Space  

NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has identified 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and in the habitable zone of their star.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope team recently released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

So far, this is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.

Kepler finds planets by detecting a minuscule drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.

With the release of this information, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.

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Interestingly, the new Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both groups have significant implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life.

"The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth."

“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”

“An important question for us is, ‘Are we alone?’” Perez said in a conference call with reporters. “Maybe Kepler today is telling us indirectly ... that we are not alone.”

An artist's rendition of Kepler spacecraft

This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler’s observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations – from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter – make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.

“This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions – how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?” said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study.

Kepler continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.

SOURCE  NASA

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Europa 

NASA is asking scientists to think about what would be the best instruments to include on a mission to land on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. The space agency recently asked the science community to prepare for a planned competition to select science instruments for a potential Europa lander.

Even though a mission to land on the scientifically tantalizing Jovian moon Europa has not yet approved by the space agency, NASA's Planetary Science Division has funding this year to conduct the announcement of opportunity process.

"The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life is at the heart of the Europa lander mission."

“The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life is at the heart of the Europa lander mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “We want the community to be prepared for this announcement of opportunity, because NASA recognizes the immense amount of work involved in preparing proposals for this potential future exploration.”

Image - NASA/JPL-Caltech

The formal community announcement provides advance notice of NASA’s plan to hold a competition for instrument investigations for a potential Europa lander mission. Proposed investigations will be evaluated and selected through a two-step competitive process to fund development of a variety of relevant instruments and then to ensure the instruments are compatible with the mission concept.

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Approximately 10 proposals may be selected to proceed into a competitive first phase. The Phase A concept study will be limited to approximately 12 months with a $1.5 million budget per investigation. At the conclusion of these studies, NASA may select some of these concepts to complete Phase A and subsequent mission phases.

NASA has stated the goals of the instruments should be:

1. to search for evidence of life on Europa
2. to assess the habitability of Europa via in situ techniques uniquely available to a lander mission
3. and to characterize surface and subsurface properties at the scale of the lander

Last year, in response to a congressional directive, NASA’s Planetary Science Division began a study to assess the science and engineering design of a future Europa lander mission. NASA routinely conducts such studies long before the start of any mission to gain an understanding of the challenges, feasibility and science value of the potential mission. The research team began work almost one year ago.

The proposed Europa lander is separate from and would follow its predecessor, the Europa Clipper multiple flyby mission – which now is in preliminary design phase and planned for launch in the early 2020s. Arriving in the Jupiter system after a journey of several years, the spacecraft would orbit the planet about every two weeks, providing opportunities for 40 to 45 flybys in the prime mission.

The Clipper spacecraft will image Europa’s icy surface at high resolution, and investigate its composition and structure of its interior and icy shell.

Of course, many of us remain quietly excited by the Europa missions, and have a secret wish for Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction vision to be at least a little bit on the mark.

SOURCE  NASA

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Space  

You can now follow the status of communications with our deep space missions and explorations of the deepest regions of the universe in near real-time. NASA now has a special site that lets you track what the antennas of the Deep Space Network are pointed at.

At three sites around the globe NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory operates a network of large radio antennas called the Deep Space Network or, DSN. The DSN supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, plus a few that orbit Earth. The network also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.

The DSN is made up of three facilities spaced equidistant from each other – approximately 120 degrees apart in longitude – around the world. These sites are at Goldstone, near Barstow, California; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. The strategic placement of these sites permits constant communication with spacecraft as our planet rotates – before a distant spacecraft sinks below the horizon at one DSN site, another site can pick up the signal and carry on communicating.

The space agency now has an online tool that will let you see what the DSN is up to in real-time - data is updated every five seconds. Which antennas are currently in use? Which spacecraft are talking to us? How quickly is data being received? How long does a signal take to get there, and back?

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The grid of antennas show you the current state of the network. 'Radio Waves' will show you if data is being sent to, or received from a spacecraft. With the radio antennas, this could be happening at the same time sometimes to more than one spacecraft at a time.

The tool also allows you to click on an antenna to see more technical information about the live link between the spacecraft and the ground.

Check it out!

SOURCE  NASA

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Space  

In the ongoing hunt for the universe's earliest galaxies, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a new image of Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's Cluster. The gravity of this cluster is strong enough that it acts as a lens to magnify images of more distant galaxies in the background.

The image above of galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also called Pandora's Cluster, was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The gravity of this galaxy cluster is strong enough that it acts as a lens to magnify images of more distant background galaxies. This technique is called gravitational lensing.

