DARPA Wants To Send Humans To The Stars
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Is this a good way to spend the money we’re borrowing from Chinese investors in U.S. Government debt? The New York Times‘ Dennis Overbye reports on DARPA’s bold step:
Alpha Centauri or bust.
The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.
In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in…
Russian Firm Reveals Plan To Build Hotel In Space
Looking for a real getaway? It sounds more sci-fi than real, but outer space may be a future vacation spot. Daily Mail reports:
Russia yesterday announced plans for a hotel in orbit 217 miles up which would house seven guests in four cabins and have huge windows for views of the Earth turning below.
Just getting there will be an adventure in itself – it will take two days aboard a Soyuz rocket – and it won’t exactly be a budget holiday: A five day stay will cost you £100,000, on top of £500,000 for your journey.
The hotel, or the Commercial Space Station to give it its proper name, is due to open by 2016 and, according to those behind it, will be ‘far more comfortable’ than the International Space Station used by astronauts and cosmonauts.
In the weightlessness of space, visitors can choose to have beds that are either vertical or horizontal, while…
SETI Is Back!
Good news for those hoping to find aliens, reported by Deborah Netburn for the LA Times:
Citizens of the world: You are awesome. This week the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute announced that it had raised more than $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched this spring. The money, which came from just over 2,000 people who want to keep the search for alien life alive, will help the institute put its Allen Telescope Array back online.
“We are so grateful to our donors,” said Tom Pierson, who co-founded the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter (the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact”). “We believe we will be back on the air in September.”
On the Setistars website, where the call for donations was originally placed, large red type proclaims: “Thank You for Your Support to Resume the Search!”
The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, is a series of 42 linked radio-telescope dishes funded by a $30-million…
Black Hole Hosts Universe’s Most Massive Water Cloud
Photo: NASA
A giant quasar billions of light-years away is surrounded by water vapor that could fill Earth’s oceans over 140 trillion times. Via National Geographic:
In a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say.
Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar.
Among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets.
“As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor,” said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with…
The Space Colony That Should Have Been
As we close the book on the final U.S. space shuttle mission ever, it’s heartbreaking to watch NASA videos from the groovy 1970s, a time of incredible optimism regarding the final frontier in the aftermath of humankind’s first walk on the moon. Preliminary plans and concepts were being outlined for self-sustaining space colonies where people could live and work. A space station called Taurus would be home to 10,000 people, with dairy farms, manufacturing, vegetation, solar power stations… and then somewhere along the way we became sidetracked.
Asteroid Travels Close To Earth Today
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sometimes asteroids come very close to home, about every six years. The latest asteroid to come closer to Earth than our own satellites appears today. Via Space.com:
An asteroid the size of a tour bus will fly past Earth today (June 27) so closely it will be beneath some of the planet’s satellites.
The rock, named asteroid 2011 MD will zoom by just 7,500 miles (12,000 km) above the planet, making a sharp turn forced by Earth’s gravity before winging off into space again. The flyby will occur at about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).
There is no risk of an impact, NASA scientists said. The space rock, estimated to be between 29 to 98 feet (9 to 30 meters) wide, is likely too small to survive a plunge through our atmosphere anyway. An asteroid this size, if it were mostly stony, would break apart and burn up before hitting the surface. Iron-heavy…
Canadian Meteorite Has All the Building Blocks for Life
Interesting article from Tim Barribeau on io9.com:
The argument that life on Earth may have been seeded from the stars just received a major boost, as scientists have found the building blocks of life inside a meteorite that landed in British Columbia in 2000.
The Tagish Lake meteorite landed in January of that year, a streaking fireball that burst into more than 500 fragments which rained down on the lake. In its trip from the outer reaches of the asteroid belt it burned down from 56 tonnes to 1.3, and deep inside the fragments there are the basic building blocks of life, including the amino acids, sugars and hydrocarbons that could have jump started life on our planet.
This meteorite is the only uncontaminated example we’ve ever found, thanks to the quick actions of the people who spotted it. What the researchers have found is that the organic compounds in the rock date back to…
‘Magnetic Bubbles’ Found Around Solar System Edge
A digital image of the newly theorized 'foam zone'.
Is our solar system a ‘cosmic jacuzzi filled with magnetic bubbles’? The outer shield of our solar system was thought to be smooth, like soda gone flat, but new theory believes it may foam-like filled with “bubbles.” From National Geographic:
The edge of the solar system may be a frothy sea of giant magnetic “bubbles,” a new NASA study says.
