David Reneke

Dave Reneke's

'WORLD of SPACE and ASTRONOMY'

Weird, Wild & Breaking News Stories in Space and Astronomy from around the World 24/7 delivered free every week with regular updates as they happen.

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Here’s a selection of Astronomy/Space related stories you may find interesting. Be sure to sign up for your own copy of Astro Space News. I absolutely do not disclose your address to anyone! There is no cost and no obligation for this service. Anyone can subscribe by completing the opt in form just over there on the right … see it, do it now! We work 24/7/365 to report the most relevant ‘Astro-Space’ news back to you … virtually as it breaks. Bookmark this page and check back regularly.

For The Media

If you are interested, an interview with astronomer, writer, educator and public lecturer representing Australasian Science Magazine and Editor of Astro Space News, Dave Reneke(Astro-Dave) can be arranged by contacting Dave by Phone/Fax(02) 65 85 2260 Mobile: 0400 636 363 or email Dave for an instant reply to davereneke@gmail.com. David is well experienced talking to the media and presents information in an easy to understand, up to date and informative manner. Interviews can be on any subject, tailored to your requirements.

                                                                                        AUSTRALASIAN SCIENCE MAGAZINE

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Australasian Science is dedicated to Australian and New Zealand science, providing a unique local perspective on scientific developments and issues that other science magazines can’t match. Check out the latest issue NOW: http://www.australasianscience.com.au/

For school & institution rates please contact Control Publications on 03 9500 0015. Fax: (03) 9500 0255 Email science@control.com.au

LETTERS TO DAVE

Your letters are welcome on any subject covered by the scope of this newsletter or any aspect of astronomy/space in general. All letters requesting help or advice will be answered personally by me.

                ______________________________________________

PLEASE NOTE:

Astro-Space News is now getting upwards of 3-4 dozen 'Letters to the Editor' each week so unfortunately I can only print a select number here on these pages. Apologies.

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Hi David

Wow that was quick. Thanks a lot for the info  Ok.. I am new to your list and nice to be here. Question: Will you be letting us know about events in the night skies? For example, I know there is a meteor shower at the end of this month. The only sites I have found are Northern Hemisphere. Not much good to us down under. Will you be letting us know the best days and times etc and for other such events? If this is already on your site and I'm just to stupid to find it (trust me this is common for me) can you tell me where to find it? Thanks for your time. Happy Star Gazing. Nothing like being outside with the stars and hot chocolate.

Gaynor

Hi Gaynor, Nic to hear from you and don’t be too hard on your self, OK. Astronomy isn’t something one can pick up in a few short weeks, even years so take it easy and with my help we’ll explore some pretty cool celestial real-estate. Yes, I have a full list of what’s happening in the night skies. It’s in my weekly newsletter … about halfway down. If you haven’t subscribed do it now OK. It’s free. See the little figure at top right of any page.

Good luck

Hi Dave,

Dave, I have a scan from a news letter (which I have attached) that came home from school with my stepson. 

I disputed the 'fact'. What do you think ? Rod S. ( The newsletter states as a 'fact' that earth is the heaviest planet in the solar system)

OH DEAR – Sometimes schools find material from some obscure internet source and reprint these claims, kids believe it and before long it's another adult with a mixed up view of astronomy.

NOT CORRECT. Jupiter, with a mass 318 times that of the Earth is by far the 'heaviest'. It will hold planet earth 1300 times! In fact, all the planets in the solar system would fit inside Jupiter, with room to spare! I don't blame teachers for making a mistake like this, they have so little information to work with. Dave

Hello Dave,

On ABC Riverland radio on Monday, you mentioned a report by priests/friars/monks of an apparent UFO event, in the early days of Australia I think.Can you send me link to that article please? I have been looking to no avail…. Thanks,Adrian W.

Hi Afdrian

Nice to hear from you. No, not in Australia. It was a report I heard of years ago… some monks in an abbey in England in the 11th -12th century were preparing for /'evensong' and dinner when they reported in their church journal seeing a "silver disc" in the sky. It was apparently found in recent times after renovations to the church were undertaken and workmen found the journal.We have a report in Aust that go to the 1860's.Hope that helps

Dave 
 

Hi Dave,

Heard you the other night on ABC with Trevor Chappell, about 4 in the morning, I dare say in your game you’d be on permanent night shift! A good mate of mine from Atherton, Jim Fitzgerald (himself a handy presenter on the heavens above) put me onto you and I got to say I love your work. Too often we hear scientific types with zero personality, so it’s a nice change to hear someone clued up and ‘normal’! We do a night boat cruise in Kakadu mainly looking for crocs, birds and snakes but we also run with no roof canopy so we can check out our night sky and because we’re out bush, we have zero pollution! It’s great just seeing the Sothern Cross etc. but when the ISS flashes by (how fast and high is it going?) people are amazed! Keep up the great work! Cheers for now, 

Andy Ralph. Coordinator. KAKADU CULTURE CAMP Website: http://kakaduculturecamp.com

Hi Andy

Great to read your email and thanks very much mate for the kind words. I really do appreciate that! Boy, you are in a place I’ve always wanted to go to… what a great tour service you provide. I bet it gets a top reaction. I keep thinking of how much I’d love to do a few astro skytours and lectures in a drak sky place like this. Reckon it would be a real buzz. Keep in touch from time to time.  Good luck. 

Hi Dave,

Thanks a lot for accepting my friend request on your bfacebook pages!  I'm really happy to have contacts with people who excel in the fields I love! I'm very pleased to meet you! Thanks so much for everything you do. Katia B.

My pleasure Katie. It's good to have you along. Anyone who enjoys astronomy is a friend of mine for sure. All the best for now.

Dave

Dave

I know I'd love Tekapo. I lived on the coast near Timaru. <sighs> Its always the $$$ thing though Dave. But I am envious. I often looked up at Mt John when I was visiting Tekapo and never actually went up and had a look. Question for you Dave. Black holes. They suck things in them right ?? Which, if I understand correctly, then get squished to a very small particle ? Anyway, whats on the other side of a black hole ?? Is it like a worm hole to another dimension. Keep up the good work Dave. I simply love reading your website'.

Rod S.

Hi Rod 

Thanks again for the kind words.The other side of a black hole is a big puzzle mate, no one knows for sure if it is possible to move through a black hole BUT scientists are toying with the idea that inside a black hole may be a throat of 'negative energy' that might hold it open enough for soemone or something to go through. You may come out somewhen else!! or in a different part of the Universe. What we DO know is that inside a black hole you would be squashed into the singularity… a point if infinite density where nothing survives. So, it may never be possible to take a 'Ellie Arroway' ride through a B/H

Dave

Dave

(Referring to this week's story on the most massive star found) By weighing in at apparently double the currently accepted limit on stellar mass, would you consider these startling discoveries surrounding R136a1 to be game-changing? or just minor aberrations, more easily melded into existing star classification scales?

David E.

Certainly game changing but not minor in scale… It shows us the Universe can throw up ANY size object it likes, whether we agree with it or not. The problem with this discovery is, are we looking perhaps at a massive, closely bound 'star cluster' … making it appear to look like ONE sun from our distant perspective? Let me explain it this way: A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!" To which the Universe replied, " That fact implies, in me, NO sense of obligation."

