#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
#Star twinkles could help pin down planet sizes Twinkle twinkle little star and show us just how little you are.
Starlight captured by the Kepler space telescope has revealed that the amount a star flickers is tied to its size offering a better way to measure a wide variety of stars and their associated planets.
Unfortunately that may be mixed news for seekers of Earth-sized worlds. Kepler was designed to spot transits the periodic dips in a star's brightness indicating that a planet has passed in front of it.
The telescope's vigil required exquisite targeting precision and key parts of its steering system are broken now ending the telescope's main mission as an exoplanet hunter.
But you haven't heard the last of Kepler. Two years'worth of data still need inspecting including information about the thousands of stars in its field of view.
Figuring out the properties of stars is vital to planet surveys. When a planet transits a star the amount of light it blocks is used to calculate its size.
That can help to pinpoint whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter as long as the star's size is known.
Simply looking at a star's colour can reveal whether it is small and compact like our sun
or big and bloated like a red giant the type of star the sun will swell into in about 5 billion years.
But such estimates are crude with uncertainties of more than 90 per cent. Much more accurate size and mass measurements boasting uncertainties of just 2 per cent come from studying vibrations within the star called starquakes.
However this technique known as asteroseismology can be used only on bright stars because it requires teasing out subtle periodic variations in a star's light.
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
and falls back down. They began with a sample of about 500 stars whose size and mass were known already thanks to asteroseismology measurements made by Kepler.
They found a clear pattern: bigger more bloated stars flicker more. That's probably because each granule spans some two dozen times the width of the Earth in a giant star compared to just a fraction of the Earth's diameter in a compact star.
What we see over time is combined the effect of this network of bright granules flickering on and off says team member Keivan Stassun also of Vanderbilt.
The method provides stellar size and mass estimates with uncertainties of about 25 per cent a vast improvement over colour-based estimates says Stassun.
So far the flicker technique has been used to find the size and mass of about 1000 stars that do not have asteroseismology measurements
and it could be used to gauge the sizes of 50000 more stars already studied by Kepler Stassun says.
How will that affect the count of Earth-sized worlds? Kepler's principal investigator William Borucki expects the current pool of candidates to shrink.
He suspects we may have been underestimating the size of stars and therefore the planets that they host so many worlds currently deemed Earthlike may turn out to be too big.
Based on previous experience there is a significant chance that star sizes will increase when we have a more accurate method he says.
Unfortunately Kepler's pointing is probably no longer precise enough to measure the subtle flicker 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.
Still the flicker method could be put to use on NASA's next planet hunter the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) due to launch in 2017.
Our hope is that TESS will be able to do what Kepler has done but over the entire sky says Stassun.
Journal reference: Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature1241 t
#Space station poised to launch open-source satellites Want to do your own space experiment? From next week you will be able to run science projects on the world's first open-source satellites.
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.
The cargo ship carrying the Cubesats should arrive at the ISS on 9 august and the satellites will then be deployed using a robotic-arm technique tested last year.
The method can put several small satellites into orbit around Earth eliminating the need for dedicated launch vehicles and making citizen-science missions like Ardusat more affordable.
No one has given people access to satellites in the same way that we're doing with Ardusat says Chris Wake of Nanosatisfi the San francisco company that builds
and operates the satellites. The maiden launch was funded partially by a Kickstarter campaign with backers buying some of the satellites'time slots to run experiments.
If there are enough extra time slots paying customers will also be able to program controls on the satellites
and run experiments for three days for $125 or for a week for $250. The satellites run Arduino an open-source platform popular with hobbyists which will let anyone write code for an app game
or research project that uses the onboard instruments. Projects that will run on the first two Ardusats are yet to be announced
but a list of ideas from the developers includes tracking meteorites and making a 3d model of Earth's magnetosphere.
Sara Seager at the Massachusetts institute of technology is not on the Ardusat team but her students design
and build Cubesats for planetary science. This definitely is helping open up space both to all people
and all nations Seager says of the Ardusat launch. The first two satellites will orbit for three to seven months before burning up as they fall to Earth.
Nanosatisfi hopes to send fleets of them into space on future launches. We're focused on launching a number of these over the next few years says Wake.