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A recent paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics presented the full catalog data for two of the six galaxy clusters studied by a project called Frontier Fields: Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, and MACS J0416, both located about four billion light years away. The other galaxy clusters selected for Frontier Fields are RXC J2248, MACS J1149, MACS J0717 and Abell 370.

The fuzzy blobs in this Spitzer image are the massive galaxies at the core of this cluster, but astronomers will be poring over the images in search of the faint streaks of light created where the cluster magnifies a distant background galaxy. Early results from this research are already starting to emerge. The astronomers used Abell 2744's gravitational lensing to detect a large number of distant, gravitationally lensed galaxy candidates.

The cluster is also being studied by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory in a collaboration for theFrontier Fields project. Hubble's image of Abell 2744 can be seen below:

Image Source - NASA

In the image, light from Spitzer's infrared channels is colored blue at 3.6 microns and green at 4.5 microns.

Galaxy cluster Abell 2744 is the product of four galaxies that crashed into one. This mix of cosmic phenomena, some of which had never been seen before, led to the nickname of Pandora's Cluster.

SOURCE  NASA

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Space  

The European Space Agency is about to reveal a three dimensional map of a billion stars in our galaxy collected from the Gaia mission. The data should give us a picture of the Milky Way that is 1,000 times more complete than anything we have today.

The Gaia spacecraft is the European Space Agency's mission to compile the most detailed three dimensional map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy. The spacecraft's mission involves charting one percent of the galaxy, about billion stars. This first data dump will open a new chapter in astronomy, according to the agency.

Gaia houses two telescopes, using ten mirrors of different shapes and sizes to collect, focus and direct light onto Gaia's sensor. On the focal plane, are three science instruments: the astrometric instrument, the photometric instrument and the radial velocity spectrograph.

With a total of 106 CCD detectors and almost one billion pixels, Gaia's camera is the largest ever flown into space.

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Launched on 19 December 2013 on a Soyuz-STB/Fregat-MT launch vehicle from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, Gaia traveled to its orbit around the Lagrangian point L2, 1.5 million km further from the Sun than Earth.

Now one thousand days after launch, the mission will release its first set of data.

The map (shown above) shows the density of stars observed by Gaia in each portion of the sky. Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer stars are observed. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with most of its stars residing in a disc about 100 000 light-years across and about 1000 light-years thick. This structure is visible in the sky as the Galactic Plane – the brightest portion of this image –which runs horizontally and is especially bright at the center.

This first Gaia data release contains a catalogue of 1,140,622,719 stars with precise measurements of their position on the sky and brightness.

From the first year of Gaia's observations alone, it is not possible to separate two concurrent effects in the changes of stellar positions recorded by the satellite: the apparent annual shift caused by Earth's motion around the Sun, or parallax, which is inversely proportional to a star's distance, and the continuous motion across the sky as stars drift through the galaxy.

With the data, it has been possible to estimate the distance from us and the proper motion for the 2,057,050 stars in common with the earlier Hipparcos and Tycho-2 Catalogues, based on data from ESA's Hipparcos mission.

In addition, the data release also contains 3194 variable stars, including details about their brightness variations. Variable stars periodically change their brightness as they rhythmically swell and shrink in size leading to periodic brightness changes.

On a typical day, Gaia performs about 637 million astrometric measurements, 155 million photometric measurements, and 13 million spectrometric measurements. These correspond to roughly 70 million celestial objects transiting the spacecraft's focal plane. Every day, Gaia sends about 40 GB of data back to Earth.

The spacecraft has recorded over 50 billion source transits over its focal plane so far, more than 110 billion photometric observations, and almost 10 billion spectra. Six data processing centers are involved in the data challenge, and about 120 000 hours of computations have so far been necessary to identify sources in the data collected by the spacecraft and associate them with the corresponding object in the sky.

SOURCE  ESA

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Space  

Two years after a disastrous crash that effectively stalled the development of space tourism, Virgin Galactic is back testing flights of its spacecraft. This an exciting milestone—for the first time, a spaceship built by The Spaceship Company, and operated by Virgin Galactic has taken to the skies.

The Spaceship Company, a spin-off of Virgin Galactic and spaceship designer Burt Rutan, has launched a successful four-hour test flight of its SpaceShipTwo-class launch vehicle, the VMS Eve, carrying the VSS Unity.

