#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.
New gravity readings suggest it hosts a subsurface sea the size of Lake superior at its south pole
The plumes shoot into space at supersonic speeds feeding one of Saturn's famous rings
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.
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.
As for the possibility of the sea freezing completely it is true that Enceladus is losing a lot of heat to space
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Many worrisome health issues that can occur in space return to normal back On earth. But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars
Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
And space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
is difficult in space, "says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals.
Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.
and performed in space, "says Burgess. This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
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.
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
To measure things with spacecraft we have to have them in just the right place
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.
Laser signals carry more data but the light is almost undetectable by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
#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
and George Clooney are left scrambling to dodge the deadly space junk. This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity#scientists are struggling with it in real life.
Now a rather unusual solution is being tested: a really big net. Next month the Japanese space agency JAXA will pilot its electrodynamic tether for the first time.
It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris (see Catch'em drag'em blast'em.
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.
One just 1 centimetre across could disable a spacecraft. The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.
and steel wires that hangs from an uncrewed spacecraft. The net is fitted with sensors that look for light reflecting from small pieces of debris
and deorbit allowing the debris spacecraft and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere.
He has reservations about the net's ability to deal with space junk. In particular he believes it could actually generate debris
#China lands on moon kicks off next lunar space race Let the modern moon rush begin.
and 2020 many from burgeoning space powers or private ventures that would also be making their first attempts.
After that three robotic Soviet spacecraft made it to the surface the final one in 1976.
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
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
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.
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
#Boxy Cubesats get a propulsion boost in new space race Tiny liquid volcanoes that spray beams of charged particles could make space history next year.
Although they have made space accessible to groups who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it most recently a team of high-school students Cubesats haven't done much cutting-edge science."
"We might have a little space race on our hands, "says Longmier s
#India blasts off for Mars: here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
Established in the 1960s India's space programme has focused so far on aiding the country's development building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and monitor deforestation.
and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and space weather. These projects may seem divorced from India's development goals
and shape a new generation of scientists and engineers says K. R. Sridhara Murthi who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation for nearly 40 years.
That is no small feat more than half of all Mars missions so far have failed. It's a stretch goal says Scott Pace director of the Space Policy Institute at George washington University in WASHINGTON DC.
One big challenge will be making sure the spacecraft's electronics function reliably in the harsh temperature
and radiation conditions at Mars he says. This was a problem for Chandrayaan-1 which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
To have India executing a successful orbiter mission would be great for space science says Mustard d
This morning Virgin galactic and NBC announced plans for a Survivor-like series that will send the winner to space.
Dubbed Space Race it is one of three space-based reality TV SHOWS that could be gracing our screens in the coming years assuming producers can get their hands on a working spacecraft.
Virgin galactic's Spaceshiptwo is a six passenger two pilot suborbital craft designed to give wannabe astronauts a few minutes in space.
All we know is that participants will gradually be eliminated as they compete for the winning ticket to space
and viewers will get a behind-the-scenes look at Spaceport America in New mexico. Space Race is not Burnett's first attempt to televise space flight.
In 2000 he announced Destination Mir a programme that would have seen contestants train for a mission to the Russian space station Mir
but the plans were scrapped after the station was orbited de in 2001. It is also not the only space-related show currently attempting to get off the ground.
Last month Sony Pictures Television announced a partnership with Dutch firm Space Expedition Corporation (SXC) for a show called Milky way Mission
which will see celebrities compete for a flight to space aboard an XCOR AEROSPACE Lynx craft.
SXC previously announced a non-televised competition to send 22 people to space and plans to film a sci-fi movie aboard a Lynx
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.
Future systems could stream high-definition video from space probes or from human missions to Mars suggests LLCD manager Donald 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.
To stabilise its pointing LLCD sits on devices that cancel out any vibrations on the LADEE spacecraft.
China's upcoming spacecraft Chang'e-3 will be the first the country has landed on a celestial body.
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.
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.
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 from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
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.
and Space Physics in Boulder Colorado who has worked on Sprint-A. Still the solar wind would have been much stronger
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.
