#Rover finds first life-friendly environment on Mars Microbes could have lived on Mars . Though we don't know yet
if they actually did NASA's Curiosity rover has found the first definitive evidence that the Red planet was suited once to life
and perhaps the first direct evidence of life-friendly conditions anywhere beyond Earth. This is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we've described
Determining if Mars could have supported ever life was the rover's chief goal when it landed in Gale crater in August 2012.
Curiosity was expected to hit pay dirt months from now when it reached a 5-kilometre-high mound of layered sediments in the middle of the crater.
All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.
and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it. The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM) also found carbon dioxide and hints of other carbon-based molecules in the drilled sample.
Part of Curiosity's mission is to find preserved organics compounds that include both carbon and hydrogen.
That would be a direct sign that something actually lived on the Red planet. These new hints of carbon are tantalising
Mars is going to pass behind the sun from Earth's perspective for the entire month of April blocking communications between the rover and mission control.
The next drill scoop will have to wait until the planet comes back into Range in the meantime the science team has plenty of data to fuel new discoveries and daydreams.
I have an image now of possibly a freshwater lake on a Mars with a thicker atmosphere maybe a snowcapped Mount Sharp said NASA science administrator John Grunsfeld.
#Curiosity's first drilling hints at Martian mining NASA's Curiosity rover bored into a Martian rock on 9 february and pulled out its first sample of the planet's insides to ingest
The achievement could lay the groundwork for future Mars explorers to build structures or even to mine the Red planet.
This is the only time anybody's drilled into Mars says Louise Jandura of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena California chief engineer for Curiosity's sampling system.
what Mars was like 3 or 4 billion years ago. However it is not the first space drilling to take place.
Astronauts drilled into rocks on the moon and Soviet landers drilled on the moon and on Venus. Curiosity's predecessors the rovers Spirit and Opportunity each had a tool that scraped away the top layers of rocks to see what was beneath
but they were equipped not to extract anything for analysis. That means Curiosity is the first Mars rover to make a deep hole and collect
what was inside to be analysed. Drilling anywhere is hard but drilling on a rover kicks it up a notch says Jandura.
The rover used the drill bit at the end of its robotic arm to make a hole 1. 6 centimetres wide and 6. 4 centimetres deep in a flat veined outcrop thought to have once been saturated with water.
Although Curiosity's digging into Mars has been extremely modest its achievement could lay the groundwork for construction and mining on the Red planet.
#8th-century tree rings hint at close-range space blast A blast of radiation that hit Earth circa AD 770 may have been caused not by a solar flare but by the energetic debris from the collision of two nearby neutron stars.
but Miyake found a 1. 2 per cent leap in those years that could only have been caused by extremely high-energy cosmic rays hitting the Earth.
and European trees from the same era while Antarctic ice cores from 775 also have increases in beryllium-10 another isotope caused by cosmic rays.
There is nothing similar anywhere else in around 3000 years of tree ring records leading Miyake to suggest a massive solar flare as the cause.
and there is no historical record of such an energetic solar flare. The aurora would have been seen up to tropical latitudes says Valeri Hambaryan of the University of Jena Germany.
Some researchers have suggested that an unknown supernova might be responsible for a red crucifix in the sky recorded in the Anglo-saxon Chronicle a history of Anglo-saxon life compiled by anonymous scribes.
GRBS are known to occur in distant galaxies and thought to be caused by the collision of two neutron stars black holes or white dwarfs.
The pair suggest that the odd isotope levels in the trees and in the Antarctic ice are the first evidence for a burst much closer to home.
#Largest structure challenges Einstein's smooth cosmos A collection of galaxies that is a whopping four billion light years long is the biggest cosmic structure ever seen.
They identified a cluster of 73 quasars the brightly glowing cores found at the centre of some galaxies far larger than any similar structure seen before.
Since 1982 astronomers have known that quasars tend to clump together in large quasar groups or LQGS.
We look for quasars that have a certain separation from the next nearest quasar says Clowes. The newly discovered and appropriately named Huge-LQG (see black circles in image) happens to be in the same region of the sky as one of the earliest known quasar clusters
which Clowes helped find in 1991. That group contains 34 quasars and measures roughly one billion light years across (red crosses) so it is dwarfed by Huge-LQG.
The discovery of Huge-LQG joins a collection of observations that seem to challenge the cosmological status quo.
But other evidence such as a controversial stream of galaxies that seem to be moving in the same direction dubbed dark flow is also poking holes in the uniformity of the universe.
because it will make cosmology too bloody complicated says Sarkar. Journal reference: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society DOI:
#Multibillion-dollar race to put internet into orbit The next-generation internet could come from above, with fleets of satellites delivering broadband to under-served areas of the world THE race is on to build a new kind of internet.