Five years out we'd love to see 100 150 of these up in the air reaching half a million students d
#3d printed rocket engine gets its first fiery test Thought current 3d printing was only good for creating cute plastic versions of teapot lids key rings and other curios?
Think again. Choreographed high-power lasers or electron beams can fuse and sculpt metal powders into high-performance machine parts.
Now NASA has proved that even rocket motors can be made this way. 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.
They wondered if additive layer manufacturing the engineer's name for 3d printing could make a precision part called a rocket injector in less time than the year it takes using conventional methods.
Detail are scant because rocket motor designs are covered by US laws that prevent them from being exported revealed to non-Americans.
But the result can be seen in the image above. 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
and costs were cut by 70 per cent. NASA is not the only organisation trying to take 3d printing into space however:
a public competition is under way to create a crowdsourced design for an open-source 3d-printable rocket engine that commercial spaceflight operators will be able to use
#Solar system has shaped a tail like a four-leaf clover Lucky us! 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.
The discovery should help us better understand how our star interacts with the Milky way including how harmful cosmic rays from interstellar space manage to sneak through the solar system's magnetic barrier.
The sun is currently zipping through one of the Milky way's spiral arms at a relative speed of about 23 kilometres per second ploughing through thin clouds of interstellar dust and gas.
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 have seen similar tails in pictures of speeding stars elsewhere in the galaxy. But until now it has been hard to see for sure what our own sun's tail might look like.
Using the first three years of observations from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft astronomers were able to map this heliotail for the first time.
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.
IBEX creates images of the solar system's borders by observing neutral atoms produced when charged particles from the solar wind collide with other charged particles in the outer heliosphere Some of these neutral atoms are bounced back towards us.
They are deflected not by magnetic fields as they travel so neutral atoms faithfully record the point of collision.
Because they travel pretty much straight you can trace them back to where they came from
and paint a picture of the solar system using atoms instead of light Christian says. One surprise is that
if we were to look straight down the length of the tail from front to back we would see particles clustered into four distinct lobes like a four-leaf clover (see image above right).
Two opposing lobes on the vertical plane consist of fast-moving particles while the two lobes on the horizontal plane consist of slower-moving particles (watch a NASA video of the tail in action).
The four lobes might be a reflection of solar activity at the time the particles left the sun says IBEX principal investigator David Mccomas. The particles took a few years to reach the tail
so they were born when the sun was minimally active. Around solar minimum you get slow solar wind around low to mid-latitudes from the sun
and high speed around high latitudes says Mccomas . But he expected this would create more of a solid horizontal band of slow particles across the tail not the odd lobes.
The short answer is we don't formed know how they he says. The lobed structure of the tail might not hold out very long.
At solar maximum the bands of slow and fast particles streaming away from the sun break down so the tail may change its shape
when the sun's activity reaches its peak says Mccomas. Ultimately a better understanding of the tail
and how it changes over time should help us understand how and where material from our solar system affects the rest of the galaxy
and how the galaxy influences us. 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
and the astrotails or heliotails are where the material coming out of stars or our sun leaves the region of the sun and gets mixed in with the rest of the stuff.
The heliotail could also be letting cosmic rays in says Brenda Dingus of Los alamos National Laboratory in New mexico who is not on the IBEX team.
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
and previous observations have shown that they seem to come mostly from the tail's direction says Dingus.
It could be that the heliotail is acting as a funnel for cosmic rays allowing them to leak into the solar system where the sun's influence is weakest.
Journal reference: Astrophysical Journal DOI: 10.1088/004-637x/771/2/7 7
#Three habitable worlds found around the same star Aliens could be watching aliens watching aliens.
That's a realistic prospect now that three potentially habitable planets a record have been glimpsed orbiting the same star.
Earlier studies had suggested that a nearby star Gliese 667c had three planets only one of which might support life.
But the very presence of multiple planets made their precise number hard to tease out.
Now Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen in Germany and his colleagues have reanalysed the original data
and added some new observations. They found evidence for up to seven worlds including three rocky planets in the star's habitable zone where temperatures should suit life.
Five are detected very solidly by any standard says Anglada-Escudé. This includes all three habitable zone candidates.
Located about 22 light years away Gliese 667c is itself part of a triple-star system making this one of the most crowded planetary neighbourhoods yet.