#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.
Ardusat-1 and Ardusat-X were launched to the International space station (ISS) on 3 august aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 interact with gases in the interstellar medium creating mini versions of these enigmatic astrophysical phenomena in the lab for the first time.
#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
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
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 astronauts will rendezvous with the Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace 1) space module which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011.
China started with the uncrewed launch of the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999 and continued with its first crewed launch in 2003.
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.
because China's approach has been markedly different from the frenetic space race between the US
There was a space race between the US and Russia because we each started at the same place.
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.
At about the distance of the Kuiper belt the region past Neptune where comets are born the would-be planet cores can't get much bigger than a millimetre.
Older observations had spotted a gap in the disc suggesting that the star has an orbiting body about 10 times the mass of Jupiter that is clearing a space.
#Antares rocket launch heats up private space race Watch out Spacex there's a new commercial rocket in town.
The launch sets the stage for a second company to begin resupply missions to the International space station.
Since the space shuttles retired in 2011 NASA has been contracting with private firms to deliver cargo and soon hopefully astronauts to the space station.
Antares built by spaceflight company Orbital Sciences of Dulles Virginia lifted off from the Mid-atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island Virginia at 22.00 GMT.
#Curiosity's discoveries hint at life's cradle on Mars NASA's Curiosity rover has found what it was looking for in its very first taste of Martian rock much to everyone's surprise.
if they actually did NASA's Curiosity rover has found the first definitive evidence that the Red planet was suited once to life
#Curiosity's first drilling hints at Martian mining NASA's Curiosity rover bored into a Martian rock on 9 february and pulled out its first sample of the planet's insides to ingest
However it is not the first space drilling to take place. Astronauts drilled into rocks on the moon
but they were equipped not to extract anything for analysis. That means Curiosity is the first Mars rover to make a deep hole and collect
Presently, satellite internet relies on spacecraft that are travelling in geosynchronous orbit at the same speed as Earth rotates.
Even internet giant Google has got in on the rush to space investing $1 billion in Spacex's venture.
"Will the space around Earth become crowded with all these satellites vying to route our data?"
"Miniaturisation and large drops in the cost of satellite components are boosting the push to space,
or six spacecraft,"says Cutler.""That's never happened before.""Companies like O3b and Spacex are planning to launch internet satellites with masses of hundreds of kilograms,
Antenna weight can be brought down by using antennas that unfurl themselves in space, like those being developed by Sergio Pellegrino at the California Institute of technology.
then come together in space to form a light, powerful satellite. A network of such orbiters should be able to provide coverage that is similar to the signals terrestrial cellular towers already pump out."
"It's a brand new space race in many ways, "says Cutler.""But instead of being fuelled from a defence perspective,
It s crazy that something as trivial as physical space as the size of the lunch table could affect productivity Waber says.
A large pink dot appears to follow the pedestrian a symbol of the robot perception of the pedestrian position in space.
and not a beam of droplets says Herbert Shea an associate professor in the Microsystems for Space technologies Laboratory at the cole Polytechnique F d rale de Lausanne.
Shea believes that at least in the near term the technology s most promising application is in spacecraft propulsion.
whereas it would take very little effort to use it as propulsion for small spacecraft he says.
The reason you d like to be in ion mode is to have the most efficient conversion of the mass of the propellant into the momentum of the spacecraft t
#Shrink-wrapping spacesuits For future astronauts the process of suiting up may go something like this:
She would then plug in to a spacecraft s power supply triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrinkwrap the garment around her body.
Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active second-skin spacesuit: Dava Newman a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small springlike coils that contract in response to heat.
In subsequent tests the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.
With conventional spacesuits you re essentially in a balloon of gas that s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere of pressure to keep you alive in the vacuum of space says Newman who has worked for the past decade to design a formfitting flexible spacesuit of the future.
While skintight spacesuits have been proposed in the past there s been one persistent design hurdle: how to squeeze in and out of a pressurized suit that s engineered to be extremely tight.
