The Science Report

by Stuart Gary

Comet century may be telescope’s last

I’ve just written a story for ABC Science about the discovery of the 100th comet by the Uppsala telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory..

The find makes the Uppsala telescope the third most successful ground-based comet discovery observatory in history.

The problem is, the discovery comes at a time when funding is about to run out for the telescope which is the only Near Earth Objects survey in the Southern Hemisphere.

If you missed my radio report on the story and you want to find out more, check out the online version at:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/05/14/3758927.htm

(Source: abcstarstuff)

(Source: astrodidact, via knowledgethroughscience)

Bill Nye The Planetary Guy

via electricspacekoolaid

(via astronomerinprogress)

The surfaces of Asteroid Itokawa, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Titan, and Earth. All images show a view of nearby rocks to the distant horizon. The amount of surface modification evident of each of the bodies increases roughly from left to right.

From the the rubble pile asteroid of Itokawa, the cratered plains of the moon, the volcanic basalts of Venus, the basalt filled craters of Mars, the eroded icy cobbles of Titan to the great oceans of Earth, a variety of surfaces in our solar system is represented.

(Source: annesastronomynews.com)

NASA Spacecraft to Visit Newly Named Asteroid

NASA’s Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will visit the asteroid now called Bennu, named after an important ancient Egyptian avian deity. OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled to launch in 2016, rendezvous with Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of the asteroid to Earth in 2023. 

The name for the carbon-rich asteroid, designated in the scientific community as (101955) 1999 RQ36, is the winning entry in an international student contest. Nine-year-old Michael Puzio suggested the name because he imagined the Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm and solar panels on OSIRIS-REx look like the neck and wings in drawings of Bennu, which Egyptians usually depicted as a gray heron. Puzio wrote the name suits the asteroid because it means “the ascending one,” or “to shine.” 

TAGSAM will collect a sample from Bennu and store it for return to Earth. The sample could hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules that may have contributed to the development of life on Earth. The mission will be a vital part of NASA’s plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. NASA recently announced an asteroid initiative proposing a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for the first human mission to an asteroid while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids. 

“There were many excellent entries that would be fitting names and provide us an opportunity to educate the world about the exciting nature of our mission,” said Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a contest judge and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission. “The information about the composition of Bennu and the nature of its orbit will enable us to explore our past and better understand our future.” 

For more information on OSIRIS-REx, visit:  http://osiris-rex.lpl.arizona.edu/

(Source: electricspacekoolaid)

Did Asteroid Impacts Spark Life’s ‘Left-Handed’ Molecules?

The mysterious bias of life on Earth toward molecules that skew one way and not the other could be due to how light shines in star- and planet-forming clouds, researchers say.

If correct, these findings suggest the molecules of life on Earth may initially have come from elsewhere in the cosmos, scientists added.

The organic molecules that form the basis of life on Earth are often chiral, meaning they come in two forms that are mirror images, much as right and left hands appear identical but are reversed versions of each other.

Strangely, the amino acids that make up proteins on Earth are virtually all “left-handed,” even though it should be as easy to make the right-handed kind. Solving the mystery of why life came to prefer one kind of handedness over the other could shed light on the origins of life, scientists say.

One possible cause for this bias might be the light shining on these molecules in space. One can think of all light waves as corkscrews that twist either one way or the other, a property known as circular polarization. Light circularly polarized one way can preferentially destroy molecules with one kind of handedness, while light circularly polarized the other way might suppress the other handedness.

To see how much light is circularly polarized in outer space, astronomers used a telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory to detect how light is polarized over a wide field of view across the sky encompassing about a quarter diameter of the moon.

The scientists focused on the Cat’s Paw Nebula about 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. The nebula is one of the most active star-forming regions known in the Milky Way.

The researchers discovered that as much as 22 percent of light from the nebula was circularly polarized. This is the greatest degree of circular polarization yet seen in a star-forming region, and suggests circular polarization may be a universal feature of star- and planet-forming regions.

“Our findings show circular polarization is common in space,” study lead author Jungmi Kwon, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told SPACE.com.

Computer simulations the astronomers developed suggest this large amount of circular polarization is due to grains of dust around stars. Magnetic fields in the nebula align these dust grains, and light that scatters off these aligned grains end up circularly polarized — dust on one side of the magnetic field gives light scattering off it one kind of circular polarization, while grains on the other side have the opposite effect.

