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Synopsis: Domenii: Space: Space generale: Celestial body: Planet:

Those fitted with magnetometers like the ones that provide your smartphone compass will transmit data about the Earth magnetic field.

and he is convinced that planet-friendly technology has a role to play in the future of motorsport.

launching a probe to Mars last month. Although India is still far behind, its efforts to reach a similar level are perceived indicative of the regional strategic benefits.

#Earlier this year, for example, China's space agency said it launched three satellites to clean up space debris orbiting the Earth:

Nearly three quarters of humans on this planet are tethered practically to their mobile phones. Yet it is only during emergencies that we realise how precious this connection is to our lives.

#Pedestrian power to shape future cities The most striking change to one of the largest cities on the planet can be seen easily from the air.

There are now 60 million new cars being added to the planet every year, and with those vehicles come more smog,

which#puts the planet's most vulnerable citizens at risk#even by 2020, it's estimated that 78%of the households in China will still not have a car.

Jet-rocket hybrideventually, mankind will see long distance travel-London to Sydney, for example-taking place outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The early space systems will probably involve gliding back to Earth #which may mean our airports will have to be redesigned to make them useable by these different designs.

Behind them are huge posters of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Nasa's Jet propulsion laboratory used a portfolio of design software made by Siemens to digitally design,

One shot onlycurrently due for launch in 2018, the JWST will be stationed 1 million miles (1. 5 million km) from Earth#some five times further away from us than the Moon.

The Solar impulse plane has crossed just successfully the US in five stages#from San francisco to New york. And the world's largest solar-powered boat, the Turanor Planet Solar,

#Exoplanets: New missions hunting for alien worlds As mountains go, Cerro Armazones may not be much to look at.

In the past decade alone, astronomers have been discovering planets outside our solar system or exoplanets, with astonishing speed.

We now have identified nearly a thousand. Most are much bigger than Earth and almost certainly Jupiter-like gas giants, making making them quite unlikely for hosting life.

None has so far been confirmed to bear life#even single-cell organisms #but some of these planets seem to be distinctly rocky and Earthlike:

Kepler-62e, Gliese-581g and Kepler 22b, to name but a few.""The quest for Earthlike exoplanets, and ultimately life on such planets, is one of the great frontiers of science, perhaps the last big piece in the puzzle of how we, humans,

fit into the big picture,#says Liske, who works at the European Southern Observatory, an organisation that already operates a number of telescopes in the Chilean desert.

Two of the more high-profile planet hunters have hit rocky ground in recent months, however.

The french-led Corot spacecraft, launched in 2006, greatly outlived its original two-and-a-half year mission of spotting terrestrial-sized exoplanets,

but in November 2012, it suffered a computer malfunction, which made it impossible to send any data back to Earth.

In June 2013, The french Space agency announced it would switch the satellite off and let it burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere#the usual fate of our mechanical helpers in space.

Nasa's $600 million space observatory Kepler, launched in 2009, has also been crippled recently. Kepler has helped spot thousands of potential exoplanets#over 130

of which have been confirmed #but two of its four reaction wheels that control the telescope's direction have failed in recent months,

and at least three are necessary to point it in the right direction. Kepler completed its primary mission in November 2012,

but this month Nasa conceded that Kepler will no longer be able to search for exoplanets.

Thankfully, more planet-hunting missions are on the way, which will continue and even extend upon their legacy.

which Liske says"will completely revolutionise the exoplanet field.##Size mattersto be considered a"habitable#world,

a planet has to be similar to Earth in size, rocky, and located in the so-called Goldilocks zone#an area of space around a parent star that is not too cold or too hot,

Since these planets are expected to be small and faint compared to their sun, spotting them is tricky with existing ground-based optical telescopes."

To tell a parent star and a potentially habitable planet apart, astronomers need incredibly sharp, high-resolution pictures.

Hence it takes an extremely large telescope to try to spot any planets that may support alien life many light years away.

