mars expedition preview

ESA is looking for 12 human lab-rats. They are to take part in an experiment which will simulate a 520 day Mars mission. This will take place in the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP). To have an idea on what is this experiment about, this is what the volunteers have to do:

• Nutrition and hygiene of the crewmembers will be comparable to that on-board the International Space Station, i.e. food will be predefined and carefully rationed, there will be no shower, and water supply will be limited. Smoking and consumption of alcoholic beverages will not be allowed.
• The crew will largely be autonomous, which will be expressed in independent decision-making, control of the environmental situation and of consumable resources, to name a few.
• A signal passage delay of up to 20 minutes one-way during communication of the crew and the ground-based control center will be gradually built in with the aim of simulating a real interplanetary mission. Additionally, private communication to family and friends will be limited comparable to a spaceflight situation.
• The daily routine will be similar to the schedule of crews in orbital flights (7 day week with two days off) and will consist of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure time and 8 hours of sleep per day. In addition all crewmembers will operate on night-shifts for one week each, in rotation.
• During work time the crew will conduct scientific experiments, perform physical exercise (1hour per day), as well as tasks related to maintenance of the facility, life support system control and maintenance, skill maintenance and learning, sanitary and hygienic procedures, etc.

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picture credits: ESA

Space Poem Chain

Stars are full of poetry. The Japanese Space Agency decided that it cannot ignore the artistic dimension of stars and universe and initiated a project: the Space Poem Chain. For six months, people around the world submitted their vision about universe, earth and life to form a chain poem. 24 poems where chosen to be recorded on a DVD and be sent on the ISS.

We children of the stars children of space
Born in the oceans and matured on land
have the history of the universe its hundreds of billions of years
etched on our bodies
Look! Today too somewhere a tiny light

Naoko Yamazaki

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When bad luck turns to gold

If someday you feel unlucky, you're maybe on your way to take Science further...

The american robot Spirit is exploring Mars' ground for some times, and its NASA team was quite worried that one of its 6 wheels broke, until they found out that this broken wheel was leaving a deep track on the robot's path, and revealed an obvious silica presence : almost 90%, says the onboard X-ray spectrometer !

What is the point of finding silica in this big messy bunch of sands that is Mars' ground ?

Its origin can have 2 different sources :

- result of the interaction between acid rain and volcanic activity, with presence of water

- cluster coming from the cooling of ancient hot water sources

In both case, the process involves an obviously huge quantity of water...Mars, water, Mars, water, there is something that does not want these words to be dissociated...

Photo credits : NASA

ESA photo album

During the last week, ESA released some pictures taken by ESA's spacecrafts orbiting the Moon (SMART-1), Mars (Mars Express) and Earth (Envisat). The huge Oreseme crater at the South Pole of the Moon, the Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars and the Earth's Alps. These three pictures make quite a good point on why we should take care of our good ol' Earth.

*photo credits: ESA

solar whisper

Did you ever wonder how it would be to have the solar wind whispering to your ears? Voyager 1 recorded it. Just check it here.

Cell-Phone Base in Orbit

The Japanese Engineering Test Satellite ETS-8 has started operations on the 25th of April after its initial test phase. ETS-8 demonstrates a futuristic technology for mobile phone devices, wireless communication services and digital multimedia broadcasting services. It covers all of Japan with 2 tennis-court sized antennas, including mountainous regions, oceans and even the small islands around Japan. Unlike the previous satellite mobile phone systems, we do not require a backpack-phone or a shoulder-phone or an umbrella-sized mobile antenna. Just a normal size mobile phone for communication will suffice, even in the middle of nowhere!

Photo credits: JAXA

ultra large geometry

Some twenty years ago, Voyager 1&2 took pictures of a strange phenomenon in saturnian atmosphere. Now, in the 15 years long saturnian polar night, Cassini imaged it again. It is a spinning hexagon four times the size of Earth. It spins and spins and spins at the nordic pole of Saturn. For now, nobody can tell exactly what it is and how it works. Best guess is that is just a strangely shaped polar vortex, similar to the Earth's circular polar vortex.


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photo credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

A light torch on the dark matter

The "dark matter" refers to this mysterious hidden mass that rules the Universe's gravity, and this term is a general name to store our ignorance on the subject, much like "terra incognita" was on the early maps.

Anyway, by combining numerical models and radio observations of some galaxies in the Hydra constellations, a friendly team of scientists managed to clear two tasks that would make me feel a hero if I was one of them.

