planet

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

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The China National Space Administration successfully launched its Shenzhou-10 mission to low Earth orbit at 0938 GMT today.

which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011. The crew will do one automatic and one manual docking test.

When it comes to sending humans beyond Earth orbit China's unwavering goals may see it beat other space powers like the US to the punch says Cheng.

So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns they might well get to some place like Mars

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#Dust devils around stars may help planets grow A dusty tornado around a young star could help solve a lingering conundrum:

how do massive planets grow from tiny grains of debris? Planets abound across the galaxy

and astronomers have seen young stars ringed by dusty discs from which planets are assumed to form.

But the steps in between have been unclear. The standard picture is that inside a dust disc grains smaller than a few micrometres will clump together until they grow into rocky bodies up to 10 times the mass of Earth.

Some of these clumps begin gathering gas from the disc and become the cores of gas giants like Jupiter.

But there is a catch. According to models of this process as the clumps get larger they feel more drag as they move through the gas and dust.

For a star like our sun a dusty clump in the same orbit as Earth can grow to about a metre wide.

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.

Now observations made with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile show that the star Oph IRS 48 probably has just such a vortex in the outer regions of its planet-forming disc.

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.

We really hope that in the next coming years we're going to find similar dust traps around other stars where they are close enough to the star that they can form a planet she says.

In the Oph IRS 48 system the Jupiter-like object is creating the pressure instabilities that would spawn the observed vortex.

If the idea is sound there must be a way to make vortices without first making giant planets perhaps involving the star heating the gas until it creates a region of instability.

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It will fall back to Earth in about two weeks and disintegrate upon reentering the atmosphere. The dummy contains instruments that will collect data about the launch to be transmitted back to mission managers before re-entry.

But while Dragon can return from its missions loaded with cargo no Cygnus craft will ever make it back to Earth.

and will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Orbital's agreement with NASA includes this trial launch and a full demonstration mission in

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#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.

The scoop of grey powder contains definitive evidence that the Red planet was suited once to life.

All the signs are had that Mars plentiful slightly salty water that could have supported primitive microbes. The hope is that Mars can help us understand the origins of life

even if the planet's early transformation into a cold dry hostile world meant life never got started there.

Determining the habitability of Mars was Curiosity's chief goal when it landed in Gale crater in August 2012.

But the rover was expected to hit pay dirt months from now when it reached a 5-kilometre-high mound of layered sediments in the middle of the crater.

and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it says rover project scientist John Grotzinger.

The thinking is that Mars would have had liquid water billions of years ago around the time Earth was playing host to early life.

But at some point Mars dried out and lost much of its atmosphere. The planet also only briefly had a magnetic field to protect its surface from cosmic radiation

which can damage DNA. These changes might have stopped any emergent life in its tracks or even prevented it from starting at all.

Records of the earliest life have been hard to find on warm wet Earth. Paradoxically water which is necessary for life is a mild oxidant

But if microbes did exist on Mars traces of them may still be preserved on the cold dry world.

If we could find evidence primitive life got a start on Mars that could fill in a lot of gaps in our understanding of conditions on early Earth says Jeffrey Bada of the University of California in San diego. What we find on Mars won't be a magic bullet to say'Ah!

And even if no hints of microbes can be found Mars's habitable regions could still serve as snapshots of a prebiotic world frozen in time says Michael Meyer lead scientist for NASA's Mars exploration programme.

Mars may have preserved that history of what was going on what you might call proto-biology before life even got started he says.

Teams are expected to choose the science instruments by early 2014 based on recommendations from Mars researchers.

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#Rover finds first life-friendly environment on Mars Microbes could have lived on Mars . Though we don't know yet

if they actually did NASA's Curiosity rover has found the first definitive evidence that the Red planet was suited once to life

and perhaps the first direct evidence of life-friendly conditions anywhere beyond Earth. This is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we've described

Determining if Mars could have supported ever life was the rover's chief goal when it landed in Gale crater in August 2012.

All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.

and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it. The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM) also found carbon dioxide and hints of other carbon-based molecules in the drilled sample.

Part of Curiosity's mission is to find preserved organics compounds that include both carbon and hydrogen.

