Top 10 great space moments in 2014 (pictures)

Source :c|net

It was a big year for space exploration, from rodeo-riding a comet to getting more familiar with Mars, distant planets and the beginning of it all.

1. Rosetta and Philae meet a comet

Photo by: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR  (Click Image to Image)

The first successful soft landing on a comet wasn't just the biggest space story of the year. It was probably also the biggest science story of 2014.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft traveled 10 years to drop the Philae lander onto a comet. The landing was bumpy, but scientists were able to conduct a few days worth of experiments on the comet's surface that first week.

But neither Rosetta nor Philae may be finished yet.

Look for more great science from both in 2015.

2. Orion lifts off

Orion lift Off (Click Image to download)

A new era in space exploration began in December with the successful test flight of the Orion spacecraft, thanks to a big assist from some massive, heavy rockets.

Orion is scheduled to make an unmanned trip to the moon, but it is later expected to carry manned missions to an asteroid and Mars.

3. New Horizons awakens

Artist 's Impression of New Horizons near Pluto and its moon Charon (Click Image to Download)

Rosetta wasn't the only spacecraft to wake up after a long journey in 2014. In December, NASA's New Horizons probe switched itself back "on" after a 1,873 day-long hibernation.

Originally launched in 2006, the craft is on track for its mission to survey Pluto and its moons in 2015.

4. India's Mars Orbiter Mission

Mars Picture taken by ISRO's MOM (Click Image to Download)

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan is a spacecraft orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014. It was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It is India's first interplanetary mission and ISRO has become the fourth space agency to reach Mars, after the Soviet space program, NASA, and the European Space Agency. It is also the first nation to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt, and the first Asian nation to do so.

5. Comet buzzes Mars

In October, we got a rare close look at a comet on a once-in-a-million-years journey. The comet came so close to Mars that humanity's orbiters circling the Red Planet actually had to hide on the other side to avoid the comet's debris cloud.

The orbiters and rovers on the surface were still able to capture images of the comet as it whizzed by.

6. Exoplanets everywhere

In 2014, not only did our knowledge of distant exoplanets grow by leaps and bounds, but so did the evidence that many of them might host the elements to support life as we know it.

As of December 15, 2014, we know of 22 planets beyond our solar system where there is reason to believe they could be habitable.

7. Space is still hard

2014 was not a year without tragedy in space and near-space exploration. In October, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed, killing one pilot.

This came within days of an explosion that happened after the liftoff of an unmanned Antares rocket carrying a payload to the International Space Station. Also, in August a SpaceX rocket exploded over Texas during a test flight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSJ2kcDirEo

In a year when science began to make amazing feats look easy, these were three reminders of the old adage that "space is hard."

8. ALMA's Image of Another Solar System

The best image ever of planet formation around an infant star.

It’s a real image of a planet-forming disk around the infant star, in this case a sunlike star approximately 450 light-years from Earth, known to astronomers as HL Tau.

It is impressive. It reveals in great detail what astronomers just a few decades ago were only theorizing about, and that is that all stars are believed to form within slow-spinning clouds of gas and dust. As the clouds spin, they flatten out into these disks. Over time, the dust particles in the cloud begin to stick together by a process known as acretion, and that process is what ultimately forms the planets like our Earth, and moons like our moon, plus the asteroids, all of which mostly still move (as they did in the original cloud) in this flat space – this disk-like space – encircling the parent star.

9.Aiming for Manned Missions to Mars

In a year when Mars rovers continued to expand our understanding of the Red Planet, momentum continued to build for a manned mission to our distant neighbor.

NASA is looking seriously at "deep sleep" methods to easily get humans to Mars, likely in the 2030s. Elon Musk started talking about getting mankind to Mars in half that time, and Mars One is already looking for astronauts to blast off in less than a decade's time, despite potential problems.

10. Racing back to the moon

Mars is cool, but isn't there more to do on the moon?

Lunar Mission One is just one of the teams that thinks so -- it raised about a million dollars for its plan to drill the moon's south pole.

Meanwhile, teams competing in the Google Lunar XPrize continued working toward returning to our lone natural satellite.

The moon, Mars, comets, asteroids and beyond -- stay tuned to @crave to see where we go in 2015.

A way to explore Venus

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NASA Langley researchers want to get a better idea about conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, so they have come up with HAVOC or a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept – a lighter-than-air rocket ship that would help send two astronauts on a 30-day mission to explore the planet’s atmosphere. Exploration of Venus is a challenge not only because its smog-like sulfuric acid-laced atmosphere, but also its extremely hot surface temperature and extremely high air pressure on the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezLihQyVgjA

Nasa’s NuSTAR probe takes first spectacular, Christmassy picture of the sun

Nasa's NuSTAR probe Picture (Click Image to Download)

Nasa’s NuSTAR probe has taken its first picture of the sun — and the stunning image  shows X-rays streaming off the star.

NuSTAR stands for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array. It is an X-ray telescope that has been flying around space in Earth’s orbit since 2012.

The image is the first picture that NuSTAR has taken of the sun, and is the most sensitive solar picture ever taken using high-energy X-rays.

The parts of the picture from NuSTAR are the green and blue at the top, which depict solar high-energy emissions. The blue represents more energetic emissions than the green ones.

The picture is overlaid on top of a picture of the sun taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. That took the red part of the photo, which represents ultraviolet light.

NuSTAR was sent out into space to conduct a survey for black holes. By looking for high-energy X-rays, the project hopes to shine new light on how stars collapse and form black holes, and how particles work in active galaxies.

But the new picture is actually a plan formulated in 2007, long before NuSTAR was launched into space. Other telescopes are able to look at the sun because it is too bright, but since NuSTAR looks specifically at higher-energy X-rays, it’s able to take pictures of the star without damaging its sensors.

NuSTAR is going to keep watching the sun, in the hope of seeing nanoflares, which would explain the mystery of why the outer atmosphere of the sun is so hot compared with the surface. Nanoflares have been proposed as the solution to the mystery and if NuSTAR were to catch them it would help solve the puzzle.