Dave

           What is the difference between a morning star and an evening star? 

What many people call the morning or evening star is actually a planet, usually Venus but just sometimes people see Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars.  

When one of them appears close to the Sun as viewed from Earth, sunset or sunrise watchers are treated to starlike brilliance of one of our planetary neighbours, which may be brighter than any of the true stars in the night sky. The distinction between "morning" and "evening" simply refers to the time at which the planet is visible.

Due to the orbital motion of planets around the Sun, a planet might be a "morning star" at one time of the year, and then later, as its orbit carries it behind and then to the other side of the Sun, it appears as an "evening star."

            Last week's question: 

What was the first thing NASA told Neil Armstrong and Buzz a Aldrin to do, once they set foot on the Moon… the very first thing! What was it.? Answer: To pick up soil samples and rocks in case the mission had to be aborted. Winner: Paul Hannah. Paul, send me your address so we can get your prize off to you.

Try your hand at this week's  teaser: 

Over 800 satellites now orbit the Earth. Which is the largest?.

Email in your answers to davereneke@gmail.com          Also at my FaceBook FanPage' . www.facebook.com/AstroDave

ANNOUNCING

TASCO TELESCOPES SPONSORSHIP & PROMOTION

I'm proud to announce that I've gained the support and sponsorship of Australia's leading telescope manufacturer TASCO. From now on I'll be actively promoting TASCO to schools, teachers, in our night astronomy shows, on my webpage, in all the newspaper columns I write and where applicable, on radio.

The company have graciously donated to my program the latest 150 mm BK15012EQ6 achromatic refractor telescope and accessories. You'll see and hear a lot more about TASCO telescopes and accessories in Astro-Space News. I will be retailing telescopes from this site as well.

THIS WEEK'S TOP STORIES

The Biggest Star Ever Found In The Universe!

Artistic representation of a giant star, similar in size to what R136a1 would look like.

They are the most colossal stars ever seen and live short, bright, lives in faraway reaches of space before exploding in a blaze of glory. One of the stars, now tagged R136a1, is estimated to weigh 265 times more than the sun and to shine millions of times more brightly. Were it to replace our own star, the intensity of its rays would sterilise the Earth leaving it lifeless.

British astronomers spotted the stars, more massive than any others on record, using the Very Large Telescope, an aptly named observatory on a mountain top in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. The discovery of the stellar giants has prompted astronomers to scrap the upper limits they set on star formation which suggested it was almost impossible for a star to grow to more than 150 times the mass of the sun. The team, led by Paul Crowther, an astrophysicist at Sheffield University, searched two regions of space for massive stars. The first region, known as NGC 3603, is a stellar nursery 22,000 light-years away in a region of the Milky Way called the Carina spiral arm.

The second target, RMC 136a, is a cloud of gas and dust, 165,000 light-years away in the Tarantula nebula of our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The astronomers were able to distinguish individual stars using exquisitely sensitive infra-red instruments on the telescope, and take measurements of their brightness and mass. At least three stars examined in the first region of space weighed in at about 150 times the mass of the sun. The record-breaking star, R136a1, was found in the second region. When born, the star could have been a staggering 320 times more massive than the sun. Several of the stars were found to have surface temperatures above 40,000C, which is more than seven times hotter than the sun.

"These stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther. "Being a little over a million years old, the most extreme star R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss programme, shedding a fifth of its initial mass over that time. Owing to the rarity of these monsters I think it unlikely this new record will be broken any time soon." If R136a1 were in our own solar system it would outshine the sun as much as the sun outshines the full moon, the scientists said. The mass of the star is so great that it would reduce the length of an Earth year – the time it takes to circle the star – to just three weeks. "It would [also] bathe Earth in incredibly intense ultraviolet radiation, rendering life on our planet impossible," said Raphael Hirschi, a member of the team at Keele University.

While the latest crop of stars are the most massive and heaviest ever spotted, they are not the largest. The biggest star in the group, R136a1, is roughly 30 times as wide as the sun. Another kind of star, known as a super red giant, can grow to many hundreds of times that size – though is considerably lighter, at only 10 times the mass of the sun. It is unlikely that any "alien" planets circle the massive stars that Crowther's team has studied. Radiation from the stars would obliterate any nearby cosmic material that could become compact enough to be a planet. Even if some remained, planets would take longer to form than the entire lifespan of a massive star.

Crowther said: "We don't really know what happens when these massive stars reach the end of their lives. When some big stars die, their cores implode and they become neutron stars or black holes, but these might be different. They might blow up in a spectacular supernova and leave no remnants behind at all." The explosions could fling the weight of 10 suns worth of iron into space. The team's observations reveal what the early universe might have looked like, when many of the first stars to be born might have been cosmic monsters like R136a1.

Before the latest discovery, the most massive star known was the peony nebula star, which, at about 175 times the mass of the sun, could still hold the record for our own galaxy. Details of the discovery.. NEWSY.COM .. R136a1 a newly discovered giant star  http://www.newsy.com/videos/new-massive-star-discovered.

Guardian UK and Newsy.Com

MORE ASTRO SPACE NEWS

Put Your Own Satellite Into Orbit With $8,000 Kit

Attention wannabe supervillains: Putting your own, personal satellite into orbit is not such a far-fetched idea after all. Interorbital Systems, which makes rockets and spacecraft, created a kit last year that lets almost anyone with a passion for electronics and space build a satellite. The $8,000 kit includes the price of the launch.

The company is now ready to launch its first sub-orbital test flights in California next month. “$8,000? That’s just the price of a cool midlife crisis,” says Alex “Sandy” Antunes, who bought one of the kits for a project that will launch on one of earliest flights. “You could buy a motorcycle or you could launch a satellite. What would you rather do?”

The hexadecagon-shaped personal satellite, called TubeSat, weighs about 1.65 pounds and is a little larger than a rectangular Kleenex box. TubeSats will be placed in self-decaying orbits 192 miles above the earth’s surface. Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver. After operating for a few months, TubeSat will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

“It is a pico satellite that can be a very low-cost space-based platform for experimentation or equipment testing,” says Randa Milliron, CEO and founder of Interorbital Systems. About 20 kits have been sold and 14 more are in the process of being handed over to customers, says Milliron. Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door. Several companies are developing space products that range from orbiting payloads to lunar landers. The burgeoning private space industry has even spawned companies planning space hotels. And last month, SpaceX, a company founded by Tesla and PayPal’s Elon Musk, successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into orbit.

TubeSat is different because it lets and hobbyist engineers and astronomers build the satellite themselves. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, a printed circuit board, Gerber files (essentially blueprints), electronic components, solar cells, batteries, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer and some programming tools. “It’s not as easy as building a little car model from a hobby shop, but it is doable with a soldering iron and a little practice,” says Antunes. “A single person in their basement can build this satellite.”

A fully built satellite must be returned to Interorbital Systems, which will launch it into space. TubeSat could be used for applications such as biological experiments, testing of electronic components in space, or video imaging from space. It doesn’t always have to be a scientific experiment. Antunes’ project, called Project Calliope, will use magnetic, thermal and light sensors to detect information in the ionosphere and transmit the data back to earth in the form of sound. That sound is almost like space music, he says.

