#Japan's huge magnetic net will trawl for space junk SOMEWHERE in Earth's orbit a satellite explodes into a terrifying cloud of debris. Moments later Sandra bullock
and George Clooney are left scrambling to dodge the deadly space junk. This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity#scientists are struggling with it in real life.
Now a rather unusual solution is being tested: a really big net. Next month the Japanese space agency JAXA will pilot its electrodynamic tether for the first time.
It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris (see Catch'em drag'em blast'em.
Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet some travelling faster than the speed of sound.
According to a report released by the US Congressional Research Service this month running into even a small piece of junk can be disastrous.
An object 10 centimetres across could catastrophically damage a typical satellite it says. One just 1 centimetre across could disable a spacecraft.
The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.
and the pieces would collide with each other resulting in more and more debris. To build its debris-catching net JAXA brought in Nitto Seimo a company that specialises in fishing equipment Unlike a net you would use in the ocean this one is a 700-metre-long mesh of aluminium
and steel wires that hangs from an uncrewed spacecraft. The net is fitted with sensors that look for light reflecting from small pieces of debris
The tether changes its orbit thanks to an electrical current flowing through the wires which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
Once the net has grabbed enough debris it is ordered to slow down and deorbit allowing the debris spacecraft
and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere. JAXA thinks the net's main advantage is its simplicity#it's lightweight
and doesn't require any propellant to move. If next month's test launch goes well it plans to build a 10-kilometre-long version to capture satellites that have reached the end of their lives.
However the test will also explore some possible drawbacks. One concern is that the net will work very slowly taking several months or even a year to deorbit.
Then there is the risk that the net will run into operational satellites. The engineers also worry that the debris they are fighting could fight back.
There is a possibility of the tether being severed by impacts of small debris objects or micrometeoroids says a JAXA spokesperson.
Not everyone is convinced of the idea. A net isn't necessarily the best option to collect debris says Hugh Lewis an aerospace engineer at the University of Southampton UK.
He has reservations about the net's ability to deal with space junk. In particular he believes it could actually generate debris
if it collides with a large satellite. There is a growing trend for organisations to put forward a concept for a debris removal device without considering fully the potential risks involved in deploying
and operating the device says Lewis. I believe that these ideas should be subjected to international scrutiny before they are deployed.
#China lands on moon kicks off next lunar space race Let the modern moon rush begin.
China's first moon landing which took place on Saturday afternoon (GMT) marks the rekindling of humanity's love affair with our only natural satellite.
and 2020 many from burgeoning space powers or private ventures that would also be making their first attempts.
This flotilla of 21st-century moon explorers should arrive bristling with technologies that will help them map the moon's uncharted regions
and prospect for resources that could one day sustain lunar outposts and missions further afield (see a map of planned landing sites).
The crew of the final Apollo mission lifted off from the moon's Sea of Serenity on 14 december 1972.
After that three robotic Soviet spacecraft made it to the surface the final one in 1976.
For the next few decades the moon's only visitors were a dozen or so orbiters and deliberate crashes such as NASA's LCROSS mission in 2009
Hopefully the lander doesn't tilt said Bernard Foing director of the International Lunar Exploration Working group a forum sponsored by multiple space agencies before the landing.
and South korea are also in the running to send missions to the moon that would involve combinations of landers and rovers.
The moon is the nearest island in space out from the Earth says Igor Mitrofanov at Russia's Institute for Space Research in Moscow the project scientist for two planned Russian-led rover missions.
As countries develop their space programmes the moon is a natural first foray beyond Earth that allows remote-controlled robots to get their sea legs
while staying within a 10-second call of the planet's shores. But the moon is more than a test bed for space missions.
China's Yutu rover will venture a few kilometres away from its landing site to snap images take stock of minerals with onboard spectrometers and probe below the surface with radar.
and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan aerospace exploration agency the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth
It's a part of the Earth says Foing. I call it the eighth continent. Several of the proposed exploration missions are targeting the moon's poles
which have never been visited by a lander. But data from orbiters support the idea that the rocks
and any organic material it might hold in deep freeze could shed light on where Earth got its water
The damp moon could also be a useful resource for future robotic and human exploration says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston Texas. Astronauts could drink moon water extracted from its rocks or use it as radiation shielding.
Water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel. Much of the weight of today's rockets comes from their own propellant so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for much more ambitious human missions.