"NuSTAR will be exquisitely sensitive to the faintest X-ray activity happening in the solar atmosphere, and that includes possible nanoflares," said David Smith, a solar physicist and member of the NuSTAR team at University of California, Santa Cruz.

The probe might also be able to spot axions, one of the leading candidates for dark matter. Dark matter refers to the idea that there is heavy matter in the universe that we are unable to see. In the unlikely event that NuSTAR were to spot axions, it would solve another mystery at the heart of astrophysics.

Source : Independent.co.uk

'Perfect Storm' Suffocating Star Formation around a Supermassive Black Hole

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High-energy jets powered by supermassive black holes can blast away a galaxy’s star-forming fuel -- resulting in so-called "red and dead" galaxies: those brimming with ancient red stars yet little or no hydrogen gas available to create new ones.

Now astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that black holes don’t have to be nearly so powerful to shut down star formation. By observing the dust and gas at the center NGC 1266, a nearby lenticular galaxy with a relatively modest central black hole, the astronomers have detected a "perfect storm" of turbulence that is squelching star formation in a region that would otherwise be an ideal star factory.



Fig 1. Artist impression of the central region of NGC 1266. The jets from the central black hole are creating turbulence in the surrounding molecular gas, suppressing star formation in an otherwise ideal environment to form new stars. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

This turbulence is stirred up by jets from the galaxy’s central black hole slamming into an incredibly dense envelope of gas. This dense region, which may be the result of a recent merger with another smaller galaxy, blocks nearly 98 percent of material propelled by the jets from escaping the galactic center.

"Like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, the molecules in these jets meet so much resistance when they hit the surrounding dense gas that they are almost completely stopped in their tracks," said Katherine Alatalo, an astronomer with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. This energetic collision produces powerful turbulence in the surrounding gas, disrupting the first critical stage of star formation. "So what we see is the most intense suppression of star formation ever observed," noted Alatalo.

Previous observations of NGC 1266 revealed a broad outflow of gas from the galactic center traveling up to 400 kilometers per second. Alatalo and her colleagues estimate that this outflow is as forceful as the simultaneous supernova explosion of 10,000 stars. The jets, though powerful enough to stir the gas, are not powerful enough to give it the velocity it needs to escape from the system.

Isro gets closer to manned mission, tests crew module

ISRO's GSLV Mark III (Click Image to Download)

This rocket didn't put a satellite in orbit. In fact, its payload plunged into the Bay of Bengal 20 minutes after the vehicle lifted off from Sriharikota. And that made it a success, for it was the first step to India's manned space mission.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) achieved success of a different kind on Thursday when its GSLV Mark III on a suborbital experimental flight carried an unmanned crew module which was ejected at a height of 126km. Re-entering the atmosphere, its parachutes ensured a soft-thud on the sea. Recovered by the Indian Coast Guard, the Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment (CARE) will undergo tests to ascertain its efficiency in bringing back future astronauts from India.

"Everything went as per plan," said ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan. "After a decade of developing the GSLV Mk II, we have tasted the first success of an experimental flight. The performances of the solid and liquid stages were as expected. The unmanned crew module worked extremely well."

Source : Times of india

Mars has gas, and Curiosity finds organic matter -- fuzzy signs of life?

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It could be a sign, a vague one.

A NASA rover has found the building blocks of life on Mars. They might be the product of past or present life on the Red Planet -- or they might not be.

Either way, the samples of organic matter in the atmosphere and in rock show that Mars may at least have once had conditions favorable to hosting life, NASA said in a statement. They also show that the planet is still chemically active.

The Curiosity rover's tapping into organics in rock is the first find ever of life's building blocks on Mars' surface.

Gas blast

The rover has run into pockets of gas on Mars: methane, often used to fire up gas stoves back on Earth.

Organic matter is made up of carbon bonded with other elements, often hydrogen and oxygen. Living things are made up of it, but life is not necessary for it to exist.

Methane is the smallest organic compound, consisting of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms.

On our planet, methane is a fossil fuel, but it can also rise out of rotting sewage or fly through the air in flatulence.

In other words, it usually comes from something living, or something that was once alive.

No life found

That could be the case on Mars, too, NASA said in a statement this week.

But the space agency carefully points out that methane can also come from inanimate sources as well.

"There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock," said Sushil Atreya, a scientist on the Curiosity team.

At this point, NASA doesn't know if microbes are behind the gas or just minerals.

Researchers used Curiosity's instruments a dozen times to get a breath of methane, and four of those times, it peaked at a level 10 times higher than usual.

They believe it may have been puffed up from the ground like little burps.

Organic rock

Curiosity also found organic matter while drilling into stone.

"This first confirmation of organic carbon in a rock on Mars holds much promise," said scientist Roger Summons, who works on the rover team.

Source : CNN

New Signal May Be Evidence of Dark Matter

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Scientists say they may have discovered a possible dark matter signal coded in the X-rays emanating from two bright objects in the sky.

The findings, set to be published next week in Physical Review Letters, could offer tangible evidence for the existence of dark matter -- and help researchers build new tools to search for and study this mysterious stuff.

When it comes to matter in the universe, dark matter is like a backroom political power broker: You never see it, but behind the scenes, it's been throwing its weight around. The effects of its gravitational influence can be seen in the large-scale structures of the cosmos. Dark matter makes up about 84.5% of the matter in the universe while all the stuff we actually see -- stars, galaxies, planets, ourselves -- makes up the remaining 15.5%. The enormous galaxies and clusters of galaxies that populate the universe are bantamweights compared to the massive, unseen dark matter 'halos' that anchor them.

Dark matter's formidable gravitational influence is the only way that the strange stuff can be detected, because it's invisible -- it does not interact with light. Physicists have no idea what it's made of, although they've looked for it by building detectors in underground former gold mines, sending satellites into space and other methods.

But now, a team led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland say they've discovered a signal that could be a sign of dark matter.