"With the E-ELT, we believe that we will be able to directly see exoplanets similar to Earth out to a distance of about 20 light years,

The closest potentially habitable planet is about seven light years away, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

they would be receiving light from Earth from today. To them, Armazones would still look intact.

it spotted the first exoplanet to be observed directly, 2m1207b, approximately 170 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

The technology corrects for the blurriness caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere that makes stars twinkle

But even with these adaptive optics tools, existing ground-based telescopes can only"see#planets bigger than Jupiter#gas giants that orbit their parent stars at a huge distance.

Sphere for the VLT and Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) for the Gemini Telescope in Chile"will blow NACO and Keck AO away#,according to Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

But while GPI and Sphere will make it possible to spot exoplanets of similar size to Jupiter#even these will still be too big to be considered habitable.

E-ELT, GMT and TMT will all be equipped with tools for exoplanet search, and are expected to be able to peer so deep into the universe

The Hubble space telescope has been circling Earth since 1990 and has spotted a few planets #and also helped determine what some extra-solar worlds are made probably of.

But Hubble's 2. 4m (7. 9ft) mirror is too small to see planets smaller than Jupiter,

says Matt Mountain, the director of the Space telescope Science Institute at Nasa. Hubble's planned successor, the James webb space telescope (JWST)# set to go into orbit around 2018#is expected to do much more.

among them the search for planets orbiting nearby stars. It will work in the infrared spectrum,

which will allow it to"probe down to smaller planetary sizes than Hubble, to roughly two-to-three times larger than Earth,

more Neptune-scale planets,#says Mountain. The telescope will aim to find out whether these extra-solar worlds are so-called"super-Earths##rocky planets that could potentially be habitable#or miniature versions of Neptune,

unable to support life. Using an instrument called a coronagraph, JWST will try to determine

whether a planet has an atmosphere, and#for the first time#analyse it by examining the spectrum of the light coming from the planet.

Elements and molecules in an atmosphere, such as water and oxygen, have specific signatures in the spectrum,

'If we're lucky we may be able to say something about the exoplanet's surface:

most exoplanets are still found using indirect techniques#such as detecting a wobble in the position of the star that indicates it is being pulled slightly towards an orbiting planet,

which planets are identified by the tiny dip in brightness caused when they pass in front of its star.

but the method doesn't allow us to calculate a planet's mass#a critical factor in determining its density and hence its rockiness.

It studies space bodies by recording how a planet's gravity makes its parent star appear to vibrate as it rotates around it.

It can use that vibration to detect new planets, but has also been used to learn more about known exoplanets.

It determined that an exoplanet discovered by Corot in September 2009 some 500 light-years away

and dubbed Corot-7b had a rocky surface and a mass only five times of our Earth.

This would make it a likely habitable candidate if it wasn't for its proximity to its parent star#the planet lies only 2. 5 million km (1. 6 million miles) away from it,

which is just 1/23rd of the distance from the Sun to Mercury.""By far the most powerful combination right now is the combination of transit detections and Doppler spectroscopy,

which gives you both the mass and radius of the planet, so you can start to say what it's made of,

because the odds that any single planet discovered by Doppler will also transit are very low,

and the huge numbers of transit planets discovered by Kepler are all orbiting relatively faint stars

but can discern planets around bright nearby stars: Tess, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Due to launch in 2017,

when Tess finds a potentially habitable planet, just as with Kepler, other tools will come into play to find out more about them,

to determine whether they are super-earths or micro-Neptunes.""The big ground-based telescopes can work with it

and do the spectroscopy, #says Macintosh.""And if Tess finds a habitable planet around a very nearby star,

you can then use the James webb space telescope to measure the composition of its atmosphere.##But to really find a habitable Earth-twin orbiting a star just like our Sun,

we will have to go to space, he adds#with a giant telescope fully designed for planet hunting

and equipped with a mirror of eight metres or more. That won't happen any time soon

The fact that there have been few good candidates for planets that host life found so far should not discourage the searchers The data already collected suggests that there are about 100 billion planetary systems in our galaxy alone,

So if we do ever send astronauts to Mars they might be tucking into freshly printed pizza.

The catalysts are cheap, earth-abundant materials and form by self-assembly, which should make manufacture cheaper.