A host of companies and billions of dollars are in play, with the ultimate goal of ringing the planet with satellites that will allow anyone, anywhere,
to get online at broadband speeds. Presently, satellite internet relies on spacecraft that are travelling in geosynchronous orbit
at the same speed as Earth rotates. But while this ensures the satellites are always in the same spot above Earth
it means there is a large time lag in the service, as radio waves take a quarter of a second to make the round trip up to a geosynchronous satellite and back.
Added to the time for the other trips your data must take across the rest of the internet,
the lag becomes unworkable for real-time applications like video or voice chat (see diagram). To speed up the service firms are looking at using satellites closer to Earth.
This month, Virgin galactic and chip-maker Qualcomm announced their backing of a venture called Oneweb.
This plans to put 648 satellites in orbit about 1200 kilometres above Earth's surface, where the round trip time for radio waves is just a few thousands of a second, fine for any online application.
Spacex immediately announced its own plan to do the same, building and launching 4000 satellites to a similar altitude.
That would more than double the number of satellites in orbit. The race has attracted more than just newcomers.
Iridium Communications based In virginia, has provided satellite telephone services and low-bandwidth internet since the late 1990s.
Its existing network of 66 satellites is set to be replaced by a new one called Iridium NEXT.
Due to start launching this year, the new satellites will be capable of delivering high-speed internet on a par with
what Oneweb and Spacex envisage. And O3b, a sister company to Oneweb, already has 12 satellites at an altitude of 8000 kilometres.
The firm provides connectivity to Colombia, the Democratic republic of the congo, South Sudan and Papua new guinea. Even internet giant Google has got in on the rush to space
investing $1 billion in Spacex's venture. The move is motivated by net neutrality concerns, says Kerri Cahoy, an aerospace engineer at the Massachusetts institute of technology.
If the internet service providers that rule the physical infrastructure of the internet start charging web services to deliver content to users,
the thinking goes, an alternative route to customers via satellites will be invaluable. It's not the only reason."
"It's a very interesting combination of motivations, "says Cahoy.""Some of these guys are fuelled by ads.
The more eyes they reach and more products they convince people to buy, the more business.
"Will the space around Earth become crowded with all these satellites vying to route our data?"
"I'm not worried about the physical interaction of the satellites as much as what they're using for the transmission.
"Beaming down Radio transmission is the most common way to communicate between satellites and Earth.
lower powered satellites that can still talk to the ground easily.""Radio has been the de facto,
"Miniaturisation and large drops in the cost of satellite components are boosting the push to space,
These have combined to increase access to orbit as never before.""I've got students that will leave with a master's
or six spacecraft,"says Cutler.""That's never happened before.""Companies like O3b and Spacex are planning to launch internet satellites with masses of hundreds of kilograms,
but Cutler says those of the future could be closer to 5 or 10 kilograms.
Antenna weight can be brought down by using antennas that unfurl themselves in space, like those being developed by Sergio Pellegrino at the California Institute of technology.
if companies make their equipment small enough to fit in Cubesats small, lightweight satellites that can piggyback on the launches of other vehicles."
"That way every rocket that goes up is kicking off Cubesats, "he says, with each small orbiter perhaps holding only a fraction of a functional communications rig."
"What you want to do is start to self-assemble, "he says. Instead of building large satellites On earth and then fighting gravity to get them in orbit,
the components themselves would be launched, then come together in space to form a light, powerful satellite.
A network of such orbiters should be able to provide coverage that is similar to the signals terrestrial cellular towers already pump out."
"It's a brand new space race in many ways, "says Cutler.""But instead of being fuelled from a defence perspective,
It s crazy that something as trivial as physical space as the size of the lunch table could affect productivity Waber says.
A large pink dot appears to follow the pedestrian a symbol of the robot perception of the pedestrian position in space.
says Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, a postdoc in MIT Aerospace Controls Lab. ormally, a robot may make some decision,
a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, will present details of the visualization system at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauticsscitech conference in January.
or propulsion systems for fist-sized nanosatellites. In the latest issue of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical systems Velsquez-Garc a his graduate students Eric Heubel and Philip Ponce de Leon and Frances Hill a postdoc in his group describe a new prototype
Higher currents thus promise more-efficient manufacturing and more-nimble satellites. The same prototype also crams 1900 emitters onto a chip that s only a centimeter square quadrupling the array size and emitter density of even the best of its predecessors.
and not a beam of droplets says Herbert Shea an associate professor in the Microsystems for Space technologies Laboratory at the cole Polytechnique F d rale de Lausanne.
Shea believes that at least in the near term the technology s most promising application is in spacecraft propulsion.
whereas it would take very little effort to use it as propulsion for small spacecraft he says.
The reason you d like to be in ion mode is to have the most efficient conversion of the mass of the propellant into the momentum of the spacecraft t
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth s surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don t need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
#Shrink-wrapping spacesuits For future astronauts the process of suiting up may go something like this:
Instead of climbing into a conventional bulky gas-pressurized suit an astronaut may don a lightweight stretchy garment lined with tiny musclelike coils.