The scientists looked at X-ray emissions coming from the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster, collected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope. After accounting for all the light particles (called photons) emanating from known sources in the Andromeda galaxy, they were left with a strange set of photons that had no known source. The found the same light signature emanating from the Perseus cluster. And when they turned their attention to the Milky Way, they found signs of this signal in our home galaxy, as well.

"It is consistent with the behavior of a line originating from the decay of dark matter particles," the authors wrote in a pre-print of the study.

This weird light signal, they think, could be coming from the destruction of a hypothetical particle called a sterile neutrino (which, if it exists, might help explain dark matter). But it's going to take a lot of follow-up study to determine whether this signal is a scientific breakthrough or an anomalous blip.

"Future detections or non-detections of this line in multiple astrophysical targets may help to reveal its nature," the study authors wrote.

Japan's upcoming Astro-H mission, they said, might allow them to do just that.

Source :Science Tech Today

NASA and SpaceX targeting Dec. 19 for next Space Station Launch

ISS under construction (Click Image to Download)

NASA and SpaceX are now targeting Dec. 19 as the launch date for the next unmanned cargo run to the International Space Station (ISS) under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract.

The fifth SpaceX cargo mission was postponed from Dec. 16 to Dec. 19 to “allow SpaceX to take extra time to ensure they do everything possible on the ground to prepare for a successful launch,” according to a statement from NASA.

The Dragon spacecraft will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 at Cape Canaveral launch pad 40 is slated to launch on Dec. 19, 2014 on the CRS-5 mission. Credit: Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com

Both the Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon spacecraft are in good health, according to NASA.

The mission dubbed SpaceX CRS-5 is slated for liftoff at 1:20 p.m.

An on time liftoff will result in a rendezvous with the ISS on Sunday. The crew would grapple the Dragon with the stations 57 foot long robotic arm at about 6 a.m.

See more at : Universe Today

Amazing details of Saturn & its moons captured by NASA

Image of Saturn Taken by Cassini Space Probe (Click Image to Download)

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been studying Saturn and its moons for a decade now, routinely delivering stunning images of the second largest planet in our solar system. One of its noteworthy achievements is that it is now shedding a lot more light on six moons that were once shrouded in mystery.

When NASA’s Voyager spacecraft flew by moons like Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus back in the 1980s, it sent back landmark images that were nevertheless fuzzy, incomplete, and hard to make out. Now, Cassini has plugged the holes – with bursts of color, no less – and delivered stunning new images of these icy satellites.

Here is a before/after shot of Mimas showcasing the differences between Voyager's image (left) and Cassini's (right).



"The most obvious [discoveries] are differences in color and brightness between the two hemispheres of Tethys, Dione and Rhea,” wrote Preston Dyches of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The dark reddish colors on the moons' trailing hemispheres are due to alteration by charged particles and radiation in Saturn's magnetosphere.”

“Except for Mimas and Iapetus, the blander leading hemispheres of these moons – that is, the sides that always face forward as the moons orbit Saturn – are all coated with icy dust from Saturn's E-ring, formed from tiny particles erupting from the south pole of Enceladus."



You can view the rest of the images here. Impressively, however, these aren’t the only photographs of Saturn and its moons making headlines this week.

Source : RT.com

Isro to Test-Fly Heaviest Rocket, Crew Module on December 18

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India will test-fly its heaviest and upgraded rocket - the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-Mark III) - on December 18, space agency Isro said Friday.

According to a tweet by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the 630-tonne rocket will be powered by liquid and solid fuel engines while the cryogenic stage/engine will be a passive one.

The rocket will also carry a crew module to test its re-entry characteristics.

"The main purpose of the mission is to test the atmospheric characteristics and stability of the rocket on its way up. We also decided to use this opportunity to test one component of the crew module - a human space mission that India may embark on at a later date," M.Y.S Prasad, director of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, told reporters in a recent interaction.

The experimental mission will cost Rs. 155 crores and will not carry any satellite as the cryogenic engine needed for the purpose is still under development, he said.

"This will be India's new launch vehicle. It is bigger and can carry satellites up to four tonnes," said GSLV Mark III project director S. Somanath.

The main objective of the crew module is to demonstrate its re-entry flight and aero braking, and end-to-end parachute system validation.

The rocket will go up to 126km and the crew capsule will then detach and fall into the Bay of Bengal, 20 minutes after blast-off.

The descent speed of the crew module will be controlled on board motors for some distance and then by three parachutes.

The module will splash down 600km from Port Blair and 1,600km from the space centre. The capsule will be recovered by an Indian Coast Guard or Indian Navy ship.

Source : NDTV

ALMA Identifies Gas Spirals as a Nursery of Twin Stars

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With new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations, astronomers led by Shigehisa Takakuwa, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA), Taiwan, have found spiral arms of molecular gas and dust around "baby twin" stars. Gas motions supplying materials to the twin were also identified. These results unveil for the first time, the mechanism of the birth and growth of binary stars, which are ubiquitous throughout the Universe. The study was published on November 20 in The Astrophysical Journal.



Fig 1. Gas and dust disks around L1551 NE spotted by ALMA. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / Takakuwa et al.

Stars form in interstellar clouds of molecular gas and dust. Previous studies of star formation focused primarily on single stars like the Sun, and a standard picture of single star formation has been established. According to this picture, a dense gas condensation in an interstellar cloud collapses gravitationally to form a single protostar at the center. Previous observations have found such collapsing gas motions feeding material toward the central protostars.

Compared to single star formation, our understanding of binary star formation has been limited, even though more than half of stars with a mass similar to that of the Sun are known to be binaries. It is thus crucial to observe the physical mechanism of binary formation to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of star formation. Theory suggests that a disk surrounding a young binary will feed material to the central "baby twin" in order for them to grow. While recent observations have found such disks (known as "circumbinary disks"), it was not possible to image the structure and gas motions because of the insufficient imaging resolution and sensitivity.



Fig 2. Comparison of the disks in simulation and observation. The right panel shows the disk image simulated with ATERUI, and the left panel the real ALMA image. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ Takakuwa et al.