"This technology can potentially also help cancer patients from the side effects of radiation therapy and astronauts from chronic exposure to cosmic rays on their journey to Mars. s

and IFC is instrumental in bringing the project in Chile to life. he Atacama desert receives some of the planet steadiest concentrations of direct sunlight according to First Solar.

the firm that stands as the only private company to ever return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit.

CLIM-RUN designed its method to support a future World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climate services network designed for the entire planet.

The collected data will be made available through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS. New technologies and approaches to water management are being tested

This has led already to a sharp increase in price for rare-earth metals (such as Neodymium (Nd),

Considering the resource distribution of rare-earth metals, European car manufactures have to face the problem of restrictive and vulnerable supply chains for rare earth metals

Also known as polysaccharides, these complex sugars are by far the most abundant biomolecules on the planet. Produced biologically in plants, animals and microorganisms,

and then combining them to detect sub-centimetre-scale height differences on the Earth surface.

DORIS has proved it can record Earth movements and deformation over time. he ability to construct long time series,

As it user friendly and doesn cost the earth, this could really change the way we farm

In a letter coordinated by the nonprofit sustainability advocacy organization, Ceres, 223 companies including industry giants such as Ikea,

Mars and VF Corporation said he new standards will reinforce what leading companies already know:

and that might ultimately find their way to the surfaces of planets says Garrod. The branched carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide is a common feature in molecules that are needed for life such as amino acids

The discovery reported in the journal Science lends weight to the idea that biologically crucial molecules like amino acids that are commonly found in meteorites are produced early in the process of star formation even before planets such as Earth are formed.

The goal is to find ways to produce some of the world s largest-volume chemicals from a sustainable carbon source that the Earth not only has in excess

The study also suggests butterflies are the ancestral group to the tens of thousands of moth species on the planet

when bats spread across the planet as a means of escaping these and other nocturnal predators Kawahara says.

#Spinach leaves vibrate to kick off photosynthesis Vibrations deep within spinach leaves enhance the efficiency of photosynthesishe energy conversion process that powers life on our planet.

#Material snags CO2 from natural gas Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on June 9 2014scientists have created an Earth-friendly way to separate carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas from natural gas right

#Exoplanet weather forecast calls for clouds University of Chicago rightoriginal Studyposted by Steve Koppes-Chicago on December 31 2013a team of scientists report they have characterized definitively the atmosphere of a super-Earth class

planet orbiting another star for the first time. Today s forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.

The scrutinized planet which is known as GJ1214B is classified as a super-Earth type planet because its mass is intermediate between those of Earth and Neptune.

Recent searches for planets around other stars (xoplanets have shown that super-Earths like GJ 1214b are among the most common type of planets in the Milky way galaxy.

Because no such planets exist in our solar system the physical nature of super-Earths is largely unknown.

Previous studies of GJ 1214b yielded two possible interpretations of the planet s atmosphere. Its atmosphere could consist entirely of water vapor

or some other type of heavy molecule or it could contain high-altitude clouds that prevent the observation of what lies underneath.

But now a team of astronomers led by Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago has detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble space telescope.

This was the largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet. An artist s rendering of extrasolar planet GJ 1214b.

Credit: NASA ESA and G. Bacon (STSCL) via U. Chicago) The researchers describe their work as an important milestone on the road to identifying potentially habitable Earthlike planets beyond our Solar system.

The results appear in the January 2 issue of the journal Nature. e really pushed the limits of

and first author of the new paper. his advance lays the foundation for characterizing other Earths with similar techniques.?

and really nail down some property of a small planet orbiting a distant starexplains Bean an assistant professor and the project s principal investigator.

GJ 1214b is located just 40 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

Because of its proximity to our solar system and the small size of its host star GJ 1214b is the most easily observed super-Earth.

Kreidberg Bean and their colleagues used Hubble to precisely measure the spectrum of GJ 1214b in near-infrared light finding what they consider definitive evidence of high clouds blanketing the planet.

The planet was discovered in 2009 by the MEARTH Project which monitors two thousand red dwarf stars for transiting planets.

