#In Japan, Eight People With Two Laptops Launch A Telescope Into Orbit A new low-cost highly automated rocket from Japan's space agency launched Saturday with just eight crew members and two laptops on-site.
The Japan aerospace exploration agency sent the first of its new generation of launch vehicles into orbit carrying a telescope that will observe the atmospheres of Venus Mars and Jupiter.
The telescope's measurements will provide astronomers with clues to events early in the solar system's history according to the agency's description of the project.
A large control room could be integrated into a single laptop PC the rocket's project manager Yasuhiro Morita said in a statement in 2011.'
'We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events.''The new rocket called Epsilon has artificial intelligence to perform its own safety checks.
Its computer system reduces the number of people needed at a launch site from the 150 that were standard at Japan's previous space launches.
Japan's space program JAXA developed both its Epsilon Launch vehicle and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope
so that it could launch more missions more frequently. We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events Morita said.
The agency retired Epsilon's predecessor a rocket called M-5 seven years ago because of its high costs the BBC reported.
It took $37 million to develop the Epsilon half of what it cost to develop the M-5. The mission was supposed originally to launch in August
but blastoff was delayed first and then cancelled apparently because of computer glitches. JAXA reported Saturday's launch went fine
and that the satellite now in orbit is in good health. Japan aerospace exploration agency BBC Why do photos of Japan always seem so clean and tidy?
Eat you heart out N. Korea. ROFL5 years from now they'll use 2 smart phones. 150 to just 8!!!
HAHAHAA! Man that is awesome. Automation will kill the average tech job and even a control engineers job too!
Bill Joy-Chief Scientist and Cofounder-Sun Micro Systems sums it up best in this Wired article.
The data was collected over several decades by NASA and researchers from the UK and Germany.
but it does highlights that we still don't know everything about the surface of our own planet.
Satellite Signals A wireless device developed by researchers at Duke university that converts microwaves into electricity could eventually harvest Wi-fi or satellite signals for power according to its creators.
or satellites to improve efficiency and make lost energy usable. â##It s possible to use this design for a lot of different frequencies
#Planet Without A Star Found â##We have seen never before an object free-floating in space that that looks like this.
It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars but it is drifting out there all aloneâ#stated team leader Michael Liu who is with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. â
##I had wondered often if such solitary objects exist and now we know they do. â#The planet is about 80 light-years from Earth
which is quite close and is part of a star group named after Beta pictoris that also came together about 12 million years ago.
There is a planet in orbit around Beta pictoris itself but PSO J318. 5-22 has a lower mass
and likely had a different formation scenario the researchers said. Astronomers uncovered the planet which is six times the mass of Jupiter
while looking for brown dwarfs or â##failed stars. â#PSO J318. 5-22â#s ultrared color stood apart from the other objects in the survey astronomers said.
The telescope was identified in the Pan-STARRS 1 wide-field survey telescope in Maui. Follow-up observations were performed with several other Hawaii-based telescopes including the NASA Infrared telescope Facility the Gemini North Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
The discovery will soon be detailed in Astrophysical Letters but for now you can read the prepublished verison on Arxiv.
Source: Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii This article was republished with permission from Universe Today o
#U k. Supermarket Lets You 3-D Scan And Print Yourself In store Add this one to your grocery list.
A supermarket chain in the U k. is offering a new service that lets customers scan objects
and then get figurines of them 3-D-printed in ceramic. The 3-D service debuts tomorrow in the chain Asda's York store.#
A Bright Flash From The Sun At 8: 30 p m. Eastern time yesterday a solar flare peaked on the surface of the sun emitting an intense burst of radiation.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the M9. 4-class event at a wavelength of 131 Angstroms
M-class flares can cause some space weather effects On earth like disrupting radio signals. Anything more intense than an M9. 9 flare becomes an X-class the highest category.
The sun is currently undergoing a solar maximum a peak of activity that occurs about every 11 years making solar flares like this more likely.