If we're really interested in extending our reach to Mars and beyond we don't want to have to bring fuel with us says Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field California.
He is the project scientist on a proposed robotic mission called Resource Prospector which could launch in 2018 to try to extract water from lunar rocks.
Private groups are also hoping to get in on the action. The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first private team that by the end of 2015 launches a lunar spacecraft that can land on the moon travel 500 metres
and send back video. Some of the teams vying for the prize also have their sights set on selling lunar-derived rocket fuel.
and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
#Boxy Cubesats get a propulsion boost in new space race Tiny liquid volcanoes that spray beams of charged particles could make space history next year.
They are one of two technologies vying to be the first to let cheap, miniature satellites called Cubesats fly in formation,
switch orbits or voyage to other planets feats usually reserved for large, expensive craft. They could even provide us with a global Wi-fi system On earth.
Paulo Lozano leads a team working on Cubesat propulsion at the Massachusetts institute of technology. He has been given the go-ahead to launch two propelled Cubesats in 2014 one funded by the US Department of defense
the other by private donors. Meanwhile, Benjamin Longmier at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, who leads a rival project, announced that his team also has private funding
and a slot to launch their Cubesat on a NASA rocket next year. The race is on.
Cubesats are made from off-the-shelf components. The initial aim was to make access to space easier and more affordable.
They are typically put into low Earth orbit by a rocket where they remain for around 6 months,
before spiralling in and burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Although they have made space accessible to groups who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it most recently a team of high-school students Cubesats haven't done much cutting-edge science."
"They were considered like toys, "says Lozano. Some Cubesats have basic steering, but getting them to change orbits,
let alone visit other planetary bodies, requires new technology. That's because even today's most efficient propulsion method, the ion engine, doesn't scale down to Cubesat size.
Instead, Lozano and his colleagues will propel their craft with an unusual substance called an ionic liquid,
made solely of positively or negatively charged ions. In the engine, a reservoir of ionic liquid soaks into a porous, metal chip and forms tiny pools in the pores of spikes on its surface.
The result is an array of between 500 and 5000 focussed ion beams that stream from each of the eight chips on the Cubesat when the electric field the strength
and calculate that just 8 grams of ionic liquid will propel a 2 kilogram Cubesat and change its orbit by 100 kilometres.
the aim is to send such a satellite to an asteroid to collect a scoop of dust.
Their Cubesat Ambipolar Thruster, or CAT, uses xenon, like traditional ion engines. The difference is that the CAT adds an intense
000 target, the appeal prompted a private donor to offer to pay for the technology and a launch next year aboard a NASA rocket.
They hope their propelled Cubesats will one day fly to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, both
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
Propelled Cubesats could even be useful back here On earth. Creating a universal"satellite Wi-fi""like existing satellite phone coverage,
would require thousands of big satellites, which is prohibitively expensive. But you could dump a thousand Cubesats in one place then spread them out to the right points, for a fraction of the price.
Longmier's team has launched just a second Kickstarter campaign, which could fund some add-ons, including a camera.
and propel the Cubesat next year.""We might have a little space race on our hands,
"says Longmier s
#India blasts off for Mars: here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
Now India is set to join the US Russia and Europe in the exclusive club by sending a probe to Mars. The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast of India on 5 november.
Established in the 1960s India's space programme has focused so far on aiding the country's development building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and monitor deforestation.
Then in 2008 it launched Chandrayaan-1 a lunar orbiter and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and space weather.
These projects may seem divorced from India's development goals but could lead to spin-off applications in areas like remote sensing
and shape a new generation of scientists and engineers says K. R. Sridhara Murthi who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation for nearly 40 years.
The main goal of the $73 million Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is to prove that India can put a working probe into Mars orbit.
That is no small feat more than half of all Mars missions so far have failed. It's a stretch goal says Scott Pace director of the Space Policy Institute at George washington University in WASHINGTON DC.
One big challenge will be making sure the spacecraft's electronics function reliably in the harsh temperature
and radiation conditions at Mars he says. This was a problem for Chandrayaan-1 which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early
because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon. MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries.
It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
I'd say the data are equivocal at the moment says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence Rhode island.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
Gaping canyons and river-like channels point to large amounts of water and therefore a thick warming atmosphere in the past.
A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
NASA's MAVEN mission also due to launch next month will tackle that same puzzle but with a larger suite of instruments.
