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
and automatically aligns itself so that it can attract the material. 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.
A net isn't necessarily the best option to collect debris says Hugh Lewis an aerospace engineer at the University of Southampton UK.
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.
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.
It could reveal different episodes of volcanism at the site which is covered with solidified lava.
But data from orbiters support the idea that the rocks and shadowed craters at both poles contain millions or even billions of tonnes of water ice.
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 a US-based firm called Shackleton Energy company says it wants to send robots 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 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.
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 can hold components like sensors and cameras. They are typically put into low Earth orbit by a rocket
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."
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.
When a small electric field is applied these pools morph into cones, which amplify the electric field so that it is strong enough to pull away ions in a steady beam (see below).
The process is self-sustaining. Fresh liquid gets sucked onto the chip when ions are emitted, just as tree roots suck in water
when vapour escapes the leaves. 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
of which acts as the engine's throttle is applied. Lozano's team have fired the thrusters in the lab
and calculate that just 8 grams of ionic liquid will propel a 2 kilogram Cubesat and change its orbit by 100 kilometres.
The team plans to test this in one of its launches next year. Eventually the aim is to send such a satellite to an asteroid to collect a scoop of dust.
and carefully shaped magnetic field that stops xenon ions from hitting the engine walls and going to waste.
Longmier's team began their first crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter website in July. Although they failed to raise their $200
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.
No matter what happens, the team already has enough money to launch and propel the Cubesat next year."
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.
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
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.
I'd say the data are equivocal at the moment says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence Rhode island.
A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
#Virgin galactic joins the reality TV space race Reality TV is set to become a little more out of this world.
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.
The company has sold more than 600 tickets so far with prices currently set at $250000 but has yet to conduct a commercial launch.
Last month Sony Pictures Television announced a partnership with Dutch firm Space Expedition Corporation (SXC) for a show called Milky way Mission
This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
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.
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
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.
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.
Joseph Kahn of Stanford university in California also acknowledges the need for higher bandwidth in returning ever larger amounts of data from space missions.
or impossible using only radio frequencies he says. But using shorter wavelengths for communication presents new challenges.
Laser beams do not spread out as much as radio waves while they travel which means that they must be aimed very precisely at detectors on the ground.
To stabilise its pointing LLCD sits on devices that cancel out any vibrations on the LADEE spacecraft.
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.
For this mission there is a better than 90 per cent chance of any one of those sites being open Cornwell says.
and possibly land people on the moon in the 2020s says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a think tank in WASHINGTON DC.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Two years'worth of data still need inspecting including information about the thousands of stars in its field of view.
Fabienne Bastien of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and colleagues used Kepler data to watch instead for flickers in starlight due to short-lived convection cells or granules on the star's surface.
These are bright regions where hot plasma wells up surrounded by darker boundaries where it cools
or asteroseismology signals from sun-like stars says Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark who leads a consortium of researchers who analyse Kepler's starquake data.
And it won't break the bank. Ardusat-1 and Ardusat-X were launched to the International space station (ISS) on 3 august aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle
(which is also carrying fresh food supplies and a talking humanoid robot). Known as Cubesats each mini satellite packs an array of devices including cameras spectrometers and a Geiger counter into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.
but her students design and build Cubesats for planetary science. This definitely is helping open up space both to all people
Five years out we'd love to see 100 150 of these up in the air reaching half a million students d
Engineers led by Tyler Hickman in the Game Changing Technology Program at NASA's Glenn Research center in Cleveland Ohio worked together with rocket motor maker Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento California.
Fed liquid oxygen and gaseous hydrogen the injector performed perfectly in a series of tests says Aerojet's programme manager Jeff Haynes. Better still it took only four months to make the injector using 3d printing
Our solar system has a tail reminiscent of a four-leaf clover according to new observations of the plasma bubble that shields the solar system from the rest of the galaxy.