First, they pointed out exactly where the dark matter should be (in red in the picture), so that it becomes suddenly brighter than expected.

Then they might have a serious idea about its composition : molecular hydrogen !

The "hidden" behavior of the dark matter was generally assumed to be due to its exotic composition : nice particles such as neutralinos, axions, or unknown "stuff".

Well in the studied galaxies, assuming that dark matter would be of this type would go against our best modern models about galaxy formation. these models tell that the dark matter should remain in the spherical halos that surround galaxies. But the numerical computations performed on the tide dwarves (forget about your Tolkien dreams, these are galaxies born because of giant intergalactic collisions - a bit freakier than the Moria), show that these galaxies simply stole matter from the discs of their mother-galaxy at their birth. The dark matter in those is obvious : their mass is 3 times what it should be, and it is also obviously not coming from the halos.

As a very cold molecular gas, hydrogen seems to be the number one suspect hiding behind the dark people...

credits : Ciel et Espace, CEA/CNRS,

NASA

slingshot mail delivery

Since SpaceDHL and starUPS didn't start to compete on the intergalactic fast shipping market, some students thought of a method to deliver a parcel to Earth using just gravity.
At an altitude of about 300 km, a half a millimeter thick, 30 km long tether will be released from the Russian research capsule Foton M3. From the tether will be attached the result of YES2 project, the "parcel", Fotino. Due to the gravity, the parcel will start swinging up and down. The parcel will be released and placed on a path towards Earth.

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picture credits: ESA

biggest boom

The brightest and most energetic stellar explosion was recorded by Chandra X-Ray Telescope and ground based space telescopes.

"The top panel of this graphic is an artist's illustration that shows what SN 2006gy may have looked like if viewed at a close distance. The fireworks-like material in white shows the explosion of an extremely massive star. This debris is pushing back two lobes of cool, red gas that were expelled in a large eruption from the star before it exploded. The green, blue and yellow regions in these lobes shows where gas is being heated in a shock front as the explosion material crashes into it and pushes it backwards. Most of the optical light generated by the supernova is thought to come from debris that has been heated by radioactivity, but some likely comes from the shocked gas."(http://chandra.harvard.edu)

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Image credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al.; IR: Lick/UC Berkeley/J.Bloom & C.Hansen

black hole eclipse

A black hole is not the first thing to come in one's mind in the list of eclipsable things. Nonetheless, Chandra X-Ray Telescope recorded such an "serendipitous" event. X-Ray photons released from the superheated material disk around the supermassive black hole were blocked by a passing dense cloud of gas. This allowed astronomers to measure the size of the material disk.

The X-Ray insert in the picture contains the Chandra image with the black hole appearing as a bright spot in the center, while the optical image was captured by the European Space Observatory Very Large Telescope.

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Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/INAF/Risaliti Optical: ESO/VLT

training New Horizons

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft launched in 2006. It's main mission is to visit Pluto and it's moon Charon and to reach the Kuiper Belt.
On February 28'th, New Horizons came to within 2.3 million kilometers from Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to trim 3 years from it's journey to Pluto. During it's approach to the Jupiter system, New Horizons stored more than 30Gb of pictures and information collected from Jupiter and it's moons. This proved to be a good occasion to test all instruments aboard New Horizons.

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photo: NASA, New Horizons Spacecraft, Jupiter's moon, Io, with a volcanic plume

rocket science games

Both NASA and ESA let you play a little with assembling their main launchers.

You can assemble Ariane 5 on ESA's webpage.

On NASA's webpage you can assemble one of the Delta, Atlas or Pegasus launchers.

milibots - nanonauts

A new breed of astronauts is born in Glasgow's laboratories. Taking advantage of miniaturization, the engineers there are cooking up robots not bigger than 1 mm. Despite their size, they can communicate, work in formation and take scientific measurements.
The most impressive part though, is their way of moving. They use small voltages to deform a polymer which is attached to the main chip. This allows them to change shape and increase or decrease the drag coefficient. Thus, they can use wind for moving towards a target. Actually they hop towards the target, taking advantage even of the swirling winds.
The nanonauts can be used to explore planets like Mars and Venus, but their size is limited by the density of the planet's atmosphere.

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no more radiation

If I were you I wouldn't schedule a photo session in 15 trillion years from now. It's not that my molecules would be so far away that I'll probably need Hubble v.100 to do it, but it seems that by the end of time, matter would dominate radiation. That means in 10 trillion years we will only be able to see our own cluster of galaxies. And in about 15, Hollywood will bankrupt.

