Space the Final Frontier

"The three astronauts on board the International Space Station are getting a sneak peak of the latest Star Trek film just before people around the world get a chance to see it in theaters themselves." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Anyone else" and "people around the world" being phrases that mean "Americans". Just got back from watching it; very enjoyable and Benedict Cumberbatch is twice as excellent as you imagine he might be. - Mark H

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS. - Hieronymous Boob

"Janhunen (Finnish Meteorological Institute) is the developer of the electric sail concept soon to be tested by the ESTCube-1 satellite, which launched last night aboard a Vega rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. [...] The ESTCube-1 satellite, the work of Estonian students testing out Janhunen’s ideas, uses a long wire that maintains a steady electric potential as its means of interacting with the solar wind. [...] ESTCube-1’s tether is a 50 micrometer wide, 10 meter long wire made out of four strands of aluminum that will gradually be deployed from the satellite in a process that could take as much as a week. Once deployed, the tether will be charged and variations in the satellite’s rotation rate will, if all goes well, reveal the interactions between it and atmospheric ions. But future electric sails will soon be deploying longer wires." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Assuming the concept passes its initial muster, we can look forward to upsized missions using tethers up to 20 kilometers long, deploying as many as a hundred of these from a single spacecraft. This is the design that, in computer simulations, yields potential speeds of 100 kilometers per second, fast enough to get a payload into the nearby interstellar medium in about fifteen years.... more... - Mark H

"I continue to have a soft spot in my heart (and head) for the 1980 Crown International comedy Galaxina. I honestly don't know why, except that it's part of the post-Star Wars space opera boom, and that, as awful as it is, I can't help but enjoy the damned thing. Anyway, here's a selection of Galaxina lobby cards that showcase the film's more interesting visuals, including Chris Walas' alien "rockbiter," the funky spaceship miniatures... and the admittedly stellar Dorothy Stratten as the titular android." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

Wow, that web site is amazing! - Adrian

"It is awfully hard to move stuff from the surface of our planet into orbit or beyond. [...] I took a look at the amount of ‘stuff’ we’ve managed to get off Earth in the past 50-60 years. It’s actually pretty hard to evaluate, lots of the mass we send up comes back down in short order – either as spent rocket stages or as short-lived low-altitude satellites. But we can still get a feel for it." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"When the Space Shuttle flew it amounted to about 115 metric tons (Shuttle + payload) making it into low-Earth orbit. Since there were 135 launches of the Shuttle that amounts to a total hoisted mass of about 15,000 metric tons over a 30 year period. Take a look at [an oil supertanker]. This kind of tanker, fully loaded, is about 550,000 metric tons. That’s thirty-six times more mass... more... - Mark H

"The Space Foundation holds an international student art contest every year. Each year has a different inspiring theme like Space is Infinite - Explore (2012) or Human Space Travel in 2020 (2011). The theme for 2013 was If I were going..." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"University of Washington researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

Good videos at the link explaining the process and the comments are interesting too; there's a link to the research paper there as well. - Mark H

"A nice side-effect of President Obama releasing his 2014 budget proposal today: a number of federal agencies, including NASA, have released more detailed information on what they plan to do with their allocations for the coming year. In NASA's case, that includes the news it's starting work on a far-fetched plan to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to the Earth so that astronauts can visit it by 2025. NASA also revealed new details, imagery, and video animation on just how it plans to nab the space rock." - Hieronymous Boob from Bookmarklet

"We are developing a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement, adding "This asteroid initiative brings together the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve the president's goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025." - Hieronymous Boob

"NASA's budget includes $105 million that will be divided up among this mission and other "identification and general mitigation strategies for asteroids," that is, ways to spot and track asteroids before they hit Earth." - Hieronymous Boob

"The upcoming 2013 April 18 Space Exploration Signature Auction by Heritage Auctions brought us these fine document covers. Manuals, guidebooks, press kits, reports, brochures - all with cool artworks and typography. Enjoy!" - Hieronymous Boob from Bookmarklet

"NASA’s Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Infrared Telescope — have combined forces to create this new image of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The SMC is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"The various colors represent wavelengths of light across a broad spectrum. X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in purple; visible-light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue; and infrared observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are also represented in red. " - Mark H

"From a Soviet space capsule landing outside of Kankakee, Illinois to life discovered on Jupiter in 1996, it’s all enshrined for the curious. One of our faves is Google’s 2004 announcement that they were accepting applications at a new research center… based on the Moon in Copernicus crater. The ability to survive “with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes,” was cited as a prerequisite, but a sushi chef and two massage therapists would be on site. At least the assignment wouldn’t be totally austere!" - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Space tethers hold intriguing potential for satellite manoeuvring, attitude control and even power generation. But about half of all orbital tether tests have either failed to deploy or snapped, probably due to micrometeoroid impacts. This scanning electron microscope image shows the new design of an ultra-thin and hopefully snap-proof solar sail tether soon to be tested on Estonia’s ESTCube-1, which is being launched into orbit along with ESA’s Proba-V satellite on the next Vega rocket in April." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Harnessing manufacturing techniques from the microelectronics industry, this aluminium tether measures just 50 micrometres across – across half the diameter of the average human hair – with a smaller 25 micrometre wire interweaved onto it. The University of Helsinki’s interweaving technique, with several wires joined together every centimetre, will hopefully keep the tether intact to run an electric charge down it, even if all but one subwires in the tether are cut. " - Mark H

