#Swedish space rock may be piece of early life puzzle A fossil meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry.
The mysterious rock may be known the first piece of the bullet that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth.
Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm which is being mined for flooring.
All of the meteorites are part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period
when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species. Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite.
Analysing its microscopic crystals Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period
but is of a kind completely unknown to science. About 515 million years ago our planet was going through an evolutionary slump.
A burst of diversity that happened during the Cambrian period had tapered off and few new types of animals were emerging.
Mysteriously about 25 million years later life sprang back into action in the early part of the Ordovician generating loads of species. So
Fossil meteorites from the quarry suggest that during this time impacts were tens to hundreds of times more frequent than they are today.
The meteorites may have been born when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter.
The larger object spawned the cloud of L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years.
According to one popular idea this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches
and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery.
The fact that the latest fossil comes from the same rock layers as the L chondrites suggests that it is a piece of that second asteroid says Schmitz.
The theory says that most of the smaller asteroid was vaporised during the collision so it also makes sense that only scant fragments of it would remain.
David Harper at Durham University UK agrees. The team may at last have identified the impactor responsible for the break up of the parent body of the L chondrite meteorites he says.
In which case he adds it is a direct remnant of one of the most violent events in our solar system's history.
This was documented the largest asteroid break up event of the past 3 billion years says Schmitz.
The asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period believed to have killed the non-avian dinosaurs was tiny in comparison.
Journal reference: Earth and Planetary science Letters DOI: 10.1016/j. epsl. 2014.05.03 3
#How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites THERE ARE some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies researchers
and start-ups are promising a powerful new perspective on earthly activities that range from global commerce to perfecting the art of mining landfills for recyclable materials.
On 10 june Google acquired Skybox Imaging a 5-year-old Silicon valley firm for $500 million.
The company already has a 1-metre cube satellite called Skysat-1 in orbit and has plans for 23 more each with high-resolution imaging and video capability.
The satellite's design is an iteration of the diminutive 10-centimetre Cubesats that have been used for scientific research since 2003.
It wants to hire satellites already in orbit to prospect landfill sites for potentially valuable materials.
Then there are rare-earth metals that could be retrieved from discarded electronics along with bits of tin copper and gold.
That's where satellites come in. If the satellite gives us 1000 potential sites from the 25000 in the UK we would then use drone reconnaissance to get a richer picture of say the wood cover
and surface profile Terra Recovery cofounder Greg Fitzgerald said last week at a meeting of the UK government's space business advocacy group in London.
Initially the firm plans to use information collected by European space agency satellites which have a 1-metre resolution.
But it could later switch to satellites like the 28 imaging cubesats that the firm Planet Labs of San francisco already has in orbit.
Planet Labs ultimately wants a fleet of 100 of the tiny satellites enough to refresh its imagery of the entire planet once a day says Arin Jumpasut a Planet Labs imaging engineer.
#Crystal cocoons kept bacteria safe in space ASTEROIDS have a killer reputation taking the blame for death and destruction on massive scales.
Several hundred million years after Earth formed when life was emerging our young planet had an atmosphere oceans and primordial continents.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
Because UV radiation can damage DNA that would have made it difficult for any but the most extreme forms of life to survive.
In 2002 a team led by astrobiologist Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh UK discovered a unique group of cyanobacteria in Haughton crater in northern Canada.
and pressure of the asteroid or comet impact that made the crater about 23 million years ago.
while letting enough sunlight through to allow them to photosynthesise. Complex life evolved long before the crater formed
but there have been countless space rock strikes in Earth's history. That raised a whole bunch of questions about
whether the unique geology of impact craters could have been a good UV shield on the early Earth says Casey Bryce a member of Cockell's lab. Bryce
As part of the European space agency's EXPOSE mission the team sent some of the crater rocks to the International space station (ISS.
The bacteria received radiation doses far more intense than conditions on early Earth. When the samples were returned to the lab the microbes in the glass discs were dead.
The team's findings provide the first direct evidence that crystal cocoons formed by impacts might have been radiation-proof cradles for early life (International Journal of Astrobiology doi. org/tcs.
Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets
and then shielded whatever emerged. Crater rocks could provide refuges even now for life on other planets such as Mars she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline Space rock strikes protected early lif f
#Impossibly heavy planet is the first'mega-Earth'Sly Stallone has nothing on this rocky heavyweight.
Twice the size of Earth and with 17 times our planet's mass Kepler-10c is so unusual that it has been placed in a brand new class of exoplanet.
Kepler-10c was discovered in 2011 by NASA's Kepler space telescope. The planet orbits a star that is about 560 light years away from us.