At the same time a stream of particles blowing out from the sun the solar wind inflates a bubble of plasma around the solar system called the heliosphere Astronomers have assumed long that the sun's motion through the galaxy squashes
and spreads the heliosphere into a bullet shape with an extended tail at the back (see image).
We've never taken a picture of it IBEX mission scientist Eric Christian said today in a teleconference.
This is actually the first real data we have that gives us the shape of the tail.
They are deflected not by magnetic fields as they travel so neutral atoms faithfully record the point of collision.
Our own sun and the Earth and all of us are made up of atoms that came out of other stars'stellar winds long ago says Mccomas. There's a big recycling process that occurs
or our sun leaves the region of the sun and gets mixed in with the rest of the stuff.
The magnetic field of the heliosphere protects us from the bulk of these galactic high-energy particles. But some manage to impinge on our solar system
Now Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen in Germany and his colleagues have reanalysed the original data
#Tabletop accelerator shoots cheap antimatter bullets Make way for the antimatter gun. A tabletop device just 10 square metres in size can spit out energetic bursts of positrons as dense as those kicked out by the giant particle-factories at CERN.
Each positron-packed bullet lasts for just a fraction of a second so don't expect to fill the tank of your antimatter engine any time soon.
Instead the smaller cheaper machine might help labs around the world study deep-space objects such as powerful radiation jets squirted out by black holes.
The particles annihilate on contact with ordinary matter vanishing in a puff of energy which makes it difficult to produce
The team call their device an antimatter gun because the bursts of positrons last just 30 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second).
This article will appear in print under the headline Antimatter bullets get fast and chea a
The astronauts will rendezvous with the Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace 1) space module which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011.
They will also run medical and technical tests and broadcast a science lesson to Chinese students from orbit.
The launch continues the execution of an orderly programme laid out in the 1990s says Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College in Newport Rhode island.
and a sustained interest during those 25 years says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a conservative policy research group in WASHINGTON DC.
So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns they might well get to some place like Mars
because they are persistent and willing to spend the money and make the effort t
#Dust devils around stars may help planets grow A dusty tornado around a young star could help solve a lingering conundrum:
and become the cores of gas giants like Jupiter. But there is a catch. According to models of this process as the clumps get larger they feel more drag as they move through the gas and dust.
At about the distance of the Kuiper belt the region past Neptune where comets are born the would-be planet cores can't get much bigger than a millimetre.
so it might be more of a comet factory says van der Marel. We really hope that in the next coming years we're going to find similar dust traps around other stars where they are close enough to the star that they can form a planet she says.
and the interpretation of the dust clump as a vortex is plausible says Philip Armitage an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The dummy contains instruments that will collect data about the launch to be transmitted back to mission managers before re-entry.
According to Curiosity's onboard chemistry lab the sample is between 20 and 30 per cent smectite a clay mineral that forms in the presence of water.
The instruments also detected minerals indicating that this water was ph neutral and carried substances capable of supplying microbes with energy.
We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably
if this water had been around and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it says rover project scientist John Grotzinger.
At a scientific meeting in Texas this week team members presented analyses from three of the rover's remote sensing instruments that show many types of hydrated minerals
The planet also only briefly had a magnetic field to protect its surface from cosmic radiation
If we could find evidence primitive life got a start on Mars that could fill in a lot of gaps in our understanding of conditions on early Earth says Jeffrey Bada of the University of California in San diego. What we find on Mars won't be a magic bullet to say'Ah!
what was going on what you might call proto-biology before life even got started he says.
#Rover finds first life-friendly environment on Mars Microbes could have lived on Mars . Though we don't know yet
This is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we've described and recorded said David Blake principal investigator for the rover's Chemistry
and Mineralogy instrument Chemin. Determining if Mars could have supported ever life was the rover's chief goal
a non-acidic environment; enough water for microbes to thrive in; and minerals that could act like batteries allowing electrons to flow
and bring energy to any potential organisms. They found all three. The instruments showed that between 20 and 30 per cent of the dust is called a clay mineral smectite
which forms in the presence of water. More importantly they found calcium sulphate salts which form in non-acidic water.
