switch orbits or voyage to other planets feats usually reserved for large, expensive craft. They could even provide us with a global Wi-fi system On earth.
They are typically put into low Earth orbit by a rocket where they remain for around 6 months,
before spiralling in and burning up in Earth's atmosphere. 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."
the aim is to send such a satellite to an asteroid to collect a scoop of dust.
They hope their propelled Cubesats will one day fly to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, both
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
#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.
Now India is set to join the US Russia and Europe in the exclusive club by sending a probe to Mars. The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast of India on 5 november.
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
The main goal of the $73 million Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is to prove that India can put a working probe into Mars orbit.
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
because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon. MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries.
It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
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.
I'd say the data are equivocal at the moment says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence Rhode island.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
and look down upon mother Earth says executive producer Mark Burnett who has created previously other reality shows like Survivor and The Voice.
For those looking beyond low Earth orbit Mars One is also continuing with its plans to send humans on a televised one-way mission to the Red planet by 2023.
Mars One does not yet have a craft capable of leaving Earth but CEO Bas Lansdorp says it plans to launch its first show in 2014 detailing the crew selection process.
but says Mars One will be different. This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
It's a very serious job position that we're selecting the best people for r
#Crack a comet to spawn the ingredients of life Some of the key ingredients for life may have been shocked into existence.
A physical simulation of a comet's impact with a planet shows that the conditions are extreme enough to create amino acids within the comet's ice.
whether life or its ingredients could have travelled to Earth on the back of a comet or asteroid.
Comets are known to contain the organic precursors of amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
What's more one comet Wild 2 was shown recently to contain the simplest amino acid glycine.
We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
The idea is that a comet would contain the raw materials for life-building compounds says Nir Goldman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who made the theoretical calculations.
When a comet impacts a planetary surface it creates very high pressures and temperatures. Those will then drive the raw materials that already exist in the comet to form more complex things that could be life-building.
To find out if this works in practice Price and colleagues made model comet ice in the lab containing various amounts of ammonia carbon dioxide and methanol.
Then they shot the ice with a steel pellet travelling at about 7 kilometres a second to simulate the comet smacking into a planet
or another body colliding with the comet. The goop that remained after the ice was evaporated away was analysed by Price's colleague Zita Martins at Imperial College London who found it contained the amino acids alanine and norvaline.
This is significant as we now have a simple realistic mechanism to generate amino acids Price says.
As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system then complex organic molecules are also very probably widespread.
This is a neat way of suggesting prebiotic material could be produced regardless of the external conditions of the planet says Goldman.
You could have a planet that isn't really conducive to forming amino acids like early Earth supposedly wasn't he says.
But then you can have a comet come in and that impact will drive prebiotic processes within the comet itself regardless of
what the planet looks like. Journal reference: Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1930correction: When this article was published first on 15 september it did not give details of the researcher who detected amino acids in the ice.
These have now been included d
#NASA orbiter will use laser to bring broadband to moon The man in the moon is about to get his own version of a broadband connection as well as a visit from China.
NASA's LADEE moon orbiter due to launch on 7 september will use laser pulses to exchange high-capacity signals with Earth.
China meanwhile recently announced plans to launch a robotic moon lander by the end of the year.
LLCD will beam signals to Earth at 622 megabits per second six times as fast as is currently possible from the moon.
or from human missions to Mars suggests LLCD manager Donald Cornwell. If you have an ill astronaut it would be nice to have a 3d image of them he says
considering sending robots to nearby asteroids. In some cases robot geologists could take HD video that would allow their human puppeteers to best plan their next moves suggests Cornwell.
Earth's atmosphere including clouds can also thwart laser signals. To maximise the chance of cloudless skies LLCD will be able to beam its light to any of three detectors in New mexico California or Spain.
or so of LADEE's planned four months in lunar orbit but a follow-on mission called LCRD will test laser links from Earth orbit for two years beginning in 2017.
LADEE is not the only visitor the moon will receive in the coming months. China's upcoming spacecraft Chang'e-3 will be the first the country has landed on a celestial body.
Future Chinese missions could bring lunar samples back to Earth perhaps around 2017 and possibly land people on the moon in the 2020s says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a think tank in WASHINGTON DC.
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.
About an hour later the Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere (SPRINT-A) separated from the launch rocket.
Update 27 august 2013: JAXA today cancelled the planned launch of Epsilon due to an abnormality detected 19 seconds before the planned lift off at 1. 45 pm local time.
Original article published 26 august 2013bigger isn't always better: 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.
the world's first space telescope designed to study the planets from afar. The Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere or Sprint-A will look at Venus
and Mars to find out why some worlds lose their atmospheres while others manage to keep a grip on their gases.
This will in turn help exoplanet hunters figure out which distant worlds are capable of hosting atmospheres that might support life.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
If all goes to plan the Epsilon rocket will launch from Japan's Uchinoura Space center on 27 august at 0445 UTC.
