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Space: The Final Frontier

S

smiggyRT

Member
y2dvd said:
It wouldn't just be biological concerns. It would be an evolutionary concern. Vsauce did a good video on this. The trip there may take a few lifetimes. We would need to reproduce. Thing is without Earth's gravity to tell us which way is up/down, left/right, or forward/backward, we would suffer from constant motion sickness. I think they even touched on how sperm wouldn't be able to "direct" itself for a lack of a better term lol. Without Earth's gravity to stress our bones, we would have softer and longer bones. We would have poorer vision because blood flow wouldn't flow properly to our eyes. They pretty much said we'd be fucked unless we can somehow mimics Earth's gravity onto the spaceship.
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Could the ship spin? Use centrifugal force to mimic gravity, or is that it just some science fiction nonsense.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
National park on the moon at Apollo landing sites: A 'loony' idea?

Care to go for a hike in a national park? How about one on the moon? A bill introduced in Congress would protect U.S. Apollo lunar landing sites by making the detritus that astronauts left behind a part of the national park system.

It may sound like a loony proposal, but the Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act, or HR 2617, would seek to protect the spots where the Apollo missions left an artifact on the moon from 1969 to 1972.

The U.S. hasn’t sent a human to the moon in decades, and hasn't announced any plans to return anytime soon. But the bill this week by Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) comes as private companies move into space-faring enterprises and space tourism to the moon inches closer to reality.

"As commercial enterprises and foreign nations acquire the ability to land on the moon," the bill's authors wrote, "it is necessary to protect the Apollo lunar landing sites for posterity."
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The Interior secretary (whose department includes the National Park Service) would serve as administrator for the park, in partnership with NASA. The bill also requires that the Apollo 11 landing site be submitted to the United Nations to become a World Heritage Site within a year of the lunar park’s establishment.

That's all well and good, except for one minor detail: By international agreement, the moon’s territory can’t be claimed. The artifacts themselves that were left behind – even by the Apollo 13 mission, which never landed because of a serious malfunction – are what would become part of a historical park.

It's unclear on how this would affect the National Park Service, which usually operates on American territory, and how such artifacts could be protected without control of the land around them.
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At first I was puzzled by what sort of artifact the Apollo 13 mission would have left on the moon, but a quick google told me it was the the Saturn S-IVB booster stage (which burns during trans-lunar injection) that was deliberately crashed on the moon. It's nice that at least something of Apollo 13 made it to the lunar surface.
 
F

FelixOrion

Poet Centuriate
p1330aw_0.jpg


NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the distant blue-green planet Neptune, the 14th known to be circling the giant planet.

The moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across, making it the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system. It is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. It even escaped detection by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet's system of moons and rings.

Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., found the moon July 1, while studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune. "The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system," he said. "It's the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete -- the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs."

The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009.

On a whim, Showalter looked far beyond the ring segments and noticed the white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus. The dot is S/2004 N 1. Showalter plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours.
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http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-hubble-finds-new-neptune-moon/#.UeQz_6WthcB
 
Melchiah

Melchiah

Member
XJ8ROcy.jpg


The article below is from 2012, so I don't know if it's already been posted here.
http://www.space.com/16867-black-holes-quantum-mechanics-theory.html
Black Holes: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong

If most people know one thing about black holes, they probably know that nothing can escape from them, not even light.

Yet this most basic tenet about black holes has actually been disproven by the theory of quantum mechanics, explains theoretical physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in an essay published online today (Aug. 2) in the journal Science.

...

To solve the dilemma, physicists looked to the idea of entropy, a measurement of disorder or randomness. The laws of thermodynamics state that in the macroscopic world, it's impossible to reduce the entropy of the universe — it can only increase. If a person were to fall into a black hole, entropy would increase. If the person were to pop back out of it, the universal entropy tally would go down. For the same reason, water can spill out of a cup onto the floor, but it won't flow from the floor into a cup.

This principle seems to explain why the process of matter falling into a black hole cannot be reversed, yet it only applies on a macroscopic level.

Physicist Stephen Hawking famously realized that on the microscopic, quantum mechanical level, things can escape from black holes. He predicted that black holes will spontaneously emit particles in a process he dubbed Hawking radiation. Thus, quantum mechanics refuted one of the basic tenets of black holes: that nothing can escape.