The Fastest Stars in the Universe May Approach Light Speed

Our sun orbits the Milky Way’s center at an impressive 450,000 mph. Recently, scientists have discovered stars hurtling out of our galaxy at a couple million miles per hour. Could there be stars moving even faster somewhere out there?

After doing some calculations, Harvard University astrophysicists Avi Loeb and James Guillochon realized that yes, stars could go faster. Much faster. According to their analysis, which they describe in two papers recently posted online, stars can approach light speed. The results are theoretical, so no one will know definitively if this happens until astronomers detect such stellar speedsters—which, Loeb says, will be possible using next-generation telescopes.

But it’s not just speed these astronomers are after. If these superfast stars are found, they could help astronomers understand the evolution of the universe. In particular, they give scientists another tool to measure how fast the cosmos is expanding. Moreover, Loeb says, if the conditions are right, planets could orbit the stars, tagging along for an intergalactic ride. And if those planets happen to have life, he speculates, such stars could be a way to carry life from one galaxy to another.

It all started in 2005 when a star was discovered speeding away from our galaxyfast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way. Over the next few years, astronomers would find several more of what became known as hypervelocity stars. Such stars were cast out by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. When a pair of stars orbiting each other gets close to the central black hole, which weighs about four million times as much as the sun, the three objects engage in a brief gravitational dance that ejects one of the stars. The other remains in orbit around the black hole.

Loeb and Guillochon realized that if instead you had two supermassive black holes on the verge of colliding, with a star orbiting around one of the black holes, the gravitational interactions could catapult the star into intergalactic space at speeds reaching hundreds of times those of hypervelocity stars.

This appears to be the most likely scenario that would produce the fastest stars in the universe, Loeb says. After all, supermassive black holes collide more often than you might think. Nearly all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, and nearly all galaxies were the product of two smaller galaxies merging. When galaxies combine, so do their central black holes.

Loeb and Guillochon calculated that merging supermassive black holes would eject stars at a wide range of speeds. Only some would reach near light speed, but many of the rest would still be plenty fast. For example, Loeb says, the observable universe could have more than a trillion stars moving at a tenth of light speed, about 67 million miles per hour.

Because a single, isolated star streaking through intergalactic space would be so faint, only powerful future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope , planned for launch in 2018, would be able to detect them. Even then, telescopes would likely only see the stars that have reached our galactic neighborhood. Many of the ejected stars probably would have formed near the centers of their galaxies, and would have been thrown out soon after their birth. That means that they would have been traveling for the vast majority of their lifetimes. The star’s age could therefore approximate how long the star has been traveling. Combining travel time with its measured speed, astronomers can determine the distance between the star’s home galaxy and our galactic neighborhood.

If astronomers can find stars that were kicked out of the same galaxy at different times, they can use them to measure the distance to that galaxy at different points in the past. By seeing how the distance has changed over time, astronomers can measure how fast the universe is expanding.

These superfast rogue stars could have another use as well. When supermassive black holes smash into each other, they generate ripples in space and time called gravitational waves, which reveal the intimate details of how the black holes coalesced. A space telescope called eLISA, scheduled to launch in 2028, is designed to detect gravitational waves. Because the superfast stars are produced when black holes are just about to merge, they would act as a sort of bat signal pointing eLISA to possible gravitational wave sources.

The existence of these stars would be one of the clearest signals that two supermassive black holes are on the verge of merging, says astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Although they may be hard to detect, he adds, they will provide a completely novel tool for learning about the universe.

In about 4 billion years, our own Milky Way Galaxy will crash into the Andromeda Galaxy. The two supermassive black holes at their centers will merge, and stars could be thrown out. Our own sun is a bit too far from the galaxy’s center to get tossed, but one of the ejected stars might harbor a habitable planet. And if humans are still around, Loeb muses, they could potentially hitch a ride on that planet and travel to another galaxy. Who needs warp drive anyway?

Source : wired.com

5 Most Mysterious Objects in the Solar System

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What unsolved mysteries lurk out in the thick blackness of space? Presenting 5 mysterious celestial objects in our Solar System, including Comet ISON, the Black Knight Satellite, 1991 VG, Object X and Planet X / Nibiru.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni0GtB5UugI

Source : Dark5

Cool gases ideal for star formation in galaxies

Horsehead nebula (Click Image to Download)

Astronomers have discovered that a cool cosmic environment is ideal for the creation of new stars.

A surge of warm gas from a nearby galaxy - left over from the devouring of a separate galaxy - eliminates star formation by agitating the available chilled gas, the study says.

Astronomers wanted to understand why galaxies in the local universe fall into two major categories: younger, star-forming spirals (like our own Milky Way) and older ellipticals in which fresh star making has ceased.

The new study observed galaxy NGC 3226, which occupies a transitional middle ground so getting a lead on its star formation was critical.

"We have explored big data archives from NASA and European Space Agency's space telescopes to pull together a picture of an elliptical galaxy that has undergone huge changes in its recent past due to violent collisions with its neighbours," said Philip Appleton, project scientist for the NASA Herschel Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

These collisions are modifying the condition of the gas that resides in it, making it hard for the galaxy to form many stars, he added.

NGC 3226 is relatively close, just 50 million light-years away from Earth.

The data from the three telescopes finds that NGC 3226 has a very low rate of star formation.

It appears that in this case, the material falling into NGC 3226 is heating up as it collides with other galactic gas and dust, quenching star formation instead of fueling it.

As the warm gas flooding NGC 3226 cools to star-forming temperatures, the galaxy should get a second wind, the authors said.

The paper appeared on Astrophysical Journal.

Source : ZEE NEWS

From the Hubble, a new image of a glittering cosmic wonderland with stars as old as the universe itself

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It kind of looks like a snow globe -- or maybe like the glittering ornament atop a massive Christmas tree.

Or like your neighbor's house during December, if you're lucky enough to live next to an aggressive seasonal decorator.

But this image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 92. Messier 92 is a globular cluster, or a spherical group of old stars bound tightly together by gravity. Their density can make globular clusters appear quite bright, and this is one of the brightest in our whole galaxy.