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.
So far our best clues to the original atmospheres of Mars and Venus come from the composition
and structure of ancient rocks either meteorites that made it to Earth from those planets
Based on the evidence it seems that Mars Earth and Venus probably had similar atmospheres long ago.
But we also know that the sun pumps out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind
which can ionise gases in a planet's upper atmosphere and pick up the newly charged particles effectively sweeping them away.
Earth is protected from the solar wind by a relatively strong global magnetic field which repels charged particles from the sun explains Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric
and Space Physics in Boulder Colorado who has worked on Sprint-A. Still the solar wind would have been much stronger
when the sun was young and more active. Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
And while Mars is farther away it has no global magnetic field. It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
What drives the escaping is a big question says Schneider. Solar stripping is a leading hypothesis
but it is not the only runner. For instance others have suggested that Mars lost its atmosphere all of a sudden during a powerful collision with an asteroid or comet.
A NASA probe called Maven due to launch in November will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere up close to try to solve the puzzle.
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
and Venus says Sawai. 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.
The results may add a new twist to the search for exoplanets that can support life says Schneider.
Until recently a planet's habitability was defined largely by its distance from its star which hints at
whether its surface would be warm enough to support liquid water. But it is clear from our solar system that a lot of other factors come into play says Schneider d
#Star twinkles could help pin down planet sizes Twinkle twinkle little star and show us just how little you are.
Starlight captured by the Kepler space telescope has revealed that the amount a star flickers is tied to its size offering a better way to measure a wide variety of stars and their associated planets.
Unfortunately that may be mixed news for seekers of Earth-sized worlds. Kepler was designed to spot transits the periodic dips in a star's brightness indicating that a planet has passed in front of it.
The telescope's vigil required exquisite targeting precision and key parts of its steering system are broken now ending the telescope's main mission as an exoplanet hunter.
But you haven't heard the last of Kepler. Two years'worth of data still need inspecting including information about the thousands of stars in its field of view.
Figuring out the properties of stars is vital to planet surveys. When a planet transits a star the amount of light it blocks is used to calculate its size.
That can help to pinpoint whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter as long as the star's size is known.
Simply looking at a star's colour can reveal whether it is small and compact like our sun
or big and bloated like a red giant the type of star the sun will swell into in about 5 billion years.
But such estimates are crude with uncertainties of more than 90 per cent. Much more accurate size and mass measurements boasting uncertainties of just 2 per cent come from studying vibrations within the star called starquakes.
However this technique known as asteroseismology can be used only on bright stars because it requires teasing out subtle periodic variations in a star's light.
Fabienne Bastien of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and colleagues used Kepler data to watch instead for flickers in starlight due to short-lived convection cells or granules on the star's surface.
These are bright regions where hot plasma wells up surrounded by darker boundaries where it cools
and falls back down. They began with a sample of about 500 stars whose size and mass were known already thanks to asteroseismology measurements made by Kepler.
They found a clear pattern: bigger more bloated stars flicker more. That's probably because each granule spans some two dozen times the width of the Earth in a giant star compared to just a fraction of the Earth's diameter in a compact star.
What we see over time is combined the effect of this network of bright granules flickering on and off says team member Keivan Stassun also of Vanderbilt.
The method provides stellar size and mass estimates with uncertainties of about 25 per cent a vast improvement over colour-based estimates says Stassun.
So far the flicker technique has been used to find the size and mass of about 1000 stars that do not have asteroseismology measurements
and it could be used to gauge the sizes of 50000 more stars already studied by Kepler Stassun says.
How will that affect the count of Earth-sized worlds? Kepler's principal investigator William Borucki expects the current pool of candidates to shrink.
He suspects we may have been underestimating the size of stars and therefore the planets that they host so many worlds currently deemed Earthlike may turn out to be too big.
Based on previous experience there is a significant chance that star sizes will increase when we have a more accurate method he says.
Unfortunately Kepler's pointing is probably no longer precise enough to measure the subtle flicker or asteroseismology signals from sun-like stars says Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark who leads a consortium of researchers who analyse Kepler's starquake data.
Still the flicker method could be put to use on NASA's next planet hunter the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) due to launch in 2017.
Our hope is that TESS will be able to do what Kepler has done but over the entire sky says Stassun.
Journal reference: Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature1241 t
#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.
And it won't break the bank. Ardusat-1 and Ardusat-X were launched to the International space station (ISS) on 3 august aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle
(which is also carrying fresh food supplies and a talking humanoid robot). Known as Cubesats each mini satellite packs an array of devices including cameras spectrometers and a Geiger counter into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.
The cargo ship carrying the Cubesats should arrive at the ISS on 9 august and the satellites will then be deployed using a robotic-arm technique tested last year.