They also found sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide two forms of sulphur that have lost respectively
and gained electrons and so could have acted as microbial energy sources. All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.
This rock frankly looks like a typical thing we would see On earth says Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger.
We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably
. But now that they've found a habitable environment the team will keep the rover in place a
if it continues to look promising we'll do more work he said. If not we'll get on the road.
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.
#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
Although Curiosity's digging into Mars has been extremely modest its achievement could lay the groundwork for construction and mining on the Red planet.
Last year Fusa Miyake at Nagoya University Japan and colleagues discovered that two Japanese cedar trees had unexpectedly high levels of carbon-14 in tree rings formed between 774 and 775.
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.
however as such a bright blast of energy would surely have been noted at the time 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.
Roger Clowes of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston UK and colleagues discovered the structure using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey the most comprehensive 3d map of the universe.
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.
and creating new and improved cosmological models says Subir Sarkar of the University of Oxford.
#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
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,
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.
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.
the new satellites will be capable of delivering high-speed internet on a par with what Oneweb and Spacex envisage.
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,
"Will the space around Earth become crowded with all these satellites vying to route our data?"
If they're using radio waves, those beams will have areas of overlap and interference.""Beaming down Radio transmission is the most common way to communicate between satellites and Earth.
However, as anyone who has had trouble with their wireless router knows, working with radio waves is finicky.
So Cahoy and colleagues are working on using light to transfer data instead. Easier to focus
and send over long distances, laser signals could make it possible to build smaller, lower powered satellites that can still talk to the ground easily."
says James Cutler at the University of Michigan. These have combined to increase access to orbit as never before."
"I've got students that will leave with a master's and have built and launched five
"Companies like O3b and Spacex are planning to launch internet satellites with masses of hundreds of 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.
This means antennas of similar size to today's can be made of lighter materials as they will only have to support their own weight in microgravity, rather than On earth's surface.
Cutler says satellite internet will really take off 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,
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 being fuelled by an internet perspective i
#Running the color gamut If LCD TVS start getting much more colorful and energy-efficient in the next few years,
it will probably be thanks to MIT spinout QD Vision, a pioneer of quantum dot television displays.
Quantum dots are light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that can be tuned by changing their size, nanometer by nanometer to emit all colors across the visible spectrum.
By tuning these dots to red and green, and using a blue backlight to energize them,
QD Vision has developed an optical component that can boost the color gamut for LCD televisions by roughly 50 percent,
and increase energy-efficiency by around 20 percent. Last June, Sony used QD Vision product, called Color IQ, in millions of its Bravia riluminostelevisions, marking the first-ever commercial quantum dot display.
In September, Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL began implementing Color IQ into certain models. These are currently only available in China,
ecause a lot of growth for the TV market is there, says Seth Coe-Sullivan Phd, cofounder and chief technology officer of QD Vision,
who co-invented the technology at MIT. But within a couple of months, he says, these displays will be olling out to the rest of the world.
Replacing the bulb In conventional LCD TVS pixels are illuminated by a white LED backlight that passes through blue, red,
and green filters to produce the colors on the screen. But this actually requires phosphors to convert a blue light to white;
because of this process, much light is lost, and displays only reach about 70 to 80 percent of the National Television Standard Committee color gamut.
Manufacturers can potentially boost color by incorporating more LEDS, but this costs more and requires more energy to run.
Color IQ is a thin glass tube, filled with quantum dots tuned to red and green, that implemented during the synthesis process.
Manufacturers use a blue LED in the backlight, but without the need for conversion phosphors.
As blue light passes through the Color IQ tube, some light shines through as pure blue light
while some is absorbed and re-emitted by the dots as pure red and pure green.
