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spaceplasma: 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.
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spaceplasma: ESA’s Fleet In Solar System
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spaceplasma: ESA’s Fleet Across Spectrum
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springwise: Site opens up space research to web users Those without sufficient scientific knowledge to work in astronomy have still been able to explore space with the ArduSat, an open source satellite. Now, Planet Four is crowdsourcing help from web users to find out more about Mars. READ MORE…
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discoverynews: “So, what do you do for a living?” “I just analyze data from radio telescopes… oh and I take pictures of black holes.” Pretty awesome job. Do Black Holes Really Look Like This? A giant black hole is thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way, but it has never been directly seen. Now astronomers have predicted what the first pictures of this black hole will look like when taken with technology soon to be available. In particular, researchers have found that pictures of a black hole ― or, more precisely, the boundaries around them ― will take a crescent form, rather than the blobby shape that is often predicted. Read more…
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spaceplasma:

The SpaceX Dragon

Dragon is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft developed by SpaceX under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Initiated internally by SpaceX in 2005, the Dragon spacecraft is made up of a pressurized capsule and unpressurized trunk used for Earth to LEO transport of pressurized cargo, unpressurized cargo, and/or crew members.

In May 2012, SpaceX made history when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle in history to successfully attach to the International Space Station. Previously only four governments — the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency — had achieved this challenging technical feat. SpaceX has now begun regular missions to the Space Station, completing its first official resupply mission in October 2012.

The Dragon spacecraft is comprised of 3 main elements: the Nosecone, which protects the vessel and the docking adaptor during ascent; the Spacecraft, which houses the crew and/or pressurized cargo as well as the service section containing avionics, the RCS system, parachutes, and other support infrastructure; and the Trunk, which provides for the stowage of unpressurized cargo and will support Dragon’s solar arrays and thermal radiators.

In December 2008, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) when the Space Shuttle retires. The $1.6 billion contract represents a minimum of 12 flights, with an option to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion.

Though designed to address cargo and crew requirements for the ISS, as a free-flying spacecraft Dragon also provides an excellent platform for in-space technology demonstrations and scientific instrument testing. SpaceX is currently manifesting fully commercial, non-ISS Dragon flights under the name “DragonLab”. DragonLab represents an emergent capability for in-space experimentation.

Source: SpaceX

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starsaremymuse: Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not Foamy Space-time is smooth rather than foamy, a new study suggests, scoring a possible victory for Einstein over some quantum theorists who came after him. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as fundamentally smooth, warping only under the strain of energy and matter. Some quantum-theory interpretations disagree, however, viewing space-time as being composed of a froth of minute particles that constantly pop into and out of existence. It appears Albert Einstein may have been right yet again. A team of researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart. Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier “bubbles” in the quantum theorists’ proposed space-time foam. If this foam indeed exists, the three protons should have been knocked around a bit during their epic voyage. In such a scenario, the chances of all three reaching the Fermi telescope at virtually the same time are very low, researchers said. So the new study is a strike against the foam’s existence as currently imagined, though not a death blow. “If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved,” study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. (The Planck length is an almost inconceivably short distance, about one trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.) “There is a possibility of a statistical fluke, or that space-time foam interacts with light differently than we imagined,” added Nemiroff, who presented the results Wednesday (Jan. 9) at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif. If the study holds up, the implications are big, researchers said. “If future gamma-ray bursts confirm this, we will have learned something very fundamental about our universe,” Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University said in statement.
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spaceplasma: Hubble Captures a “Lucky” Galaxy Alignment An interesting galaxy has been circled in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy — one of a group of galaxies called Luminous Red Galaxies — has an unusually large mass, containing about ten times the mass of the Milky Way. However, it’s actually the blue horseshoe shape that circumscribes the red galaxy that is the real prize in this image. More information: Spacetelescope.org
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irkajavasdream: 10th Prize - Ms. Joan Röhl University of Potsdam - Berlin, Germany Specimen: Daphnia magna (100x) Technique: DIC Images of specimens entered into the 2011 Small World contest included insects, microchips, desmids, cultured cells, dinosaur bones, sand, graphite, and coral. Judges for the 37th annual contest were Alan Boyle (MSNBC.com), Dan Vergano (USA Today), Simon Watkins (University Of Pittsburgh), Richard Day (Indiana University), and Michael W. Davidson (Florida State University).
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(Source: idtrees, via slging)

2017
gallantcannibal: Prehistoric whale evolution, illustrated by Tiffany Turrill.
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science: The media are abuzz with news of an experiment that manages to create negative absolute temperature. Phys.org: In order to bring water to the boil, energy needs to be added to the water. During heating up, the water molecules increase their kinetic energy over time and move faster on average. Yet, the individual molecules possess different kinetic energies – from very slow to very fast. In thermal equilibrium, low-energy states are more likely than high-energy states, i.e. only a few particles move really fast. In physics, this distribution is called Boltzmann distribution. Physicists around Ulrich Schneider and Immanuel Bloch have now realized a gas in which this distribution is exactly inverted: Many particles possess large energies and only a few have small energies. This inversion of the energy distribution means that the particles have assumed a negative absolute temperature. The Boltzmann distribution can be illustrated with balls that are distributed on a hilly landscape, which provides both a lower and upper bound for the potential energy of the balls. At positive temperatures (left figure), as they are common in everyday life, most balls lie in the valley around minimum potential energy. They barely move and therefore also possess minimum kinetic energy. States with small total energy are therefore more likely than those with large total energy – the usual Boltzmann distribution. At infinite temperature (central figure) the balls spread evenly over low and high energies in an identical landscape. Here, all energy states are equally probable. At negative temperatures (right figure), however, most balls wander on top of the hill, at the upper limit of potential energy. Also their kinetic energy is maximal. Energy states with large total energy are occupied more than those with small total energy – the Boltzmann distribution is inverted.
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spaceplasma: NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit Who says NASA has lost interest in the moon? Along with rumours of a hovering lunar base, there are reports that the agency is considering a proposal to capture an asteroid and drag it into the moon’s orbit. Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion – slightly more than NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover – and could be completed by the 2020s. For now, NASA’s only official plans for human spaceflight involve sending a crewed capsule, called Orion, around the moon. The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One proposed target, chosen because of its scientific value and favourable launch windows for a rendezvous, is a space rock called 1999 AO10. The mission would take about half a year, exposing astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field and taking them beyond the reach of any possible rescue. Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans. Full Article→ Credit: NewScientist
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