“Just like people have taken ambient sound and used it in music, artists can take this and create something out of it.” says Antunes. Antunes, who got his personal satellite kit a few months ago, says the equipment for Project Calliope is almost ready but he still has to put together the kit. “I need a DIY person to make the boards, get the extra electronics, add the instruments and hook everything together,” he says. “The project management takes much longer than the technology.”

Once the TubeSat satellite is ready, Antunes hopes to start testing the equipment for his Project Calliope to ensure the electronics can withstand the rigors of space, including the shaking during launch.“A lot of off-the-shelf electronics does well in space because you don’t have to worry about about water or weather,” says Antunes. “But it still has to be tested for vacuum, shielded from the sun and the cold.” And after all, if the launch fails, Antunes isn’t worried. Interorbital Systems has promised him a free second attempt.

Wired.Com

Russia Scoffs At NASA Plans To Send Astronauts To Asteroid And Mars By 2015

U.S. NASA does not have capacities to build an asteroid mission spacecraft by 2015, the head of Roscosmos' manned flights department, Alexei Krasnov, said in the wake of NASA's announcement to create the spacecraft for deep space missions.
On July 15, NASA unveiled its plans to send astronauts to an asteroid and to Mars no later than 2015.

Earlier in April, U.S. President Barack Obama said in his speech on U.S space industry development that the astronauts would likely to fly to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the mid-2030s, but NASA was ready to boost the process saying the development of the spacecraft for manned deep space missions should be started as early as 2015.

"It is unreal by 2015," Krasnov said. "[They] probably won't be able to any sooner than by 2023-2025. They do not have the necessary spacecraft, and we will be ready with the project by 2018-2020" Laying out his plans, President Obama committed NASA to a series of development milestones he said would lead to new spacecraft for astronauts to ride to the International Space Station, a modified Orion capsule developed as an emergency return spacecraft, and a powerful new rocket. He also promised a host of new technologies that would protect space travelers from radiation and other unique hazards. 

"Early in the next decade, a set of crewed flights will test and prove the systems required for exploration beyond low Earth orbit," the president said. "And by 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it." 

Space Travel/Astrobiology

Australian Laser System To Track Space Junk

An Australian company last Tuesday said it had developed a laser tracking system that will stop chunks of space debris colliding with spacecraft and satellites in the Earth's orbit. Electric Optic Systems said lasers fired from the ground would locate and track debris as small as 10 centimetres (four inches) across, protecting astronauts and satellites.

"We can track them to very high precision so that we can predict whether there are going to be collisions with other objects or not," Craig Smith, the company's CEO said.  mith said the technology improved upon existing radar systems because it could detect tiny objects, left behind by disused rockets and satellites, which can still devastate hardware because they are travelling at ultra-high speeds. 

He said there were an estimated 200,000 objects measuring less than one centimetre floating in orbit, with another 500,000 of a centimetre or larger. "It ranges from bus-size bits of rocket bodies all the way down to a little half-a-millimetre fleck of paint," Smith said from the company's headquarters in Canberra.

"The trouble is that they're all travelling at about 30,000 kilometres (19,000 miles) an hour. So unless you're in the same orbit you have hyper-velocity impacts, which can be devastating to a satellite." Electric Optic Systems said it had developed the technology thanks to a four million dollar (3.5 million US) grant from the Australian government. Smith said the company has received interest in the lasers, developed at Canberra's Mount Stromlo Observatory, from around the world.

But he said the system would work best with a network of tracking stations placed at strategic points around the globe. "A network is better than a single station of your own because — particularly in lower earth orbit — things are not always coming over your head when you want them to be," said Smith.

The problem of space debris and its possible dangers must be addressed by all nations of the world, an international foundation has told the United Nations. The Secure World Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to space sustainability, told the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space that developing a legal framework and protocol to address this problem is vital. 

"In order to keep the ability to work in space, we need to reduce as much as possible the amount of debris that we put in orbit," Secure World Foundation Executive Director Ray Williamson said. A collision between an American communications satellite and a defunct Soviet spacecraft in 2009 added more than a thousand pieces of trackable debris to orbit, Williams said, and illustrated the seriousness of the problem.

The collision illustrated the necessity of creating programs to reduce junk in space and keep track of existing debris to avoid further accidents, Williamson said. But there must be international agreements on protocol first, he said. "The U.S. wouldn't like it a bit if China were to take out an old U.S. satellite and bring it back," Williamson said. "And they wouldn't like it if we took one of theirs and brought it back. We need to work on protocol. This makes things very complicated."

SpaceMart

Reader Photo Sent In – Can You Identify This Object?

Hi Dave

I took this photo some time back, and when we were looking through them we noticed this anomaly. There is a photo taken exactly 4 seconds later and the object is not visible. Whatever it is it was really moving. There was no noise like an aircraft. Can you help identify this Unidentified Flying Object? Kind regards, Ray S.

Hi Ray

Thanks for the mail and the interesting photo.

Best guess, probably a plane in unusual light conditions. You can see it's illuminated by the Sun from underneath and what appears to be a 'jet trail' behind it.

Leftt: An extreme blow up of the 'UFO'        

I'll post it on my newsletter to see if anyone else can come up with a better explanation if that's OK with you. I'll also pass it on to photographic experts I know for analysis. I'll retain the original 6MB image for future reference or future examination by technically trained individuals. 

Well known astro-photographer Shevill Mathers (Tasmania) comments: "They do not say that they actually saw the object in real time naked eye, only they picked it up when looking at pics later!!!. It is possible that it is an artifact withing the camera itself, rather than in they sky?? Given this lack of real information, I cannot make any useful comments. Has it been reported to the UFO groups, they would need date & time plus location etc. in the event that it was an actual object in the sky which may have been seen by others." A follow up critique from Shevill:  "Another possibility is a reflection off the detector surface from the intense sunlight shining straight into the camera. I get this effect most of the time with bright Moon shots in a dark sky, readily seen, I get emails about these secondary reflection all the time. Just a possibility. The image has a dark & light end, similar to the horizon line under the sun??"

 ** (Any further feedback on this photo would be appreciated. Dave) Email me from this page. Results published next week.

WISE Mission Completes All-sky Infrared Survey

If you take a lot of digital pictures, you're probably familiar with the frustration of keeping track of dozens of files, and always running out of hard drive space to store them. Well, the scientists and engineers on NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have no pity for you. Their spacecraft just finished photographing the entire sky in exquisite detail: a total of 1.3 million photos.

"The eyes of WISE have not blinked since launch," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Both our telescope and spacecraft have performed flawlessly and have imaged every corner of our universe, just as we planned."

WISE surveys the sky in strips as it orbits the earth. It takes six months of constant observing to map the entire sky. By pointing at every part of the sky, astronomical surveys deliver excellent data covering both well-known objects and those that have never been seen before.

"WISE is filling in the blanks on the infrared properties of everything in the universe from nearby asteroids to distant quasars," said Peter Eisenhardt of JPL, project scientist for WISE. "But the most exciting discoveries may well be objects we haven't yet imagined exist." One example of a well-known object seen in new light by WISE is the Pleiades cluster: a group of young blue stars shrouded by dust that the cluster is currently passing through. In WISE's false-color infrared vision, the hot stars look blue but the cooler dust clouds give off longer wavelengths of infrared light, causing them to glow in shades of yellow and green.

