#Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion On earth THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
and electrons the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions.
It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid behaving like mixing ocean currents
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
Snowflakes shorelines and most recently black holes (see Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed) also exhibit such fractal behaviour.
These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
#Canada uses satellite to scold Russia over Ukraine Canada has blocked the launch of a satellite aboard a Russian rocket as a result of tensions over Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The move is a step up from a largely symbolic US ban on cooperating with Russia in space earlier this month.
The M3m satellite was built by Com Dev of Cambridge Ontario under contract for the Canadian space agency (CSA)
It was scheduled for launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket in June and was due to be shipped to the launch site in Baikonur Kazakhstan.
and the CSA meanwhile plan to launch the M3m satellite on another rocket. We are confident that the mitigations will be in place prior to the originally planned M3m in service date of September 2014 said Pley.
But unlike the US Canada doesn't have its own vehicles capable of launching a satellite into orbit
and so must hitch a ride on rockets launched by others. It isn't yet clear who might provide an alternative
Earlier this month NASA announced it was suspending cooperation with Russia although the International space station was excluded from the ban.
NASA only has a few smaller-scale joint activities with Russia such as an instrument aboard its Curiosity Mars rover
but there are no signs these have been affected by the boycott t
#Supernova found aligned with galactic magnifying glass A perfectly arranged exploding star and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.
Sometimes when a white dwarf star dies it explodes as a type 1a supernova. All supernovae in this class reach a very specific colour and peak brightness creating
what astronomers call a standard candle. As a result any deviations from this standard brightness and colour indicate
whether and by how much the light from the supernova is being messed with by other things like nearby galaxies or the expansion of the universe.
For example the gravity from a massive object like a galaxy can magnify light from another object like a supernova bending its light waves
and focusing them like a lens. We can only see this effect from Earth if the two objects are aligned perfectly.
Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
its light is being lensed by a galaxy in front of it. The supernova PS1-10afx was discovered in 2010 using the Pan starrs telescope in Hawaii.
Because it was so much brighter than normal it sparked controversy over whether it was a new type of supernova
or was being magnified by a gravitational lens. Quimby thought it must be lensing but nobody could see an intervening galaxy that could be doing the job.
There were good data taken before during and after the supernova and none of these showed obvious signs of a foreground object says Quimby.
Now his team has found a galaxy full of dim old stars that was hard to see against the bright background of the galaxy holding the supernova.
They calculate that it is the right size to make a normal type 1a supernova look about 30 times brighter about the same as the apparent brightness of PS1-10afx.
It's quite remarkable. I'm impressed they could find this thing says Brian Schmidt at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Schmidt used type 1a supernovae to deduce that the universe's expansion was accelerating a finding that won him the 2011 Nobel prize in physics along with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.
The finding could help investigate dark matter the stuff thought to make up over 80 per cent of our universe's matter.
And that in turn may depend on the galaxy's dark matter content and distribution since massive dark matter halos are thought to cocoon galaxies making up most of a galaxy's mass.
We have these numerical simulations of dark matter that make pretty strong predictions of what dark matter halos should look like Schmidt says.
So if you could get a really good measurement of how dark matter is distributed within a bunch of galaxies one can essentially test the dark matter model better than we can at present.
Such systems could also help in the search to understand dark energy the mysterious entity thought to be behind the acceleration of the universe's expansion.
and hailed by some as the discovery of the century may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
when researchers report new results from the European space agency's Planck satellite. On 17 march researchers led by John Kovac of Harvard university announced that gravitational waves from the early universe had been found by a telescope called BICEP2 at the South pole.
The waves were said to be the smoking gun evidence for the theory of inflation which suggests that space expanded faster than the speed of light in the first moments after the universe's birth.
The announcement sent shock waves through the physics world. I was excited so recalls Philipp Mertsch of Stanford university in California.
ever since appear in every direction in the sky as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. But other things apart from gravitational waves such as dust can emit polarised photons.
To minimise the chances of this effect causing a false signal the BICEP 2 team pointed their telescope at a patch of sky far away from the Milky way's dusty disc.
A handful of nearby dust shells can be seen by radio telescopes appearing as giant loops looming above the Milky way's galactic disc.
and the giant loops detected by radio telescopes (blue lines). The effect of this finding on the BICEP2 result is not clear
because no thorough measurements have yet been made of how much polarised light the dust in our galaxy produces.
if you take the dust into account along with emissions from charged particles in the galaxy
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
This is not a trailer for an alien invasion movie NASA is gearing up to conduct the first test flight of a disc-shaped spacecraft designed to safely land heavy loads
and one day people on the surface of Mars. The Low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from the US NAVY's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
and crashing is stopping says Allen Chen at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California who oversaw the successful landing of the one-tonne Curiosity rover in 2012.
We really only have two options for stopping at Mars: rockets and aerodynamic drag. Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
But the heavier the load the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity NASA invented an ambitious system called the sky crane
which combined parachutes with landing gear powered by retrorockets that could lower the rover to the surface on tethers.
