A detailed look at Russia’s new Angara rocket family.
A detailed look at Russia’s new Angara rocket family.
Year: 2014
The oldest galaxy known might be a tiny dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
The oldest galaxy known might be a tiny dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
Segue 1 is very, very tiny. It appears to contain only a few hundred stars, compared with the few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Researchers led by Anna Frebel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge collected detailed information on the elemental composition of six of the brightest of Segue 1’s stars using the Las Campanas Observatory’s Magellan Telescopes in Chile and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The measurements, reported in a paper accepted for Astrophysical Journal and posted on the arXiv repository, revealed that these stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and contain just trace amounts of heavier elements such as iron. No other galaxy studied holds so few heavy elements, making Segue 1 the “least chemically evolved galaxy known.”
Complex elements are forged inside the cores of stars by the nuclear fusion of more basic elements such as hydrogen and helium atoms. When stars explode in supernovae, even heavier atoms are created. elements spew into space to infuse the gas that births the next generation of stars, so that each successive generation contains more and more heavy elements, known as metals. “Segue 1 is so ridiculously metal-poor that we suspect at least a couple of the stars are direct descendants of the first stars ever to blow up in the universe,” says study co-author Evan Kirby of the University of California, Irvine.
An incredible collection of photos from the Edwards Air Force Base 2009 open house air show.
An incredible collection of photos from the Edwards Air Force Base 2009 open house air show.
It includes close-ups of Scaled Composites’ WhiteKnight motherships for SpaceShips One and Two.
Obamacare rules have killed a New Jersey healthcare plan aimed at providing healthcare for children.
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare rules have killed a New Jersey healthcare plan aimed at providing healthcare for children.
While the federal government was trumpeting the benefits of Obamacare to boost enrollment earlier this year, about 1,800 families in New Jersey were receiving letters telling them their children would be losing their health coverage last week. The Affordable Care Act — the federal law that mandates everyone have insurance — effectively killed FamilyCare Advantage, a low-cost option for kids in New Jersey created six years ago for parents who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid and other subsidized programs but too little to buy on a policy on their own. The state program was the first of its kind in the nation.
We have only just begun. The disaster that is Obamacare is going to continue bulldozing its way through the healthcare insurance industry, destroying everything it touches.
However, the two unintended positive consequences of this terrible law might be that 1) it will destroy the careers of many of the Democratic politicians who forced it on us. The Democratic Party has needed a house-cleaning for about two decades. Obamacare might finally give it to us. 2) The destruction of the healthcare industry as we have known it might actually be a good thing in the long run. It might return us to a system where the patient pays for the medical care, which will force prices down and get rid of the middleman insurance company.
The Connecticut college that threatened a student with expulsion for daring to ask the governor questions about his gun control position took down its Facebook page rather than answer questions for critics posting there.
The Connecticut college that threatened a student with expulsion for daring to ask the governor questions about his gun control position took down its own Facebook page rather than answer questions of critics posting there.
After a trial in which Saucier’s acquitting evidence — the video itself — was kept out of light, administrators told Saucier that any further disturbance could result in his expulsion. After the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education drew attention to Saucier’s plight, sympathetic people began posting questions on ACC’s Facebook page. ACC first chose simply to delete critical posts. Eventually, it took down its Facebook page entirely. FIRE captured screenshots of the page, however.
Boeing is about to begin environmental tests on a new composite fuel tank for rockets.
The competition heats up: Boeing is about to begin environmental tests on a new composite fuel tank for rockets.
Tanks made of composite materials have been a dream of space engineers for decades. Lockheed Martin tried to build them for the X-33, and their failure was essentially what killed that spacecraft. If Boeing is successful here and the composite tanks can then be put into a variety of launch rockets, the savings in weight will lower the cost of getting payloads to orbit significantly.
As the NASA lunar probe LADEE nears its planned end — where it will crash onto the Moon — the scientists running it admit that they have as yet been unable to solve its primary scientific question about levitating lunar dust.