The WISE survey is particularly significant because such a wide range of objects in the universe are visible in infrared light. Giant molecular clouds glow in infrared light, as do brown dwarfs – objects that are bigger than planets but smaller than true stars. WISE can also see ultra-bright, extremely distant galaxies whose visible light has been stretched into the infrared by the expansion of the universe during its multi-billion-year journey.

The recently completed WISE survey also observed 100,000 asteroids in our solar system, many of which had never been seen before. 90 of the newly discovered asteroids are near-earth objects, whose orbits cross our own, making them potentially dangerous but also potential targets for future mission. You might think that 1.3 million pictures would be plenty, but WISE will keep mapping the sky for another three months, covering half of the sky again and allowing astronomers to search for changes.

The mission will end when the spacecraft's solid hydrogen coolant finally runs out and the infrared detectors warm up (they don't work as well when they are warm enough to emit the same wavelengths of infrared light that they are meant to detect). But even as the telescope warms up, the astronomers on the WISE team will just be getting warmed up too. With nearly two million images, they will be busy making new discoveries for years to come.

Universe Today

Mars Sample return Mission Could Start In  2018

 Space officials in the United States and Europe are planning an ambitious dual-rover mission that could start collecting Martian soil samples in 2018 to be picked up by a subsequent mission and returned to Earth in the 2020s.

Artist's concept of the ExoMars rover. Credit: ESA

The costly mission would blast off on an Atlas 5 rocket in 2018 and land two rovers on Mars with a single "sky crane" descent system that will be tested for the first time at the Red Planet in August 2012.

It would be the first time two rovers will be delivered to the same landing site on Mars. The European Space Agency's ExoMars rover and a $2 billion NASA Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher mission are the leading candidates for the tandem project.

ExoMars carries a drill to burrow into the Mars subsurface and retrieve samples from as deep as six feet underground. Some of that soil could be placed inside a high-tech storage device on NASA's rover for eventual return to Earth, according to Doug McCuistion, head of the agency's Mars exploration program. "There may be a possibility to actually cache subsurface samples that the ExoMars drill collects, which had not been in our plans before," McCuistion said in an interview last week.

Marcello Coradini, ESA's coordinator for solar system missions, confirmed the studies of placing underground samples into a NASA cache for later retrieval. "We're hoping that what we do with our rover is actually collect the samples that we will then go back in the 2020s to retrieve in the Mars sample return campaign," McCuistion said. A simple sample cache was originally planned for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory launching next year, but officials removed the payload due to scientific and technical concerns, according to McCuistion.

Spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars can only launch about every 26 months, limiting sample return options. Scientists agree the best strategy is to spread the effort across three missions to spread the high cost of the endeavor among several years. "By breaking it up into those three pieces, you can sort of thread the costs and spread some of the risks over multiple missions and make the overall program both more robust and more affordable," said Steve Squyres, a Cornell University researcher leading an independent review of potential NASA science missions. 

Called the decadal survey, the review will rank the scientific value of 28 proposed missions for the next 10 years. The ultimate timing of a sample return campaign will boil down to the budget of both NASA and ESA, McCuistion said.

SpaceflightNow

Hyperfast Star Was Booted from Milky Way

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star.

This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It is blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) an hour, three times faster than our Sun's orbital velocity in the Milky Way.

Hubble observations confirm that the stellar speedster hails from the Milky Way's core, settling some confusion over where it originally called home. Most of the roughly 16 known hypervelocity stars, all discovered since 2005, are thought to be exiles from the heart of our galaxy. But this Hubble result is the first direct observation linking a high-flying star to a galactic center origin.

"Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star comes from by measuring the star's direction of motion on the sky. Its motion points directly from the Milky Way center," says astronomer Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., a member of the Hubble team that observed the star. "These exiled stars are rare in the Milky Way's population of 100 billion stars. For every 100 million stars in the galaxy lurks one hypervelocity star."

The movements of these unbound stars could reveal the shape of the dark matter distribution surrounding our galaxy. "Studying these stars could provide more clues about the nature of some of the universe's unseen mass, and it could help astronomers better understand how galaxies form," says team leader Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "Dark matter's gravitational pull is measured by the shape of the hyperfast stars' trajectories out of the Milky Way."

The stellar outcast is already cruising in the Milky Way's distant outskirts, high above the galaxy's disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. By comparison, the diameter of the Milky Way's disk is approximately 100,000 light-years. Using Hubble to measure the runaway star's direction of motion and determine the Milky Way's core as its starting point, Brown and Gnedin's team calculated how fast the star had to have been ejected to reach its current location.

"The star is traveling at an absurd velocity, twice as much as the star needs to escape the galaxy's gravitational field," explains Brown, a hypervelocity star hunter who found the first unbound star in 2005. "There is no star that travels that quickly under normal circumstances — something exotic has to happen." There's another twist to this story. Based on the speed and position of HE 0437-5439, the star would have to be 100 million years old to have journeyed from the Milky Way's core.

Yet its mass — nine times that of our Sun — and blue color mean that it should have burned out after only 20 million years — far shorter than the transit time it took to get to its current location. The most likely explanation for the star's blue color and extreme speed is that it was part of a triple-star system that was involved in a gravitational billiard-ball game with the galaxy's monster black hole. This concept for imparting an escape velocity on stars was first proposed in 1988. The theory predicted that the Milky Way's black hole should eject a star about once every 100,000 years.

SpaceRef.Com

Entrepreneurs Enter 'Space Race'

At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like.

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder, told Kenneth Chang of The New York Times. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station. If this business plan unfolds as it is written — the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already — Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after, providing ample business for the private companies that the Obama administration would like to finance for the transportation of astronauts into orbit — the so-called commercial crew initiative.

President Obama’s budget proposal for 2011 calls for investing $6 billion over five years for probably two or more companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying people into space. Then, instead of operating its own systems, like the space shuttles, NASA would buy rides for its astronauts on these commercial space taxis.

NY Times

Long-Lost Soviet Moon Robot Comes to Life: Beams Laser Back to Earth

A Soviet robot lost on the dusty plains of the Moon for the past 40 years was found again, and it is returned surprisingly strong laser pulses to Earth. 

"We shone a laser on Lunokhod 1's position, and we were stunned by the power of the reflection," said Tom Murphy of UC San Diego, who leads the research team that's putting the old robot back to work. "Lunokhod 1 is talking to us loudly and clearly."

An almost forgotten bit of history from the Apollo-era space race, Lunokhod 1 was one of the greatest successes of the old Soviet lunar exploration program. In 1970, Time magazine described the robot's historic landing: "Three hours after reaching the Moon aboard the latest unmanned Russian Moon probe, Luna 17, Lunokhod I (literally "moonwalker") lumbered down one of two ramps extended by the mother ship and moved forward … thus taking the first giant step for robotkind on another celestial body."