The team used more than 200 data points from three different spectrographs which can detect how a star is tugged back and forth by the gravity of an orbiting planet.
The five strongest signals were from planets between 1. 94 and 5. 94 times the mass of Earth making them all likely to be rocky.
But only three are in the habitable zone. These three worlds are close enough to each other that any intelligent life there with the ability to build rockets could easily visit the neighbours.
Larger rockets would take you pretty quickly from one planet to the other one to two months at most says Anglada-Escudé.
This discovery adds more targets to the many exciting worlds we are discovering out there says Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts.
She reported the first pair of neighbouring habitable worlds in April. The next step will be to find a way to scan these worlds for signs of life she adds.
That's assuming the new trio of habitable planets is real. In 2010 two of the paper's co-authors were acclaimed
and then criticised when they claimed to have found the first potentially habitable rocky planet around the star Gliese 581 a discovery others were unable to confirm.
Anglada-Escudé is worried not: We made sure to be very careful this time. Journal reference:
Astronomy & Astrophysics in pres h
#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.
Antiparticles have the same mass as their ordinary particle counterparts but carry an opposite charge and spin.
The particles annihilate on contact with ordinary matter vanishing in a puff of energy which makes it difficult to produce
and study them On earth. Huge machines at particle physics labs such as CERN near Geneva Switzerland have been churning out antimatter for over a decade.
This is similar to the powerful streams of matter-antimatter observed outside pulsars and black holes. CERN physicist Niels Madsen notes though that the tabletop device has limitations.
As an alternative says Sarri the beams can be used to mimic the way particle fountains from black holes
and pulsars shoot through and interact with gases in the interstellar medium creating mini versions of these enigmatic astrophysical phenomena in the lab for the first time.
This article will appear in print under the headline Antimatter bullets get fast and chea a
#China inches closer to building its own space station Update 11 june 2013: The China National Space Administration successfully launched its Shenzhou-10 mission to low Earth orbit at 0938 GMT today.
The Long March 2f rocket lifted off flawlessly from the Jiuquan space centre in Mongolia's Gobi desert
and headed towards the fledgling spacefaring nation's space station Tiangong 1 around which it is expected to test manoeuvres before docking for a 15-day stay on orbit.
Original article published 10 june 2013china will launch the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft on 11 june lofting three astronauts on a 15-day mission to learn how to rendezvous
The mission is the last of three scheduled experiments designed to help astronauts master the skills for building
and operating a space station. If all goes to plan the mission will mark the end of the beginning of China's slow but steady approach to human space flight.
Right now the country is not doing anything revolutionary. But progress so far suggests that more advanced plans such as a moon base
or a crewed Martian trek may not be beyond China's reach. In a press conference Monday a spokeswoman for the Chinese human space programme Wu Ping announced that Shenzhou-10 will lift off at 0938 UTC according to the Chinese news service Xinhua.
The capsule will carry two men Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang and one woman Wang Yaping.
The astronauts will rendezvous with the Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace 1) space module which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011.
The crew will do one automatic and one manual docking test. 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.
It's a slow incremental programme but it's also very ambitious she says. China started with the uncrewed launch of the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999 and continued with its first crewed launch in 2003.
This week's lift off will mark their fifth human mission in 10 years. The ultimate goal is to build a space station by 2020.
What China plans to do with the space station is still unclear and they may need a new heavy launch vehicle called the Long March 5 in order to build it.
There is a good chance they can make it happen in part because China's approach has been markedly different from the frenetic space race between the US
and the USSR in the 1960s and'70s says Johnson-Freese. There was a space race between the US
and Russia because we each started at the same place. But for China there's no race with the US
The two countries also have different political attitudes towards space exploration. What we have seen more than anything else is a truly long-term commitment to space that dates back at least 25 years
By contrast NASA's human spaceflight programme has struggled under changing budgets and political whims. Plans to return to the moon under George w bush's administration for instance morphed into crewed missions to an asteroid under Barack Obama's presidency.
When it comes to sending humans beyond Earth orbit China's unwavering goals may see it beat other space powers like the US to the punch says Cheng.
So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns they might well get to some place like Mars
or establish a lunar presence precisely because they are persistent and willing to spend the money
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