To have India executing a successful orbiter mission would be great for space science says Mustard d
#Virgin galactic joins the reality TV space race Reality TV is set to become a little more out of this world.
This morning Virgin galactic and NBC announced plans for a Survivor-like series that will send the winner to space.
Dubbed Space Race it is one of three space-based reality TV SHOWS that could be gracing our screens in the coming years assuming producers can get their hands on a working spacecraft.
For the past 10 years I have pursued relentlessly my dream of using a TV SHOW to give an everyday person the chance to experience the black sky of space
and look down upon mother Earth says executive producer Mark Burnett who has created previously other reality shows like Survivor and The Voice.
Virgin galactic's Spaceshiptwo is a six passenger two pilot suborbital craft designed to give wannabe astronauts a few minutes in space.
All we know is that participants will gradually be eliminated as they compete for the winning ticket to space
and viewers will get a behind-the-scenes look at Spaceport America in New mexico. Space Race is not Burnett's first attempt to televise space flight.
In 2000 he announced Destination Mir a programme that would have seen contestants train for a mission to the Russian space station Mir
but the plans were scrapped after the station was orbited de in 2001. It is also not the only space-related show currently attempting to get off the ground.
Last month Sony Pictures Television announced a partnership with Dutch firm Space Expedition Corporation (SXC) for a show called Milky way Mission
which will see celebrities compete for a flight to space aboard an XCOR AEROSPACE Lynx craft.
SXC previously announced a non-televised competition to send 22 people to space and plans to film a sci-fi movie aboard a Lynx
For those looking beyond low Earth orbit Mars One is also continuing with its plans to send humans on a televised one-way mission to the Red planet by 2023.
Mars One does not yet have a craft capable of leaving Earth but CEO Bas Lansdorp says it plans to launch its first show in 2014 detailing the crew selection process.
but says Mars One will be different. This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
It's a very serious job position that we're selecting the best people for r
#Crack a comet to spawn the ingredients of life Some of the key ingredients for life may have been shocked into existence.
A physical simulation of a comet's impact with a planet shows that the conditions are extreme enough to create amino acids within the comet's ice.
whether life or its ingredients could have travelled to Earth on the back of a comet or asteroid.
Comets are known to contain the organic precursors of amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
What's more one comet Wild 2 was shown recently to contain the simplest amino acid glycine.
We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
The idea is that a comet would contain the raw materials for life-building compounds says Nir Goldman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who made the theoretical calculations.
When a comet impacts a planetary surface it creates very high pressures and temperatures. Those will then drive the raw materials that already exist in the comet to form more complex things that could be life-building.
To find out if this works in practice Price and colleagues made model comet ice in the lab containing various amounts of ammonia carbon dioxide and methanol.
Then they shot the ice with a steel pellet travelling at about 7 kilometres a second to simulate the comet smacking into a planet
or another body colliding with the comet. The goop that remained after the ice was evaporated away was analysed by Price's colleague Zita Martins at Imperial College London who found it contained the amino acids alanine and norvaline.
This is significant as we now have a simple realistic mechanism to generate amino acids Price says.
As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system then complex organic molecules are also very probably widespread.
This is a neat way of suggesting prebiotic material could be produced regardless of the external conditions of the planet says Goldman.
You could have a planet that isn't really conducive to forming amino acids like early Earth supposedly wasn't he says.
But then you can have a comet come in and that impact will drive prebiotic processes within the comet itself regardless of
what the planet looks like. Journal reference: Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1930correction: When this article was published first on 15 september it did not give details of the researcher who detected amino acids in the ice.
These have now been included d
#NASA orbiter will use laser to bring broadband to moon The man in the moon is about to get his own version of a broadband connection as well as a visit from China.
NASA's LADEE moon orbiter due to launch on 7 september will use laser pulses to exchange high-capacity signals with Earth.
China meanwhile recently announced plans to launch a robotic moon lander by the end of the year.
Spacecraft normally rely on radio waves to communicate. These can be detected rain or shine but their relatively long wavelengths limit the information they can transmit in a given time period.
LLCD will beam signals to Earth at 622 megabits per second six times as fast as is currently possible from the moon.
Future systems could stream high-definition video from space probes or from human missions to Mars suggests LLCD manager Donald Cornwell.
If you have an ill astronaut it would be nice to have a 3d image of them he says
in order to diagnose what's wrong. Both NASA and commercial entities are considering sending robots to nearby asteroids.