The remote-controlled Lunokhod-1 rover traveled almost seven miles during its 11 month lunar tour, relaying thousands of TV images and hundreds of high-resolution panoramas of the Moon back to Earth, and sampled and analyzed lunar soil at 500 locations before it was lost – until last month when NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found it again.  On April 22, Murphy and his team sent pulses of laser light from the 3.5 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, zeroing in on the target coordinates provided by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. A laser retroreflector on Lunokhod 1 intercepted the pulses and sent a clear signal back to Earth. "We got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try. After almost 40 years of silence, this rover a lot to say," notes Murphy.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Apollo astronauts placed three other retroflectors on the Moon to allow laser ranging of the Moon's orbit. Assisted by a fourth reflector on Lunokhod 2, a twin of Lunokhod 1 that landed in 1973, these mirrors constitute the only Apollo science experiment still operating. Eric Silverberg, now retired from the University of Texas, was in charge of the lunar laser ranging activities at the McDonald Observatory from 1969 until 1982. "During that time," he recalls, "we successfully ranged all three of the Apollo corner reflectors and the Lunakhod 2 reflector.

We also tried to range on the first lunar rover but had only one possible (but not definite) detection on Dec 31, 1970. Our lack of knowledge of the location of the rover and the pressures of keeping up with the Apollo program caused us eventually to lose interest in Lunakhod 1." "When I read that Tom Murphy had discovered returns from the lost rover I was very surprised and elated," says Silverberg.

Murphy's initial reaction was disbelief: "The signal was so strong, my first thought was that our detector was acting up! I expected the rover's reflector to be degraded and dull after all this time, so I thought, 'this couldn't possibly be it.' But it was." "This reflector is even strong enough to let us get measurements in lunar daylight – a first for this experiment!" Silverberg continues: "The fact that Lunokhod 1's reflection is now stronger than that of its twin is a mystery. This may yield important clues as to why all of the reflectors are weaker than in the first decade after landing." With Lunokhod 1 back in the fold, the laser ranging study can get up to full throttle for the first time.

Daily  Galaxy

New Private Spacesuit Unveiled With New York Flair 

Two private spacesuit designers unveiled their first steps toward serious attire for future space travelers Friday night in front of a young, hip crowd of artists and tech geeks in Manhattan. 

A spacesuit model arched his back experimentally, flashed the thumbs up and struck other poses that drew chuckles from the crowd gathered inside the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

He showed off a bright yellow pressure suit topped by the dome of a roomy space helmet, with a blue glove on the right hand and a black glove on the left hand.

Pic: A spacesuit model poses in a new private spacesuit developed by inventing team Ted Southern and Nikolay Moiseev of Final Frontier Design. The spacesuit was unveiled at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City on July 16, 2010

The blue glove was designed by Moscow-based spacesuit engineer Nikolay Moiseev, who built in unprecedented flexibility at the metacarpal knuckles of the hand. The black glove represented a single-layer design made from urethane by Brooklyn-based inventor and artist Ted Southern, which reduced the torque required to move the fingers to practically nothing.

Ads by Google Mens Designer Suits SaleBuy men's suits online & save! Up to 80% OFF Retail Prices www.Eleganza-Menswear.com.au Inventors Find SolutionsGot a great idea but not sure what to do next? visit IHQ for help. www.inventorsHQ.com.au
"In the future, our plan is to actually blend the two and make a low-torque, single-layer, metacarpal glove," Southern said to the assembled crowd. "And it's going to happen."

Moiseev and Southern first combined their talents as former competitors to win a $100,000 second place prize in NASA's 2009 astronaut glove challenge. Now they have expanded their partnership under the name of Final Frontier Design to go from glove to full-fledged spacesuit designed to be worn inside a spacecraft during launch and re-entry.

Space.Com

1974 UFO Close Encounter With 'Saucer' In NSW

Pic: This is a sketch of the saucer done by the witness. 

I've included this report after so much comment and feedback received from readers about the Westall Case I featured last week. This report has interesting parallels (to me) with the type and shape of object seen at Westall.

Witness' account in own words: "My sister and myself were driving along Hamilton Road, Quakers Hill, NSW Australia when the car I was driving suddenly shook violently then completely stopped, nothing worked, not even the radio, the motor just stopped. I was scared something was really wrong with the car. I started to get out of the car to get my to babies out of the back seat when something made me look up. Thats when I observed this massive circular disc shaped object, it didn't seem to be much higher than the power pole.

It was surrounded completely by lights and had a dome in the middle on the top. We watched it slowly move over the dairy adjacent to the road, there was no sound then it seemed to stop then shoot up into the air. I was actually standing under this thing, it was a gun metal grey in colour and the size of half a football field. Once the object shot up in the air my car started again with no problems. Description  - "It was one solid shape round with a dome on the top of it. Someone from another part of NSW reported at the time to a newspaper and sketched exactly what we saw. There was several sightings that night." 

Credit: UFO Research NSW Inc.

Sam Worthington Will Return To Space As Dan Dare

Sam Worthington is headed back into space, though not for Avatar 2, at least not yet. Instead he’s signed on to star in Dan Dare, a movie based on the 1950s comic character created by Frank Hampson.

In his original form Dan is a pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet. It’s sort of like a British Buck Rogers and, presumably much like Tin Tin, people “over there” care about this character even though you’ve probably never heard of him.

The stories sent Dan Dare on complex, lengthy adventures to planets full of extraterrestrials. The style of the comics is described as being like British war movies of the 1950s, full of snappy one-liners and gallant heroes. Though it first appeared in comics the character has also shown up in radio programs and even a TV series.

No word yet on who else might be involved, aside from Worthington. Only that the thing is a go, with Warner Bros. close to securing all the rights they need to the project, and likely eager to get Sam Worthington back out amongst the stars before James Cameron gets around to making another Avatar. 

For those not familiar with this character here is a brief synopsis: Dan Dare is a British science fiction comic hero, created by illustrator Frank Hampson. He appeared in the Eagle comic story Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future in 1950, dramatised 7 times a week on Radio Luxembourg.

The stories were set in the late 1990s but the dialogue and manner of the characters is reminiscent of British war films of the 1950s. Dan Dare has been described as "Biggles in Space" and as the British equivalent of Buck Rogers. Dan Dare was distinguished by its long, complex story lines, snappy dialogue and meticulously illustrated comic-strip artwork by Hampson and other artists, including Harold Johns, Don Harley, Bruce Cornwell, Greta Tomlinson, Frank Bellamy and Keith Watson.

Currently, one new Dan Dare publication is available. A recently completed mini-series of Dan Dare has been launched by Virgin Comics. It is written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Gary Erskine and is a completely new and somewhat darker intrepretation of Dan Dare.

Cinema Blend

Do Americans Still Care About The Space Program?

Forty-one years ago last Tuesday marked one of the biggest accomplishments the U.S. has ever completed. Much like Sept. 11 or when John F. Kennedy was shot, many people remember where they were when they watched the event unfold on their televisions.

Stumped? On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon, propelling the U.S. ahead in the space race with the Soviet Union.

Then, it was a big deal. A really, really big deal. Children and adults alike watched in awe as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin floated with ease in their spacesuits. The spectacle was otherworldly, a moment that etched itself in everyone’s minds.

Fast forward to today. Can you recall the last space shuttle to be launched into space? What was the last big space mission accomplishment? Can you name one astronaut currently in the space program? (No, the female astronaut who drove across the country wearing a diaper does not count.) It’s sad, but true — the majority of Americans no longer care about the space program, at least not as much as in the past. It’s no longer watercooler talk. Space missions barely get two minutes of air time on the news networks; newspapers may run a blurb somewhere inside their national news brief sections.

