| Asteroid (42) |  |
| Black hole (105) | |
| Comet (53) | |
| Constellation (32) | |
| Crater (6) | |
| Meteoroid (96) | |
| Moon (220) | |
| Planet (1557) | |
| Star (1318) | |
| Asteroid (42) | |
| Black hole (105) | |
| Comet (53) | |
| Constellation (32) | |
| Crater (6) | |
| Meteoroid (96) | |
| Moon (220) | |
| Planet (1557) | |
| Star (1318) | |
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.
A few moments later a flag is waved, red with gold stars on it. This is China's first spacewalk#on 27 september 2008,
a lunar mission named after a Moon goddess with a six-wheeled rover named Yutu,
China has made no secret of its designs on the Moon, with speculation that one of its citizens will walk on the surface within the next ten years.
since the US and Soviet union to put exploratory spacecraft on the Moon#the last time being the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976.
Senior Curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum,"help to answer some important questions about the origins of the Moon and geologic processes there.#
but of course, Moon missions have never solely been about science. In September 1961, President John F Kennedy set the US the challenge of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade.
Fuelled by Cold war fears and supposedly by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wanted to take on
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.
As with Apollo, China's missions to the Moon could also reap huge technological benefits.
#Earlier this year, for example, China's space agency said it launched three satellites to clean up space debris orbiting the Earth:
"When the Chinese are standing on the Moon, there will be many members of the US Congress that will proclaim their"shock#at that happening,
Regardless of when or how China chooses to send a manned mission to the Moon,
and bounced on the Moon, before placing a flag on its surface. But the flag didn't have the familiar stars-and-stripes pattern.
It was red with gold stars on it. If you would like to comment on this article
His rather lofty goal was to put a Zambian on the moon before anybody else.
which supported several early robotic missions to the moon during the Apollo programme. In the following decades, South africa developed its own space research projects, mostly for military purposes.
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.
A team at the University of Groningen has demonstrated a way to switch off antibiotic agents after just a few hours using warmth or sunlight.
or exposed to sunlight, they reverted to the Z-form, which is all but useless as an antibiotic.
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,
when powered only by the Sun . If you would like to comment on this slideshow or anything else you have seen on Future,
just another in the existing KH-11 satellite constellation, which uses electro-optical imaging. But officials have hinted also at new surveillance capabilities,
Flower power, a device due to be launched towards the end of this year by Paris-based wireless tech company Parrot, measures sunlight, soil moisture, temperature and nutrient levels in plants,
and whether they should be moved to change sunlight levels. Flower power and related technologies could be vital in developing countries with dry climates.
#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,
but just right to support liquid water. Since these planets are expected to be small and faint compared to their sun,
spotting them is tricky with existing ground-based optical telescopes.""It's like trying to see the light from a feeble little LED 10cm away from a stadium floodlight,
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 VLT has discovered several worlds outside the Solar system, with the help of an instrument called NACO.
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.
Transiting was used to great success by Kepler, but the method doesn't allow us to calculate a planet's mass#a critical factor in determining its density and hence its rockiness.
To determine the mass another instrument enters the stage#a spectrograph. One such device, the High accuracy radial velocity planet searcher (Harps), is mounted on a 3. 6m-(11. 8ft-)mirror telescope at La Silla, another one of ESO's observatories in the Atacama.
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,
#says Macintosh.""Unfortunately, this combination has been hard to do for many of the most interesting cases,
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
#because Kepler was designed to look at faint stars.##The worlds discovered by Kepler are also thousands of light-years away#totally inaccessible to direct imaging,
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.
That's one possibility if Harvard professor Daniel Nocera's idea for a device that can harness and store energy from the Sun comes to fruition.
The catalysts are cheap, earth-abundant materials and form by self-assembly, which should make manufacture cheaper.
which focuses the sun rays to create obsidian. Other transformative processes include Ginger Krieg Dosier printed sandstone bricks of bio-manufactured masonry grown using bacteria.
"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 until the sun comes up really that you know authorities can't get in and really begin to assess
Are we to believe that a country which sent a man to the moon and created the internet can figure out how to integrate alternative power sources into the power grid?