With more light shining through the pixels, LCD TVS equipped with Color IQ produce 100 percent of the color gamut,
with greater power efficiency than any other technology. he value proposition is that you are not changing the display,
all youe doing is replacing the light bulb, and yet the entire display looks much better.
The colors are much more vivid known as much more saturated allowing you to generate a much more believable image,
says QD Vision cofounder and scientific advisor Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology at MIT, who also co-leads the MIT Innovation Initiative.
Green from radle to gravewhile QD Vision aims to bring consumers more color-saturated displays,
Color IQ also has a positive environmental impact, which earned the company the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U s. Environmental protection agency in October.
While developing its Color IQ which replaces phosphor in displays the company developed a much greener synthesis, according to the EPA.
This synthesis involves replacing alkyl phosphine solvents with long-chain hydrocarbons, which are less hazardous,
and replacing cadmium and zinc building blocks with less hazardous materials. This eliminates 40 000 gallons of toxic solvents and 100 kilograms of toxic cadmium waste in U s. production each year.
Using the components in 20 million TVS is projected to save 600 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year worldwide enough electricity to power 50,000 average U s. homes. ee been able to show, cradle to grave,
from the materials we use to how we make it to how it put to rest, that there an environmental benefit,
Other technologies, called organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, use an organic compound to reach upward of 100 percent of the color gamut
LCD TVS made with Color IQ are just as colorful but are made for a few hundred dollars less
and operate with greater efficiency, Coe-Sullivan says. Lighting to displays, and back QD Vision technology began at MIT more than a decade ago.
Coe-Sullivan, then a Phd student in electrical engineering and computer science, was working with Bulovic and students of Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor in Chemistry,
on implementing quantum dots into electronic devices. In a study funded by MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Coe-Sullivan, QD Vision cofounder Jonathan Steckel Phd 6,
and others developed a pioneering technique for producing quantum dot LEDS (QLEDS). To do so, they sandwiched a layer of quantum dots, a few nanometers thick, between two organic thin films.
When electrically charged, the dots illuminated a light bulb 25 times more efficiently than traditional devices.
The resulting paper, published in Nature in 2002, became a landmark in the quantum dot-devices field. oon venture capitalists were calling Vladimir,
asking if we spin a company out, Coe-Sullivan says. Coe-Sullivan started toying around with the idea of starting a company.
Then, a chance encounter at a cocktail party at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship with a former classmate
QD Vision cofounder Greg Moeller MBA 2 sped things along. Early in the evening, the two started discussing Coe-Sullivan QLED advancements;
they soon found themselves up all night in a lab in Building 13, fleshing out a business strategy.
Following that conversation, Coe-Sullivan enrolled in 15.390 (New Ventures) to further develop a business model. hat led to the more rigorous formation of a sales and marketing plans,
and product creation, he says. In 2004 Coe-Sullivan, Bulovic, Moeller, Steckel, and mentor Joe Caruso launched QD Vision.
In 2010, the company launched its first product, a QD light bulb, with partner Nexxus Lighting.
However, realizing this $100 light bulb would soon need to sell for $10 to remain competitive
quantum dot displays. aking a transition like that from lighting to displays tests the nerves of folks involved, from top to bottom,
Pooling all resources into displays, the company eventually caught the eye of Sony, and last year became the first to market with a quantum dot display.
Today, QD Vision remains one of only two quantum dot display companies that have seen their products go to market.
Now, with a sharp rise in commercial use, quantum dot technologies are positioned to penetrate the display industry
Coe-Sullivan says. Along with Color IQ-powered LCD TVS, Amazon released a quantum dot Kindle last year,
and Asus has a quantum dot notebook. nd there nothing in between that quantum dots can address,
he says. In the future, Coe-Sullivan adds, QD Vision may even go back and tackle its first challenge:
QD light bulbs. he market has stabilized quite a bit, he says. omewhere down the line, we think there an application
and value proposition for quantum dot lighting. n
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