President Obama has proposed cutting NASA’s Constellation Program, which had aimed to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. NASA’s budget would increase to $19 billion in 2011 under a proposed budget released in February; however, the emphasis would be more on science and less on space exploration. The NASA budget now constitutes 0.52 percent of the federal budget, the lowest its been since the 1950s. Funding for the space program peaked in 1966 at 5.5 percent.

In a recent Forbes story, it said that a 1961 poll showed that 65 percent of Americans approved of the goal to send people to the moon; 20 percent did not. A 2009 poll showed that 58 percent of Americans thought the space program could be justified financially — more than half of those polled were at least 10 years old when man landed on the moon.I believe we still do care about what’s up there in the sky, but we need something new to talk about. Why are we there? What bang are we getting for our buck?

Of course, if you believe man landing on the moon was a hoax, you’ll always have something to talk about.

Niles Daily Star

Virgin's Spaceship Enterprise Makes First Crewed Flight

For the first time, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, named the Enterprise, flew with crew on board. While it stayed attached to the "Eve" mothership for the duration of the July 15 flight, Scaled Composites – the builders of the spacecraft – called the flight a "significant milestone as the team marches towards the first solo flights." Numerous combined vehicle systems tests were conducted, as two crew members on board VSS Enterprise evaluated all of the spaceship’s systems and functions from end to end in the air, and all objectives were achieved.

Media: The VSS Enterprise's first crewed flight on July 15, 2010. Credit: Virgin Galactic.

This was the third time the Enterprise had flown in its "captive carry" configuration, but the first time with crew on board. It was the 33rd flight for WhiteKnightTwo, also known as Eve. The flight time was 6 hours 12 minutes.
The crew on the Enterprise was Peter Siebold, Michael Alsbury, and on board Eve were Mark Stucky, Peter Kalogiannis, and Brian Maisler.

SpaceShipTwo can fly up to eight people (six passengers and two pilots) on suborbital flights that would provide a weightless experience for 4-6 minutes. Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, has stated that the company would "not put a definite timeline on when the commercial flights would begin" but if all goes according to plan they hope to make their first passenger flights in 2011. Tickets are on sale for $200,000 per person.

Twin Astronauts Will Meet Up In Space

Next year, NASA is set to hit one more milestone in space before retiring their space shuttle fleet — twins in space. Mission commanders Scott and Mark Kelly are identical twins from New Jersey.

Both took separate paths following their high school graduation, heading off to different colleges. "There are still people in the astronaut office who can't tell us apart," Scott Kelly laughed.

"I am not kidding you that we would fight — like fistfight — every single day until we were probably 15 years old, and our parents weren't home so they would last like eight hours," Mark offered.

Their journeys united again in 1996 when they both joined the same astronaut class, making them NASA's first set of twins. Now they are getting ready to do another first at NASA as the first blood relatives to meet in space.

Scott will head off to the space station in October and take over command there for six months. Mark will meet up with him in February when he commands the final shuttle flight on the retiring Endeavour. There is talk in Congress about adding one more shuttle flight after Endeavour's STS-134 mission, but nothing official has been decided ye

MyFox Tampa Bay

Houston… We Had A Problem!

On July 23, 1969, as Apollo 11 hurtled back towards Earth, there was a problem — a problem only a kid could solve. At age 10, Greg Force reaches his arm into a tiny hole to fix an antenna crucial to Apollo 11.

It sounds like something out of a movie, but that's what it came down to as Apollo 11 sped back towards Earth after landing on the moon in 1969. It was around 10:00 at night on July 23, and 10-year-old Greg Force was at home with his mom and three brothers. His father, Charles Force, was at work.

Charles Force was the director of the NASA tracking station in Guam, where the family was living. The Guam tracking station was to play a critical role in the return of Apollo 11 to Earth. A powerful antenna there connected NASA communications with Apollo 11, and the antenna was the only way for NASA to make its last communications with the astronauts before splashdown.

But at the last minute on that night, a bearing in the antenna failed, rendering it nearly useless. To properly replace the bearing would have required dismantling the entire antenna, and there was simply no time. So Charles Force thought of a creative solution: If he could get more grease around the failed bearing, it would probably be fine. The only problem was, nobody at the station had an arm small enough to actually reach in through the two-and-a-half inch opening and pack grease around the bearing.

And that's when Greg was called in to save the day. Charles Force sent someone out to his home to pick up Greg. Once at the tracking station, Greg reached into the tiny hole and packed grease around the failed bearing. It worked, and the station was able to successfully complete its communications role in the mission. Apollo 11 splashed down safely the next day. At the time, Greg didn't think what he was doing was a big deal, and 40 years later, he's still modest about his role in the mission.

"That's all I did, was put my hand in and put grease on it," he says. If he hadn't been there, NASA would not have been able to make its last communications with the mission before splashdown, but Greg says "it wasn't life or death, [from] my understanding."

CNN via Rob Brand

DID YOU KNOW?

* Do astronauts burp? Because you are weightless in space, the contents of your stomach float and tend to stay at the top of your stomach, under the rib cage and close to the valve at the top of your stomach. Because this valve isn't a complete closure (just a muscle that works with gravity), if you burp, it becomes a wet burp from the contents in your stomach. Gross!

* The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth and the tides are to blame. Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.

* Every rainbow is unique – each rainbow is formed from light hitting your eye at a very precise angle. Someone standing next to you will see light coming from a slightly different angle than you and therefore see a different rainbow.

It could happen….

A woman brings eight-year-old Johnny home and tells his mother that he was caught playing doctors and nurses with Mary, her eight-year old daughter.

Johnny's mother says, "Let's not be too harsh on them…. they are bound to be curious about sex at that age."

"Curious about sex?" replies Mary's mother. "He's taken her appendix out!"

20 Things you never knew about space

1 Nearly every astronaut experiences some space sickness, caused by the wildly confusing information reaching their inner ears. In addition to nausea, symptoms include headaches and trouble locating your own limbs. Just like college, really.

2 And those are the least of your worries. In weightlessness, fluids shift upward, causing nasal congestion and a puffy face; bones lose calcium, forming kidney stones; and muscles atrophy, slowing the bowels and shrinking the heart.

3 At least you’ll be puffy, constipated, and tall: The decreased pressure on the spine in zero-g causes most space travelers to grow about two inches.

4 Lab rats sent into space during midpregnancy, while their fetuses’ inner ears are developing, spawn some seriously tipsy babies. 

5 No humans have yet been conceived in space, so we can only imagine.

6 So that’s what it takes: A 2001 study showed that astronauts who snored on Earth snoozed silently in space.

7 But astronauts sleep less soundly; 16 sunrises a day throws a major wrench into their circadian rhythms.

8 And Ziggy played guitar. At the start of the workday on the space shuttle, mission control in Houston broadcasts wake-up music, usually selected with a particular astronaut in mind. On the all-work, no-play International Space Station, crews wake to an alarm clock.

9 If you are ever exposed to the vacuum of space without a suit on, don’t hold your breath: Sudden decompression would cause your lungs to rupture.

10 In addition, water on the tongue, in the nose, and in the eyes would boil away. This actually happened in 1965, when a space suit failed during a NASA experiment and the tester was exposed to a near vacuum for 15 seconds.

11 Contrary to Hollywood, though, you wouldn’t explode. Lack of oxygen in the blood is what would kill you, but it would take about two minutes.