In some cases robot geologists could take HD video that would allow their human puppeteers to best plan their next moves suggests Cornwell.
Joseph Kahn of Stanford university in California also acknowledges the need for higher bandwidth in returning ever larger amounts of data from space missions.
At some point it will become more and more difficult or impossible using only radio frequencies he says.
To stabilise its pointing LLCD sits on devices that cancel out any vibrations on the LADEE spacecraft.
Earth's atmosphere including clouds can also thwart laser signals. To maximise the chance of cloudless skies LLCD will be able to beam its light to any of three detectors in New mexico California or Spain.
or so of LADEE's planned four months in lunar orbit but a follow-on mission called LCRD will test laser links from Earth orbit for two years beginning in 2017.
LADEE is not the only visitor the moon will receive in the coming months. China's upcoming spacecraft Chang'e-3 will be the first the country has landed on a celestial body.
Future Chinese missions could bring lunar samples back to Earth perhaps around 2017 and possibly land people on the moon in the 2020s says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a think tank in WASHINGTON DC.
China is also aiming to build its own space station by 2020 0
#Japanese probe to sniff out why planets lose gases Update 16 september: Epsilon took off at 2pm local time on 14 september.
About an hour later the Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere (SPRINT-A) separated from the launch rocket.
Update 27 august 2013: JAXA today cancelled the planned launch of Epsilon due to an abnormality detected 19 seconds before the planned lift off at 1. 45 pm local time.
Original article published 26 august 2013bigger isn't always better: Japan's newest rocket scheduled for its maiden voyage this week is designed to be a smaller cheaper way to get science satellites into space.
Advances in pre-flight automation mean that the rocket dubbed Epsilon can be ready to lift off in about a week with fewer people in mission control helping to slash costs to about $38 million per launch much cheaper than its heavier labour-intensive predecessors.
But perhaps the most exciting aspect of the inaugural launch will be Epsilon's cargo: the world's first space telescope designed to study the planets from afar.
The Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere or Sprint-A will look at Venus
and Mars to find out why some worlds lose their atmospheres while others manage to keep a grip on their gases.
This will in turn help exoplanet hunters figure out which distant worlds are capable of hosting atmospheres that might support life.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
If all goes to plan the Epsilon rocket will launch from Japan's Uchinoura Space center on 27 august at 0445 UTC.
It will deploy Sprint-A into low Earth orbit where the spacecraft will take aim at the planets using cameras and sensors that record extreme-ultraviolet light.
Extreme UV is a range of light suitable for observing planetary atmospheres says Shujiro Sawai of the Japan aerospace exploration agency (JAXA.
Extreme UV from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
and the way it is redirected can reveal the atmospheric composition. But extreme UV radiation coming from space is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere
so it is not observable from the ground says Sawai. Very little outer space observation with extreme UV has been done so scientists are expecting new discoveries that no one has imagined ever before.
So far our best clues to the original atmospheres of Mars and Venus come from the composition
and structure of ancient rocks either meteorites that made it to Earth from those planets
or rocks examined by rovers and orbiters. Based on the evidence it seems that Mars Earth
and Venus probably had similar atmospheres long ago. But we also know that the sun pumps out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind
which can ionise gases in a planet's upper atmosphere and pick up the newly charged particles effectively sweeping them away.
Earth is protected from the solar wind by a relatively strong global magnetic field which repels charged particles from the sun explains Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric
and Space Physics in Boulder Colorado who has worked on Sprint-A. Still the solar wind would have been much stronger
when the sun was young and more active. Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
And while Mars is farther away it has no global magnetic field. It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
What drives the escaping is a big question says Schneider. Solar stripping is a leading hypothesis
but it is not the only runner. For instance others have suggested that Mars lost its atmosphere all of a sudden during a powerful collision with an asteroid or comet.
A NASA probe called Maven due to launch in November will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere up close to try to solve the puzzle.
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
and Venus says Sawai. By observing this phenomenon we will investigate how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of planets and how the planetary atmosphere escapes into outer space.
The results may add a new twist to the search for exoplanets that can support life says Schneider.
Until recently a planet's habitability was defined largely by its distance from its star which hints at
whether its surface would be warm enough to support liquid water. But it is clear from our solar system that a lot of other factors come into play says Schneider d
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011