To find an active material that would be most suitable for use in space Holschuh considered 14 types of shape-changing materials ranging from dielectric elastomers to shape-memory polymers before settling on nickel-titanium shape
and is given likely infeasible the limited power resources available to astronauts in space. Holschuh and Newman are currently exploring the second option looking into potential mechanisms to lock
As for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit Holschuh is contemplating several designs. For instance an array of coils may be incorporated into the center of a suit with each coil attached to a thread that radiates to the suit s extremities.
Or smaller arrays of coils could be placed in strategic locations within a spacesuit to produce localized tension
While the researchers are concentrating mostly on applications in space Holschuh says the group s designs
and mobile but these designs are not just for use in space. This research was funded by NASA and the MIT Portugal Program m
without needing to know details of the underlying hardware. ee doing the same thing for the drone space,
left corner of that table was located in physical space. ou say that corner is this far off the floor, this far to the right of my chair,
Something that doesn t get mentioned a lot in this space is the amount of time that gets saved through ride consolidation he says.
GS could adapt over time into that space, as well. o
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
and to convert carbon dioxide to fuels for applications On earth and in space. Today industrial infrastructure manages basic resources linearly
and has since found its way back to space. Meeting at MIT in 2006 over a shared fondness for biotech, Silver, then a research scientist in MIT Space Systems Lab,
and Buck, a biological engineering graduate student, won a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts program to create a life-support system that could treat waste
In 2012, NASA began funding a Cambrian project, called Exogen, that uses electromethanogenesis to more efficiently extract oxygen or fuel from CO2 for long-duration space flights.
Silver says. he challenge of supporting astronauts in space is very similar to sustainability On earth,
he says. hat youe looking to do in space is maximize reuse, while minimizing energetics. If we look at Earth as the spaceship, it the same problem.
With Ecovolt, and its other ongoing projects, Cambrian overall aim, Silver says, is to leverage biotechnology to advance a sustainable ndustrial ecology,
but the company is also planning to launch additional bionic products into the space to provide assistance to a larger number of people Herr says.
Pantazis says. e now have the tools to precisely map brain function both in space and time,
It might be a job for efficient spray cooling f we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.
and Dust environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft had made history by using a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 239000 miles from the moon to Earth at a record-breaking data-download speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps). This download speed is more than six times faster than the speed achieved by the best
LLCD also demonstrated a data-upload speed of 20 Mbps on a laser beam transmitted from a ground station in New mexico to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit;
Finally LLCD provided continuous measurements of the distance from Earth to the fast-moving LADEE spacecraft with an unprecedented accuracy of less than half an inch.
He describes below the highly improved communications capabilities that will enable NASA to significantly change the scope and design of future scientific space missions.
It is NASA s first space-based laser communications system. And it is by far the longest two-way laser communications link ever accomplished.
The beam-stabilization system on the space terminal is based on inertial sensors which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets.
It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
With the success of LLCD next-generation space mission designers can now feel more comfortable in including a laser communication system as part of their design.
and power on their spacecraft for the much higher data return they can get. Q:
Then the Laboratory did the more detailed full-system design the detailed design of the three modules that make up the space terminal and the detailed design of the primary ground terminal.
and delivered these various parts to the spacecraft and to the ground site. Finally we designed
and configuring the space and ground segments in a coordinated fashion h
#Persuading light to mix it up with matter Researchers at MIT have succeeded in producing and measuring a coupling of photons
which is periodic both in time and space. Victor Galitski, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who was involved not in this research,
when in audio recordings represents every second of speech as a point in a three-dimensional space.
Video courtesy of Stephen Shum E pluribus tresthe result is that for every second of a recording a diarization system would have to search a space with 120000 dimensions which would be prohibitively time-consuming.
The graph would be a diagonal line in a two-dimensional space. Now imagine rotating the axes of the graph
Similarly i-vectors find new axes for describing the information that characterizes speech sounds in the 120000-dimension space.
Birds of a featherfor every second of sound in a recording Shum thus ends up with a single point in a three-dimensional space.
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