12 More explosion paranoia: Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space-tourism company, reportedly considered barring women with breast implants due to fears that they might blow up.

13 John Glenn found it hard to choke down his food, but not because of the lack of gravity: Early astronauts relied on aluminum tubes of semiliquid mush, food cubes, and dehydrated meals.

14 Today astronauts can spice up their meals with salt and pepper—in liquid form. Sprinkled grains would float away, tickling noses and clogging vents.

15 Missing something? Those vents on the space shuttle and International Space Station serve as the lost and found, sucking up anything that’s floating about unsecured.

16 The shuttle commode requires that astronauts align themselves precisely in the dead center of the seat. A mock-up of the shuttle toilet, complete with built-in camera, is used to train them how to position themselves.

17 NASA tried building a bathroom into its space suits—a fitted condom attached to a bladder for men, a molded gynecological insert for women—but gave up and passed out diapers to all.

18 Returning astronauts report extreme difficulty moving their arms and legs right after touchdown, one reason why they call landing “the second birth.”

19 But some long-duration cosmonauts report that the hardest thing to readjust to about life on Earth is that when you let go of objects, they fall.

20 Better just to stay up there? Eighteen people have died on space missions, but never in space—always on the way up or the way down.

Image Of The Week

The Mysterious Beauty of a Supernova Embryo

Eta Carinae is a mysterious, extremely bright and unstable star located a mere stone's throw – astronomically speaking – from Earth at a distance of only about 7,500 light years. The star is thought to be consuming its nuclear fuel at an incredible rate, while quickly drawing closer to its ultimate explosive demise. When Eta Carinae does explode, it will be a spectacular fireworks display seen from Earth, perhaps rivaling the moon in brilliance. Its fate has been foreshadowed by the recent discovery of SN2006gy, a supernova in a nearby galaxy that was the brightest stellar explosion ever seen.

The erratic behavior of the star that later exploded as SN2006gy suggests that Eta Carinae may explode at any time. Eta Carinae, a star between 100 and 150 times more massive than the Sun, is near a point of unstable equilibrium where the star's gravity is almost balanced by the outward pressure of the intense radiation generated in the nuclear furnace. This means that slight perturbations of the star might cause enormous ejections of matter from its surface. In the 1840s, Eta Carinae had a massive eruption by ejecting more than 10 times the mass of the sun, to briefly become the second brightest star in the sky. This explosion would have torn most other stars to pieces but somehow Eta Carinae survived.

The latest composite image shows the remnants of that titanic event with new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The blue regions show the cool optical emission, detected by Hubble, from the dust and gas thrown off the star. This debris forms a bipolar shell around the star, which lies near the brightest point of the optical emission. This bipolar shell is itself surrounded by a ragged cloud of fainter material. An unusual jet points from the star to the upper left.

Chandra's data, depicted in orange and yellow, shows the X-ray emission produced as material thrown off Eta Carinae rams into nearby gas and dust, heating gas to temperatures in excess of a million degrees. This hot shroud extends far beyond the cooler, optical nebula and represents the outer edge of the interaction region.

The X-ray observations show that the ejected outer material is enriched by complex atoms, especially nitrogen, cooked inside the star's nuclear furnace and dredged up onto the stellar surface. The Chandra observations also show that the inner optical nebula glows faintly due to X-ray reflection. The X-rays reflected by the optical nebula come from very close to the star itself; these X-rays are generated by the high-speed collision of wind flowing from Eta Carinae's surface (moving at about 1 million miles per hour) with the wind of the companion star (which is about five times faster).

The companion is not directly visible in these images, but variability in X-rays in the regions close to the star signals the star's presence. Astronomers don't know exactly what role the companion has played in the evolution of Eta Carinae, or what role it will play in its future.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/M.Corcoran et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI 

Northern Galactic – Southern Galactic

Members Images

Northern Galactic and Southern Galactic International was established to commemorate the United Nations International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and was officially launched in November 2008.

In partnership Northern Galactic and Southern Galactic International aims to gather together research and discoveries in the areas of optical and radio astronomy, astrophotography, planetary studies, and space atmospheric sciences as a service to the interested public.  Our service is available to all astronomers and scientists throughout the world. Northern Galactic also makes available for its Members its own Research Grade 406mm/16" RCOS Carbon Truss Telescope for a Low Annual Subscription Fee.

The Sword Of Orion – Member: Louie Atalasidis 

IN THE SKY THIS MONTH JULY 2010

HIGHLIGHTS THIS MONTH 

* July 11 – Total Solar Eclipse. The path of totality will only be visible in the southern Pacific Ocean, Easter Island, and parts of southern Chile and Argentina. A partial eclipse will be visible in many parts of southern South America. 

* July 26 – Full Moon

* July 28, 29 – Southern Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower. The Delta Aquarids can produce about 20 meteors per hour at their peak. The shower usually peaks on July 28 & 29, but some meteors can also be seen from July 18 – August 18. The radiant point for this shower will be in the constellation Aquarius. Best viewing is usually to the east after midnight.

Dave Reneke

Caught on Tape: UFO in China
Los Angeles Times
According to state media outlet China Daily, the incident happened at Hangzhou's Xiaoshan Airport on July 7, when the UFO was spotted around 8:30 pm …

Chinese UFO still a mystery
Ninemsn
The UFO, which was described by some as looking like a "fireball", spooked locals and forced a major Chinese airport to ground several flights to avoid a …

China UFO Sightings, Back-To-Back, Alarm Residents (VIDEO, POLL)
Huffington Post (blog)
A second China UFO sighting has residents on edge, just seven days after an unidentified flying object shut down a Chinese airport. The new UFO sighting …

New Treehotel in Sweden features room shaped like a UFO
Sify
A new hotel in Sweden is set to offer guests the chance to stay in rooms shaped like a UFO, birds nest and a "mirrorcube". The Treehotel, which is located …

FEATURE STORY

Could Our Universe Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole

Radical New Theory Says"Yes"

“Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” In a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, a physicist at Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.

Poplawski says that the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does.

This theory predicts that particles with half integer spin should interact, generating a tiny repulsive force called torsion. In ordinary circumstances, torsion is too small to have any effect. But when densities become much higher than those in nuclear matter, it becomes significant. In particular, says Poplawski, torsion prevents the formation of singularities inside a black hole.

Astrophysicists have long known that our universe is so big that it could not have reached its current size given the rate of expansion we see now. Instead, they believe it grew by many orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the period known as known as inflation. Poplawski's approach immediately solves the inflation problem, saying that torsion caused this rapid inflation, which means the universe as we see it today can be explained by a single theory of gravity without any additional assumptions about inflation.

Another important corollary of Poplawski's approach is that it makes it possible for universes to be born inside the event horizons of certain kinds of black hole where torsion prevents the formation of a singularity but allows energy density to build up, which leads to the creation of particles on a massive scale via pair production followed by the expansion of the new universe. "Such an expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon's formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time," says Poplawski. For this reason, he emphasizes, the new universe is a separate branch of space time and evolves accordingly.

Poplawski's theory also suggests an solution lto why time seems to flow in one direction but not in the other, even though the laws of physics are time symmetric.