"Although a black hole will never emit an astronaut or a table or a chair, in practice, it can definitely emit an ordinary elementary particle or an atom," Witten explained.

However, scientists have yet to observe Hawking radiation.
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Melchiah

Melchiah

Member
Putting things into perspective...

XKjVKTBl.jpg

An image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on Friday.

"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997
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L

Lucky Forward

Member
APKmetsfan posted this in Poligaf:

NASA asteroid mission is new focus of budget debate in Congress

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, voting on party lines, passed a NASA authorization bill Thursday that would specifically prohibit the agency from moving forward with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (sometimes called the Asteroid Retrieval Mission) without first giving Congress more information about the plan.

“While the Obama administration’s asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) may sound out of this world, many questions still remain about whether this costly mission contributes to NASA’s long-term goals,” science committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said in a statement released by his office.
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NASA’s asteroid initiative is in preliminary stages, and the capture mission isn’t even an official program yet. The administration caught many people on the Hill and in the space community by surprise when it included the proposal in its 2014 budget request earlier this year.
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Smith, the House science committee chairman, says the mission won’t advance NASA’s long-term agenda. “The proposed mission does not advance science, protect us against dangerous asteroids or develop technologies necessary to explore deep space,” he said. “Congress and the American people simply need more information about why an asteroid retrieval mission is necessary before billions of taxpayer dollars are spent.”
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Nelson, the Florida senator who is a key advocate for NASA and the administration’s strategy, criticized the Republicans in the House for overreaching.

“A committee of politicians doesn’t know better than the experts in aerospace and science,” Nelson said.

He echoed the planetary-defense rationale for the mission: “Remember what happened to the dinosaurs?”

Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.) said Republican attacks on the asteroid mission appear to be reflexive anti-Obama politics.

“It almost feels like anything the president proposes, it’s an automatic ‘I’m against it,’ ” she said.

Rep. Steven M. Palazzo (R-Miss.) denied that the vote to stop the asteroid mission had anything to do with Obama, saying the administration simply needs to provide more information before Congress can approve the spending. He said a higher priority is developing the hardware for human spaceflight in the post-shuttle era.

“My primary goal is launching American astronauts on American rockets from America,” Palazzo said.
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G

Gui_PT

Member
ngc2392_hubblechandra_960.jpg


The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble and Chandra

Explanation: In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula. From the ground, NGC 2392 resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the Eskimo Nebula in visible light, while the nebula was imaged in X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2007. The above combined visible-X ray image, with X-rays emitted by central hot gas and shown in pink, was released last week. From space, the nebula displays gas clouds so complex they are not fully understood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a Sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible above are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula spans about 1/3 of a light year and lies in our Milky Way Galaxy, about 3,000 light years distant, toward the constellation of the Twins (Gemini).
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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
kiboro-3.jpg
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Japanese cargo launch sends a tiny talking robot to space station

Call it one giant leap for robotkind: A small talking robot was launched into space aboard a Japanese cargo ship Saturday to keep astronauts company on the International Space Station.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched the humanoid Kirobo "robot astronaut" into orbit from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan amid nearly 3.5 tons of supplies and equipment to resupply the space station's six-person crew.
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The HTV-4 spacecraft will arrive at the space station on Aug. 9.
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The Kirobo space robot is a diminutive mechanical person just 13 inches (34 centimeters) tall, built to converse with astronauts on long space voyages. The robot, and its ground-based counterpart Mirata, are part of the Kibo Robot Project to develop new technologies to enhance human-robot interaction in space. Kirobo speaks Japanese and is expected to talk to JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata when he arrives at the space station in November.

Kibo, which means "hope" in Japanese, is the name of Japan's research laboratory module aboard the International Space Station. The name of Kirobo is a merging of Kibo and robot, project officials have said.
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Melchiah

Melchiah

Member
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806171645.htm
The Sun's Magnetic Field Is About to Flip
Aug. 6, 2013 — Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip.

"It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal," said solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system."

The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of "solar max" will be behind us, with half yet to come.

...

A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event. The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the "heliosphere") extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space.

...
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F

fierrotlepou

Member
It's time to watch some shooting stars (Perseids), guys. Thought I'd let you awesome people know. I've been watching for five minutes and I've already seen one!
 
Melchiah

Melchiah

Member
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/201...tar-methuselah_n_2834999.html?just_reloaded=1
Astronomers Find Ancient Star 'Methuselah' Which Appears To Be Older Than The Universe

Scientists have discovered an "impossible" star which appears to be older than the universe.