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This is first ever flight of a vehicle built by The Spaceship Company. Like every flight of SpaceShipTwo, this mission is crewed, with two of Virgin Galactic's pilots in VSS Unity and two more in WhiteKnightTwo.

SpaceShipTwo doesn’t launch from a pad on the ground, but rather from under the wing of a carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo. Yesterday's flight test was what we called a ‘captive carry’ flight, during which VSS Unity remained mated to our WhiteKnightTwo mothership (VMS Eve) for the entire flight from takeoff to landing.

In this configuration, WhiteKnightTwo serves as a veritable ‘flying wind tunnel,’ allowing the highest fidelity method of testing airflow around SpaceShipTwo while simultaneously testing how the spaceship performs when exposed to the frigid temperatures found at today’s maximum altitude of ~50,000 feet and above.

Throughout the entire 3 hour and 43 minute test flight, the flight crew as well our mission controllers and ground crews did the hard work of supporting a crewed test flight of a spaceflight system—great practice for our eventual flights to space.

With this flight in the books, the team will now analyze flight data, learning what worked well and what could be improved for subsequent flight tests. "Only when that analysis is done, along with detailed vehicle inspections, some already-planned work, and potentially more captive carry flights, will we be ready to move into the next phase of test flight," they report.

"Today is an emotional day for our team. We are so grateful to our families, customers, and friends for sticking with us," the company posted on its Facebook page.

SOURCE  Virgin Galactic

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Artificial Intelligence  

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talked recently with Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Walt Mossberg about his plans to send a one-way rocket to Mars in 2018 and his analysis that we are all probably living in a computer simulation if you consider the math. 

Onstage recently at the Code Conference, SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk explained to the crowd why it's entirely possible, if not likely, that our existence is really a simulation being run by a highly advanced civilization.

"Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality."

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Musk has already shown himself to be a follower of the ideas of Nick Bostrom with regards to artificial intelligence. Bostrom clearly influenced Musk to co-found and fund the non-profit artificial intelligence research company, OpenAI, with the aims of promoting and developing open-source friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole

Bostrom also has presented one of the best laid out argument of why there is a high likelihood that we are living in a computer simulation.

According to Musk, "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously."

He continues,  "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1000 from what it is now. It's a given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is 1 in millions."

See the must-watch full interview below.

SOURCE  Recode

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Videos  

If we hope to one day leave Earth and explore the universe, our bodies are going to have to get a lot better at surviving the harsh conditions of space. Using synthetic biology, Lisa Nip hopes to harness special powers from microbes on Earth — such as the ability to withstand radiation — to make humans more fit for exploring space. "We're approaching a time during which we'll have the capacity to decide our own genetic destiny," Nip says. "Augmenting the human body with new abilities is no longer a question of how, but of when."

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SOURCE  TED

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Space  

In a surprise boost for interstellar travel, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking have announced $100m project to research sending a small lightweight robot to Alpha Centauri at near light speed travel.

In a joint announcement at the One World Observatory in New York City, billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking unveiled Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million research and engineering program seeking to lay the foundations for an eventual interstellar voyage. Milner and Hawking were joined by Ann Druyan, Freeman Dyson, Mae Jamison, Avi Loeb and Pete Worden to make the announcement. (Video of the announcement below.)

"For the first time in human history we can do more than just gaze at the stars,we can actually reach them."

This is the third Breakthrough Initiative in the past four years and will test the technologies needed to send a featherweight robot spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years away (40,000,000,000,000 kilometres or 25 trillion miles).

The first step of the program involves building light-propelled “nanocrafts” that can travel at relativistic speeds—up to 20 percent the speed of light. At such high velocities, the robotic spacecraft would pass Pluto in three days and reach our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, in only 20 years after launch.

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“For the first time in human history we can do more than just gaze at the stars,” Milner said. “We can actually reach them.”

Milner cites three factors in the exponential rise of technology that will enable the project. These include mobile phone technology, nanotechnology and photonics. Broken down, the probe itself will be constructed of the same technology as your phone, with nanotech sails, and propelled by lasers.

"The message that Stephen Hawking and I want to send is that for the first time ever, this is an achievable goal," Milner said. "We can stand up and talk about it. Fifteen years ago, it wouldn't have made sense to make this investment. Now we've looked at the numbers, and it does."

At Tuesday's announcement, Hawking spoke of humanity's need for exploration as a driving force behind the project.

"Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human and our nature is to fly," he said.