It has a radius slightly more than double that of Earth's a size that led astronomers to assume it was a shrunken version of gassy planet Neptune
which is four times larger than Earth. Now Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts and his colleagues have used the HARPS-N telescope in the Canary islands to pin down Kepler-10c's mass.
They found it is actually 17 times as heavy as Earth: more or less the same mass as Neptune.
But because Kepler-10c is much smaller then Neptune it must be an incredibly dense rocky world the like
of which has never been seen before. All the major existing planetary formation models were not predicting this type of planet
and it is why we could not believe our result at the beginning says Dumusque who presented the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston this week.
But the team checked for a bevy of possible errors that might have been caused by the telescope itself
or by activity from the host star and they say a massive rocky world is the best explanation for the data.
Calculations by geophysicists previously suggested that gravity should compress planets so much that rocky worlds can't get bigger than twice Earth's size says Kepler team member Geoff Marcy at the University of California Berkeley.
This suggestion of a rocky planet 2. 3 times the size of Earth blows me away he says.
The team has dubbed Kepler-10c a mega-Earth because it is too heavy to fit into the super-Earth class of exoplanets
which are bigger than our home world but much lighter than Neptune. It is made probably from the same materials as Earth water silicates
and iron but in different proportions says Dumusque. Kepler-10c is denser than Earth but still it is far from being made of pure iron
which would be the physical limit for planets he says. Neighbouring planet Kepler-10b was already famous among planet hunters for being confirmed the first rocky world outside our solar system.
But it is very close to its star completing a full orbit in just 20 hours.
The more we find planets outside the solar system the more we are surprised by the diversity of these new worlds says Dumusque e
#Spacex unveils sleek reusable Dragon crew capsule First cargo now crew the uber-modern space taxi known as the Dragon V2 is ready for passengers.
At an unveiling ceremony yesterday complete with smoke effects and coloured lights Spacex CEO Elon musk gave the world its first glimpse of the upgraded Dragon spacecraft.
NASA is already using an unpiloted version of Dragon to send cargo to the International space station and return valuable gear and scientific experiments.
But Musk has wanted always Dragon to become a reusable ride for astronauts. The new vehicle has simple silvery walls seats for up to seven passengers and a set of flatscreen control panels.
The spacecraft can dock itself to the ISS without help from the space station's robotic arm.
But the most radical aspect of the redesign is the landing gear which will allow astronauts to set the spacecraft down on solid ground.
The current version of Dragon deploys a parachute as it descends and splashes down in the ocean.
Dragon V2 instead comes with a set of incredibly powerful Superdraco engines each capable of producing more than 70000 newtons of thrust.
The engines will allow astronauts to better manoeuvre in space as well as control their trajectory for re-entry.
You'll be able to land anywhere On earth with the accuracy of a helicopter Musk said during the event at Spacex headquarters in Hawthorne California.
The engines are encased in protective shells and they are set up in pairs so that if one fails the other can give a boost of power to compensate.
The Dragon V2 also has sturdier heat shields which brings Spacex a step closer to realising its goal of developing spacecraft that are fully and rapidly reusable.
Spacex has tested successfully a set of landing legs on a rocket used to send the uncrewed Dragon to the ISS
and Musk hopes to soon make it possible for rockets and crew capsules to simply be reloaded with propellant
and flown again much like commercial airplanes. As long as we continue to throw away rockets and spacecraft we will never have true access to space says Musk.
Like passengers in today's commercial aeroplanes riders of the Dragon V2 won't get much leg room in the capsule's tight quarters.
But the craft does include touchscreen interfaces to control the spacecraft as well as manual buttons for critical functions that would be needed in case of emergency.
Passengers on the Dragon V2 won't get much leg room (Image: Spacex) NASA ASTRONAUTS are not set to ride in the Dragon V2 until 2017.
However a colony of mice and rats will make the journey on the next Spacex cargo launch becoming the private company's first mammalian passengers.
The rodents are set to spend six months on the ISS and will be the subjects of various experiments on the long-term effects of microgravity on mammal physiology.
The results will hopefully prove handy for Musk who hopes to eventually shuttle humans on the long trip to Mars
. When the Dragon V2 does launch with its first commercial crew the face of space travel is going to change.
It will no longer be heroic to go to space it will become a commodity and it's about time says John Logsdon a space policy expert at George washington University's Elliott School of International affairs in WASHINGTON DC.
What will count is what people do once they get there e
#Baby model cosmos grows up to look like the real thing A supercomputer simulation has tracked the evolution of the universe from a mere 12 million years after the big bang until the present day.