However Curiosity pushed the weight limits of that technology and future human missions could require 40 to 100 metric tonnes per mission.
which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
and fire a small rocket to reach a height of 55 kilometres about halfway to the edge of space.
As it falls back to Earth the system will inflate and moments later the parachute will fire.
NASA has three more test flights in Hawaii planned for the LDSD and mission managers will review the results before deciding on next steps.
In addition to landing human missions on Mars the system could help robotic craft safely land in Martian mountains or highlands.
These areas have even less air available for slowing down a spacecraft via drag and so have been inaccessible with current technology.
Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed d
#Squirting moons face off in race to find alien life Icebound seas just keep getting hotter at least as candidates for life beyond Earth.
Fresh discoveries have put two moons in our solar system neck and neck in the race.
In December astronomers announced hints of watery plumes spurting from Jupiter's large moon Europa potentially giving us a peek into a vast ocean likely to exist beneath its ice.
Saturn's moon Enceladus stole back the limelight last week when NASA reported firm evidence of an ocean linked to geysers at its south pole (see diagram below.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew through the geysers and detected water salts and carbon-based molecules.
Cassini scientist Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome Italy and colleagues have mapped now Enceladus's gravity
The constantly gushing geysers would let us easily sample those seas making Enceladus a prime target for a life-seeking mission says Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco.
and scoop up some of the plume for analysis avoiding a tricky landing on the moon's surface.
The habitable zone of Enceladus remains the most well studied well understood and accessible of all the destinations for finding life
Models suggest that the moon can host geothermal vents which would be hotspots for marine life
Data from NASA's Galileo probe which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 show clay-like minerals on Europa's surface probably debris from meteor impacts
And Jupiter's strong magnetic field means that intense radiation surrounds the moon which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate.
For now Europa is slightly ahead in terms of funding. NASA's budget for next year includes $15 million to design possible missions there
and the agency is inviting proposals for instruments a probe could carry. Could Cassini yet yield insights that would swing things in favour of Enceladus?
The craft is in its twilight years and will end its mission in 2017. But first it will fly by Enceladus one more time
and the team will be watching for any molecular hydrogen in the plumes. Hydrogen is very short-lived
Europa is sized a good moon but Enceladus is tiny. That thing should be frozen solid and dead as a doorbell says NASA program scientist Curt Niebur who heads the committee that will evaluate science instruments for a Europa mission.
Instead it's incredibly lively. That's amazing. They're both unbelievably good candidates which is the shocking thing:
that we have not just one but two candidates for seeking life beyond Earth h
#NASA's Russia boycott may revitalise US space leadership So NASA has been dragged into the fallout over Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
An internal memo made public this week revealed the space agency has suspended contact with Russia except for that concerning International space station (ISS) operations.
The memo stated that the suspension includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian government representatives to NASA facilities bilateral meetings email and teleconferences or videoconferences.
This was confirmed in an official statement from NASA yesterday. Will this action influence Vladimir Putin
and his apparent dream of geographically reassembling parts of the Soviet union as a new Russian empire?
That's highly unlikely. So why do it? Space has a long history of serving as a surrogate for demonstrating US displeasure about foreign or domestic policy actions in other countries.
Though examples date back to the cold war the most recent case relates to China. China has been banned for years from participating in the ISS
In addition NASA has been banned legislatively from having bilateral relations with China since 2011. While ostensibly that ban relates to concerns about technology transfer the underlying reason has as much or more to do with Chinese restrictions on religious freedom.
or its relative isolation from meeting with NASA officials nor is it likely to. In fact China has pushed ahead with its own robotic lunar programme
and human spaceflight programme and works with many other countries including Russia in space. When the Soviet union collapsed
and the cold war ended the US pragmatically merged its human spaceflight programme specifically the ISS programme with the Soviet Mir space station programme inherited by the new Russian state.
The pragmatic intent was to keep lots of otherwise potentially unemployed Russian scientists and engineers from taking jobs in countries with dubious space programmes.
After all space technology is largely dual use of value to both military and civilian communities. The basics of rocket technology and missile technology are largely symbiotic.
It seemed a good idea at the time. Then after spending decades building the ISS the US cancelled the space shuttle the vehicle originally intended for transport to the ISS as part of its post-Apollo programme.
The first resident crew arrived at the ISS in 2000 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft
but shuttle missions soon followed. After the shuttle's last flight in 2011 though the US became dependent on Russia for transport to the ISS using Soyuz at a cost of nearly $71 million for each seat it requires.
It would be hypocritical to say the least for the US to ban bilateral space relations with China over general displeasure with its form of government
NASA's suspension of working with the Russians will likely be received in Russia much the same way other sanctions over its actions in Ukraine have been:
or more specifically the keys to the rocket capable of getting crew to the ISS.
and rethinking the propensity of using space as a foreign policy surrogate. The bigger issue however is how to reassert US space leadership.
Without finally dealing with that the US may increasingly find itself being pushed around in space e
#Buried'Lake superior'seen on Saturn's moon Enceladus Saturn's icy moon Enceladus already known for spitting plumes of water into space just got even more interesting.