#NASA A
#How Technology Will Make Everyone A Great Photographer At the end of May the Chicago Sun-Times laid off all its staff photographers.
The paper would instead use newswires freelancers and reporters armed with iphones. It was not the first time traditional media turned to untrained photojournalists consider the Instagram photos NBC published after the Boston Marathon bombing
#As one might expect the Sun-Times decision has met with criticism. It s been called â##shortsightedâ
#and â##idiotic. â#There s even a Tumblr of head-to-head comparisons between the Sun-Times
And in theory it will give the Sun-Times even more reach by leveraging the cameras already in place at news events.#
And the newer 20.3-megapixel Galaxy NX has an interchangeable lens mount. The Sony QX100 the newest offering in the lot is the most extreme example.
The Sun-Times to benefit from that type of machine vision the software will need to process larger image batches from multiple sources.
In time those pieces may come together proving that the Sun-Times decision wasn t foolish it was just a bit before its time.#
#One In Five Sun-Like Stars Have Earthlike Planets Back in February a team at Harvard announced they had found a possible Earthlike planet just 13 lightyears away.
The#study detailed the prevalence of these planets orbiting red dwarf stars and found#that about 15 percent have Earth-size planets within habitable zones.
However if you're stargazing from your backyard with only your eyes to guide you you wouldn't be able to see these cooler smaller stars.#
#Red dwarfs#are one-third the size and one-thousandth as bright as the sun. But in this week's PNAS Online Early Edition a team of researchers from#University of California at#Berkeley released a study that looks at how common Earth-size planets
are around stars that are more like our sun. The study found that for stars that more closely resemble our sun about 22 percent
or about one in five stars have these Earth-size planets within the habitable zone. The habitable zone includes orbits where planets receive the same amount of stellar energy from a star as the Earth receives from the sun. Earth-size planets include those that are between one and two times the size of Earth.
Perhaps the most exciting prospect of the study is the finding that#the closest potential Earthlike planet is only 12 lightyears away.
Using data from Kepler lead author Erik Petigura and his team analyzed 42000 G -and K-type stars visible to the naked eye from Earth.
These stars'surface temperatures range from just a bit hotter than the sun's 5778 Kelvin to as cool as 4100 Kelvin all of which are hotter than the M-class red dwarfs studied previously.
I do think that this work is a new chapter but it's not a new book Petigura tells Popular Science.
Indeed earlier this year Petigura published another paper that investigated the prevalence of planets as small as Earth but only those within the orbit of Mercury much closer to the star than Earth's orbit.
With the study published this week Petigura and his team are pushing that out to periods that are more similar to Earthlike periods
which house planets that have lukewarm temperatures similar to Earth. Out of those 42000 stars the team found 603 planets 10 of which fit the bill for orbit
and size#similar to Earth's. But if left it at that there would be a significant number#of planets unaccounted for.
So using custom-built software called TERRA Petigura corrected for the challenges associated with finding all of the planets orbiting stars in the Kepler field
and reached a total of 8000 Earthlike planets. I have been working a lot of late nights coming home after dark.
And around this of year the constellation Cygnus is high overhead and I've been looking up at these stars quite a bit Petigura says.
I was remembering questions I had when I was a little kid looking up and wondering how many of those stars have planets that are in some way like the Earth.
And learning more about planets with similar positioning and properties to Earth could of course aid in scientists'search for life and even future habitable sites.
I'm not saying we found Earth 2. 0 Petigura says. But it's an important stepping stone to answering that question.