She would then plug in to a spacecraft s power supply triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrinkwrap the garment around her body.
not only support the astronaut but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration.
Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active second-skin spacesuit: Dava Newman a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small springlike coils that contract in response to heat.
The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) a type of material that remembers an engineered shape
In subsequent tests the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.
With conventional spacesuits you re essentially in a balloon of gas that s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere of pressure to keep you alive in the vacuum of space says Newman who has worked for the past decade to design a formfitting flexible spacesuit of the future.
While skintight spacesuits have been proposed in the past there s been one persistent design hurdle: how to squeeze in and out of a pressurized suit that s engineered to be extremely tight.
To find an active material that would be most suitable for use in space Holschuh considered 14 types of shape-changing materials ranging from dielectric elastomers to shape-memory polymers before settling on nickel-titanium shape
The first option would overheat an astronaut and require heavy battery packs a design that would significantly impede mobility
and is given likely infeasible the limited power resources available to astronauts in space. Holschuh and Newman are currently exploring the second option looking into potential mechanisms to lock
As for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit Holschuh is contemplating several designs. For instance an array of coils may be incorporated into the center of a suit with each coil attached to a thread that radiates to the suit s extremities.
Or smaller arrays of coils could be placed in strategic locations within a spacesuit to produce localized tension
While the researchers are concentrating mostly on applications in space Holschuh says the group s designs
We re trying to keep our astronauts alive safe and mobile but these designs are not just for use in space.
This research was funded by NASA and the MIT Portugal Program m
#How to hide like an octopus Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature most skillful camouflage artists,
able to change both the color and texture of their skin within seconds to blend into their surroundings a capability that engineers have struggled long to duplicate in synthetic materials.
But their advisor, Jonathan How, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics who directs of the Aerospace Controls Laboratory,
without needing to know details of the underlying hardware. ee doing the same thing for the drone space,
left corner of that table was located in physical space. ou say that corner is this far off the floor, this far to the right of my chair,
Something that doesn t get mentioned a lot in this space is the amount of time that gets saved through ride consolidation he says.
but also light much as window blinds tilt to filter the sun. Researchers say the work could lead to waterproofing and anti-glare applications such as smart windows for buildings and cars.
or sunlight says Yangying Zhu a graduate student in MIT s Department of Mechanical engineering. So you could filter how much solar radiation you want coming in and also shed raindrops.
In a recent case study with Mars for example Affectiva found that the client s chocolate ads elicited the highest emotional engagement
#Steam from the sun A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure a layer of graphite flakes
When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material pores,
if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.
who led the development of the structure. specially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy,
Cutting the optical concentration Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough
when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems. his is a huge advantage in cost-reduction,
From sun to steam The approach itself is relatively simple: Since steam is generated at the surface of a liquid,
Ghasemi looked for a material that could both efficiently absorb sunlight and generate steam at a liquid surface.
As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam.
and exposing it to a solar simulator a light source that simulates various intensities of solar radiation.
Lasers can also move energy between two points such as two satellites. But this requires an uninterrupted continuous path between the transmitter and the receiver
GS could adapt over time into that space, as well. o
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery.
Prototype to productglass first conceived of the BAT while working at MIT toward his master s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.
#Getting more electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current.
In most photovoltaic (PV) materials, a photon (a packet of sunlight) delivers energy that excites a molecule,
which makes up almost half the sun electromagnetic radiation at the Earth surface. According to their estimates, applying their technology as an inexpensive coating on silicon solar cells could increase efficiency by as much as 25 percent.
and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems. Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition,
Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0. 5 percent of wasted heat per Degree celsius increase.
and to convert carbon dioxide to fuels for applications On earth and in space. Today industrial infrastructure manages basic resources linearly
for the agricultural industry. arth as a spaceshipecovolt is valuable today as a solution to Earth water issues.
But the core technology began as a bit of aerospace ingenuity and has since found its way back to space.
Meeting at MIT in 2006 over a shared fondness for biotech, Silver, then a research scientist in MIT Space Systems Lab,
and Buck, a biological engineering graduate student, won a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts program to create a life-support system that could treat waste
and generate electricity for astronauts. Soon, they came across exoelectrogens; a 1999 study had revealed that exoelectrogens could,
in fact, generate more amps per square centimeter than was thought previously. This made exoelectrogens a third and largely better candidate for wastewater treatment, over aerobic or anaerobic methods.
In 2012, NASA began funding a Cambrian project, called Exogen, that uses electromethanogenesis to more efficiently extract oxygen or fuel from CO2 for long-duration space flights.
NASA currently carries out oxygen recovery from CO2 in a multistep chemical process; Exogen will make it a simplified, one-step process.