You may even have seen this cosmic bauble before. It's over 25,000 light years away from Earth, but with 330,000 stars packed tightly into it, it's often visible with the naked eye. You can catch its occasional appearances in the constellation Hercules.

Astronomers know from Messier 92's molecular composition that it isn't just bright -- it's also very old. About as old as the universe itself, in fact.

Like this image? You could have been the one to create it. A version of this photo was submitted by Gilles Chapdelaine as part of the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image competition. The Hubble has beamed back so much data that not all of it has been translated into visible images, but the public is welcome to sift through archives to try to find stellar shots worth sharing.Find out more at the Hubble Web site.

Source : Washington post

Ancient Mars May Have Been More Habitable Than We Thought

An artist's impression of what ancient Mars may have looked like, based on geological data (Click Image to Download)

Data collected by the Curiosity Rover suggests Mars once featured a moderate climate capable of fostering lakes of liquid water and even a vast sea, and that this climate could have extended to many parts of the Red Planet.

NASA's Curiosity Rover is currently investigating the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, a section of rock 500 feet (150 meters) high known as the Murray formation. Observations taken by the robotic probe suggests the mountain was produced by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years. The observation strongly suggests that ancient Mars maintained a long-lasting water-friendly climate.

According to NASA scientists, it's an hypothesis that's challenging the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground. It now appears that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but NASA scientists aren't entirely sure how the atmosphere produced the required effects.

A Mountain in a Crater

Scientists have struggled to explain why the mountain sits inside a crater. Last year, a study suggested that the 3.5-mile-tall Mount Sharp formed as strong winds carried dust and sand into the crater in which it rests. It was actually bad news at the time because it suggested that the Gale Crater probably never contained a lake, which was one of the primary reasons why NASA sent Curiosity there in the first place.

But this new analysis has revived an older theory which suggests that Mount Sharp is the eroded remnant of sedimentary layers that once filled the crater — layers of silt that were originally deposited on a massive lakebed.



Cross-bedding seen in the layers of this Martian rock is evidence of movement of water recorded by waves or ripples of loose sediment the water passed over. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Thanks to on-the-ground observations made by Curiosity, NASA scientists have now caught a glimpse of Mount Sharp's lower flanks, which feature hundreds of rock layers. These layers, which alternate between lake, river, and wind deposits, bear witness to the repeated filling and evaporation of a Martian lake. Rivers carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing the sediments at the mouth of the river to form deltas. It was a cycle that repeated over and over again.

Cross-bedding seen in the layers of this Martian rock is evidence of movement of water recorded by waves or ripples of loose sediment the water passed over. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

"The great thing about a lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works," noted Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger in a NASA report. "As Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp, we will have a series of experiments to show patterns in how the atmosphere and the water and the sediments interact. We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time. This is a hypothesis supported by what we have observed so far, providing a framework for testing in the coming year."

After the sediments hardened to rock, the resulting layers of sediment were sculpted over time into a mountainous shape by wind erosion that carved away the material between the crater perimeter and what's now the edge of the mountain.

Greater Potential for Life?

The new discovery has major implications for our understanding of the Red Planet. It suggests Mars was far warmer and wetter in its first two billion years than previous assumed. It also suggests that Mars experienced a vigorous and dynamic global hydrological cycle that involved rains or snows to maintain such moderate conditions.

A pic depicting a lake of water partially filling Mars' Gale Crater, receiving runoff from snow melting on the crater's northern rim. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Source : io9.com

Astronomers Discover Extremely Rare Jet-Emitting Spiral Galaxy

(Click image to Dwonload)

1649+2635 is a spiral galaxy located about 800 million light-years away from our Solar System.



It is only the fourth spiral galaxy known to produce large, powerful jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light.

The first galaxy of this type, 0313-192, was found in 1998 in the galaxy cluster Abell 428.

The second, Speca (J1409-030), was revealed in 2011 by images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Very Large Array.

And the third, J2345-0449, was found earlier this year near the massive galaxy cluster RBS 2042.

Giant jets of superfast particles are powered by supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. Both elliptical and spiral galaxies harbor such black holes, but only J1649+2635 and three other spiral galaxies have been seen to produce large jets. These jets pour outward from the poles of rapidly-rotating disks of material orbiting the black hole.

The problem is that spiral galaxies are not supposed to have such large jets.

“In order to figure out how these jets can be produced by the ‘wrong’ kind of galaxy, we realized we needed to find more of them,” said Dr Minnie Mao from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who is the lead author of the paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (arXiv.org preprint).

Dr Mao and his colleagues, with help from participants of an online project called the Galaxy Zoo, looked at images of galaxies from the visible-light Sloan Digital Sky Survey and classified them as spiral, elliptical, or other types.

Next, they decided to cross-match the SDSS visible-light spirals with galaxies in a catalog that combines data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey and the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty Centimeters survey.

The results of the cross-matching showed that one of the galaxies, J1649+2635, is both a spiral galaxy and has powerful twin radio jets.

“This is the first time that a galaxy was first identified as a spiral, then subsequently found to have large radio jets. It was exciting to make such a rare find,” said team member Dr Ryan Duffin from the University of Virginia and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

J1649+2635 is unusual not only because of its jets, but also because it is the first example of a ‘grand design’ spiral galaxy with a large optical halo (about 313,000 light-years in diameter) surrounding it.

The galaxy harbors an enormous black hole with the mass of 300 million to 700 million times the mass of the Sun.

“This galaxy presents us with many mysteries. We want to know how it became such a strange beast,” Dr Mao said.

Source : Sci-news

Discovery of a Pulsar and Supermassive Black Hole Pairing Could Help Unlock the Enigma of Gravity

Last year, the very rare presence of a pulsar (named SGR J1745-2900) was also detected in the proximity of a supermassive black hole (Sgr A**, made up of millions of solar masses), but there is a combination that is still yet to be discovered: that of a pulsar orbiting a 'normal' black hole; that is, one with a similar mass to that of stars.