I feel so fortunate to be alive in a time when we're even able to start answering this question e
#Preventing Superbugs By Deactivating Antibiotics With A Flash Of Light Bacterial resistance is becoming one of the most serious problems in the medical world
and it's largely a problem of our own making. We've become so good at making
and distributing antibiotics to kill bacteria that as the antibiotics build up in the environment the bacteria are becoming immune.
or at all and get a job after graduation. â#Doing scientific research in Antarctica is incredibly important and expensive According to a March 2012 article in the NSF-funded Antarctic Sun
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
Viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet and among the most mysterious. Mya Breitbart a microbial ecologist at the University of South Florida has figured out how to quickly decipher what they are and
Her contributions have been pivotal in unmasking the enormous diversity of viruses on the planet says Curtis Suttle a marine virologist at the University of British columbia.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
Soon Cappos hopes to use Seattle to surf the Net from the International space station too. Click here to see more from our annual celebration of young researchers whose innovations will change the world.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
With the data he has collected thus far Schmale has built a model of atmospheric circulation that shows large sections of air sweeping across the face of the planet like waves across an ocean transporting dust and microbes thousands of miles.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
zee44. comwhen the shark looks up from the depths of the water seeing the surface with the swimmer having the sun overhead silhouetting the swimmer the happy shark with open its mighty jaws with delight of his soon to be eaten meal of
what he believes is a seal shadowing the sun. Of course biting the diver will be a little a big wad of gume with the camouflage rubber wet suit.
practically anything on the planet certainly sperm cells even skin cells (as this reseach so obviously shows.
In addition to the underlying cause a death certificate has space for up to 20 additional causes. That's where cocaine or antidepressants would show up.
No bees on Mars just sayin...It is GMO CROPS watch the documentary on Netflix or go to rt. com Brainless Americans you are the reasons corporations have taken over our government
Lucas K. â##If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth man would only have four years left to live. â#â##Albert Einsteinthere's a long article Colony collapse disorder on wikipedia that is definitely worth reading
and animals then the statement â##.If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth man would only have four years left to live...
#Russia Will Launch Its First Moon Mission Since The 1970s Roscosmos the Russian federal space agency will launch an unmanned mission to the moon in 2015 according to agency head Vladimir Popovkin.
The rocket carrying the robotic probe called Luna-Glob will be the first set off from Russia's new Far east launchpad the Vostochny cosmodrome.
Last year President Vladimir Putin pledged to pour $1 billion into the new launch site located near China.
Luna-Glob the first of four planned Russian moon missions will carry scientific equipment to take soil samples
State-run news agency Ria Novosti has said that it will carry dust monitors and plasma sensors to sense high-energy cosmic rays as well.
It will be the first Russian trip to the moon since the 1970s. Roscosmos'latest moon exploration project has been postponed several times
since 2010 and will be its first mission after 2011's Phobos-Grunt failure. The probe set to collect samples from the Martian moon Phobos unsuccessfully aimed its course for Mars
and crashed into the Pacific ocean after two months in Earth's orbit. Luna-Glob and its successors are part of a larger plan to revamp development of Russia's space industry.
Plans are also in development to send a manned spacecraft to the moon in 2018. Washington post I like the moon.
I hope we humans and robots settle there. Besides it will give the humans a place to stay after the robots take over the Earth.
When I read the title I thought they were doing a manned mission. It would be good to see people leave the confines of low orbit for the first time in 50 years.
Plus they could use it as practice/tests for going to mars. It's about time the space faring governments of the world start building an infrastructure on the lunar surface that will support long term duration stays ship yards fuel generation and processing navigation stations for terrestrial navigation
and launch facilities on the moon. This is what robots should be doing there about now.
Otherwise we'll never get there in a reasonable amount of time. Can't believe the Russian government will spend billions launching more lunar probes
or even spend billions more on a manned lunar mission in the next 5 years. It has no value to them especially
since the feat has already been accomplished. The only possible reason I can imagine for Putin to make this announcement of a manned lunar program is to create interest within the Chinese government.
The Chinese have aspirations for putting a man on the moon and maybe Putin feels the Russians could make a profit selling a lunar space system to the Chinese.
Well think if we improve our ability to send larger and larger payloads to the moon then we could use it for useful things.