It is the first to produce realistic-looking galaxies by the thousands and a triumph for our current understanding of the history of the universe.
If you take 40000 galaxies from the simulation and compare them to 40000 real galaxies you would have a very hard time distinguishing them says one of the simulation's creators Mark Vogelsberger of the Massachusetts institute of technology.
This tells you that our understanding of galaxy evolution is so complete now that we can make models that predict a universe that just looks like ours.
Previous simulations had focused on the properties of individual galaxies or on the weblike scaffold of dark matter that connects groups of galaxies.
Recent advances in supercomputing and a fresh computational approach let the recent simulation called Illustris do both at once.
Our main goal was to have a statistical sample of galaxies but also be able to say something about the characteristics of each galaxy says Vogelsberger.
He and his colleagues modelled a cube of space with sides that stretched to 347 million light years a fraction of the size of the observable universe today.
They divided it up into 12 billion smaller units and used equations that describe ordinary matter's behaviour in cosmic structures to calculate what should happen in each unit.
Instead of forcing the units to stay in a rigid grid the team allowed them to shift making the simulation more accurate as well as more computationally efficient than previous ones.
The simulation handles ordinary matter as well as enigmatic dark matter and dark energy. It also accounts for complex phenomena such as cooling gas star formation supernova explosions
and supermassive black holes pulling in material that gets too Close to run the simulation the team used several supercomputers in Europe and the US each
of which contained many central processing units or CPUS. By contrast an ordinary computer might have just one.
The entire simulation took 16 million CPU hours which means that running it on a single normal computer would take nearly 2000 years.
The resulting cosmos was almost indistinguishable from the real one we see today. As a demonstration the team compared a simulated version of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field observation to the real thing
which was made when the Hubble space telescope stared at one spot in the sky for nearly 12 days.
The code also managed to reproduce different types of galaxies including spiral galaxies like the Milky way and blob-shaped elliptical galaxies.
This is like simulating the whole US where previously it was like just simulating your neighbourhood says Michael Boylan-Kolchin at the University of Maryland in College Park who led one of the largest previous simulations called Millennium-II.
For instance small galaxies in the simulation produced stars too early so they appeared older than we observe them to be today.
What's more Boylan-Kolchin notes that some of the processes through which galaxies grow up such as star formation
and black hole radiation are still not very well understood making it difficult to tell whether the simulation gets them right.
The more we can get at these processes by trying to make realistic galaxies and seeing what works and
#Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion On earth THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
and electrons the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions.
It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid behaving like mixing ocean currents
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
Snowflakes shorelines and most recently black holes (see Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed) also exhibit such fractal behaviour.
These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
#Canada uses satellite to scold Russia over Ukraine Canada has blocked the launch of a satellite aboard a Russian rocket as a result of tensions over Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The M3m satellite was built by Com Dev of Cambridge Ontario under contract for the Canadian space agency (CSA)
It was scheduled for launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket in June and was due to be shipped to the launch site in Baikonur Kazakhstan.
and the CSA meanwhile plan to launch the M3m satellite on another rocket. We are confident that the mitigations will be in place prior to the originally planned M3m in service date of September 2014 said Pley.
But unlike the US Canada doesn't have its own vehicles capable of launching a satellite into orbit
and so must hitch a ride on rockets launched by others. It isn't yet clear who might provide an alternative
Earlier this month NASA announced it was suspending cooperation with Russia although the International space station was excluded from the ban.
NASA only has a few smaller-scale joint activities with Russia such as an instrument aboard its Curiosity Mars rover
but there are no signs these have been affected by the boycott t
#Supernova found aligned with galactic magnifying glass A perfectly arranged exploding star and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.
Sometimes when a white dwarf star dies it explodes as a type 1a supernova. All supernovae in this class reach a very specific colour and peak brightness creating
what astronomers call a standard candle. As a result any deviations from this standard brightness and colour indicate
whether and by how much the light from the supernova is being messed with by other things like nearby galaxies or the expansion of the universe.
For example the gravity from a massive object like a galaxy can magnify light from another object like a supernova bending its light waves
and focusing them like a lens. We can only see this effect from Earth if the two objects are aligned perfectly.
Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
its light is being lensed by a galaxy in front of it. The supernova PS1-10afx was discovered in 2010 using the Pan starrs telescope in Hawaii.
Because it was so much brighter than normal it sparked controversy over whether it was a new type of supernova
or was being magnified by a gravitational lens. Quimby thought it must be lensing but nobody could see an intervening galaxy that could be doing the job.