The intermittent light emitted by pulsars, the most precise timekeepers in the universe, allows scientists to verify Einstein's theory of relativity, especially when these objects are paired up with another neutron star or white dwarf that interferes with their gravity. However, this theory could be analysed much more effectively if a pulsar with a black hole were found, except in two particular cases, according to researchers from Spain and India.

Pulsars are very dense neutron stars that are the size of a city (their radius approaches ten kilometres), which, like lighthouses for the universe, emit gamma radiation beams or X-rays when they rotate up to hundreds of times per second. These characteristics make them ideal for testing the validity of the theory of general relativity, published by Einstein between 1915 and 1916.

"Pulsars act as very precise timekeepers, such that any deviation in their pulses can be detected," Diego F. Torres, ICREA researcher from the Institute of Space Sciences (IEEC-CSIC), explains to SINC. "If we compare the actual measurements with the corrections to the model that we have to use in order for the predictions to be correct, we can set limits or directly detect the deviation from the base theory."



These deviations can occur if there is a massive object close to the pulsar, such as another neutron star or a white dwarf. A white dwarf can be defined as the stellar remnant left when stars such as our Sun use up all of their nuclear fuel. The binary systems, comprised of a pulsar and a neutron star (including double pulsar systems) or a white dwarf, have been very successfully used to verify the theory of gravity.

Until now scientists had considered the strange pulsar/black hole pairing to be an authentic 'holy grail' for examining gravity, but there exist at least two cases where other pairings can be more effective. This is what is stated in the study that Torres and the physicist Manjari Bagchi, from the International Centre of Theoretical Sciences (India) and now postdoc at the IEEC-CSIC, have published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The work also received an Honourable Mention in the 2014 Essays of Gravitation prize.

The first case occurs when the so-called principle of strong equivalence is violated. This principle of the theory of relativity indicates that the gravitational movement of a body that we test only depends on its position in space-time and not on what it is made up of, which means that the result of any experiment in a free fall laboratory is independent of the speed of the laboratory and where it is found in space and time.

The other possibility is if one considers a potential variation in the gravitational constant that determines the intensity of the gravitational pull between bodies. Its value is G = 6.67384(80) x 10-11 N m2/kg2. Despite it being a constant, it is one of those that is known with the least accuracy, with a precision of only one in 10,000.

In these two specific cases, the pulsar-black hole combination would not be the perfect 'holy grail', but in any case scientists are anxious to find this pair, because it could be used to analyse the majority of deviations. In fact, it is one of the desired objectives of X-ray and gamma ray space telescopes (such as Chandra, NuStar or Swift), as well as that of large radio telescopes that are currently being built, such as the enormous 'Square Kilometre Array' (SKA) in Australia and South Africa.

Source : Daily galaxy

VIDEO : NASA Asteroid Bennu's Journey

ALL CREDIT GOES TO NASA

Bennu's Journey is a 6-minute animated movie about NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, Asteroid Bennu, and the formation of our solar system. Born from the rubble of a violent collision, hurled through space for millions of years, Asteroid Bennu has had a tough life in a rough neighborhood - the early solar system. Bennu's Journey shows what is known and what remains mysterious about the evolution of Bennu and the planets. By retrieving a sample of Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will teach us more about the raw ingredients of the solar system and our own origins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LJBE5xnv14

The Dawn Spacecraft Is Closing in on Dwarf Planet Ceres

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is currently en route to the asteroid belt where it will rendezvous with the region's largest celestial body, Ceres. As a sneak preview, the spacecraft has snapped its best-yet image of the dwarf planet.

The image was snapped at a distance of 740,000 miles (1.2 million km) from Ceres. The dwarf planet features an average diameter of about 590 miles (950 km).

At 9-pixels wide, the image isn't much. It doesn't hold a candle to the one previously snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope:

But just wait until Dawn arrives at Ceres. In early 2015, the spacecraft will begin delivering images at much higher resolution.

Since launching in 2007, Dawn has visited Vesta, a giant protoplanet currently located 104 million miles (168 million kilometers) away from Ceres.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

Source : io9.com

Comet dust found in Antarctica

Researchers have discovered comet dust preserved in the ice and snow of Antarctica, the first time such particles have been found on Earth’s surface. The discovery unlocks a promising new source of this material. The oldest astronomical particles available for study, comet dust can offer clues about how our solar system formed.



A single particle of comet dust collected from Antarctic ice, as seen through an electron microscope

“It’s very exciting for those of us who study these kinds of extraterrestrial materials, because it opens up a whole new way to get access to them,” says Larry Nittler, a planetary scientist in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved with the research. “They’ve found a new source for something that’s very interesting and very rare.”

Until recently, the only way scientists could collect “chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles,” or comet dust, without going to space has been by flying research planes high in the stratosphere. It’s painstaking work: Several hours of flying time typically yield one particle of dust. Working with such small samples significantly limits the kinds of tests and analysis scientists can perform on the material, says study co-author John Bradley, an astromaterials scientist at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology of the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

The researchers found a bigger haul of the particles in Antarctica, he notes. “Two to four more orders of magnitude mass of material is potentially collectible this way,” he says. “I think it could precipitate a paradigm shift in the way these kinds of materials are collected.”

The dust gathered in Antarctica is also cleaner. Right now, scientists gathering comet dust by plane use plates coated with silicon oil to trap the particles like flies in flypaper. That leaves them contaminated with both the oil and the organic compounds later used to clean them, making it especially difficult for scientists who want to study what organic material they might contain.

Comparing the particles found in Antarctica with the ones collected in the stratosphere will help scientists figure out which components of the dust are part of their natural chemical makeup and which come from contaminants, Nittler says.

In 2010, a team of French scientists reported that they had found dense, unusually carbon-rich comet particles in the Antarctic snow, but this is the first time more typical comet dust has been found and its identity confirmed. Scientists had thought the highly porous, extremely fragile particles couldn’t survive on Earth.