Surprisingly, shifting from aerospace to Earth applications, and back again, has been an easy transition, Silver says. he challenge of supporting astronauts in space is very similar to sustainability On earth,
he says. hat youe looking to do in space is maximize reuse, while minimizing energetics. If we look at Earth as the spaceship, it the same problem.
With Ecovolt, and its other ongoing projects, Cambrian overall aim, Silver says, is to leverage biotechnology to advance a sustainable ndustrial ecology,
where the waste of industry is recycled to create energy and value much like in natural ecosystems. n a natural ecosystem,
but the company is also planning to launch additional bionic products into the space to provide assistance to a larger number of people Herr says.
David Lidzey a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield who was involved not in this work calls the research a really impressive demonstration of a direct measurement of the diffusion of triplet excitons and their eventual trapping.
The problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn shine. Now a team at MIT and Harvard university has come up with an ingenious workaround a material that can absorb the sun heat
and store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea:
since it makes the sun energy, in the form of heat, storable and distributable, says Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering,
Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other,
taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on demand.
while the sun isn out, being able to store heat for later use could be a big benefit.
and can withstand extreme temperatures, sun exposure, and heavy wear, says Doyle, the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the April 13 issue of Nature Materials.
known as are earth upconverting nanocrystals. These crystals are doped with elements such as ytterbium, gadolinium, erbium, and thulium,
This new approach could ultimately lead to advances in solar photovoltaics, detectors for telescopes and microscopes,
The findings could also prove useful in optical systems, such as microscopes and telescopes, for viewing faint objects that are close to brighter objects for example, a faint planet next to a bright star.
By using a system that receives light only from a certain angle, such devices could have improved an ability to detect faint targets.
Plants typically make use of only about 10 percent of the sunlight available to them,
Howard A. Stone a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton university who was involved not in this research calls this a very interesting paper
Pantazis says. e now have the tools to precisely map brain function both in space and time,
and it works much more reliably than lidar in bright sunlight when ambient light can yield misleading readings.
These loops form a new layer surrounding the nanotube, known as a corona. The MIT researchers found that the loops within the corona are arranged very precisely along the tube,
and the spacing between the anchors determines which target molecule will be able to wedge into the loops
They are now working on a way to predict such polymer-nanotube interactions based on the structure of the corona layers,
using data generated from a new type of microscope that Landry built to image the interactions between the carbon nanotube coronas
and their targets. hat happening to the polymer and the corona phase has been a bit of a mystery,
Howard Stone, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton university who was involved not in this work,
It might be a job for efficient spray cooling f we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.
a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute who was involved not in this research,
Don Boroson on NASA s record-breaking use of laser communications Last week NASA announced that the Lunar Laser communication Demonstration (LLCD) on its Lunar Atmosphere
and Dust environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft had made history by using a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 239000 miles from the moon to Earth at a record-breaking data-download speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps). This download speed is more than six times faster than the speed achieved by the best
radio system ever flown to the moon. LLCD also demonstrated a data-upload speed of 20 Mbps on a laser beam transmitted from a ground station in New mexico to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit;
this speed is 5000 times faster than the upload speed of the best radio system sent to the moon.
Finally LLCD provided continuous measurements of the distance from Earth to the fast-moving LADEE spacecraft with an unprecedented accuracy of less than half an inch.
These tests were the first in a monthlong demonstration of the capabilities of the LLCD
He describes below the highly improved communications capabilities that will enable NASA to significantly change the scope and design of future scientific space missions.
It is NASA s first space-based laser communications system. And it is by far the longest two-way laser communications link ever accomplished.
The beam-stabilization system on the space terminal is based on inertial sensors which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets.
And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
Q: Why is this work important? A: It is agreed generally that present-day science and exploration missions to deep space are constrained by the amount of data they can get back to Earth.
Mars landers and orbiters gather much more information in the form of images for example than they can send back over the huge distance Mars is as much as 1000 times farther from Earth than the moon despite the incredible development of NASA s radio-based
Deep space Network over the past 50 years. It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
But it has been an elusive goal to bring laser communications techniques and systems to the point where they can actually deliver on their promises.
With the success of LLCD next-generation space mission designers can now feel more comfortable in including a laser communication system as part of their design.
and power on their spacecraft for the much higher data return they can get. Q:
and concepts that Lincoln Laboratory has been developing for NASA for the past 10 years and those grew out of our laser communications developments from the previous 20 years.
When Lincoln Lab pointed out to the NASA sponsors that the pieces could add up to this demonstration NASA made the mission happen.
Then the Laboratory did the more detailed full-system design the detailed design of the three modules that make up the space terminal and the detailed design of the primary ground terminal.
and delivered these various parts to the spacecraft and to the ground site. Finally we designed
and configuring the space and ground segments in a coordinated fashion h
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