The new findings may mean that our system’s magnetic barrier—once thought to be a smooth shield—may be letting in more harmful cosmic rays and energetic particles than previously thought.
The new “foam zone” theory is based on a computer model created using data from NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft, both launched in 1977 and currently about 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth.
In 2007 Voyager 1 recorded dramatic dips and rises in the amount of electrons it encountered as the craft traveled through the heliosphere—the “force…
Alien Planets Outnumber Stars
Montage of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
When we look up at the night sky we see millions of twinkling stars. But how many planets are we not seeing? Astronomers’ new study has found that ‘Jupiter-like gas giants’ are more common than previously thought. The National Geographic reports:
If you look to the stars tonight, consider this: No matter how innumerable they may seem, there are far more planets than stars lurking out there in the darkness, a new study suggests.
The study uncovered a whole new class of worlds: Jupiter-like gas giants that have escaped the gravitational bonds of their parent stars and are freely roaming space.
What’s more, “our results indicate that such planets are quite common,” said study team member David Bennett, an astronomer at Notre Dame University in Indiana.
“There’s a good chance that the closest free-floating planet is closer to Earth than the closest star.”
Ohio State University astronomer…
Woman Selling Million-Dollar ‘Moon Rock’ Arrested
The wackiest part of this chain of events? That NASA has undercover agents who orchestrate stings to crack down on space crimes. Via the Guardian:
A woman who tried to sell what she said was a rare piece of moon rock for $1.7 million was detained when her would-be buyer turned out to be an undercover NASA agent, officials said Friday.
The gray rocks, which are considered national treasures and are illegal to sell, were given to each U.S. state and 136 countries by then-President Richard Nixon after U.S. moon missions and can sell for millions of dollars on the black market.
NASA investigators and Riverside County sheriff’s deputies detained the woman after she met Thursday with an undercover NASA investigator at a restaurant in Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the sheriff’s office said. The investigation was conducted over several months.
NASA planned to conduct tests to determine whether the…
How Area 51 Hid Secret Craft And Low-Tech Decoys
Via The CIA created Area 51 in 1955 to test and develop top secret U.S. military projects in the remote Nevada desert. More than 50 years later, the base still doesn’t officially exist and appears on no public U.S. government maps.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51 was the epicenter of the OXCART project, intended to create the successor for the U-2 spy plane.
The OXCART plane was expected to be undetectable in the air as it flew surveillance and information-gathering missions over the Soviet Union. But Area 51 personnel soon found it necessary to conceal the craft from the Soviets eyes even when it was still being tested on the ground.
It was discovered that Soviet spy satellites, dubbed ash cans by Area 51 staff, were making regular rounds over Nevada.
[Continues at National Geographic]
Astronomers Begin Search For Alien Signals From 86 Earth-Like Planets
Via Space.com:
A new survey is under way to search for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but this one has a twist: Instead of listening for alien signals from anywhere in the sky, scientists are aiming radio telescopes at the alien planets most likely to be like our own Earth.
The new search, which began last week, is scanning 86 alien worlds for radio signals that could suggest the presence of an advanced civilization. The extrasolar planets are thought to be the most Earth-like of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered so far by NASA’s prolific Kepler space observatory.
“We’ve picked out the planets with nice temperatures — between zero and 100 degrees Celsius [32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit] — because they are a lot more likely to harbor life,” said physicist Dan Werthimer of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.
This new SETI search is not part of the SETI Institute, which has long…
Planets Spinning In Reverse
Did you know that some planets spin backwards? A new study reveals the so called hot Jupiters, reported via Reuters:
Some planets are just flipping backward.
Of the more than 500 planets detected around stars besides our Sun, the vast majority appear to spin the same way the star does, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
But some of these extrasolar planets spin in the opposite direction of the stars they orbit, astronomers found. These strange, backward-spinning planets are usually gassy giants called hot Jupiters, not rocky orbs like Earth.
Besides their backwards twirling, which the astronomers call flipped orbits, these big planets huddle close to their stars, unlike Jupiter, which is about 483 million miles (778 million km) from the Sun, more than five times as distant from the Sun as Earth.