The mysterious star Methuselah appears to be between 14 and 15 billion years old - a bit of an issue considering the universe itself is known to have come into existence 13.8 billion years ago.

Oddly enough, Methuselah is even located inside our own galaxy - about 190 light years away.

And even after using new information about the star's distance from us, its brightness and its structure, scientists are unable to place an estimate of its age much below 14.5 billion years - still older than the universe.

Fortunately for the team from Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, there appears to be a margin of error of about 800 million years, or so - enough to just barely place the star below the age of everything else, if peace of mind is important to you.

Wo44A2J.jpg

Above: the current location of the star

Formally known as HD 140283, the star is the oldest object currently known to astronomers.

It was first discovered a century ago, moving more than 800,000 mph relative to our solar system.

The star is on a long and looping orbit around the galaxy, and is only briefly passing through Earth's neighbourhood on the western spiral arm.

In the study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers said the star was born in a 'dwarf galaxy' which was swallowed by the Milky Way more than 12 billion years ago.

Using new measurements the team was able to refine its estimate of the star's position, and learn more about its structure.

The study suggests that further research might bring the age of the star down even further.
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P

Partial Gamification

Banned
Here's a view looking at one year of seasonal transformations on Earth. Made possible by the tremendous folks of the NASA Visible Earth team, I downloaded the twelve cloud-free satellite imagery mosaics of Earth ("Blue Marble Next Generation") at each month of the year. I wrapped them into some fun projections then stitched them together into a couple animated gifs...
source
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BreathingEarth.gif
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He describes the seasonal cycle as breathing. Poetic in the superorganism view of the planet.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
NASA, Navy practice space-capsule recovery

During the glory days of the U.S. space program in the 1960s and '70s, astronauts returning to Earth splashed down at sea in their capsules and were picked up by the Navy in a triumphant moment that made for stirring TV. Now, NASA and the Navy are training again for the first such recovery in a generation.

On Thursday, they completed several days of tests, practicing the retrieval of an unmanned mock-up of the Orion capsule that the U.S. hopes to send someday to an asteroid and Mars.

Navy divers and the crew of the USS Arlington carried out the exercise in the calm waters of the Elizabeth River at a Naval Station Norfolk pier.
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In a break with the past, the Navy doesn't plan to use helicopters to retrieve Orion, although they will be available on standby. Instead, an amphibious transport ship will come close to the capsule and dispatch divers and small boat teams to go secure it.
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NASA decided to employ an amphibious ship about seven years ago, in part because it is less expensive than using a large nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It also allows for astronauts who may be weakened by space travel to avoid a physically draining extraction at sea. The crew can stay inside the capsule while it is being recovered.

Another reason for using the amphibious-ship method: The Orion capsule will be bigger and much heavier than the Apollo spacecraft that came before it.

More training and testing of the procedure are planned in the coming years. Astronauts will not fly into space aboard Orion until 2021 at the earliest.
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IMG_9997a_Orion-water-recovery_Ken-Kremer.jpg


IMG_0085a_Orion-recovery-test_Ken-Kremer.jpg
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G

Gui_PT

Member
arp271_gemini_960.jpg


The Colliding Spiral Galaxies of Arp 271

What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides. Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.
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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130825.html
 
xclaw

xclaw

Member
Asbel said:
I wonder what the night sky would look like with another galaxy so close. Edge on, it may look like the Milky Way we see from Earth but at an angle, maybe we could see the spirals or even the center of the other galaxy?
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I'm going to guess that the distances would be so far there might not be might to notice. Could be wrong...
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
Asbel said:
I wonder what the night sky would look like with another galaxy so close. Edge on, it may look like the Milky Way we see from Earth but at an angle, maybe we could see the spirals or even the center of the other galaxy?
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Wonder no more...

Milky_Way_%26_Andromeda_Galaxy_Collision.jpg
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This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth's night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision
 
F

FelixOrion

Poet Centuriate
Alienshogun said:
It's a shame none of us will be here to see it, if we even exist as a species at that point. And even if we did what we would resemble wouldn't even be recognizable to us now.
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Well, considering in 3-4 billion years the Earth is estimated to be massive greenhouse like Venus with temperatures capable of melting rock, I'd say that if we're still around, we've left home for good.
 
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