Like building giant greenhouses to grow food on to help take some strain off earth's resources.
It might not be a huge amount at first but theres thousands of square kilometers up there and we could build it up over time.
Just imagine thousands of kilometers of farm without having to clear cut thousands of kilometers of forest or other habitat on earth...
Like building giant greenhouses to grow food on to help take some strain off earth's resources...
Since the lunar environment has none of the resources needed for agriculture (except for sunlight) just how would this take some of the strain off earth's resources?
We would have to launch water CO2 soil chemical fertilizers the materials to construct the greenhouses
Then we would need the massive spacecraft able to transport these agricultural products back to earth.
But don't forget as far as sunlight is concerned. On the moon you have 14 of our days of sunlight and then 14 of our days of dark.
But don't forget as far as sunlight is concerned. On the moon the sunlight is moderated not by an atmosphere.
Agreed d
#This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf she sees much more than just green.
Around the edge I ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green
#Using Lasers To Save Earth's Cultural Monuments History is unwritten by the destruction of great artifacts.
and spacesuit pioneer ILC Dover to develop its proprietary UV-and weather-resistant fabric. B The first commercial BAT will house a 30-kilowatt turbine
In the Arctic for example there isn't enough sunlight to justify solar power for months at a time
#Satellite data Maps Sea floor's Hidden Depths While many detailed maps exist of Earth s continents
what lies beneath our planet s waters has remained somewhat of a mystery. So far only 10 percent of the seafloor has been mapped at high resolution leaving researchers pretty eager to know what s going on in that other 90 percent.
Harnessing never-before-used satellite altimeter data from the European space agency s (ESA) Cryosat-2 and NASA s Jason-1 the scientists have created stunning maps of Earth s entire seafloor bringing to light mountains
and ridges that have never before been charted. The maps give the researchers a new understanding of deep ocean plate tectonics and little-studied ocean basins.
According to lead researcher David Sandwell both the satellites are tasked with capturing the Earth s gravity field over the oceans.
The satellites orbit the earth and sends out thousands of radar pulses a second Sandwell a#geophysics professor#at Scripps.#
By mapping out all the bumps and indentions in the water the researchers had a pretty good snapshot of the variations in the Earth s crust.
what we have with maps of Mars and Mercury Sandwell says. We know more about these other planets than we know about the sea floor.
We need to try to make high resolution maps everywhere.##The researchers published their findings in the journal Science e
or research scientists floating into space. But the finding is especially troubling combined with the news Popular Science reported back in May that the collapse of some West Antarctic glaciers due to rising global temperatures is now very likely unstoppable.
According to the European space agency scientists discovered the gravity change by combining readings from the ESA's GOCE satellite
which has been taking high-resolution measurements of Earth's gravity for the past four years with those of the American-German orbiter GRACE which uses gravity data to measure changes in ice mass.
-or no-carbon economic development projects such as expanding their energy generation capacity with renewables like sun and wind instead of fossil fuels.
#Earth's Water Is Older Than The Sun Since water is one of the vital ingredients for life On earth scientists want to know how it got here.
One theory is that the water in our solar system was created in the chemical afterbirth of the Sun
. If that were the case it would suggest that water might only be common around certain stars that form in certain ways.#
#But a new study published today in Science suggests that at least some of Earth s water actually existed before the Sun was born
--and that it came from interstellar space.##That s certainly something to ponder the next time you drink a glass of water.#
--and maybe life#--may be ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.##If water in the early Solar system was inherited primarily as ice from interstellar space then it is likely that similar ices
along with the prebiotic organic matter that they contain are abundant in most or all protoplanetary disks around forming stars study author Conel Alexander explained in a press release.#
#The researchers concluded that a significant portion of Earth s water came from interstellar space by looking at the relative abundance of hydrogen and deuterium.#
#Deuterium is like hydrogen s heavier#brother. Both atoms have one proton in their nuclei
#In interstellar space for example water ice contains lots of deuterium thanks to the freezing cold temperatures and ionizing radiation.