SOURCE  Livestream

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Existential Risk  

NASA's new Planetary Defence Coordination Office (PCDO) will now arrange  all of the space agency's attempts to catalog risky Near Earth Objects, as well as work with government agencies to protect the Earth should the threat become reality.

Showing that the organization is committed to averting a potential existential risk, NASA has formalized its ongoing program for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs) as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). The office remains within NASA's Planetary Science Division, in the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The new organization will be responsible for supervision of all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth's orbit around the sun.

"The 2013 Chelyabinsk super-fireball and the recent 'Halloween Asteroid' close approach remind us of why we need to remain vigilant and keep our eyes to the sky."

The PDCO will also take a leading role in coordinating inter-agency and intergovernmental efforts in response to any potential impact threats.

So far, more than 13,500 near-Earth objects of all sizes have been discovered to date, with  more than 95 percent of them only discovered since NASA surveys began in 1998. Typically, about 1,500 NEOs are now detected each year.

"Asteroid detection, tracking and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "While there are no known impact threats at this time, the 2013 Chelyabinsk super-fireball and the recent 'Halloween Asteroid' close approach remind us of why we need to remain vigilant and keep our eyes to the sky."

This diagram maps the data gathered from 1994-2013 on small asteroids impacting Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrating to create very bright meteors, technically called “bolides” and commonly referred to as “fireballs”.  Sizes of orange dots (daytime impacts) and blue dots (nighttime impacts) are proportional to the optical radiated energy of impacts measured in billions of Joules (GJ) of energy, and show the location of impacts from objects about 1 meter (3 feet) to almost 20 meters (60 feet) in size. Image Source - NASA

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In addition to detecting and tracking potentially hazardous objects, the office will issue notices of close passes and warnings of any detected potential impacts, based on credible science data. The office also will continue to assist with coordination across the U.S. government, participating in the planning for response to an actual impact threat, working in conjunction with FEMA, the Department of Defense, other U.S. agencies and international counterparts.

"The formal establishment of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office makes it evident that the agency is committed to perform a leadership role in national and international efforts for detection of these natural impact hazards, and to be engaged in planning if there is a need for planetary defense," said Lindley Johnson, longtime NEO program executive and now lead program executive for the office, with the title of Planetary Defense Officer.

Astronomers detect near-Earth objects using ground-based telescopes around the world as well as NASA's space-based NEOWISE infrared telescope. Tracking data are provided to a global database maintained by the Minor Planet Center, sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union.

Once detected, orbits are precisely predicted and monitored by the Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Select NEOs are further characterized by assets such as NASA's InfraRed Telescope Facility, Spitzer Space Telescope and interplanetary radars operated by NASA and the National Science Foundation. Such efforts are coordinated and funded by NASA's longtime NEO Observations Program, which will continue as a research program under the office.

With more than 90 percent of NEOs larger than 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) already discovered, NASA is now focused on finding objects that are slightly bigger than a football field — 450 feet (140 meters) or larger. In 2005, NASA was tasked with finding 90 percent of this class of NEOs by the end of 2020. NASA-funded surveys have detected an estimated 25 percent of these mid-sized but still potentially hazardous objects to date.

SOURCE  NASA JPL

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Space  

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its recent flyby. They are probably the best close-ups of the far away solar body we will see for many years.

The piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14 each week.

"These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth."

The latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.  In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.

“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see."

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These latest images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide on a world 3 billion miles away. The pictures trend from Pluto’s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains. (To view the strip in the highest resolution possible, click here and zoom in.)

 “These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we’re there already – down among the craters, mountains and ice fields – less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable."

The mission scientists expect more imagery from this set over the next several days, showing even more terrain at this highest resolution.

SOURCE  NASA

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Space  

Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle successfully flew to space, reaching its planned test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before executing a historic landing back at the launch site in West Texas.

Blue Origin has reported to have made a controlled landing on solid ground with its New Shepard rocket.

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In the video below, Blue Origin, which was started by Amazonès Jeff Bezos, demonstratess its most recent launch of its New Shepard space vehicle. During the test mission, its BE-3 rocket and crew capsule were launched to a height of 62 miles. Then, the capsule made a controlled landing, falling to the ground under a parachute.

The BE-3 rocket also began its own controlled descent, when its own rockets fired at 5,000 feet. It then descended into a tidy, vertical landing, touching the ground in one piece.

SOURCE  Blue Origin

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Cosmology  

New data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, colliding with our own.