To find them, the researchers collected snow and ice from two different sites in Antarctica over several years, starting in 2000. By melting the ice and filtering the water, they collected more than 3000 micrometeorites, tiny particles from space that were 10 microns in diameter or larger. Analyzing the micrometeorites one by one under a stereomicroscope over a period of 5 years yielded more than 40 particles with the characteristics of comet dust. A closer analysis found they were indistinguishable from comet dust collected in the stratosphere, and they also matched samples collected from the coma of a comet by NASA’s Stardust mission in 2006, the researchers report online ahead of print in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

“Our result shows that such fragile particles can be preserved not only in … snow, but also in ice,” says the study’s lead author, Takaaki Noguchi, a meteorite researcher at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan.

A good next step would be to make a more detailed analysis of the organic material in the particles, says meteorite researcher Cécile Engrand of the Centre de Spectrométrie Nucléaire et de Spectrométrie de Masse of Paris-Sud University in Orsay, a co-author of the earlier French research. “The study of these cometary particles will help shed more light on the material that served for planetary formation,” she says. “They are the best witnesses that we have of that period of time.”

What Our Milky Way Galaxy Looked Like 10 Billion Years Ago

Using two supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, a group of researchers headed by Dr Simon Portegies Zwart of Leiden Observatory has simulated the long term evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy over a period of six billion years – from 10 to 4 billion years ago.



(Click Image to Download)

If you took a photo of our Milky Way Galaxy today from a distance, it would show a spiral galaxy with a bright, central bar of dense star populations.

The Sun would be located outside this bar near one of the spiral arms composed of stars and interstellar dust; beyond the visible galaxy would be a dark matter halo.

Now, if you wanted to go back in time and take a video of our Milky Way Galaxy forming, you could go back 10 billion years, but many of the galaxy’s prominent features would not be recognizable.

You would have to wait about 5 billion years to witness the formation of our Solar System. By this point, 4.6 billion years ago, the galaxy looks almost like it does today.

This is the timeline Dr Portegies Zwart and his colleagues are seeing emerge when they use supercomputers to simulate the Milky Way’s evolution.



This image shows what the Milky Way Galaxy looked like ten billion years ago. Image credit: SURFsara / J. Bédorf / NVIDIA.

“We don’t really know how the structure of the galaxy came about. What we realized is we can use the positions, velocities, and masses of stars in three-dimensional space to allow the structure to emerge out of the self-gravity of the system,” Dr Portegies Zwart said.

The challenge of computing galactic structure on a star-by-star basis is, as you might imagine, the sheer number of stars in the Milky Way – at least 100 billion. Therefore, the team needed at least a 100 billion-particle simulation to connect all the dots.

Before the development of the team’s code, known as Bonsai, the largest galaxy simulation topped out around 100 million particles.

The team tested an early version of Bonsai on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Titan – the second-most-powerful supercomputer in the world – to improve scalability in the code.

After scaling Bonsai, the scientists ran Bonsai on the Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center and simulated galaxy formation over 6 billion years with 51 million particles representing the forces of stars and dark matter.

After a successful Piz Daint run, the team returned to Titan to maximize the code’s parallelism. Bonsai achieved nearly 25 petaflops of sustained single-precision, floating point performance on the Titan.

The team aims to compare simulation results to new observations coming from ESA’s Gaia satellite launched in 2013.

“One percent of the particles, or stars, in our simulated galaxy should match Gaia data,” Dr Portegies Zwart said.

Source : sci-news

Stephen Hawking: Artificial Intelligence could spell end of human race

World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC he believes future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to eradicate mankind.

The Cambridge professor, who relies on a form of artificial intelligence to communicate, said if technology could match human capabilities “it would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

He also said that due to biological limitations, there would be no way humans could match the speed of development of technology.

“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded,” he said.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neuron disease, and uses AI technology as part of a system which senses how he thinks and predicts which words he will use next.

His bleak forecast came in response to questions about updates to his AI communication systems.

His latest upgrade, developed by Intel Corporation over the past three years, will allow the professor to write up to 10 times faster and communicate more effectively with friends, family and students.



“With the improvements made, I am now able to write much faster, and it means that I can continue to give lectures, write papers and books and, of course, speak with my family and friends more easily.”

“This new system is life changing for me, and I hope it will serve me well for the next 20 years,” he said.

Other technology specialists do not share Hawking’s grim outlook. Rollo Carpenter, creator of Cleverbot, said he believes mankind will maintain control over technology.

“I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realized,” he said.

Carpenter’s software responds to stimulation from conversations with actual humans, and has the capability to learn from its previous interactions.

Cleverbot has scored highly in the ‘Turing test’, which is designed to examine how closely machines can replicate human behavior.

“We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” Carpenter added.

Technology and a rise in the capabilities of AI are already affecting workplaces nationwide, as many employers opt to invest in a machine, rather than hiring people.

In November, a study from the University of Oxford suggested that a third of UK jobs could be replaced by machines over the next two decades.

Low-paid jobs featuring repetitive tasks are most likely to be superseded by technology, with clerical and support service jobs most at risk.

The study further found that jobs with a salary under £30,000 are almost five times more likely to be replaced than jobs over £100,000.

Source : RT

Monster Telescope Will be World's Largest Cosmic Eye

An artist's illustration depicts the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in its enclosure. It eventually will be the world’s largest "eye on the sky." (Click Image to Download)

The world's largest telescope has gotten its official construction go-ahead, keeping the enormous instrument on track to start observing the heavens in 2024.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile's Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday (Dec. 4).

The current construction approval applies only to Phase 1; contracts for this work will be awarded in late 2015. The Phase 2 components will be approved as more funding becomes available, ESO officials said.

"The funds that are now committed will allow the construction of a fully working E-ELT that will be the most powerful of all the extremely large telescope projects currently planned, with superior light-collecting area and instrumentation," de Zeeuw said. "It will allow the initial characterization of Earth-mass exoplanets, the study of the resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies as well as ultra-sensitive observations of the deep universe."

 the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) — which, not surprisingly, will boast a light-collecting surface 30 m, or 98 feet, wide — is slated to start observing from Hawaii's Mauna Kea in 2022. Like E-ELT, TMT's primary mirror will be composed of hundreds of relatively small segments.