"Pray that you die easily." - Hieronymous Boob

Interesting that they preferred him to dye his hair black as well. I guess they can't take a redhead seriously as a villain? - Spidra Webster

unless you're playing a Frenchman, then it = good guy (apparently) - Hieronymous Boob

"Remember the ‘wardens’ that were built into the Project Daedalus plan? They were designed to take care of the vessel on its 50-year run to Barnard’s Star, an acknowledgment of what happens to complex systems over time. These days we’re focusing in on self-healing electronics that can repair themselves in microseconds, integrated chips that spring back from potential disaster, rebuilding themselves faster than any human intervention could manage. Members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory at Caltech have been experimenting with self-healing integrated chips that can recover all but instantaneously from serious levels of damage." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"The chips in question are high-frequency power amplifiers useful for communications, imaging, sensing and other applications. Each of these chips holds more than 100,000 transistors along with a custom-made application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) that monitors the amplifier’s performance and adjusts the system’s actuators when changes are called for. The idea is to let the... more... - Mark H

"Two years ago today, after an odyssey of nearly seven years and eight billion kilometers, the Messenger spacecraft slipped into orbit around the planet Mercury. In order to contain costs in the face of the need for intense speed, the journey was not a direct flight. Instead it included 15 trips around the sun, along with several gravity-boost flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself before the spacecraft finally reached its long-term orbit around the first planet." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"The Messenger adventure may come to an end soon, as the project's budget runs out this week. If an extension can be secured, Mercury explorers will be able to study the surface at very close range while the spacecraft spirals slowly down to its inevitable 'lithobraking' (impact). There might also be a chance to observe the approaching comet Ison - which could be quite a spectacular and... more... - Mark H

"Sir Patrick Stewart has an acting career spanning more than 50 years. He was an accomplished Shakespearean actor when he took on the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation which brought him international acclaim . He talks to Sarah Montague about his decision to join the Star Trek cast and why it wasn't supposed to be successful." - Hieronymous Boob from Bookmarklet

"The football-shaped elliptical galaxy near the center of this image hosted a surprising supernova last year. PS1-12sk, the yellow dot at image center, is classified as a very rare Type Ibn supernova - only the sixth such example found out of thousands of supernovae. A Type Ibn supernova is thought to come from the explosion of a young, massive star. However, the site of the explosion shows no signs of recent star formation, and a supernova from a massive star has never before been seen in a galaxy of this type." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"The finding suggests that the host galaxy might be hiding a star factory, allowing it to form massive stars where none were expected. Alternatively, PS1-12sk might have an entirely different origin such as a collision of two white dwarfs, one of which was helium-rich. "This supernova is one-of-a-kind," said Nathan Sanders of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead... more... - Mark H

"A new discovery could rewrite the history books on the Milky Way. According to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, our galaxy absorbed a smaller satellite galaxy several million years ago. But more than that, it was a celestial event that culminated in the meeting of each galaxy's central black holes. The ensuing collision resulted in a cataclysmic event that blasted a swath of old stars straight out of the core region at hypervelocity speeds. The theory, put forth by Georgia Institute of Technology's Kelly Holley-Bockelmann and Tamara Bogdanović, suggests that our galaxy has had a violent past — and it may not have been the only encounter like it over the course of its history." - Hieronymous Boob from Bookmarklet

IT WILL KILL AGAIN. :P - Hieronymous Boob

"It’s reasonable to call the two Voyager spacecraft our first interstellar probes, in the sense that they are approaching the heliopause and are still transmitting data. Long before controllers shut them down — which should occur somewhere in the 2020s — Voyager 1 will have left the Solar System and we’ll have data on what happens when the solar wind gives way to the stellar winds from beyond. A case could be made for the Pioneer craft as interstellar probes as well, but while Pioneer 10 has reached a distance of 107 AU, the Pioneers are no longer transmitting data. Voyager 1 is now 123.45 AU out, for a round-trip light time of 34 hours, 15 minutes." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Voyager is still deeply in the grip of the Sun. In fact, Voyager 1 would have to travel another 14,000 years to reach the roughly 50,000 AU distance where the Sun’s gravity would cease to be a factor. [...] How far would our Voyagers have to be from the Earth before the Sun began to look like just another star? It turns out we’d have to go a long way. From 400 AU, a distance at which... more... - Mark H

"Scientists have discovered a new planet orbiting a Sun-like star, and the exoplanet is the smallest yet found in data from the Kepler mission. The planet, Kepler-37b, is smaller than Mercury, but slightly larger than Earth’s Moon. The planet’s discovery came from a collaboration between Kepler scientists and a consortium of international researchers who employ asteroseismology — measuring oscillations in the star’s brightness caused by continuous star-quakes, and turning those tiny variations in the star’s light into sounds." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"The host star, Kepler-37, is about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the Sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury’s distance from the Sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800... more... - Mark H

