#Antares rocket launch heats up private space race Watch out Spacex there's a new commercial rocket in town.
After a few delays due to weather and a technical glitch the Antares launch vehicle lifted off on its maiden flight on 21 april.
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.
Antares was designed to deliver the company's Cygnus cargo craft to the ISS. For the test flight the rocket climbed high into a clear blue sky carrying a mock cargo ship with the same mass
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
#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.
Instead it struck lucky with a sample of rock drilled on 9 february in an area called Yellowknife Bay near
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.
#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.
Curiosity 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.
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.
#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.
Astronauts drilled into rocks on the moon and Soviet landers drilled on the moon and on Venus. Curiosity's predecessors the rovers Spirit and Opportunity each had a tool that scraped away the top layers of rocks to see what was beneath
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
Although Curiosity's digging into Mars has been extremely modest its achievement could lay the groundwork for construction and mining on the Red planet.
#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.
There is nothing similar anywhere else in around 3000 years of tree ring records leading Miyake to suggest a massive solar flare as the cause.
and there is no historical record of such an energetic solar flare. The aurora would have been seen up to tropical latitudes says Valeri Hambaryan of the University of Jena Germany.
Some researchers have suggested that an unknown supernova might be responsible for a red crucifix in the sky recorded in the Anglo-saxon Chronicle a history of Anglo-saxon life compiled by anonymous scribes.
and thought to be caused by the collision of two neutron stars black holes or white dwarfs. The pair suggest that the odd isotope levels in the trees
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.
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth s surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don t need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
but also light much as window blinds tilt to filter the sun. Researchers say the work could lead to waterproofing and anti-glare applications such as smart windows for buildings and cars.
or sunlight says Yangying Zhu a graduate student in MIT s Department of Mechanical engineering. So you could filter how much solar radiation you want coming in and also shed raindrops.
In a recent case study with Mars for example Affectiva found that the client s chocolate ads elicited the highest emotional engagement
#Steam from the sun A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure a layer of graphite flakes
When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material pores,
if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.
who led the development of the structure. specially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy,
Cutting the optical concentration Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough
when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems. his is a huge advantage in cost-reduction,
From sun to steam The approach itself is relatively simple: Since steam is generated at the surface of a liquid,
Ghasemi looked for a material that could both efficiently absorb sunlight and generate steam at a liquid surface.
As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam.
and exposing it to a solar simulator a light source that simulates various intensities of solar radiation.
but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery.
#Getting more electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current.
In most photovoltaic (PV) materials, a photon (a packet of sunlight) delivers energy that excites a molecule,
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.
and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems. Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition,
Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0. 5 percent of wasted heat per Degree celsius increase.
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,
The problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn shine. Now a team at MIT and Harvard university has come up with an ingenious workaround a material that can absorb the sun heat
and store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea:
since it makes the sun energy, in the form of heat, storable and distributable, says Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering,
Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other,
taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on demand.
while the sun isn out, being able to store heat for later use could be a big benefit.
and can withstand extreme temperatures, sun exposure, and heavy wear, says Doyle, the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the April 13 issue of Nature Materials.
known as are earth upconverting nanocrystals. These crystals are doped with elements such as ytterbium, gadolinium, erbium, and thulium,
for viewing faint objects that are close to brighter objects for example, a faint planet next to a bright star.
Plants typically make use of only about 10 percent of the sunlight available to them,
and it works much more reliably than lidar in bright sunlight when ambient light can yield misleading readings.
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
radio system ever flown to the moon. 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;
this speed is 5000 times faster than the upload speed of the best radio system sent to the moon.
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
the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT. hat pretty much a description of what the ankle is.
First the cell absorbs sunlight which excites electrons in the active layer of the cell.
#Toward a low-cost'artificial leaf'that produces clean hydrogen fuel For years scientists have been pursuing artificial leaf technology a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants'ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use.
Peidong Yang Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
and exposed to sunlight produces hydrogen gas. The scientists say that the technique could allow their technology to be scaled up at low cost.
The researchers led by Professor Joel K. W. Yang at A*STAR (the Agency for Science Technology
To demonstrate how these nanopixels could enable high-resolution 3d color microprints the researchers designed a stereoscopic image containing stars on a 2d sheet by overlaying two slightly displaced views of the same image onto the same area.
The other four peaks include Sustainable Earth New Media the East-West knowledge hub and Innovation Asia.