whether Earth's deuterium came from space or whether it was cooked up in the birth of the Sun.#To find out researchers used mathematical models to#virtually recreate#the young solar system's protoplanetary disk--the cloud around the newborn#Sun. They found that based on the temperature
and radiation conditions that would have existed back then it wasn t possible for the young solar system to create the ratios of hydrogen
and deuterium that scientists observe in Earth s oceans and on comets. Because of that the researchers estimate that anywhere between 7 and 50 percent of Earth s water had to have come from the interstellar medium in
which the solar system was born. And since other solar systems would have formed in the same interstellar medium the findings suggest that the origins of water On earth were not unique
and that the thirst-quenching#life-supporting substance may be common on exoplanets throughout the galaxy x
#Facebook Says Wi-fi Drones Will be sized Jumbo jet If a new Facebook plan is successful the easiest way to access the cloud may be...
#in the clouds. Facebook wants to spread Wi-fi Internet to unconnected parts of the world with drones
and at#a summit in New york earlier this week the company revealed those drones will be the size of jumbo jets.
Snake bots slithering like their reptilian namesakes are great at crawling through narrow spaces but they're fairly slow.
When the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing future versions of this battery could release energy captured during more productive times into nations'power grids.
It also might make sun-and wind-produced electricity cheaper; by storing extra energy that isn't being used less electricity is wasted in the long run.
--were housed in little more than a couple of glorified wooden cigar boxes leaving vast amounts of empty space between the rear wheels.
Spacex And Boeing Will Take You Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner-well two actually.
Today NASA announced that two private companies will be tasked with taxiing NASA ASTRONAUTS to and from the International space station beginning in 2017.
And the spoils go to Boeing and Spacex. The companies will sign contracts with NASA to further develop their spacecraft to deliver astronauts to and from the ISS.
Boeing will receive $4. 2 billion to build its CST-100 spacecraft a vehicle it has been working on for the past four years
while Spacex will receive $2. 6 billion to create an upgraded rendition of its Dragon spacecraft aptly named Dragon Version 2. The original Dragon is currently being used to ferry cargo from Earth to the ISS.
The CST-100 and Dragon V2 outwardly look similar to NASA s Orion capsule but they can both hold up to seven crewmembers each.
To get to the ISS Boeing's CST-100 will be launched on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas v rocket
and Spacex will launch the Dragon V2 on its own Falcon 9 v1. 1 rocket. This was not an easy choice NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said at the Sept. 16 announcement
but this is the best choice for NASA and the nation. The partnership is part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program
which was established in 2010 to foster the development of a U s. commercial crew space transportation capability.
The idea was to make trips to space both safe and cost effective and private companies have demonstrated for some time that they can send rockets to space for a fraction of the cost.
Most importantly though is that the program will end bring an end to NASA's reliance on Russian spacecraft to ferry astronauts from Earth to the ISS.
Since the end of the Space shuttle program in 2011 NASA ASTRONAUTS have been hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets.
The arrangement doesn't do much for the American ego especially since the recent Ukraine conflict has soured the relationship between Russia
and the United states. Plus rides on the Soyuz don't come cheap costing about $70 million a pop.
We don't know for sure how much it will cost to launch the Dragon or the CST-100 but Bigelow Aerospace estimates the cost per ride may be cut almost in half.
Spacex and Boeing beat out a number of other private companies for the NASA gig including another big contender the Sierra nevada Corp. All three companies had been involved in an earlier phase of the program in
which NASA awarded them a total of $1. 4 billion in Space Act Agreements and contracts to get their ideas up and running.
Despite not being chosen for the program Sierra nevada plans to further develop its Shuttle-esque vehicle the Dream Chaser perhaps as a resupply vehicle or for commercial space flight t
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