"This incredibly detailed image comes from the one and only Robert Gendler and was assembled from three separate data sources. The detail for the nebula is from Hubble Space Telescope data, the background starfield from the Gemini Observatory/AURA and the color data from his own equipment. Here we see fanciful gas clouds with thick clumps decorating them. Intense radiation and gas streams from the central dying star in waves, fashioning out hollows and caves in the enveloping clouds. While these clumps in the clouds may appear as wispy details, each serves as a reminder of just how vast space can be… for each an every one of them is about the same size as our Solar System." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"At the heart of NGC 5189 shines the tiny light of its central star… no bigger than Earth. It wobbles its way through time, rotating rapidly and spewing material into space like a runaway fire hydrant. Astronomers speculate there might be a binary star hidden inside, since usually planetary nebulae of this type have them. However, only one star has been found at the nebula’s center and it might be one very big, very bad wolf." - Mark H

"A few years ago when I was a bright-eyed PhD student, I stumbled upon a press release making a provocative argument: a thousand year old supernova remnant in our Galaxy called W49B may have formed from a gamma-ray burst. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extreme supernova explosions thought to mark the end of the lives of some very massive stars, and they are the most energetic and luminous events in the Universe. Although astronomers have now found several hundred gamma-ray bursts, these explosions tend to be billions of light years away. So the claim that one may have occurred in our own Galaxy seemed astounding. It got me thinking: what would a gamma-ray burst look like after a thousand years, and what would it leave behind?" - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"We can all hope for fast propulsion, but suppose the engineering is intractable. Would we still go to the stars if limited to speeds much less than ten percent of c? One-tenth of one percent of lightspeed gets you to Alpha Centauri in about 4300 years, which is also (very roughly) the extent of human history in terms of recoverable documents and written language. A worldship moving at this speed, in other words, recapitulates the human historical experience aboard a craft that would have to be engineered to be a living world, a vast O’Neill cylinder with propulsion." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Putting the speed issue in perspective, one tenth of one percent of the speed of light is 300 kilometers per second, compared to the 17 kilometers per second that our fastest deep space probe, Voyager 1, has attained. There are ways of moving that fast that we can calculate today, but the engineering needed to produce a worldship — and the vast issues raised by creating a closed-loop... more... - Mark H

"You can see the yellowish glow of older stars in the center of the galaxy, making up its central bulge, or “hub”. Cascading out are two lovely spiral arms, glowing blue due to the fierce combined light of millions upon millions of hot, young, massive stars. Festooned across the arms are long strings of opaque dust clouds, blocking the blue light and appearing dark. So far, though spectacular, this is pretty mainstream spiral galaxy stuff." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Then you see those red frills, streamers of gas at odd angles to the rest of the galaxy, one each on opposite sides of the galaxy’s core. These are called its anomalous arms, because they don’t line up well at all with M106’s more obvious spiral arms. The red color is a giveaway that we’re seeing gas being warmed by an outside source; hydrogen glows at that color when excited. So... more... - Mark H

"It’s a stunning look at what is known as Thor’s Helmet. This helmet-shaped feature is an emission nebula is located in the constellation of Canis Major, about 15,000 light years from Earth. The nebula is a large expanding bubble illuminated by a central star in its last stage of life — a massive Wolf-Rayet star which is shedding its outer layers of gas at an extremely high rate due to intense radiation pressure. Wolf-Rayet stars are thought to represent a brief stage of evolution near the end of life for giant super massive stars; the last unstable phase before the star explodes as a brilliant supernova. The nebula is some 30 light years in diameter is embedded among a dense star field consisting of thousands of multi-colored stars, adding more beauty to the scene." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

Sixty-three coloured plates illustrating a series of familiar discourses on astronomy. - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"My solar system chauvinism is well-established, but I am as much a sucker for beautiful astrophotos as the rest of you. Once in a while I get a media advisory from the European Southern Observatory about a new pretty picture posted on their website, and then I inevitably lose an hour following links to one stunner after another. Here are a few that particularly struck me on a recent random walk through their website; I heartily encourage all of you to take your own turn through their archives!" - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Imagine two massive stars orbiting each other. One ends its life as a supernova. The core collapses, but doesn’t have the oomph needed to make a black hole. Instead, it forms a neutron star, an incredibly dense ball of neutron a few kilometers across but with the mass of the Sun. Then, sometime later, the second star explodes and also forms a neutron star. The two compact and ridiculously dense objects orbit each other, and over time (due to complicated relativistic effects) the orbit decays. The two neutron stars get closer, until, eventually, they get so close they merge. The gravity of either star is a billion times that of Earth, so when they merge, it’s a fiercely violent event. There’s a huge explosion, and again you get those twin beams of energy blasting out." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"If one of those went off now at that distance, it would be bad. Our atmosphere would absorb all the radiation and we’d be safe enough from all that here on Earth’s surface, but we’d lose satellites, the interaction of the high-energy gamma rays would blow out power grids all over the planet, and our civilization would be in big trouble. But remember, these events are very, very... more... - Mark H