There were good data taken before during and after the supernova and none of these showed obvious signs of a foreground object says Quimby.
Now his team has found a galaxy full of dim old stars that was hard to see against the bright background of the galaxy holding the supernova.
They calculate that it is the right size to make a normal type 1a supernova look about 30 times brighter about the same as the apparent brightness of PS1-10afx.
It's quite remarkable. I'm impressed they could find this thing says Brian Schmidt at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Schmidt used type 1a supernovae to deduce that the universe's expansion was accelerating a finding that won him the 2011 Nobel prize in physics along with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.
The finding could help investigate dark matter the stuff thought to make up over 80 per cent of our universe's matter.
Since we know what the light from PS1-10afx should look like without gravitational lensing a standard candle any differences can be attributed to the mass of the galactic lens
and how that mass is distributed. And that in turn may depend on the galaxy's dark matter content
and distribution since massive dark matter halos are thought to cocoon galaxies making up most of a galaxy's mass.
We have these numerical simulations of dark matter that make pretty strong predictions of what dark matter halos should look like Schmidt says.
So if you could get a really good measurement of how dark matter is distributed within a bunch of galaxies one can essentially test the dark matter model better than we can at present.
Such systems could also help in the search to understand dark energy the mysterious entity thought to be behind the acceleration of the universe's expansion.
The ultimate fate of the universe is thought to depend on whether the acceleration is changing. Type 1a supernovae are used already to measure the rate of expansion over time
but having a gravitational lens offers a way to improve the measurements particularly if scientists can find more examples at different distances.
To assist with that Quimby's team offers advice on how to find lensed type 1a supernovae:
#Star dust casts doubt on recent big bang wave result An imprint left on ancient cosmic light that was attributed to ripples in spacetime
and hailed by some as the discovery of the century may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
when researchers report new results from the European space agency's Planck satellite. On 17 march researchers led by John Kovac of Harvard university announced that gravitational waves from the early universe had been found by a telescope called BICEP2 at the South pole.
The waves were said to be the smoking gun evidence for the theory of inflation which suggests that space expanded faster than the speed of light in the first moments after the universe's birth.
The announcement sent shock waves through the physics world. I was excited so recalls Philipp Mertsch of Stanford university in California.
or align the electromagnetic fields of photons they came into contact with in the infant universe.
ever since appear in every direction in the sky as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. But other things apart from gravitational waves such as dust can emit polarised photons.
To minimise the chances of this effect causing a false signal the BICEP 2 team pointed their telescope at a patch of sky far away from the Milky way's dusty disc.
A handful of nearby dust shells can be seen by radio telescopes appearing as giant loops looming above the Milky way's galactic disc.
and the giant loops detected by radio telescopes (blue lines). The effect of this finding on the BICEP2 result is not clear
because no thorough measurements have yet been made of how much polarised light the dust in our galaxy produces.
if you take the dust into account along with emissions from charged particles in the galaxy
For sure this BICEP2 result will put even more pressure on Planck's next release says Fabio Finelli a Planck team leader at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna.
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
This is not a trailer for an alien invasion movie NASA is gearing up to conduct the first test flight of a disc-shaped spacecraft designed to safely land heavy loads
and one day people on the surface of Mars. The Low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from the US NAVY's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
The inflatable technology is intended to help slow down vehicles after they enter the thin Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds.
and crashing is stopping says Allen Chen at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California who oversaw the successful landing of the one-tonne Curiosity rover in 2012.
We really only have two options for stopping at Mars: rockets and aerodynamic drag. Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
But the heavier the load the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity NASA invented an ambitious system called the sky crane
which combined parachutes with landing gear powered by retrorockets that could lower the rover to the surface on tethers.
However Curiosity pushed the weight limits of that technology and future human missions could require 40 to 100 metric tonnes per mission.
Such weight can't be slowed adequately by parachutes in the Martian air which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
The LDSD design solves this quandary using a balloon-like decelerator and a giant parachute twice the size of Curiosity's. The decelerator would attach to the outer rim of a capsule-like entry vehicle.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
and fire a small rocket to reach a height of 55 kilometres about halfway to the edge of space.
As it falls back to Earth the system will inflate and moments later the parachute will fire.
NASA has three more test flights in Hawaii planned for the LDSD and mission managers will review the results before deciding on next steps.
In addition to landing human missions on Mars the system could help robotic craft safely land in Martian mountains or highlands.
These areas have even less air available for slowing down a spacecraft via drag and so have been inaccessible with current technology.
Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed d
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