Last spring Fan received a proof-of-concept grant from the Department of energy through the North Central Regional Sun Grant Center to determine
Sun Grant promotes collaboration among researchers from land-grant institutions government agencies and the private sector to develop
While they are not nearly as efficient as silicon-based solar cells in collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity,
The new dye-sensitized solar cells were as much as 20 percent better at converting sunlight into power,
To control their micro-swimmers the researchers integrated tiny rare-earth magnets in the two scallop shells.
and reduce carbon dioxide emissions on the earth Shimoi said d
#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
Over the years scientists have been very successful at making complex 3d shapes from DNA using diverse strategies said Wei Sun a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss'Molecular Systems Lab
and functionally-relevant materials such as gold and silver Sun said. Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3d form the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA nanostructuresthe concept can be likened to the Japanese method of growing watermelons in glass cubes.
Professor Evans and his team have all of the membrane proteins required to construct a fully working mimic of the way plants capture sunlight.
A group of researchers from the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR has taken the health benefits of green tea to the next level by using one of its ingredients to develop a drug delivery system
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth's surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight's energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don't need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun's spectrum.
Now researchers at A*STAR have used a process known as friction stir processing (see image) to produce an evenly distributed mix of nanosized aluminum oxide (Al2o3) particles in aluminum.
Guo J. F. Liu J. Sun C. N. Maleksaeedi S. Bi G. et al. Effects of nano-Al2o3 particle addition on grain structure evolution and mechanical behaviour of friction-stir-processed Al.
Hydrogen is virtually everywhere on the planet, but the element is bonded typically with other elements
Researchers have known long that some single-celled organisms use a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (br) to absorb sunlight
If the researchers wanted to power their generators with sunlight, they'd need to improve on that.
acts as a large solar system that can be used to recharge portable electronics and lights for the upcoming night of camping."
calibrated to one Sun illumination (natural sunlight). The measurement itself is conceptually simple:""We're applying an oscillating voltage across the device
"We do this underneath the simulated sunlight. Mathematically, we're looking at the phase shifting of the current out relative to the voltage in."
"Co-authors are Xiaoping Hong, Jonghwan Kim, Su-Fei Shi, Yu Zhang, Chenhao Jin, Yinghui Sun, Sefaattin Tongay, Junqiao Wu and Yanfeng Zhang.
which degrade under exposure to sunlight and can also be difficult to align with imaging sensors.
It's a pitfall that could be important to understand in the development of long-lasting solar cells where sun could provide risky heat into the equation.
Stephen Westland professor of color science and technology at Leeds University said in The Independent These new materials they are pretty much as black as we can get almost as close to a black hole as we could imagine.
One example of a use for the material is in telescopes to increase the instruments'ability to see very faint stars.
For example it reduces stray-light improving the ability of sensitive telescopes to see the faintest stars
How much of the universe is black holes? More information: www. surreynanosystems. com/news/19 9
#Researchers demonstrate novel tunable nanoantennas A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a novel,
Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors: n-type which are rich in electrons;
and hold sunlight to drive the chemical reactions involved in water splitting. Semiconductors like silicon and gallium arsenide are excellent light absorberss is clear from their widespread use in solar panels.
While the overall efficiency of this cell is still low compared to other types about 9 percent of the energy of sunlight is converted to electricity the rate of improvement of this technology is one of the most rapid seen for a solar technology.
and thus boosting their overall efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity. Many approaches to creating low-cost large-area flexible and lightweight solar cells suffer from serious limitations such as short operating lifetimes
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.
Just as a glass lens can be used to focus sunlight to a certain spot, these plasmonic nanostructures concentrate incoming light into hotspots on their surface,
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
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.@
@Oniraptor...NASA and Spacex are doing what you are requesting just a few years down the road.
A cheap launch system is needed desperately for support of deep space missions and other needs. And yes the Space shuttle was a huge drain on resources
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.
The telescope's measurements will provide astronomers with clues to events early in the solar system's history according to the agency's description of the project.
and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope so that it could launch more missions more frequently.
Bill Joy-Chief Scientist and Cofounder-Sun Micro Systems sums it up best in this Wired article.
but it does highlights that we still don't know everything about the surface of our own planet.
#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
and is part of a star group named after Beta pictoris that also came together about 12 million years ago.
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.
The telescope was identified in the Pan-STARRS 1 wide-field survey telescope in Maui. Follow-up observations were performed with several other Hawaii-based telescopes including the NASA Infrared telescope Facility the Gemini North Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
The discovery will soon be detailed in Astrophysical Letters but for now you can read the prepublished verison on Arxiv.
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