As the NASA lunar probe LADEE nears its planned end — where it will crash onto the Moon — the scientists running it admit that they have as yet been unable to solve its primary scientific question about levitating lunar dust.
A major goal of the mission was to understand a bizarre glow on the Moon’s horizon, spotted by Apollo astronauts just before sunrise. “So far we haven’t come up with an explanation for that,” project scientist Rick Elphic, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said at a media briefing on 3 April. One leading idea is that the Sun’s ultraviolet rays cause lunar dust particles to become electrically charged. That dust then lofts upwards, forming a cloud that caught the light and the astronauts’ eyes.
LADEE carries an instrument that measures the impact of individual dust particles, as well as the collective signal from smaller particles. Lunar scientists had expected a certain amount of tiny dust to explain what the Apollo astronauts saw. But LADEE didn’t find it. “We did measure a signal that indicates that the amount of lofted dust has to be at least two orders of magnitude below the expectations that were based on the Apollo reports,” says Mihály Horányi, the instrument’s principal investigator, who is at the University of Colorado. Perhaps the dust lofting happens only occasionally, he suggests, and the astronauts were in just the right place at the right time to see it.
This remains an important question. Knowing what caused that horizon glow and knowing how often it occurs is essential knowledge for any future lunar base or research station.
The launches at Kennedy, delayed because of a fire at an Air Force radar facility, have now been rescheduled.
The launches at Kennedy, delayed because of a fire at an Air Force radar facility, have now been rescheduled.
This includes a military launch by an Atlas 5 rocket on April 10 and SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch to supply ISS. The Falcon 9 flight will also include an attempt to bring the first stage back to a soft vertical landing over water.
Even as India successfully launched its second homemade GPS satellite today, its space agency ISRO announced that it will launch a test flight of a manned capsule in June using that country’s powerful GSLV rocket.
The competition heats up: Even as India successfully launched its second homemade GPS satellite today, the head of of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in India announced that it will launch a test flight of a manned capsule in June using that country’s powerful GSLV rocket.
Because of a $10 million shortfall in its astrophysics budget, NASA is weighing the fate of nine operating space telescopes.
Because of a $10 million shortfall in its astrophysics budget, NASA is weighing the fate of nine operating space telescopes.
Six of the projects vying for extended funding are U.S.-based. Three are overseen by international space agencies and have U.S. partners.
The NASA missions are: the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope; the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array X-ray observatory; the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope; the Swift Telescope, which tracks gamma-ray bursts; a proposed Kepler space telescope follow-on mission known as K2; and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which was brought out of hibernation last year to help search for asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
Also in the running are two European Space Agency missions, XMM-Newton — an X-ray observatory — and Planck, which studied relic radiation from the Big Bang. Planck was decommissioned in October, but its data analysis program continues.
The final contender is Japan’s Suzaku X-ray telescope.
In hearings today, Pentagon officials said that they are considering ways to build American-built engines to use on our rockets rather than buy Russian-made engines.
In hearings today, Pentagon officials said that they are considering building American-built engines to use on our rockets rather than buy Russian-made engines.
They could do this very cheaply if they simply allowed SpaceX to bid on all military launches.
UrtheCast has released its first image of Earth, taken from one of its cameras on ISS.
UrtheCast has released its first image of Earth, taken from one of its cameras on ISS.
The UrtheCast (pronounced Earth-Cast) system, which was installed (not without trouble) on the International Space Station at the end of 2013, is composed of two cameras. The Theia “medium resolution” camera took this shot; the full picture has a resolution of 3200×8000, or about 25 megapixels. The high-resolution device, which will capture video, is still being calibrated.
Eventually UrtheCast plans to provide free, constant, near-real-time video of the globe from far above — that is, when it’s not being rented out to parties interested in a quick satellite snap of an area. Powerful cameras able to respond quickly to such requests are in high demand by everyone from law enforcement to disaster-relief coordinators.