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visiting aliens' hometown

Burkhard Heim is a German physicist that worked on the Theory of Everything, the Philosophical Stone of modern physics. This theory should unify the quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. His results are surrounded by doubt, mainly because almost nobody seems to understand them. Nonetheless, his theory is the only one able to predict the mass of fundamental particles.
What makes his theory important for visiting aliens' hometown is the fact that it provides the background for a new method of propulsion, one that would make the trip to Mars a leisure 3 hour drive. A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity force that would propel a spacecraft into a multidimensional hyperspace. The required magnetic field required to propel a 150 tones spacecraft would be around 25 Tesla (500,000 times the Earth magnetic field). This is within the reach of today's technology that allows pulsed magnets to briefly reach 80 Tesla.

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Galileo?

The European version of GPS seems to have some problems. It's not technology, but the never ending economic-political quarrellings. Nevertheless, the EU Commission is decided to continue the program no matter the costs.

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picture: ESA, Galileo constellation

Aliens' hometown ?

This kind of information becomes almost regular in the space community, but this time it sounds better than ever > A life-friendly planet has been discovered and seems to host the most similar parameters to Earth than we ever know. Nearly 250 exoplanets (planets located outside our beloved Solar System) has been discovered until now, and this one will be the number one focus of scientists. What makes it so special ? (or so "familiar" ?) Let us give its ID :
- Name : Gl 581c (pretty sexy)
- location : Gliese 581 system (red dwarf)
- distance from Earth : 20.5 light years (peanuts)
- Mass : 5 times Earth's
- Diameter : 1.5 times Earth's (making it one of the smallest planet ever discovered)
- about the orbit : the orbit radius is 10.7 millions km with a period of 13 days. Earth is 150 millions km away from the Sun and has a 365 days period. The trick is that Gliese 581 (the exoplanet's sun) is far lighter and colder than the Sun, which makes our exoplanet being situated in the area where water can be liquid.
- consitution : as far as we know today, it is too much lighter to be made of gas. It is then a "rocky" planet, and further analysis will tell if it is an ocean planet, as some scientists guess.
Calculations show that if Gl 581c's albedo is 35% (as it is on Earth), average temperature would be 40°C. But if it is 50%, this temperature would decrease to the very nice value of 20°C, which would make the potential aliens not sweat.

This discovery is due to the great Franco-Swiss team leaded by Michel Mayor, already known for discovering the first exoplanet in 1995. They work on the French observatory located in La Silla, Chile,which hosts powerful instruments such as the VLT (Very Large Telescope) and its awesome adaptative optics system (that enables scientists to get rid of the atmospheric noise by a mirror system that compensates the atmospheric variations in real time).
The team placed the HARPS spectrometer (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Search project - pfooo) on the 3.6m telescope. This instrument is well-known for being "the best exoplanet finder in the world", which is a label that few of us can claim.

The team did not mention yet if they have internet on Gl 581c, and we also don't know if the gravity constant can provide nice conditions for extreme skateboarding. We keep you informed.

StarTrek shielding

Most of the space agencies around the world announced lately their plans on human space exploration missions. But going to space is like a field trip to Chernobyl. Some protection is needed and neither sun cream or lead can provide a viable solution.
Scientists try to imitate Nature in the way it protects us from dangerous solar radiation or cosmic rays. They try to create an artificial magnetic field around the spacecraft which is strong enough to deflect all dangerous radiation.
The idea is not new. SS Enterprise from the Star Trek series was imagined to have such a deflector shield that the radiation would bounce off.

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hayabusa - typical japanese bad luck

Hayabusa - the Pilgrim Falcon - is a Japanese mission to collect sample material from a close to Earth asteroid. It was launched in May 2003 and arrived in a heliocentric orbit close to the Itokawa asteroid in September 2005. It managed to land on the surface of the asteroid, but the MINERVA mini-lander (~600 g) was lost due to the long command response time. It is not sure if the sample collection procedure was properly executed (a metal projectile should have hit the asteroid's surface) but it is supposed that at least a small quantity of dust will be found in the sealed container.
In December 2006, a fuel leakage determined loss of communication. It is supposed that 8 - 10 cc of leaked fuel evaporated resulting in a precession movement which stabilized into a spinning after 4 months. Communication was reestablished, but 4 out of the 11 battery cells were found to be damaged and that only 2 of the ion engines work normally.
At the beginning of April 2007, Hayabusa was expected to start it's journey home, a journey that will end in 2010.

More on Hayabusa's problems and solutions