit: Discovery Network)
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Apr 23

Boeing X-37B autonomous space shuttle launched last night, due back ‘whenevs’

Posted in: military, Robots, space, Today's Chili, Transportation, wargadget

Boeing’s X-37B, the test craft that’s been kicking around for the last decade or so, has finally made it into orbit. Formerly a NASA project, we’ve heard little about the thing since it passed into DARPA hands in 2004 — and statements like those of the Air Force’s Gary Payton don’t help much: “in all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back for sure.” How’s that for autonomous? Also uncommented upon, yet tantalizing, are the military’s intentions for the unmanned vehicle, which can remain in orbit 270 days at a time. Spy drone? Orbital weapons platform? Plaything for our future robot overlords? (Let’s hope it’s not the last one.) The success of the mission will depend on a couple things, namely: how the return trip goes (it should make it back to California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base via autopilot… sometime) and whether the thing can be re-launched quickly enough. Ideally, the craft should be ready for another flight in fifteen days. Another test is planned for 2011.

[Thanks, One Love!]

Boeing X-37B autonomous space shuttle launched last night, due back ‘whenevs’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apr 23

Researchers: Exoplanet Contains Unusual Atmosphere

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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As technology improves, scientists are beginning to pick up clues of Earth-like exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars.
One possible stepping stone to finding those is a Neptune-sized exoplanet near a star about 33 light years away. The exoplanet’s surface could be as hot as 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But its atmospheric composition has turned out to be much different than expected.
“GJ 436b is the smallest exoplanet whose direct light we’ve been able to measure,” said Kevin Stevenson, the University of Central Florida‘s first planetary sciences doctoral student and lead author of the study, which will be published Thursday, April 22, in Nature.
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Apr 22

NASA Unveils First Solar Dynamics Observatory Images

Posted in: NASA, science, solar, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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NASA has unveiled the first series of images from the agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which had launched back in February.
The photos are striking images of looping flares and massive explosions on the sun’s surface. As Popular Science reports, the goal of the mission is to help scientists gain a better understanding of how various processes on the sun affect our lives on Earth.
In particular, SDO will provide a “wealth of solar data” to help researchers improve solar weather forecasts. The observatory carries four telescopes, views the sun with a resolution an order of magnitude higher than what is possible with an HD video camera, and also contains instruments for measuring magnetic motions and ultraviolet energy output, the report said.
Click here for NASA’s complete SDO photo gallery.
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Apr 19

Astronomers Discover Mysterious Object in Space

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Scientists have discovered a mysterious new object, located within the galaxy M82, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope–and it’s not like anything we’ve seen before.
The new object is a micro-quasar, a sort of miniature version of the brightest objects in the night sky, and could be the brightest one ever discovered, according to Space.com.
What’s strange is that, unlike other micro-quasars, it began shooting out radio waves last year very rapidly–within a few days–and hasn’t died down, unlike other supernovae. In fact, it has even become a bit brighter, the report said.
“We think a massive black hole must be involved, but we don’t really understand how it’s getting fueled,” said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, in the report. (Image credit: NASA/Spitzer)
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Apr 16

NASA to Launch Supercomputing App

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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Who said supercomputers were dead? NASA on Monday will unveil a powerful new supercomputing application called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), which will let scientists model and analyze large Earth science data sets, InformationWeek reports.
The program will enable collaborative work via social networking-enhanced virtual environments, so that scientists can share research and work on projects together from remote locations.
The report said NEX will run on the 609-teraflops Pleiadies, NASA’s most powerful supercomputer and the sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world. It will also hook into a 450-terabyte internal storage cache, a 160-terabyte external storage cache, and a potential 10+ petabyte tape archive. (Image credit: NASA Ames)
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Apr 16

Obama Lays Out Visions for NASA, Mars Exploration

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out a case for saving some NASA jobs and an eventual manned mission to Mars.
At the Kennedy Space Center, Obama sought to address concerns–not to mention a few prominent critics like Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon–that the U.S. intends to remain a world leader with its space program, despite an original plan to abandon the Constellation moon program, Reuters reports.
“The bottom line is, nobody is more committed to manned space flight, to human exploration of space, than I am. But we’ve got to do it in a smart way,” Obama said in the article.
Obama said that he would like to see deep space-capable craft by 2025, a manned mission to an asteroid and even to Mars by the mid-2030s, and later, a mission to land humans on Mars. “And I expect to be around to see it,” he said.
He also said that he would salvage the Orion crew capsule from the Constellation program, and use that as an emergency escape vehicle for the International Space Station–preventing the need to rely on Russia’s Soyuz capsule.
Obama also proposed a $40 million fund to boost the economy around NASA’s facilities in Florida, which could create thousands of new jobs to offset the losses at NASA–projected to be about 9,000 Kennedy Space Center jobs after the shuttle program ends and Constellation is shut down, according to the report. (Image: NASA/Ares I)
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Apr 15

Massive European Telescope to Search for ET

Posted in: NASA, radio, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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A massive new telescope, with 44 stations spread across Europe, will soon kick the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) into high gear.
The LOFAR (the pan-European Low Frequency Array) project has unveiled new images and observing plans for the telescope, which is currently under construction, Discovery News reports.
Each of the 44 stations will have dozens of antennas, and be able to achieve “unprecedented spatial resolution for meter-wave astronomy,” a virtually unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
That means the telescope will be useful for detecting radio jets, cosmic rays, intergalactic hydrogen, and other natural phenomena in addition to possible alien life, the report said. (Image credit: LOFAR)
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