That would be a direct sign that something actually lived on the Red planet. These new hints of carbon are tantalising

Mars is going to pass behind the sun from Earth's perspective for the entire month of April blocking communications between the rover and mission control.

The next drill scoop will have to wait until the planet comes back into Range in the meantime the science team has plenty of data to fuel new discoveries and daydreams.

I have an image now of possibly a freshwater lake on a Mars with a thicker atmosphere maybe a snowcapped Mount Sharp said NASA science administrator John Grunsfeld.

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#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

The achievement could lay the groundwork for future Mars explorers to build structures or even to mine the Red planet.

This is the only time anybody's drilled into Mars says Louise Jandura of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena California chief engineer for Curiosity's sampling system.

what Mars was like 3 or 4 billion years ago. However it is not the first space drilling to take place.

Although Curiosity's digging into Mars has been extremely modest its achievement could lay the groundwork for construction and mining on the Red planet.

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#8th-century tree rings hint at close-range space blast A blast of radiation that hit Earth circa AD 770 may have been caused not by a solar flare but by the energetic debris from the collision of two nearby neutron stars.

but Miyake found a 1. 2 per cent leap in those years that could only have been caused by extremely high-energy cosmic rays hitting the Earth.

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with the ultimate goal of ringing the planet with satellites that will allow anyone, anywhere,

at the same speed as Earth rotates. But while this ensures the satellites are always in the same spot above Earth

it means there is a large time lag in the service, as radio waves take a quarter of a second to make the round trip up to a geosynchronous satellite and back.

To speed up the service firms are looking at using satellites closer to Earth. This month, Virgin galactic and chip-maker Qualcomm announced their backing of a venture called Oneweb.

"Will the space around Earth become crowded with all these satellites vying to route our data?"

"Beaming down Radio transmission is the most common way to communicate between satellites and Earth.

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In a recent case study with Mars for example Affectiva found that the client s chocolate ads elicited the highest emotional engagement

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which makes up almost half the sun electromagnetic radiation at the Earth surface. According to their estimates, applying their technology as an inexpensive coating on silicon solar cells could increase efficiency by as much as 25 percent.

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for the agricultural industry. arth as a spaceshipecovolt is valuable today as a solution to Earth water issues.

Surprisingly, shifting from aerospace to Earth applications, and back again, has been an easy transition, Silver says. he challenge of supporting astronauts in space is very similar to sustainability On earth,

If we look at Earth as the spaceship, it the same problem. With Ecovolt, and its other ongoing projects, Cambrian overall aim, Silver says,

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known as are earth upconverting nanocrystals. These crystals are doped with elements such as ytterbium, gadolinium, erbium, and thulium,

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for viewing faint objects that are close to brighter objects for example, a faint planet next to a bright star.

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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

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.

which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets. And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.

and exploration missions to deep space are constrained by the amount of data they can get back to Earth.

Mars landers and orbiters gather much more information in the form of images for example than they can send back over the huge distance Mars is as much as 1000 times farther from Earth than the moon despite the incredible development of NASA s radio-based

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The other four peaks include Sustainable Earth New Media the East-West knowledge hub and Innovation Asia.

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To control their micro-swimmers the researchers integrated tiny rare-earth magnets in the two scallop shells.

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and reduce carbon dioxide emissions on the earth Shimoi said d

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#Physicists set new records for silicon quantum computing Two research teams working in the same laboratories at UNSW Australia have found distinct solutions to a critical challenge that has held back the realisation of super

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Hydrogen is virtually everywhere on the planet, but the element is bonded typically with other elements

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and internal bleeding contains gadolinium a rare-earth metal. Recently biomedical researchers have found ways to increase the effectiveness of certain contrast agents by associating them with nanoparticles.

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He and his printer system are#part of this year's NASA International Space Apps Challenge in Paris proposing to use e waste to make 3-D printers that would print tools to colonize Mars. euronews

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offer reliable affordable and regular round-trip access to low Earth orbit. Bond and the engineers at Reaction engines the aerospace company he founded with two colleagues in 1989 refer to the future craft as the Skylon.

and glide back to Earth just as the shuttle did. Eliminating the expendable rockets needed to boost the shuttle into space could theoretically reduce the cost of launches from $10000 per pound to $1000 per pound.