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.
the Solartab lets its users charge any mobile device using green, sun-fueled energy. And even more impressively, ipad enthusiasts can charge their beloved touch-screen gadget even
as long as the sun is out, the Solartab will always charge at maximum efficiency. To keep this promise,
After adjusting the angle to the sun current position, all that left to do is plug in any smartphone
and shaded sunlight conditions; conventional systems suffer large efficiency losses, if able to work at all, under such conditions.
Unlike traditional building-applied photovoltaic (PV) systems, restricted to use in direct sunlight on very limited skyscraper rooftop space,
Solarwindow#is designed to operate in sunlight and shaded conditions on the many thousands of square feet of glass surfaces common to today#s high-rise towers#a game-changing advantage.
*Capable of producing power in direct sunlight and shaded or low natural light conditions;**Able to generate significant electricity from both natural and artificial light;*
#MIT Turns Up The Heat On Solar PV You might think that fewer steps in the process of turning sunlight into electricity would be the most efficient way to go.
in order to make use of a wider range of the sun energy. The work here is in the solar realm known as thermophotovoltaics,
T) he team inserted a two-layer absorber-emitter device made of novel materials including carbon nanotubes and photonic crystals between the sunlight and the PV cell.
This intermediate material collects energy from a broad spectrum of sunlight, heating up in the process.
facing the sunlight, is an array of multiwalled carbon nanotubes, which very efficiently absorbs the light energy and turns it to heat.
could provide efficiency because of their broadband absorption of sunlight; scalability and compactness, because they are based on existing chip-manufacturing technology;
CLIM-RUN designed its method to support a future World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climate services network designed for the entire planet.
#Smart sensors that harvest power from sun heat or vibrations European researchers have developed advanced energy harvesting technology that allows wireless sensor networks to power themselves from the sun, heat or vibrations.
But what if sensors could harness energy directly from their environment from the sun, from ambient heat, from radio waves or vibrations?
"Harvesting the sun, vibrations and radio waves The SWAP team are studying, testing and deploying novel technologies that enable sensors to use solar
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
where the sun emits more than 40%of its radiation. By improving the reflectance of the materials,
as darker shades take in far more solar radiation. How not to soak up the rays With COOL-Coverings
adds to the difficulty of cooling down sun-kissed cities. To meet their objectives, the partners incorporated nanoparticles and micro-or nano-sized pigments into coatings and surface layers. e implemented this technology for three types of material:
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,
It demands a lot of sun, good soil, water and cold temperatures. But how do you install an environmentally friendly and sustainable cooling system in a country so warm?
"We all get heat from sun. We feel it on our bodies when it's warm,
but who ever heard of getting cold from sun? That's what MEDISCO is about.
The process involves single axis tracking concentrating collectors that essentially orient panels towards the sunlight.
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,
That alone made innovative solutions developed by the EU-funded project COMET very attractive to industry in Europe. illing machines are fantastic
COMET has managed to get robot accuracy down to 0. 05 mm, which is a significant improvement on today machines. e proved with our seven tech demos that,
COMET improved the absolute positioning accuracy of industrial robots so they could quickly react to changing conditions during production.
COMET has come up with an integrated programming and simulation environment (PSIR), as developed by partner Delcam,
and national project partners to explore new applications for COMET robotics solutions in fields such as grinding, abrasive finishing,
and laser and fluid polishing. he software Delcam developed under COMET is already generating up to a million euros in additional sales,
each requiring tool monitoring systems like those developed in COMET. Fraunhofer IPA, another partner from Germany, carried out advanced R&d on a compensation mechanism (HDCM)
One of the keys to COMET success says Gunnink, has been to include robot integrators, like SIR and Gizelis from the start:
so wee prepared to fly our results to the moon and back to give taxpayers a return on investment.
As it user friendly and doesn cost the earth, this could really change the way we farm
#From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first'solar'kerosene An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first'solar'jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2), a promising technology for a better
using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight
CO2 and water. The process In a first step concentrated light-simulating sunlight-was used to convert carbon dioxide
and water to synthesis gas (syngas) in a high-temperature solar reactor containing metal-oxide based materials developed at ETH Zürich.
