#Swedish space rock may be piece of early life puzzle A fossil meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry.
The mysterious rock may be known the first piece of the bullet that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth.
Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm which is being mined for flooring.
All of the meteorites are part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period
when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species. Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite.
Analysing its microscopic crystals Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period
but is of a kind completely unknown to science. About 515 million years ago our planet was going through an evolutionary slump.
A burst of diversity that happened during the Cambrian period had tapered off and few new types of animals were emerging.
Fossil meteorites from the quarry suggest that during this time impacts were tens to hundreds of times more frequent than they are today.
The meteorites may have been born when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter.
The larger object spawned the cloud of L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years.
According to one popular idea this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches
and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery.
The fact that the latest fossil comes from the same rock layers as the L chondrites suggests that it is a piece of that second asteroid says Schmitz.
The theory says that most of the smaller asteroid was vaporised during the collision so it also makes sense that only scant fragments of it would remain.
David Harper at Durham University UK agrees. The team may at last have identified the impactor responsible for the break up of the parent body of the L chondrite meteorites he says.
In which case he adds it is a direct remnant of one of the most violent events in our solar system's history.
This was documented the largest asteroid break up event of the past 3 billion years says Schmitz.
The asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period believed to have killed the non-avian dinosaurs was tiny in comparison.
Journal reference: Earth and Planetary science Letters DOI: 10.1016/j. epsl. 2014.05.03 3
#How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites THERE ARE some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies researchers
and start-ups are promising a powerful new perspective on earthly activities that range from global commerce to perfecting the art of mining landfills for recyclable materials.
On 10 june Google acquired Skybox Imaging a 5-year-old Silicon valley firm for $500 million.
Then there are rare-earth metals that could be retrieved from discarded electronics along with bits of tin copper and gold.
But it could later switch to satellites like the 28 imaging cubesats that the firm Planet Labs of San francisco already has in orbit.
Planet Labs ultimately wants a fleet of 100 of the tiny satellites enough to refresh its imagery of the entire planet once a day says Arin Jumpasut a Planet Labs imaging engineer.
#Crystal cocoons kept bacteria safe in space ASTEROIDS have a killer reputation taking the blame for death and destruction on massive scales.
Several hundred million years after Earth formed when life was emerging our young planet had an atmosphere oceans and primordial continents.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
Because UV radiation can damage DNA that would have made it difficult for any but the most extreme forms of life to survive.
and pressure of the asteroid or comet impact that made the crater about 23 million years ago.
while letting enough sunlight through to allow them to photosynthesise. Complex life evolved long before the crater formed
but there have been countless space rock strikes in Earth's history. That raised a whole bunch of questions about
whether the unique geology of impact craters could have been a good UV shield on the early Earth says Casey Bryce a member of Cockell's lab. Bryce
The bacteria received radiation doses far more intense than conditions on early Earth. When the samples were returned to the lab the microbes in the glass discs were dead.
Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets
and then shielded whatever emerged. Crater rocks could provide refuges even now for life on other planets such as Mars she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline Space rock strikes protected early lif f
#Impossibly heavy planet is the first'mega-Earth'Sly Stallone has nothing on this rocky heavyweight.
Twice the size of Earth and with 17 times our planet's mass Kepler-10c is so unusual that it has been placed in a brand new class of exoplanet.
The planet orbits a star that is about 560 light years away from us. It has a radius slightly more than double that of Earth's a size that led astronomers to assume it was a shrunken version of gassy planet Neptune
which is four times larger than Earth. Now Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts and his colleagues have used the HARPS-N telescope in the Canary islands to pin down Kepler-10c's mass.
They found it is actually 17 times as heavy as Earth: more or less the same mass as Neptune.
But because Kepler-10c is much smaller then Neptune it must be an incredibly dense rocky world the like
of which has never been seen before. All the major existing planetary formation models were not predicting this type of planet
and it is why we could not believe our result at the beginning says Dumusque who presented the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston this week.
But the team checked for a bevy of possible errors that might have been caused by the telescope itself
or by activity from the host star and they say a massive rocky world is the best explanation for the data.
Calculations by geophysicists previously suggested that gravity should compress planets so much that rocky worlds can't get bigger than twice Earth's size says Kepler team member Geoff Marcy at the University of California Berkeley.
This suggestion of a rocky planet 2. 3 times the size of Earth blows me away he says.