“Until now, the origin of circular polarization was unclear and circular polarization was basically considered a rare feature,” Kwon said.

Chemical reactions inside nebulas can manufacture amino acids. These molecules end up possessing a certain handedness depending on the light shining on them. The researchers suggest left-handed amino acids may then have rained down on Earth by piggybacking on space rocks, resulting in one handedness dominating the other.

“Left-handed amino acids produced by circular polarization in space can be delivered by meteorites,” Kwon said.

The researchers will continue to look for circular polarization in other star- and planet-forming regions. They detailed their findings March 1 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

http://www.space.com/20888-earth-life-amino-acids-asteroids.html?cmpid=514630

(Source: astrodidact)

Even though we can’t predict when the next NEO (near earth object), like asteroids or short period tail comets, will come and hit us we can definitely tell you the odds. We also won’t get too much of a warning either because there are still tons of undiscovered larger NEO’s out and about.

This is where NASA comes in. Besides the Spaceguard Survey NASA has a mission to Mars that will study Mars’ deep interior. It was also carry an experiment that will slam an impactor into a threatening asteroid. The mission Osiris-Rex is targeting a 900 ft. asteroid called 1999 RQ36 that can give us clues on how life began on Earth as well as it is headed straight for us in 2182! Osiris-rex will collect samples from the rock and return it back to Earth in 2023. One of the biggest challenges is actually the budget for this mission and time constraint. They want to get this mission started in the fall, which isn’t a lot of time as well as NASA is footing the bill of $100+ million.  

Check out our latest blog post on Impact Craters to get more insight on what asteroids can do http://www.penny4nasa.org/2013/04/29/death-beauty-and-hows-that-space-program-going-the-impact-crater-story/

(Source: pennyfournasa)

What happened…when the object apparently responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs hit the Earth 65 million years ago?

“First, there was a gigantic fireball brighter than the Sun as the comet plunged to its death, not with a whimper, but a bang. One casualty was the ozone layer, which temporarily vanished. Seconds after the big comet first encountered Earth’s upper atmosphere, it carved out a crater - now buried - 200 kilometers wide and 25 kilometers deep. All that debris shot up into the sky and came back again, all over the Earth. No place would have been spared a hit of at least a tiny particle.

Reacting to this incredible bombardment, the air temperature rose quickly until, for mor ethan two hours, the worldwide temperature reached that of an oven set to broiling. The sky glowed like an electric heater. Ground fires flared everywhere. Then the temperatures started to drop, and drop, and drop. A thick cloud of dust blackened the world, setting off a several-month period without sunlight. Rains poisoned with sulfuric and nitric acid added to the misery.

With blow after blow to the biosphere…most large land-roving dinosaurs probably died within weeks. Other creatures took longer; those who survived one disaster would perish in the next one. Slowly, the great cloud dissipated, and temperatures began to rise again, this time due to a greenhouse effect that lasted for centuries or millennia. Overall, perhaps 70 percent of all the species of life died during the siege, and in North America at least, about half of the species of flowering plants.

But not everybody. Some of the hardier representatives of many species, including the ones equipped to hibernate, made it through the impact winter. Enough small mammals survived that, when the biosphere finally started to recover, they began to proliferate and flourish.

Impacts clear the decks for new forms of life. The fossil record shows that after major impacts, there is a burst of speciation. New life forms fill the niches that the old ones leave behind. If there were no impacts, the thrust of evolution might have slowed down, and today there would be a different set of species inhabiting the Earth.”

David H. Levy, Gene Shoemaker in an exchange about comets and cosmic collisions| Impact Jupiter: The Crash Of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

[image credit]

NASA Deep-Space Missions Take Aim at Mars

The announcement today of an ambitious new project to launch the first private manned mission to Mars in 2018 may suggest to some that NASA has lost a step in the pursuit of deep-space exploration. But the U.S. space agency is forging ahead with plans for a flexible new spaceship and rocket to send astronauts deeper into space than ever before.

The nonprofit Inspiration Mars Foundation unveiled plans for a private Mars flyby mission on Feb. 27) that calls for a January 2018 launch of a two-person crew — a man and woman, possibly a married couple — on a 501-day trip to the Red Planet and back. The mission would not land on Mars but bring a capsule and inflatable module within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the Martian surface before zooming away back to Earth.

Just one hour after the Inspiration Mars Foundation announcement in Washington, D.C., NASA officials here at the Kennedy Space Center briefed reporters about the agency’s own plans for deep-space missions, including an eventual Mars trek.