Although producing syngas through concentrated solar radiation is still at an early stage of development, the processing of syngas to kerosene is already being deployed by companies,
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:
Called supporting cells they form a physical base for the hearing system s##stars##the hair cells in the ear that interact directly with the nerves that carry sound signals to the brain.
when the star has been injured. After some searching the team found that an amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has the gene ptena
The researchers hypothesized that ramping up the presence of lpten making it the star on the court could overcompensate for the mutated ptena.
not only but also that real skin regeneration is occurring##says Zhaoli Sun director of transplant biology research at Johns Hopkins School of medicine.##
Alexander Star, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, says the new chip,
Star says, nd bacterial infections are a common complication of the implant. Infection can damage the body surrounding the implant,
Star and his team have developed similar chip/nanotube sensors that can be affixed to a toothbrush to detect bad breath (the presence of hydrogen sulfide)
Another Star-developed chip measures acetone in breath, an indicator of diabetes. A National Energy technology Laboratory grant supported the research
Organic molecules usually found in these star-forming regions consist of a single ackboneof carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain.
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 two molecules isopropyl cyanide and normal-propyl cyanide are also the largest molecules yet detected in any star-forming region
#Computer recreates powerful solar flares ETH Zurich rightoriginal Studyposted by Barbara Vonarburg-ETH Zurich on September 26 2014physicists have used computers to model solar explosions
Hans Jurgen Herrmann a professor at the Institute for Building materials says solar flares were not the original focus of the work.
Similar patterns to those in solar flares can also be found in earthquakes avalanches or the stock market. olar explosions do not of course have any connection with stock exchange ratessays Hermann
In the case of solar flares the build up of magnetic energy is emitted in sudden bursts. The sun consists of hot plasma made of electrons and ions.
Magnetic field lines extend from the solar surface all the way into the corona. Moving and twisting bundles of field lines form magnetic flux tubes.
The affected solar area lights up as a solar flare. The radiation extends across the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves and visible light to X-rays and gamma rays.
Observations suggest that the solar flares size distributions show a certain degree of regularity statistically speaking. vents can be arbitrarily large
However calculations based solely on plasma turbulence were also unable to reproduce the occurrence of solar flares in full.
and reached a breakthrough. e have been able to reproduce the overall picture of how solar flares occurthe researcher says.
which control the occurrence of solar flares. Demonstrating such temporal-energetic correspondences is the first step towards a prediction model.
The researchers say this technology would be useful in places where sun and radio waves can t always penetrate such as inside walls
which degrade under exposure to sunlight and can also be difficult to align with imaging sensors. oday s color filtering mechanisms often involve materials that are not CMOS-compatible
and his team to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight. e can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet
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
#Star collision may explain the lonely supernova University of Warwick rightoriginal Studyposted by Tom Frew-Warwick on August 11 2014 A massive collision between white dwarf
since that is where the stars arelyman says. owever a large fraction of these are exploding at huge distances from their galaxies where the number of stellar systems is miniscule. hat we address in the paper is
The deep observation allowed them to rule out the presence of faint dwarf galaxies or globular star clusters at the locations of these nearest examples.
although fainter is the collapse of a massive star in a binary system where material is stripped from the massive star undergoing collapse.
or other massive stars in the vicinity allowing them to reject massive stars as the progenitors of calcium rich transients. t was increasingly looking like hypervelocity massive stars could not explain the locations of these supernovaesays Andrew Levan of the physics department. hey must be lower-mass
longer-lived stars but still in some sort of binary systems as there is no known way that a single low-mass star can go supernova by itself
or create an event that would look like a supernova. he researchers then compared their data to
what is known about short-duration gamma ray bursts (SGRBS). These are seen also often to explode in remote locations with no coincident galaxy detected.
or when a neutron star merges with a black hole. Although mergers between neutron stars and black holes would not explain these brighter calcium-rich transients the researchers considered that
if the collision was instead between a white dwarf star and neutron star it would fit their observations because:
hat we therefore propose is these are systems that have been ejected from their galaxy. A good candidate in this scenario is a white dwarf and a neutron star in a binary system.
The neutron star is formed when a massive star goes supernova. The mechanism of the supernova explosion causes the neutron star to be kicked to very high velocities (100s of km/s). This high velocity system can then escape its galaxy
and if the binary system survives the kick the white dwarf and neutron star will merge causing the explosive transient. he researchers who say such merging systems of white dwarfs
and neutron stars may produce high energy gamma-ray bursts will next look for any new examples of calcium-rich transients to confirm this.
Such merging systems will contribute significant sources of gravitational waves potentially detectable by upcoming experiments that will shed further light on the nature of these exotic systems.
Researchers from University of Leicester and the Lund University Observatory contributed to the work. Source:
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