The team has dubbed Kepler-10c a mega-Earth because it is too heavy to fit into the super-Earth class of exoplanets
which are bigger than our home world but much lighter than Neptune. It is made probably from the same materials as Earth water silicates
and iron but in different proportions says Dumusque. Kepler-10c is denser than Earth but still it is far from being made of pure iron
which would be the physical limit for planets he says. Neighbouring planet Kepler-10b was already famous among planet hunters for being confirmed the first rocky world outside our solar system.
But it is very close to its star completing a full orbit in just 20 hours.
The more we find planets outside the solar system the more we are surprised by the diversity of these new worlds says Dumusque e
#Spacex unveils sleek reusable Dragon crew capsule First cargo now crew the uber-modern space taxi known as the Dragon V2 is ready for passengers.
At an unveiling ceremony yesterday complete with smoke effects and coloured lights Spacex CEO Elon musk gave the world its first glimpse of the upgraded Dragon spacecraft.
NASA is already using an unpiloted version of Dragon to send cargo to the International space station and return valuable gear and scientific experiments.
The results will hopefully prove handy for Musk who hopes to eventually shuttle humans on the long trip to Mars
It also accounts for complex phenomena such as cooling gas star formation supernova explosions and supermassive black holes pulling in material that gets too Close to run the simulation the team used several supercomputers in Europe and the US each
of which contained many central processing units or CPUS. By contrast an ordinary computer might have just one.
For instance small galaxies in the simulation produced stars too early so they appeared older than we observe them to be today.
and black hole radiation are still not very well understood making it difficult to tell whether the simulation gets them right.
#Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion On earth THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
and electrons the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions.
It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid behaving like mixing ocean currents
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
Snowflakes shorelines and most recently black holes (see Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed) also exhibit such fractal behaviour.
These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
#Supernova found aligned with galactic magnifying glass A perfectly arranged exploding star and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.
Sometimes when a white dwarf star dies it explodes as a type 1a supernova. All supernovae in this class reach a very specific colour and peak brightness creating
whether and by how much the light from the supernova is being messed with by other things like nearby galaxies or the expansion of the universe.
For example the gravity from a massive object like a galaxy can magnify light from another object like a supernova bending its light waves
We can only see this effect from Earth if the two objects are aligned perfectly. Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
its light is being lensed by a galaxy in front of it. The supernova PS1-10afx was discovered in 2010 using the Pan starrs telescope in Hawaii.
Because it was so much brighter than normal it sparked controversy over whether it was a new type of supernova
or was being magnified by a gravitational lens. Quimby thought it must be lensing but nobody could see an intervening galaxy that could be doing the job.
and after the supernova and none of these showed obvious signs of a foreground object says Quimby.
Now his team has found a galaxy full of dim old stars that was hard to see against the bright background of the galaxy holding the supernova.
They calculate that it is the right size to make a normal type 1a supernova look about 30 times brighter about the same as the apparent brightness of PS1-10afx.
and hailed by some as the discovery of the century may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
and one day people on the surface of Mars. The Low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from the US NAVY's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
We really only have two options for stopping at Mars: rockets and aerodynamic drag. Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
But the heavier the load the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity NASA invented an ambitious system called the sky crane
which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
As it falls back to Earth the system will inflate and moments later the parachute will fire.
In addition to landing human missions on Mars the system could help robotic craft safely land in Martian mountains or highlands.
Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed d
#Squirting moons face off in race to find alien life Icebound seas just keep getting hotter at least as candidates for life beyond Earth.
Fresh discoveries have put two moons in our solar system neck and neck in the race.
In December astronomers announced hints of watery plumes spurting from Jupiter's large moon Europa potentially giving us a peek into a vast ocean likely to exist beneath its ice.
Saturn's moon Enceladus stole back the limelight last week when NASA reported firm evidence of an ocean linked to geysers at its south pole (see diagram below.
Cassini scientist Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome Italy and colleagues have mapped now Enceladus's gravity
The constantly gushing geysers would let us easily sample those seas making Enceladus a prime target for a life-seeking mission says Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco.
and scoop up some of the plume for analysis avoiding a tricky landing on the moon's surface.
The habitable zone of Enceladus remains the most well studied well understood and accessible of all the destinations for finding life
Models suggest that the moon can host geothermal vents which would be hotspots for marine life
Data from NASA's Galileo probe which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 show clay-like minerals on Europa's surface probably debris from meteor impacts
And Jupiter's strong magnetic field means that intense radiation surrounds the moon which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate.
Could Cassini yet yield insights that would swing things in favour of Enceladus? The craft is in its twilight years
But first it will fly by Enceladus one more time and the team will be watching for any molecular hydrogen in the plumes.