According to a newly published paper, we may have recently glimpsed another universe. Analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope seems to suggest that an anomalous glow out in deep space could well originate from a separate universe residing just next to ours.

Multiverse theory has long been postulated. Pursuant to the theory, if many universes were created at the Big Bang, then they are all probably next to each other, vibrating. If these universes touch one another, the collision would leave some sort of evidence.



Caltech cosmologist Ranga-Ram Chary compared the  cosmic microwave background (CMB) with a picture of the entire night sky also taken by the Planck telescope, and found a weird patch of bright light that could be the result of universes colliding as has been published in the research paper.

"We find convincing evidence for residual excess emission in the 143 GHz band in the direction of CMB cold spots which is well correlated with corresponding emission at 100 GHz," Chary writes.

The data suggests that the other universe rubbing up against ours would look very different than anything we’re used to and would have hit our universe just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

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A multiverse would be the consequence of cosmic inflation — the idea that the universe is constantly expanding. The eternal inflation would produce “a number of pocket universes,” Alan Guth, an MIT cosmologist and pioneer of the multiverse theory, told New Scientist.

Hidden energy in empty spaces would drive inflation forward at an intense speed, creating new bubbles of energy that could eventually blow up into smaller pocket universes that continue to expand.

The biggest problem studying these other universes is that the bubbles would be constantly expanding, as would the space between them. Light wouldn’t be traveling fast enough to carry much information from one to another. In order to actually observe physical properties, astronomers would have to wait for collisions or look for other evidence.

That is the reason why this new data is so special. If our universe has bumped into another one, it would probably create an anomalous light signature, just what Chary may have found. The newly observed spots are 4,500 times brighter than what conventional theory predicts they should be. One explanation could be that the other universe is gushing with protons and electrons, making the light from the collision much brighter.

Chary admits that his idea is as tentative as it is exciting. “Unusual claims like evidence for alternate universes require a very high burden of proof,” he writes.

SOURCE  New Scientist

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Space  

NASA's Cassini spacecraft will soon take the deepest dive ever through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists hope this close flyby will shed light on what's happening beneath the moon's icy surface. With a global ocean and likely hydrothermal activity, Enceladus even have the ingredients necessary to host life.

Space scientists will soon get their best look ever at the ocean that sloshes beneath the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. On October 28th, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will zoom just 30 miles (50 kilometers) above Enceladus, flying through and sampling the plume of material that erupts from the satellite's south polar region.

The plume is thought to originate from Enceladus' underground liquid-water ocean. Cassini's onboard sample analysis will hopefully provide evidence about the moon's potential to host or support life.

"On Wednesday, we will plunge deeper into the magnificent plume coming from the south pole than we ever have before, and we will collect the best samples ever from an ocean beyond Earth," Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said during a news conference.

Image Source - NASA/JPL-Caltech

There are three main science objectives for the flyby, said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California: The mission team aims to confirm the presence of molecular hydrogen in the plume, which would provide evidence for hydrothermal activity (a potential energy source for life) in the ocean. The team also hopes to characterize the plume's chemistry and determine the nature of the plume source(s).

"We're certainly all eagerly awaiting the scientific results from this deep plunge through the plume."

The flyby will occur at about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) Wednesday. Cassini will check in with mission control about 3 hours later, but the first encounter images likely won't be released until late Thursday or early Friday.

Scientists will probably get their first quick look at Cassini's spectrometer data on the sampled plume particles within a week after the flyby, but more in-depth analysis may take several weeks, she added.

Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 and discovered the moon's icy geysers in 2005. Cassini has flown through the plume before, but from much farther away.

"There's a lot of excitement about this particular flyby," she said. "We're certainly all eagerly awaiting the scientific results from this deep plunge through the plume."

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After Wednesday, Cassini will have one more flyby of Enceladus remaining before the end of its mission, in September 2017. On Dec. 19 of this year, the spacecraft will cruise within 3,106 miles (4,999 km) of the icy satellite, making observations that should allow mission scientists to gauge the heat flowing from Enceladus' interior.

The $3.2 billion Cassini mission, a joint effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, launched in 1997. Next year, Cassini will begin a series of manoeuvres to put itself in orbits that take it high above, and through, Saturn's rings.

As a final act, in 2017, ground controllers will command the spacecraft to plunge into the planet's atmosphere once the probe's fuel has all but run out. The hope is the probe will continue to send valuable scientific data about Saturn before it is eventually destroyed.

SOURCE  Space.com

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