New gravity readings suggest it hosts a subsurface sea the size of Lake superior at its south pole
-and that this liquid water is in direct contact with the moon's core which is rich in nutrients.
The result comes hot on the heels of the discovery late last year that a second icy moon Europa
which orbits Jupiter also spews plumes of water. Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
if only a suitable mission could be arranged NASA's Cassini orbiter first spotted spectacular plumes at Enceladus's south pole in 2005 shortly after arriving at Saturn.
The plumes shoot into space at supersonic speeds feeding one of Saturn's famous rings
and are known to contain both salts and organic compounds. They make an attractive target for exploration as a craft could potentially fly through them to take samples much simpler than landing on a moon.
Most astronomers thought that the plumes force their way out through cracks in an icy crust sitting over a sea of liquid water.
But until now no one knew how deep that sea went. Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and his colleagues used radar On earth to track Cassini on three separate fly-bys of Enceladus
and watched how the spacecraft was accelerated by the moon's gravity. This allowed them to map the distribution of mass in the moon's interior.
They found that Enceladus has a rocky core and an icy crust. Before we knew almost nothing about the core beyond its likely existence.
Now we know roughly how big it is and also that it has a surprisingly low density says team member Francis Nimmo at the University of California Santa cruz. That might be due to open fractures
or low-density hydrated minerals like clays. Either answer suggests that the rock has been in substantial contact with water for instance allowing minerals to dissolve
Hosting an ocean in contact with rocks boosts the chances that Enceladus hosts life because the rocks could leach elements like potassium sulphur and phosphorus vital for life into the water.
because it wouldn't be in contact with the rock says team member Jonathan Lunine at Cornell University in Ithaca New york. This gravity map hinting at a much larger ocean is a more favourable model for having some sort of life in Enceladus's interior.
and there are no firm plans for future craft to return to Saturn. However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.
She says the new results bode well for such an effort. The next mission there can immediately get down to the business of searching for signs of life or its precursor chemistry.
As for the possibility of the sea freezing completely it is true that Enceladus is losing a lot of heat to space
but astronomers suspect that this is an unusual episode. We are looking at Enceladus at a wonderful special time where it's very active
and there's a lot of heat Mckinnon says. Could the plumes deplete the sea completely? Probably not.
Even if they continue at the current rate the moon would only have lost 30 per cent of its water by mass
when the sun becomes a red giant in 6 billion years. A lot of things can happen in 6 billion years
Some future extraterrestrials visiting our solar system will be able to look at the naked rocky core of
what was once an ice moon. Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science. 125055 5
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
The hope is that such robots will accompany future astronauts on long deep-space missions, when the chances are higher that someone will experience physical trauma."
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Astronauts are screened carefully for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies,
Many worrisome health issues that can occur in space return to normal back On earth. But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars
and getting home quickly won't be an option. Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
and contaminate the cabin. And space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
"Everything that we take for granted, even something as simple as putting a Band aid down on a table,
is difficult in space, "says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals.
Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.
James Burgess at Carnegie mellon University in Pittsburgh thinks robots like these could be particularly useful
and performed in space, "says Burgess. This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
#Earth raises a plasma shield to battle solar storms Earth can raise shields to protect itself against solar storms.
For the first time satellites and ground-based detectors have watched as the planet sends out a tendril of plasma to fight off blasts of charged solar matter.
The discovery confirms a longstanding theory about Earth's magnetic surroundings and offers us a way to keep track of the planet's defences.
It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.
Earth doesn't just sit there and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back.
Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Previous observations of this plasmasphere showed that plumes sometimes emerge from this region. Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
If this plume reaches the boundary between the earthly and solar magnetic fields it would create a buffer zone of dense material.
This would make it harder for magnetic field lines to meet up and spark further reconnection. But while ground-based measurements can see a plume forming their resolution isn't good enough to tell for sure
whether the material reaches the magnetic boundary. Brian Walsh at NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER in Greenbelt Maryland and his colleagues have clinched now it.
In January 2013 GPS sensors on the ground mapped electrons in the upper atmosphere and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
which are designed to study solar storms crossed through the magnetic boundary during the event. The craft saw a 100-fold increase in the number of electrons at the boundary
which would probably have been deposited by the plume. For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
and the sun's says Walsh. It gets to that boundary and helps protect us keeps these solar storms from slamming into us.
Not every solar storm generates a plasma plume which means ground-based observations will continue to be vital for understanding the phenomenon.
To measure things with spacecraft we have to have them in just the right place
but the ground stations can measure this stuff almost constantly says Walsh. We want to know
when does the Earth decide to protect us? By validating this tool we're now able to figure that out t
#Interplanetary comms get easier with a nanotech boost E t. MANAGED to phone home. But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away?
Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home. Laser signals carry more data but the light is almost undetectable
by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
So says Richard Mirin at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado who developed the detector with NASA.
Data must be encoded before it can be sent. The most reliable way of doing this is to vary the time interval between light pulses with a long interval representing a 0 say
Laser communication is one of the technologies we are considering says Bas Lansdorp CEO of the Mars One project which aims to place a human colony on Mars by 2025.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011