“We know we’re eventually going to Mars, and there are multiple destinations between here and Mars,” Dan Dumbacher, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, said in a briefing that did not address the private Mars project.

To do that, NASA is developing the new Orion deep-space capsule, the agency’s first manned spacecraft since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. Orion is expected to launch on a new mega-rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS).

Project Orion
Orion and the SLS form the core of NASA’s deep-space exploration program. In 2010, President Barack Obama set a lofty goal for NASA’s future — send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, then take aim at a manned Mars mission in the 2030s.

The aerospace company Lockheed Martin is building the four-person Orion capsule for NASA, with the European Space Agency providing the service module for the spacecraft. Orion’s first test flight, called Exploration Flight Test 1, is slated to launch in 2014, and parts of the space capsule are being assembled at the Kennedy Space Center now.

Once the computers are in place sometime this summer, NASA scientists will power on the test capsule for the first time and check its systems on the ground, Orion project manager Mark Geyer said.

The NASA team plans to launch the capsule atop a Delta 4 rocket, sending it 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above Earth’s surface. The main goal is to test the heat shields tasked with protecting crewmembers during Orion’s manned missions, the first of which is slated to launch toward lunar space in 2021.

Giant rocket test
NASA’s first SLS flight — the unmanned Exploration Mission 1 — is due to launch in 2017, officials said.

Currently, various components of the rocket are being built around the country. Starting in 2016, hardware is expected to begin arriving at the Kennedy Space Center for testing and assembly.

Orion and the Space Launch System won’t launch together at first, but data from both flight tests will be used to help NASA scientists learn what improvements may be needed for each of the vehicles to boost safety and efficiency, project officials said.

“You want to make sure you’ve flown in that environment before you put anyone on board,” Geyer said.

Scientists will also test Orion’s launch abort system during a separate test after the 2014 launch. Like NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, the Orion spacecraft features an abort system designed to separate the capsule from its rocket during an emergency to carry its crew to safety. The agency’s space shuttles had no such system.

During the launch abort test, NASA plans to stress the Orion capsule to its limits to replicate the conditions astronauts might experience in the case of a malfunction. The spacecraft will be ripped free of its booster and propelled 1 mile (1.6 km) away to safety through a series of intricate maneuvers performed by its abort system.

NASA is also preparing the ground facilities at Kennedy Space Center for the future missions. The Orion test flight will be run from a new firing room at the Launch Control Center, and NASA officials will be awarding a contract to a company that will reconfigure some of the structural models on the ground for the new rocket, explained Pepper Phillips, NASA’s ground systems project manager.

Watch: Lockheed Martin/NASA present the Orion Crew Capsule and NASA’s Deep Space Ambitions

Non-Profit’s Private Space Telescope to Hunt Dangerous Asteroids in 2017

With the dangers of rogue asteroids made clear by the surprise explosion of a meteor over Russia in February, a non-profit organization is ramping up its effort to search for potentially hazardous space rocks near Earth.

The B612 Foundation was started in 2002 by former NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart with colleagues. The organization aims to launch a space telescope called Sentinel in 2017 to catalog near-Earth asteroids, including those that may pose a danger to Earth.

To date, about 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids large enough to destroy the entire planet (about 1 kilometer, or 0.6 miles wide) have been discovered, but far fewer of the smaller, city-killing size (roughly 140 meters, or 460 feet, in diameter) have been found.

“We are essentially flying blind in a cosmic shooting gallery,” Scott Hubbard, B612 program architect, told reporters on Tuesday (April 9) at the 29th annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

This reality was starkly illustrated on Feb. 15, when a 55-foot-wide (17 meters) meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, just hours before an asteroid almost three times its size called 2012 DA14 flew uncomfortably close to Earth.

Sentinel’s goal is to detect about 90 percent of this city-killing class of asteroids over a period of 6.5 years.

The $450 million mission is to be privately funded, though the foundation has partnered with NASA to share its data and use the agency’s Deep Space Network of satellites to facilitate communications between Sentinel and the ground. NASA and lawmakers have said they enthusiastically support the mission and the B612 Foundation’s efforts.

“We must better recognize what the private sector can do to aid our efforts to protect the world,” Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said during a Congressional hearing on the asteroid issue Wednesday (April 10).