The method can put several small satellites into orbit around Earth eliminating the need for dedicated launch vehicles and making citizen-science missions like Ardusat more affordable.
but a list of ideas from the developers includes tracking meteorites and making a 3d model of Earth's magnetosphere.
The first two satellites will orbit for three to seven months before burning up as they fall to Earth.
#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.
The sun is currently zipping through one of the Milky way's spiral arms at a relative speed of about 23 kilometres per second ploughing through thin clouds of interstellar dust and gas.
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).
We have seen similar tails in pictures of speeding stars elsewhere in the galaxy. But until now it has been hard to see for sure what our own sun's tail might look like.
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.
IBEX creates images of the solar system's borders by observing neutral atoms produced 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.
They are deflected not by magnetic fields as they travel so neutral atoms faithfully record the point of collision.
and paint a picture of the solar system using atoms instead of light Christian says. One surprise is that
The four lobes might be a reflection of solar activity at the time the particles left the sun says IBEX principal investigator David Mccomas. The particles took a few years to reach the tail
when the sun was minimally active. Around solar minimum you get slow solar wind around low to mid-latitudes from the sun
and high speed around high latitudes says Mccomas . But he expected this would create more of a solid horizontal band of slow particles across the tail not the odd lobes.
At solar maximum the bands of slow and fast particles streaming away from the sun break down so the tail may change its shape
when the sun's activity reaches its peak says Mccomas. Ultimately a better understanding of the tail
and where material from our solar system affects the rest of the galaxy and how the galaxy influences us.
Our own sun and the Earth and all of us are made up of atoms that came out of other stars'stellar winds long ago says Mccomas. There's a big recycling process that occurs
and the astrotails or heliotails are where the material coming out of stars or our sun leaves the region of the sun and gets mixed in with the rest of the stuff.
The heliotail could also be letting cosmic rays in says Brenda Dingus of Los alamos National Laboratory in New mexico who is not on the IBEX team.
But some manage to impinge on our solar system and previous observations have shown that they seem to come mostly from the tail's direction says Dingus.
It could be that the heliotail is acting as a funnel for cosmic rays allowing them to leak into the solar system where the sun's influence is weakest.
#Three habitable worlds found around the same star Aliens could be watching aliens watching aliens.
That's a realistic prospect now that three potentially habitable planets a record have been glimpsed orbiting the same star.
Earlier studies had suggested that a nearby star Gliese 667c had three planets only one of which might support life.
But the very presence of multiple planets made their precise number hard to tease out.
They found evidence for up to seven worlds including three rocky planets in the star's habitable zone where temperatures should suit life.
Located about 22 light years away Gliese 667c is itself part of a triple-star system making this one of the most crowded planetary neighbourhoods yet.
which can detect how a star is tugged back and forth by the gravity of an orbiting planet.
The five strongest signals were from planets between 1. 94 and 5. 94 times the mass of Earth making them all likely to be rocky.
Larger rockets would take you pretty quickly from one planet to the other one to two months at most says Anglada-Escudé.
That's assuming the new trio of habitable planets is real. In 2010 two of the paper's co-authors were acclaimed
when they claimed to have found the first potentially habitable rocky planet around the star Gliese 581 a discovery others were unable to confirm.
Instead the smaller cheaper machine might help labs around the world study deep-space objects such as powerful radiation jets squirted out by black holes.
This is similar to the powerful streams of matter-antimatter observed outside pulsars and black holes. CERN physicist Niels Madsen notes though that the tabletop device has limitations.
As an alternative says Sarri the beams can be used to mimic the way particle fountains from black holes
and pulsars shoot through and interact with gases in the interstellar medium creating mini versions of these enigmatic astrophysical phenomena in the lab for the first time.
The China National Space Administration successfully launched its Shenzhou-10 mission to low Earth orbit at 0938 GMT today.
But progress so far suggests that more advanced plans such as a moon base or a crewed Martian trek may not be beyond China's reach.
which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011. The crew will do one automatic and one manual docking test.
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.
So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns they might well get to some place like Mars
#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.
The clumps slow down and start to drift towards the star. Eventually they either collide with each other
and break apart or spiral in to their doom. The farther you get from the star the smaller the clumps that can form before they start to drift inwards.
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.
This is a very big problem. If you can grow large particles they will disappear very quickly says Nienke van der Marel of Leiden Observatory in The netherlands.
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.
and colleagues observed the star at three wavelengths: one sensitive to dust grains a millimetre across
But the millimetre-sized dust grains are concentrated in a large crescent-shaped structure on one side of the star a sign that a vortex may be holding the larger grains in place.
It is quite far from the star so it might be more of a comet factory says van der Marel.
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.
The observation is dramatic and surprising and the interpretation of the dust clump as a vortex is plausible says Philip Armitage an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
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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