Europa is sized a good moon but Enceladus is tiny. That thing should be frozen solid and dead as a doorbell says NASA program scientist Curt Niebur who heads the committee that will evaluate science instruments for a Europa mission.
Instead it's incredibly lively. That's amazing. They're both unbelievably good candidates which is the shocking thing:
that we have not just one but two candidates for seeking life beyond Earth h
#NASA's Russia boycott may revitalise US space leadership So NASA has been dragged into the fallout over Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
#Buried'Lake superior'seen on Saturn's moon Enceladus Saturn's icy moon Enceladus already known for spitting plumes of water into space just got even more interesting.
-and that this liquid water is in direct contact with the moon's core which is rich in nutrients.
The result comes hot on the heels of the discovery late last year that a second icy moon Europa
which orbits Jupiter also spews plumes of water. Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
if only a suitable mission could be arranged NASA's Cassini orbiter first spotted spectacular plumes at Enceladus's south pole in 2005 shortly after arriving at Saturn.
The plumes shoot into space at supersonic speeds feeding one of Saturn's famous rings
and are known to contain both salts and organic compounds. They make an attractive target for exploration as a craft could potentially fly through them to take samples much simpler than landing on a moon.
Most astronomers thought that the plumes force their way out through cracks in an icy crust sitting over a sea of liquid water.
Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and his colleagues used radar On earth to track Cassini on three separate fly-bys of Enceladus
and watched how the spacecraft was accelerated by the moon's gravity. This allowed them to map the distribution of mass in the moon's interior.
They found that Enceladus has a rocky core and an icy crust. Before we knew almost nothing about the core beyond its likely existence.
Now we know roughly how big it is and also that it has a surprisingly low density says team member Francis Nimmo at the University of California Santa cruz. That might be due to open fractures
Hosting an ocean in contact with rocks boosts the chances that Enceladus hosts life because the rocks could leach elements like potassium sulphur and phosphorus vital for life into the water.
because it wouldn't be in contact with the rock says team member Jonathan Lunine at Cornell University in Ithaca New york. This gravity map hinting at a much larger ocean is a more favourable model for having some sort of life in Enceladus's interior.
and there are no firm plans for future craft to return to Saturn. However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.
She says the new results bode well for such an effort. The next mission there can immediately get down to the business of searching for signs of life or its precursor chemistry.
As for the possibility of the sea freezing completely it is true that Enceladus is losing a lot of heat to space
We are looking at Enceladus at a wonderful special time where it's very active
Even if they continue at the current rate the moon would only have lost 30 per cent of its water by mass
when the sun becomes a red giant in 6 billion years. A lot of things can happen in 6 billion years
Some future extraterrestrials visiting our solar system will be able to look at the naked rocky core of
what was once an ice moon. Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science. 125055 5
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
Astronauts are screened carefully for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies,
But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars and getting home quickly won't be an option.
#Earth raises a plasma shield to battle solar storms Earth can raise shields to protect itself against solar storms.
For the first time satellites and ground-based detectors have watched as the planet sends out a tendril of plasma to fight off blasts of charged solar matter.
The discovery confirms a longstanding theory about Earth's magnetic surroundings and offers us a way to keep track of the planet's defences.
It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.
Earth doesn't just sit there and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back.
Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Previous observations of this plasmasphere showed that plumes sometimes emerge from this region. Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
If this plume reaches the boundary between the earthly and solar magnetic fields it would create a buffer zone of dense material.
This would make it harder for magnetic field lines to meet up and spark further reconnection. But while ground-based measurements can see a plume forming their resolution isn't good enough to tell for sure
whether the material reaches the magnetic boundary. Brian Walsh at NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER in Greenbelt Maryland and his colleagues have clinched now it.
and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
and the sun's says Walsh. It gets to that boundary and helps protect us keeps these solar storms from slamming into us.
when does the Earth decide to protect us? By validating this tool we're now able to figure that out t
But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away? Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home.
by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
Laser communication is one of the technologies we are considering says Bas Lansdorp CEO of the Mars One project which aims to place a human colony on Mars by 2025.
#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
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.
which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere. JAXA thinks the net's main advantage is its simplicity#it's lightweight
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.
#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.
This flotilla of 21st-century moon explorers should arrive bristling with technologies that will help them map the moon's uncharted regions
The crew of the final Apollo mission lifted off from the moon's Sea of Serenity on 14 december 1972.
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
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.
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 teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011