Expendable rockets make sense for missions beyond low-Earth orbit. They can haul more cargo and more fuel than single-stage craft.

Setting up shop on Phobos and Deimos Mars Titan Europa...Later on sky cities wafting through the Venusian atmosphere (oxygen is a lifting gas on that planet so technically a simple Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere

(which is what we breathe) would be sufficient to provide bouyancy in the atmosphere. An enclosed city will eventually happen.

what does it matter that we have a shiny new toy primarily for the commercial interests who will be building 1 star hotels in near Earth orbit that cost $10000 a day

and vomit at a spectacular view of Earth. We dont need a new suborbital launch system for spy satellites

The Space program should be about exploration beyond Earth. I want craft that can support bases on the Moon flag planting ceremonies on Mars Europa and Titan.

I want to see vehicles that can mine asteroids. Its 2013 and we still havent even dug up that Monolith on the Moon.@

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The Japan aerospace exploration agency sent the first of its new generation of launch vehicles into orbit carrying a telescope that will observe the atmospheres of Venus Mars and Jupiter.

and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope so that it could launch more missions more frequently.

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but it does highlights that we still don't know everything about the surface of our own planet.

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#Planet Without A Star Found â##We have seen never before an object free-floating in space that that looks like this.

It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars but it is drifting out there all aloneâ#stated team leader Michael Liu who is with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. â

and now we know they do. â#The planet is about 80 light-years from Earth

There is a planet in orbit around Beta pictoris itself but PSO J318. 5-22 has a lower mass

Astronomers uncovered the planet which is six times the mass of Jupiter while looking for brown dwarfs

or â##failed stars. â#PSO J318. 5-22â#s ultrared color stood apart from the other objects in the survey astronomers said.

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#One In Five Sun-Like Stars Have Earthlike Planets Back in February a team at Harvard announced they had found a possible Earthlike planet just 13 lightyears away.

The#study detailed the prevalence of these planets orbiting red dwarf stars and found#that about 15 percent have Earth-size planets within habitable zones.

However if you're stargazing from your backyard with only your eyes to guide you you wouldn't be able to see these cooler smaller stars.#

and one-thousandth as bright as the sun. But in this week's PNAS Online Early Edition a team of researchers from#University of California at#Berkeley released a study that looks at how common Earth-size planets

or about one in five stars have these Earth-size planets within the habitable zone. The habitable zone includes orbits where planets receive the same amount of stellar energy from a star as the Earth receives from the sun. Earth-size planets include those that are between one and two times the size of Earth.

Perhaps the most exciting prospect of the study is the finding that#the closest potential Earthlike planet is only 12 lightyears away.

Using data from Kepler lead author Erik Petigura and his team analyzed 42000 G -and K-type stars visible to the naked eye from Earth.

These stars'surface temperatures range from just a bit hotter than the sun's 5778 Kelvin to as cool as 4100 Kelvin all of which are hotter than the M-class red dwarfs studied previously.

Indeed earlier this year Petigura published another paper that investigated the prevalence of planets as small as Earth but only those within the orbit of Mercury much closer to the star than Earth's orbit.

which house planets that have lukewarm temperatures similar to Earth. Out of those 42000 stars the team found 603 planets 10 of which fit the bill for orbit

and size#similar to Earth's. But if left it at that there would be a significant number#of planets unaccounted for.

So using custom-built software called TERRA Petigura corrected for the challenges associated with finding all of the planets orbiting stars in the Kepler field

and reached a total of 8000 Earthlike planets. I have been working a lot of late nights coming home after dark.

And around this of year the constellation Cygnus is high overhead and I've been looking up at these stars quite a bit Petigura says.

and wondering how many of those stars have planets that are in some way like the Earth. And learning more about planets with similar positioning

and properties to Earth could of course aid in scientists'search for life and even future habitable sites.

I'm not saying we found Earth 2. 0 Petigura says. But it's an important stepping stone to answering that question.

I feel so fortunate to be alive in a time when we're even able to start answering this question e

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