Satellites are being weaponised, with the anti-satellite missles, manoevering satellites that can hit other objects and satellites that hack into feeds, giving false information to the receiver. Countriies have been holding on to a balance for ages, but in the last 10 or so years, countries have been gradually upping their game.
Source: Satellite wars – FT.com
NASA took a significant step Friday toward expanding research opportunities aboard the International Space Station with its first mission order from Hawthorne, California based-company SpaceX to launch astronauts from U.S. soil.
Source: NASA Orders SpaceX Crew Mission to International Space Station | NASA
Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have taken advantage of gravitational lensing to reveal the largest sample of the faintest and earliest known galaxies in the Universe. Some of these galaxies formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang and are fainter than any other galaxy yet uncovered by Hubble. The team has determined, for the first time with some confidence, that these small galaxies were vital to creating the Universe that we see today.
Source: Hubble spies Big Bang frontiers | ESA/Hubble
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another “Earth.”
The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet — of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.
“On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0.”
Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.
Source: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
Except Escape Dynamics didn’t fire its engine by setting alight fuel in a controlled explosion, like a traditional rocket. Instead, their engine fired using power beamed at it from a microwave antenna across the room.
]…] It aims to use a giant set of batteries to draw power from the regular electric grid (or on site solar panels, wind turbines, or other available power generation). Once they’re charged and a spaceship is ready to go, power will be sent to a set of modular, phased array microwave antennae spanning a square kilometer. Those antennae will then fire a microwave beam at a heat exchanger on the spaceship. That heat exchanger will heat up the hydrogen in the fuel tank, which is what powers the rocket on the ship into orbit.
Source: This Company Aims To Launch Rockets With Beams Of Power – Forbes
Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.
The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.
Source: Stuff in Space
Basically the US is saying that it’s the wild west out in space: if you can get there, you can mine your asteroid.
Any asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained such resources
I’m very curious what other countries have to say about this?
The spacecraft broke up after being released from a carrier aircraft at high altitude, according to Ken Brown, a photographer who witnessed the plane breaking apart.
One pilot was found dead inside the spacecraft and another parachuted out and was flown by helicopter to a hospital, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.
Friday’s flight marked the 55th for SpaceShipTwo, which was intended to be the first of a fleet of craft. This was only the fourth flight to include a brief rocket firing. The rockets fire after the spacecraft is released from the underside of a larger carrying plane. During other flights, the craft either was not released from its mothership or functioned as a glider after release.
The problem happened about 50 minutes after takeoff and within minutes of the spaceship’s release from its mothership, said Stuart Witt, CEO of the Mojave Air and Space Port.
via Investigators, Branson Head to Spacecraft Crash Site | Military.com.
Good luck picking up the pieces and carrying on.
A very cheap mission has managed to park into Mars Orbit first time, something never before done. Congratulations India!
ISRO: Mars Orbiter Mission.
at 4,268px × 5,690px it’s a huge starship guide featuring hundreds of spacecraft to scale.
Size Comparison – Science Fiction Spaceships by DirkLoechel on deviantART.
How did the Moon form? According to the prevailing hypothesis, a Mars-sized body known as Theia smashed into Earth. Herwartz et al. analyzed fresh basalt samples from three Apollo landing sites and compared them with several samples of Earth’s mantle. The oxygen isotope values measured in these lunar rocks differ significantly from the terrestrial material, supporting the giant-impact hypothesis.
via Identification of the giant impactor Theia in lunar rocks.
Very quickly! Will it only be a few decades until it’s gone?
Last month, physicists used this idea to build the world’s first entanglement-enhanced microscope that dramatically increases its resolution over purely classical instruments. They created entangled photons and used one to illuminate the object. The second photon can then give them information about the first that they use to increase the resolution of the resulting image.
via How To Build A Quantum Telescope — Medium.
Yes, there are problems, no it isn’t finished yet – but it’s a great idea!
Gravitational waves squeeze space as they travel, and this squeezing produces a distinct pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Gravitational waves have a “handedness,” much like light waves, and can have left- and right-handed polarizations.
“The swirly B-mode pattern is a unique signature of gravitational waves because of their handedness. This is the first direct image of gravitational waves across the primordial sky,” said co-leader Chao-Lin Kuo (Stanford/SLAC).
via First direct evidence of cosmic inflation (Update).
IE yes, there /was/ a big bang
This book addresses the simple and complex issues that have been identified through the development of space elevator concepts over the last decade. The report begins with a summary of those ideas in Edwards’ and Westling’s book The Space Elevator (2003). Out of these beginnings has risen a worldwide cadre focused upon their areas of expertise as applied to space elevator development and operational infrastructure. The report answers some basic questions about the feasibility of a space elevator infrastructure.
via Science Deck – Space Elevators.
This study was conducted under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) […] , as well as the International Space Elevator Consortium. […] There were 41 authors and 5 editors.
2 california companies are launching swarms of satellites to low orbit to bring near real time imagery of the entire world.
http://gizmodo.com/how-swarms-of-tiny-satellites-are-creating-a-real-time-1497890594
Of the 150,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy snapped by the NASA probe in the past three years, more than 3,000 planets have been identified. Scientists then focused on the stars similar to our Sun and tried to find planets between one and two times the size of Earth in those stars’ Goldilocks orbital zones.
Their findings suggest that 22 per cent of those stars had planets about the size of Earth that could harbor liquid water – a basic building block for life as we know it. The team said the actual total could be much higher given the difficulty involved in finding them. Kepler relies on seeing planets pass directly in front of the target star on the same orbital plane as the telescope.
Galaxy is CRAMMED with EARTHLIKE WORLDS – plus, possibly ALIENS • The Register.
And this is how they actually get their names – pretty boring, but to be expected from the guys who declared Pluto a non-planet…
Naming of Astronomical Objects | IAU.
One of the problems DTN fixes is queueing transmissions, as transmitting to mars at the speed of light incurs an 8 second delay.
NASA fires-up experimental space Internet for robot control.
Two dwarf stars – oribiting each other every 13 minutes – have been observed to slightly change the size of their orbits as well as the time it takes to complete them. The effect occurs when expected to happen as they hit the waves.
BBC News – Gravitational waves spotted from white-dwarf pair.
There are a few new space elevator ideas coming along, one is a kickstarter project, another from Tokyo. They want to build one on the moon too!
Space elevator ideas rising again – Cosmic Log.
It’s the fifth moon they’ve discovered. Pluto stays a planet in my book.
New Moon Discovered in Our Solar System.
NASA has contracted this rocket to very carefully approach the ISS for resupply runs. Well done Elon Musk!
SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully • The Register.