B612 is also looking to partner with other private organizations, such as the solar system exploration non-profit organization The Planetary Society.

“We are hoping in the future to partner with B612, and we will find the asteroid that could have our name on it,” said Bill Nye, the CEO of The Planetary Society. “We will — this sounds extraordinary — we will save humankind. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s real.”

B612’s presentation at the National Space Symposium came one day before the group’s CEO, former astronaut Ed Lu, spoke before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Wednesday (April 10) on the importance of searching for potentially dangerous asteroids before they hit Earth.

Sentinel will fly in a Venus-like orbit around the sun, closer in than Earth. The observatory use an infrared telescope to search for space rocks as they near the sun, absorbing some of its light and re-radiating it as heat.

“If we build sophisticated night-vision goggles, we can see it,” said John Troeltzsch, program manager for the Sentinel mission at Ball Aerospace, which has been contracted to build the spacecraft.

Ball was the primary contractor for NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as the agency’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, which, like Sentinel, required a large camera and the ability to point precisely at a given spot in the sky.

“We have a lot of experience with very cold things observing very faint signals,” Troeltzsch said. “If you take what we learned on Spitzer and what we learned on Kepler, you can derive Sentinel.”

So far, B612 has raised about $2 million for the mission over the past eight months. It hopes to continue to raise $30 million to 40 million per year to keep the project on track.

jtotheizzoe:

The Asteroids in our Neighborhood

Check out this video from Scott Manley, tracing thirty years of asteroid discovery and the deployment of new and more sensitive instruments to find them. From the green main belt asteroids, to the yellow dots that cross Venus’ orbit, to the red that come near our own orbit … space has a lot of stuff in it. Nearly 600,000 objects known at the latest update.

But that doesn’t mean we’re in any special danger. As these objects, most very tiny, travel through their wonky, often angled orbits, they travel through a volume of 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic km, or enough to fit a trillion Earths. Space may have a lot of stuff in it, but it’s also very big.

Rest easy. We’re watching the skies.

electricspacekoolaid:

Deep Space Industries: New Asteroid-Mining Company 

I wrote this awhile back but with all these ideas and plans being thrown around about future space industries and asteroid missions, this is the best one I have wrote about or heard of. I love this plan. This is something straight out of a science fiction movie (or book).

From Deep Space Industries: The Earth is but a tiny and precious world floating in a sea of natural resources. The riches of the solar system offer humanity both unprecedented prosperity and an improved environment. The resource potential of space outstrips that of any previous frontier - without the environmental impacts. Asteroids are plentiful throughout the solar system. Many orbit close to the Earth and many of these carry vast deposits of resources ranging from water to metals such as iron, gold and platinum – everything we need to expand our civilization into space, to provide for our needs here at home and to increase the wealth of our planetary economy. In addition, the sun shines 24/7 in space, and the electricity beamed to Earth from solar power satellites is carbon-free and leaves no radioactive waste.

With the effects of gravity at a minimum, we can do amazing things when it comes to moving, construction, and innovations in chemistry and physics.  In fact, we are limited only by our own imaginations. All of this in a place safely outside of our delicate biosphere.

OUR VISION:Deep Space Industries believes the human race is ready to begin harvesting the resources of space both for their use in space and to increase the wealth and prosperity of the people of planet Earth.

Deep Space Industries, Inc. The new firm announced sometime in Jan. that it plans to launch a fleet of prospecting spacecraft in 2015, then begin harvesting metals and water from near-Earth asteroids within a decade. This work could make it possible to build and refuel spacecraft in Earth orbit, thus helping our species get a foothold in the final frontier.

“Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development,” Deep Space CEO David Gump said in a statement. Deep Space Industries will hold a press conference today in Santa Monica, Calif., at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST/1800 GMT) to unveil more details of its bold mission plan; you can watch the webcast live here

“More than 900 new asteroids that pass near Earth are discovered every year,” Gump explained. “They can be like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century — a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.”

The Spacecraft Fleet:

Firefly - A small, low cost, nimble craft that DSI will launch on one way reconnaissance missions to determine the target asteroids composition and spin-rate, rapidly spinning asteroids are harder to capture. Firefly spacecraft will utilize ultra low-cost cubesat and nanosat components, and will be sent into space as secondary “ride along” payloads on large launch vehicles carrying commercial communications and remote sensing satellites

“We can make amazing machines smaller, cheaper and faster than ever before,” Deep Space chairman Rick Tumlinson said in a statement. “Imagine a production line of Fireflies, cocked and loaded and ready to fly out to examine any object that gets near the Earth.”