The planet was targeted next for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere. The first spectra which Bean obtained in 2010 using a ground-based telescope suggested that the planet s atmosphere either was predominantly water vapor

or hydrogen-dominated with high-altitude clouds. More precise Hubble observations made in 2012 and 2013 allowed the team to distinguish between these two scenarios.

The news is about what they didn t find. The Hubble spectra revealed no chemical fingerprints whatsoever in the planet s atmosphere.

This allowed the astronomers to rule out cloud-free atmospheres made of water vapor methane nitrogen carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide.

The best explanation for the new data is that there are high-altitude clouds in the atmosphere of the planet

Models of super-Earth atmospheres predict clouds could be made out of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide at the scorching temperatures of 450 degrees Fahrenheit found on GJ 1214b. ou would expect very different kinds of clouds to form than you would expect say on Earthkreidberg says.

of this telescope will allow us to peer through the clouds on planets like GJ 1214b.

But more than that it may open the door to studies of Earthlike planets around nearby stars. he NASA the National Science Foundation the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Gravitational lensing it has long been predicted can twist E modes into B modes as photons pass by galaxies and other massive objects on their way toward earth.

(or isotope) of argon we discovered in the crab nebulasays Gomez. e now know that it is different from argon we see in rocks on the Earth.

Planets the study looked at smaller craters within the larger SPA basin made by impacts that happened millions of years after the giant impact that formed the basin.

in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California Davis. Saying it was a ake-up callyin says the Chelyabinsk meteorite the largest strike

Based on viewing angles from videos of the fireball researchers calculated that the meteoroid entered Earth s atmosphere at just over 19 kilometers per second slightly faster than had previously been reported. ur meteoroid entry modeling showed that the impact was caused by a 20-meter sized

and isotopic analysis of the meteorites and Ken Verosub professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences measured the magnetic properties of metallic grains in the meteorite.

Chelyabinsk belonged to a bigger ubble pileasteroid that broke apart 1. 2 million years ago possibly in an earlier close encounter with Earth Jenniskens speculates.

and earth-abundant elements unlike compound semiconductor materials currently used in efficient thin-film solar cell technology. he research was supported by the Energy Commercialization Institute of Ben Franklin Technology Partners the Department of energy's Office of Basic Sciences

and take spectra of planets around nearby stars. Source: UC Santa Barbar

#Wireless device grabs lost energy from Wi-fi Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals researchers have designed a power harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.

#Signs of water detected in exoplanet s debris University of Warwick rightoriginal Studyposted by Anna Blackaby-Warwick on October 11 2013the remains of a water-rich rocky exoplanet have been discovered outside

By contrast only approximately 0. 023 percent of the Earth s mass is water. Evidence for water outside our solar system has previously been found in the atmosphere of gas giants

but this is the first time it has been pinpointed in a rocky body making it of significant interest in understanding of the formation and evolution of habitable planets and life.

The dwarf planet Ceres contains ice buried beneath an outer crust and researchers have drawn a parallel between the two bodies.

Itâ#believed that bodies like Ceres were the source of the bulk of our own water On earth.

In the study published in Science researchers suggest it is most likely that the water detected around the white dwarf GD 61 came from a minor planet at least 90 kilometers (56 miles) in diameterâ

##but potentially much biggerâ##that once orbited the parent star before it became a white dwarf.

Like Ceres the water was most likely in the form of ice below the planet s surface.

It is likely that the object was as large as Vesta the largest minor planet in the solar system.

The water-rich minor planet was knocked out of its regular orbit and plunged into a very close orbit where it was shredded by the starâ#gravitational force.

Researchers believe that destabilizing the orbit of the minor planet requires a so far unseen much larger planet going around the white dwarf. t this stage in its existence all that remains of this rocky body is simply dust

and waterâ##are key in the hunt for habitable planets outside our solar system so itâ#very exciting to find them together for the first time outside our solar system.?

The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existedâ ##and maybe still existâ##in the GD 61 system and likely also around substantial number of similar parent starssays lead author Jay Farihi from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. hese water-rich building blocks

and avoid building planets and GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver lots of water to their surfaces. ur results demonstrate that there was definitely potential for habitable planets in this exoplanetary system

. or their analysis the researchers used ultraviolet spectroscopy data obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on board the Hubble space telescope of the white dwarf GD 61.