Poplawski says the origin of the arrow of time comes from the asymmetry of the flow of matter into the black hole from the mother universe. "The arrow of cosmic time of a universe inside a black hole would then be fixed by the time-asymmetric collapse of matter through the event horizon," he says.. Translated, this means that our universe inherited its arrow of time from its source. "Daughter universes," he says, "may inherit other properties from their mothers," implying that it may be possible to detect these properties, providing an experimental falsifiable proof of his idea.

                 HISTORY KEYS

           Galileo, the Telescope and the Inquisition

Galileo Galilei 's advocacy of the telescope as a scientific instrument was one reason why he failed to convince the Church that Copernicus was right

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) spent the last eight years of his life under virtual house arrest, having been found guilty of heresy for supporting, in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, the view of Copernicus that the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun. This was in contradiction to the Church’s support of the Ptolemaic geometric system, for which Biblical authority could be found.

The Development of the Telescope

It is widely thought that it was solely this matter that got Galileo into such trouble, coupled with various political difficulties surrounding the personalities involved, in particular Pope Urban VIII who had originally been a supporter of Galileo but later turned against him.

However, it was Galileo’s development of the telescope, the instrument that made his discoveries possible, that first led to him falling foul of the Catholic Church. The idea of changing vision through the use of pieces of glass ground to a certain shape, either convex or concave, dates back to the 13th century and the work of Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar in Oxford.

However, using artificial means to correct vision was regarded with great suspicion by those who regarded this as being contrary to Nature and thus the will of God. Bacon was therefore seen by many in the Church as a sorcerer.

John Welford

Story Opportunities from Australasian Science, July 2010

The True Believers
Are we pre-programmed to believe in weird and wonderful things that lack any significant scientific basis, and are some of us more likely to believe than others?

Climate Change or Natural Variability? 
Meteorological records since the 1950s reveal a decrease in rainfall that is consistent with anthropogenic climate change, but a different picture emerges when looking at records since 1900.

Microbe Genes Could Curb Livestock Burps
The DNA sequence of a microbe that produces methane in ruminants provides a target for vaccines and other drugs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

The Biggest Losers 
New evidence tightens the noose on humans as the decisive factor in the extinction of the last of the megafauna in Australia and North America.

It’s a Wiggly, Wiggly Universe
A map of the Universe as it existed six billion years ago is close to completion, and may provide new insights into the physics of dark energy.

A?Matter of Taste
Newborn babies will smile when they first taste sucrose and wrinkle their noses at the bitter taste of quinine. What is the adaptive significance of such innate responses to taste?

The Young Visionaries
Early-career scientists are using goggles that mimic common eye diseases to teach primary school children about their vision research and the importance of eye care.

Evidence for Indigenous Australian Agriculture
The assumption that indigenous Australians did not develop agriculture is highly contestable, with a body of evidence revealing that they developed food production systems and in some cases lived in large villages.

The Hazards of Synthesis
Synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines is underused in research and has hazards for practitioners.

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BOOK REVIEW

Carnarvon and Apollo: One Giant Leap for a Small Australian Town

By Paul Dench and Alison Gregg
Rosenberg Publishing, 2010
Softcover, 303 pp., illus. US$35

Forty-one years ago this week Apollo 11 achieved its historic mission of landing men on the surface of the Moon, a feat witnessed by hundreds of millions live on television. Part of that technical feat (the live television, not the much greater challenge of getting people to the Moon) was due to work by engineers to develop camera that could work in the space environment and fit in mass-constrained spacecraft.

However, those technical accomplishments also required ground stations in Australia to receive the signals, as they were the ones in sight of the Moon at the time Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module’s ladder. The role the Parkes radio telescope in particular played on that mission was dramatized in the 2000 film The Dish.

Now, a new book, Carnarvon and Apollo, describes the role a separate, little-known NASA outpost in a remote corner of Australia had on the early days of the space program, and vice versa.

Just as fascinating as the technical discussion is the effect the station had on the remote town. NASA had a presence in Australia since the beginning of its human spaceflight program, most notably the Mulchea tracking station near Perth. In preparation for the Gemini program, though, NASA sought a location farther north, where a station could track and communicate with the spacecraft on more ground passes. The agency eventually settled on the small town of Carnarvon, nearly 1,000 kilometers north of Perth. A state-of-the-art tracking station arose just outside of town and became a part of NASA’s network for the Gemini and, later, Apollo programs.

Paul Dench, the first engineer recruited to work at the station and who eventually became station manager, and Alison Gregg, a wife of one of the station’s technicians and a newspaper reporter, describe both the technical challenges and accomplishments of the station as well as the impact the station had on the small town. The station had a supporting role in missions from the beginning of Gemini through Skylab, which the authors describe in detail in the book, as well as the development of the communications and tracking infrastructure, no easy feat in a locale that in the early 1960s had limited telephone service and no television.

Just as fascinating as the technical discussion is the effect the station had on the town. An influx of well-educated people—primarily Australians as well as British emigrants—who came to Carnarvon to work at the station had a major impact on the sleepy town that had been best known for fishing and banana plantations. There was also plenty of culture shock, particularly for the Britons who moved halfway around the world into a very different environment. Over time, though, the “trackers”, as the station’s workers were known as, integrated themselves into the town and helped make their own contributions to local society.

However, in the early 1970s NASA decided to consolidate its tracking and communications facilities in Australia, and elected to close the Carnarvon station after the end of the Skylab missions. Today there is little left of the station and the role it played in the early Space Age. Carnarvon and Apollo goes into considerable depth about the station and its effect on the town; perhaps too much times for the casual reader who may not be interested in all the details presented in the book about the comings and goings of life in Carnarvon.

The book, though, serves as a reminder of the effect the opening era of the Space Age had throughout the world, even in an isolated corner of Australia

Daily Galaxy

Events

Call for Papers

10th Australian Space Science Conference

27th to 30th September 2010

It is our pleasure to invite you to submit an abstract for the 10th Australian Space Science Conference (ASSC), to be held in Brisbane at the University of Queensland. This will be the fourth ASSC jointly sponsored and organized by the National Committee for Space Science (NCSS) and the National Space Society of Australia (NSSA). This year the Australian Space research Institute (ASRI) is also helping. The ASSC is intended to be the primary annual meeting for Australian research relating to space science. It welcomes space scientists, engineers, educators, and workers in Industry and Government.

This year's ASSC will run in conjunction with the NCSS's workshop on implementing Australia's first Decadal Plan for Space Science, which will shortly be published. This one-day workshop will discuss the Plan and Government's responses, better link the scientific community and associated stakeholders in Government and industry, and start implementing the Plan's recommendations. This year, there will also be a dedicated session to showcase ASRI research, as well as others on space technology and engineering more generally, plus a dedicated session for Australian government units with interests and expertise in space.

 Complete details of all registration rates and details of accommodation will be available in early July. There are now less than 3 weeks remaining for abstract submission, as the deadline of July 11 approaches! The proceedings for peer-reviewed papers from the 2009 conference are now available to view at URL: http://www.nssa.com.au/9assc/downloads/9assc-proceedings-lores.pdf Please make the conference known to your colleagues. We hope that you will attend. You may email asscconference@nssa.com.au for more information. Wayne Short, Co-Chair, National Space Society of Australia Iver Cairns, Co-Chair, National Committee for Space Science, University of Sydney

PULSE@Parkes