Dragonfly - The next step is to scale up the Firefly spacecraft to include asteroid capture tools, and additional fuel to enable them to return asteroid samples to Earth orbit.  Dragonfly missions will bring back the first payloads of asteroid materials for study, early processing experiments and sale.  Customers will include both scientific researchers and private collectors.  For example, NASA is paying $1 billion for the OSIRIS-REx mission that may bring back 2 kg in 2021.  Collectors pay as much as $1 million per kg for rare meteorites.  DSI will feed part of the returned material into prototypes of its Microgravity Foundry (see below) to demonstrate its practicality for in-space manufacturing using asteroid resources.

 

Other Devices and Products:

Microgravity Foundry - DSI is developing a patent-pending breakthrough in 3D printers able to output complex metal components using a simple process with few moving parts. The Microgravity Foundry (MGF) will enable utilization of the asteroid material to produce parts, gears, and other components for in-space machine repair and construction of new space infrastructures like solar power satellites. 

Propellent Refinery - The water and hydrocarbons found in carbonaceous asteroids will be distilled into propellant for use by space stations, commercial habitats, and communications satellites. Crewed space agency missions to the Moon, Mars, and martian moons, require large quanities of fuel. 90 percent of the mass launched from Earth will need to be fuel. Filling up in Earth orbit will greatly reduce the cost of Mars trips. 

 

Art is done by Bryan Versteeg - Content mostly from Deep Space Industries website. 

distant-traveller:

NASA announces asteroid identification, capture and sampling initiative

NASA’s FY2014 budget proposal includes a plan to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it. A spacecraft would capture an asteroid — which hasn’t been chosen yet, but would be about 7 meters (25 feet) wide — in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration.

Video credit: NASAtelevision

NASA Budget Cutbacks Would Cripple Planetary Science, Critics Say

Proposed cuts included in NASA’s 2014 budget request would sabotage a mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter that could support life, scientists say.

The Obama administration released its 2014 budget proposal Wednesday (April 10). While the budget would set aside $17.7 billion for NASA, it would cut the agency’s previous $1.5 billion budget for the planetary science division by $200 million, scientists said in a live webcast sponsored by the Planetary Society, an organization founded by scientist Carl Sagan to promote solar-system exploration.

“We’re a little disappointed that planetary science didn’t get a little better shake,” said Bill Nye, CEO of the society and popularly known as television’s “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

The new budget does not follow the recommendations of the National Research Council’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a 410-page report that surveyed dozens of planetary scientists to identify the top priorities for the field over the next decade, Nye said.

“This very-well-thought-out, strongly supported list of suggestions has not really been embraced — or the better word would be ‘ignored,’” Nye said.

Europa, a mysterious moon of Jupiter, has a churning ocean locked beneath its icy surface, making it one of the best potential sources of extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

But the new budget doesn’t include any money to explore Europa’s ice-covered ocean.

The budget does set aside funds to identify asteroids that could threaten Earth and to bring back samples from an asteroid, said Bill Adkins, a consultant for the society.

The administration’s budget also includes funding to send a rover, much like the Curiosity rover, to Mars in 2020.

However, the budget does not set aside funds to take rocks back from the planet to study them on Earth, Adkins said.

“We want to bring back a piece of Mars,” Adkins said. “Here on Earth, we have physically much larger instruments — much higher-power instruments than we’re able to put on even our very best rovers.”

The budgetary picture could get better, as Congress still has the option to amend the 2014 budget request to include funding for Europa and other planetary priorities, Adkins noted.

But it could also get worse. The proposed budget assumes that Congress and the president will end the sequester prior to the start of the 2014 budget cycle. If that doesn’t happen, more cuts could be triggered, Adkins said.

christinetheastrophysicist:

Retired Star Found with Planets and Debris Disk

ESA’s Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt – produced by colliding comets or asteroids – orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system.

After billions of years steadily burning hydrogen in their cores, stars like our Sun exhaust this central fuel reserve and start burning it in shells around the core. They swell to become subgiant stars, before later becoming red giants.

At least during the subgiant phase, planets, asteroids and comet belts around these ‘retired’ stars are expected to survive, but observations are needed to measure their properties. One approach is to search for discs of dust around the stars, generated by collisions between populations of asteroids or comets.

Read More.