All three megascopes should help researchers tackle some of the biggest questions in astronomy, including the nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe.

Source : Discovery.com

DON'T FORGET TO SEE NASA 'S 21th CENTURY SPACE CAPSULE !

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Orion illustration (Click Image to Download)

NASA's newest capsule, designed to take astronauts deeper into space than ever before, is ready to launch to space for the first time on Thursday (Dec. 4).

The space agency's new Orion space capsule is scheduled to fly to orbit on an unmanned test flight at 7:05 a.m. EST (1205 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 37 here in Cape Canaveral, Florida Thursday before being recovered in the Pacific Ocean 4.5 hours later. Orion is currently positioned on top of the United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket that will deliver it into space on its ambitious test flight, and everything is looking good for launch day.

ORION FLIGHT TEST ANIMATED VIDEO BY NASA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW9ZqQ7Siho&feature=youtu.be

Orion — which was built for NASA by Lockheed Martin — will orbit Earth twice during its test flight, called Exploration Test Flight-1 (EFT-1). On its second orbit, the spacecraft will climb about 3,600 miles (5,793 kilometers) above Earth's surface, farther than any spacecraft made for humans has flown in more than 40 years.

You can watch the historic Orion flight live on Space.com via NASA TV Thursday at 4:30 a.m. EST (0930 GMT).

NASA plans to use the Orion capsule as part of a system that could bring humans to Mars or an asteroid towed into orbit around the moon for the first time.

Source : Space.com

GSAT-16 Ready for Launch on December 5: ISRO

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The multi-band communication satellite GSAT-16 on-board Arianespace's rocket will be launched on December 5 from the spaceport of Kourou, French Guiana, ISRO said today.

The launch is scheduled for early hours of Friday at 02:08 am (IST), ISRO said on its Facebook page.

The satellite with a lift-off mass of 3181.6 kg will be carrying C-band and Ku-band transponders to further augment communication services across - VSAT (very small aperture
terminal) services, TV services and emergency communications - the country.

The spacecraft would be joined by its co-passenger DIRECTV-14, which was built by SSL (Space Systems/Loral) for operator DIRECTV to provide direct-to-home television
broadcasts across the US.

Arianespace on its website said, "Arianespace's sixth heavy-lift mission of 2014 has been given the go-ahead for Thursday's (Friday in India) liftoff from the Spaceport on a dual-passenger Ariane 5 flight carrying the DIRECTV-14 and GSAT-16 satellites."

After GSAT-16's injection into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), ISRO's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan takes control of the satellite and performs the initial orbit raising manoeuvres using the satellite's on-board Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM), finally placing it in the vicinity of circular Geostationary Orbit.

After this, the deployment of appendages such as the solar panels, antennas and three axis stabilisation of the satellite will be performed. GSAT-16 will be positioned at 55 degree East
longitude in the Geostationary orbit and co-located with GSAT-8, IRNSS-1A and IRNSS-1B satellites.

GSAT-16 will replace INSAT-3E, which expired a little prematurely in April.

Source : NDTV

Hayabusa 2 launches on audacious asteroid adventure

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Japan’s Hayabusa 2 asteroid mission blasts off from Tanegashima Space Center aboard an H-2A rocket. Credit: JAXA

A Japanese H-2A launcher blasted off from an idyllic island spaceport Tuesday, dispatching a daring six-year expedition to bring a piece of an asteroid back to Earth.

The Hayabusa 2 mission’s roundtrip voyage began at 0422 GMT Wednesday (11:22 p.m. EST Tuesday) with a thunderous ascent from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

The 1,300-pound spacecraft rode a hydrogen-fueled H-2A rocket through clouds hanging over the seaside spaceport, leaving a twisting column of exhaust in its wake before disappearing hundreds of miles over the Pacific Ocean.

The rocket’s upper stage engine fired two times to accelerate Hayabusa 2 on a speedy departure fast enough to break free of the pull of Earth’s gravity.

The robotic explorer, packed with four stowaway landers to be deployed to the asteroid’s surface, separated from the H-2A rocket at 0609 GMT (1:09 a.m. EST). Applause could be heard in a live webcast of the launch provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which manages the Hayabusa 2 mission.

The launch marked the opening chapter in the most ambitious mission to an asteroid ever attempted. The roundtrip journey will take six years to complete, and Hayabusa 2 promises to expand scientists’ understanding of how asteroids may have seeded Earth with water and organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

Hayabusa 2 is heading for asteroid 1999 JU3, a carbon-rich world just 900 meters — about 3,000 feet — across with a tenuous gravity field 60,000 times weaker than Earth’s.

The mission follows up on the achievements of Japan’s Hayabusa 1 probe, which made the first roundtrip flight to an asteroid from 2003 to 2010. The first Hayabusa mission encountered several crippling problems, including a fuel leak, failures in its pointing system, and a glitch with the craft’s sample collection system.

Despite the challenges, the spacecraft returned to Earth in 2010 — a few years late and carrying a fraction of the asteroid specimens intended. But Japanese scientists found microscopic samples from asteroid Itokawa — Hayabusa 1’s research subject — inside the probe’s landing vehicle.

The success vaulted Japan into the big leagues of solar system exploration.

“Many scientific milestones have been achieved from asteroid observations and samples from the asteroid Itokawa,” said Tetsuo Tanaka, associate director general of JAXA’s Lunar and Planetary Exploration Program Group. “Going to a far-off asteroid and returning with samples from it for the first time, these are tremendous technological challenges and our success in meeting them has brought worldwide admiration.”

“For the Hayabusa 2 project, Japan’s development of its own deep space exploration technology aims to lead the world in that technical field,” Tanaka said. “The Hayabusa 2 project sets new challenges for Japan’s unique technologies. How we face those challenges and how we use (the) project results will surely bring new impacts to the world.”



Artist’s concept of the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft at asteroid 1999 JU3. Credit: JAXA