Using a sophisticated computer model of the white dwarf atmosphere developed by Detlev Koester at the University of Kiel they were able to infer the chemical composition of the shredded minor planet.

To date observations of 12 destroyed exoplanets orbiting white dwarves have been carried out but this is the first time the signature of water has been found.

or search for such formations on Mars and other planets to determine where water once existed.

These deep earthquakes occur in older and colder areas of the oceanic plate that gets pushed into the earth s mantle.

because seismologists could not find a seismic signal in the Earth that could confirm the results.

The ability to do such experiments allows scientists like Green to simulate the appropriate conditions within the Earth

and found the arthquakesonly within a narrow temperature range that simulates conditions where the real earthquakes occur in Earth. sing synchrotron X-rays to aid our observations we found that fractures nucleate at the onset of the olivine to spinel transitiongreen says. urther these fractures propagate dynamically

the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4649 also called M60 about 54 million light years from Earth.

This would make the density of stars about 15000 times greater than that found in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky way. raveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxystrader says. ince the stars are so much closer in this galaxy

#Earth s inner core spins faster than rest of planet University of Leeds rightoriginal Studyposted by Ben Jones-U. Leeds on September 17 2013the Earth s

Although Edmund Halley who also discovered the famous comet showed the westward-drifting motion of the Earth s geomagnetic field in 1692 it is the first time that scientists have been able to link the way the inner core spins to the behavior of the outer core.

The planet behaves in this way because it is responding to the Earth s geomagnetic field.

The findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences help scientists to interpret the dynamics of the core of the Earth the source of our planet s magnetic field.

In the last few decades seismometers measuring earthquakes travelling through the Earth s core have identified an eastwards

or superrotation of the solid inner core relative to Earth s surface. he link is explained simply in terms of equal and opposite actionsays Philip Livermore of the School of Earth

and Environment at the University of Leeds. he magnetic field pushes eastwards on the inner core causing it to spin faster than the Earth

but it also pushes in the opposite direction in the liquid outer core which creates a westward motion. he solid iron inner core is about the size of the Moon.

The fact that the Earth s internal magnetic field changes slowly over a timescale of decades means that the electromagnetic force responsible for pushing the inner and outer cores will itself change over time.

The authors used a model of the Earth s core that was run on the giant supercomputer Monte Rosa part of The swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano Switzerland.

Using a new method they were able to simulate the Earth s core with an accuracy about 100 times better than other models.

#Earth s wobble fixes food for ocean creatures Princeton university rightoriginal Studyposted by Catherine Zandonella-Princeton on September 16 2013the cyclic wobble of the Earth on its axis controls the production of ixednitrogen

and fell in a pattern that closely matched the changing orientation of Earth s axis of rotation or axial precession.

and arises because the Earth wobbles slightly as it rotates similar to the wobble of a toy top.

and geophysical sciences at Princeton university. y studying the response of nitrogen fixation to different environmental changes in the Earth s past we have found connections that may ensure that the ocean s fixed nitrogen level will always reboundsigman says. his suggests that an ocean over time has a relatively stable nutrient reservoir

#Ice may explain odd craters on Mars Brown University right Original Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on August 6 2013brown (US) More than 600 double-layer craters on Mars may have been caused by debris

These distinctive craters were documented first in data returned from the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s

Recent discoveries by planetary geoscientists at Brown and elsewhere have shown that the climate of Mars has varied in the past says James W. Head professor of geological science at Brown University.

During these times ice from the polar caps is redistributed into the mid-latitudes of Mars as a layer about 50 meters thick in the same place that we see that the DLES have formed.

or high latitudes areas where scientists believe there may once have been glacial ice on Mars. Ultimately understanding how DLES

and other crater types are formed could lead to a better understanding of Mars past. There are over 600 DLES on the Martian surface

so reconciling how they formed with our knowledge of the climate of Mars is pretty important Weiss says.

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