“That’s really weird, and it’s even weirder because the planet is so close to the star,” Frederic Rasio of Northwestern…
Private US Company Aims To Put A Man On Mars In 10-20 Years
One of these days, bang, zoom, straight to….Mars? SpaceX, a private company based in the California, is hoping to put a man on Mars within a decade or two. From Agence France-Presse via The Raw Story:
Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said.
“We’ll probably put a first man in space in about three years,” Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. “We’re going all the way to Mars, I think… best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years.”
SpaceX is one of the two leading private space companies in the United States and has won $75 million from the US space agency NASA to help its pursuit of developing a spacecraft to replace the space shuttle.
The California-based company last year completed its first successful test of an unmanned space capsule into orbit and back.
[Continues at…
Scientists Say They Can Now Test Theory Of Early Universe Being One Dimension
Site where stars are being born in Emission nebula NGC 604 2.7 million light years from Earth.
A relatively new theory suggests that the early stages of the universe may have been only one dimension and gradually gained more dimensions as it expanded. Does this mean the universe may eventually see a fourth dimension? Via Daily Mail:
Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That’s the mind-boggling question at the heart of a theory scientists say they are on the brink of solving.
The theory was first proposed by physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues from the University of Buffalo in 2010.
They suggested that the early universe – which exploded from a single point and was tiny at first – was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three, which is the world in which we live today.
The theory, if valid, would address…
If You Don’t Believe, Watch This: Recent Mass UFO/Alien Sightings Around The World
Something to get you thinkin’. Via WorldStarHipHop.com:
Silicon Valley Start-Up To Mine The Moon
A new lunar gold rush? Via Phenomenonica:
A Silicon Valley start-up, founded by an Indian-American entrepreneur, plans to mine the moon and is in the process of building robotic rovers that will search the lunar surface for precious metals and rare metallic elements.
Moon Express Inc or MoonEx, co-founded by Naveen Jain, is building the robotic rovers alongside scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Centre near San Jose, a report in the Los Angeles Times said. “MoonEx should be ready to land on the lunar surface by 2013,” Jain said.
While there is no guarantee that the moon is “flush” with these materials, MoonEx thinks it “may be a gold mine of so-called rare earth elements.”
“From an entrepreneur’s perspective, the moon has never truly been explored,” the report quoted Jain, chairman and company co-founder, as saying. “We think it could hold resources that benefit Earth and all humanity.”
MoonEx’s machines are designed to look for materials…
‘First Orbit’ Celebrates Today’s 50th Anniversary Of Man In Space
Move over PBS: YouTube/Google funded this very cool and very free movie about the beginning of spaceflight, with today being exactly 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
You can download the movie or watch it on YouTube.
From the official First Orbit site:
April 12th 1961 – Yuri Gagarin is about to see what no other person has seen in the history of
humanity – the Earth from space…
Black-Market Trinkets From Space
The Willamette Meteorite, the largest ever to be found in the United States.
The New York Times reports:
Ebay and other Web sites pulse with hundreds of sales pitches. “The pieces below have an exceptional patina,” a site called Star-bits.com said of 10 pictured fragments.
The ads are for chunks of meteorites, bits of asteroids that have fallen from the sky and are as prized by scientists as they are by collectors. As more meteorites have been discovered in recent years, interest in them has flourished and an illegal sales market has boomed — much to the dismay of the people who want to study them and the countries that consider them national treasures.
“It’s a black market,” said Ralph P. Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University who directs the federal search for meteorites in Antarctica. “It’s as organized as any drug trade and just as illegal.”
The discovery of a rich and historically…
A History Of Our Awkward Attempts To Communicate With Aliens
Lightspeed Magazine has a fun rundown of humanity’s historical efforts to send space transmissions to whatever intelligent life might be out there. The whole endeavor is slightly desperate and pathetic — “The chances of an alien civilization having the means, motive, and opportunity to catch any of these messages are slim; certainly it’s not likely that humanity will last long enough to catch any return messages.” Still, it’s nice knowing that Morse code and theremin music has been beamed into the heavens.
1. The Morse Message (1962)
This audio salute, one of the first radio signals intended specifically for interstellar intelligence, was meant as a test of the new Evpatoria Planetary Radar (EPR). In November 1962, the Unique Korenberg Telescope Array transmitted the greeting towards Venus, using simple Morse Code. Given the location of Venus in November 1962, the message is even now winging its way towards Libra.
Message Content: The words “MIR,” “LENIN,”…
