Name an exoplanet!
The International Astronomical Union (IAU), faced with challenges to its authority in naming astronomical objects, is instituting a contest allowing the public to name the 305 most studied exoplanets.
Year: 2014
An update on ISEE-3’s resurrection
The engineers trying to resurrect the 1980s ISEE-3 spacecraft have posted an update describing what happened with yesterday’s partly successful engine burn.
The bottom line:
Thruster firings were planned to done in groupings – or “segments” – of 63 firings per segment. The first chart is annotated to show the three firing attempts. The first segment was full duration but only partially successful. The second and third attempts failed. Possible causes (under investigation) include valve malfunction and fuel supply issues.
This doesn’t sound hopeful, but stay tuned as they continue to assess the situation.
Mapping the inside of Mt St. Helens
A new array of seismometers, combined with a series of planned explosions, will be used to map the interior of the Mt. St. Helens volcano to a depth of eighty kilometers or fifty miles.
To get the job done, starting next week roughly 65 people will fan out across the mountain to deploy 3,500 small seismometers along roads and back-country trails. They will drill 24 holes some 25 metres deep, drop in industrial explosives used for quarrying, and refill the holes (see ‘Under the dome’). The plan is to detonate the explosives in separate shots over four nights. Each blast will shake the ground as much as a magnitude-2 earthquake.
Results from the active blasts will be combined with the passive seismic part of the experiment, which is already under way: 70 larger seismometers around the mountain are measuring how long waves from natural earthquakes take to travel through the ground. Their data can be used to probe as far as 80 kilometres down, says Vidale.
Angara launches
The competition heats up: The first test launch today of Russia’s new Angara rocket was a success, according to Russian reports.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the first stage of the rocket separated four minutes after the liftoff, while the vehicle was flying in the projected area over the southern Barents Sea and in the range of the Russian ground control network. The main engine of the second stage was shut down as planned at 16:08 Moscow Time and the stage along with a payload mockup fell in the projected area of the Kura impact range on the Kamchatka Peninsula 5,700 kilometers from the launch site, 21 minutes after liftoff.
Russia will obviously have to conduct further test launches, including the first orbital test, before it declares Angara operational. Nonetheless, this success gets them closer to replacing the Proton and Zenit rockets and allowing them to decrease their reliance on rockets, spaceports, and components under the control of independent countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
More details about the Angara rocket family can also be found here.
Voyager 1 phones home
New data from Voyager 1 has confirmed that it entered interstellar space in August 2012.
This is just an example of good science. The data last year had suggested this conclusion, which was announced with great fanfare. The new data merely confirms it again.
ISEE-3 engine burn
The major course correction burn for ISEE-3 was only partially successful today.
We managed to conduct the first segment (composed of 63 thruster pulses) but encountered problems with the second and halted the remainder of segment firings. Today’s burn was supposed to be 7.32987 m/s. We’re looking at data and formulating a plan for tomorrow. Our window tomorrow (Wednesday) at Arecibo opens at 12:39 pm EDT and extends to 3:26 pm EDT.
Obamacare forces health insurance brokers to flee
Finding out what’s in it: According to a new report, half the insurance brokers nationwide plan to leave the healthcare industry because of Obamacare.
Link fixed!
Russia to phase out use of Ukrainian-built Soyuz rockets
As part of a major upgrade of its Soyuz rocket family, Russia is also ending its partnership with Ukraine in building those rockets.
The older Soyuz rockets rely on a Ukrainian control system — a relic of the rocket family’s Soviet heritage that in the aftermath of Russia seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in March looks like a threat to Russia’s space program. The rockets are based on the same core design that launched Sputnik and Yury Gagarin into space at the dawn of the space age. “The Soyuz-U and Soyuz-FG control systems are analog [systems] made in Ukraine,” Alexander Kirilin, CEO of the Progress Rocket and Space Center in the Volga city of Samara told Interfax on Monday.
However, the Soyuz 2 rockets use a Russian-made digital control system. Aside from further moving Russia’s space industry away from its reliance on Ukrainian components, the digital control system allows the rockets to handle a wider variety of payloads — making the tried-and-tested Russian rocket more versatile than ever before.
It is Russia’s plan to complete the transition to the new wholly Russian Soyuz 2 rockets for ISS missions within the next three years.
A source for the most powerful cosmic rays?
Astronomers think they have discovered a region in the sky, within or near the Milky Way, which might be the source of the most energetic cosmic rays
Nobody knows how ultra–high-energy cosmic rays—mainly protons or heavier atomic nuclei—acquire energies millions of times higher than have been achieved with humanmade particle accelerators. (Physicists dubbed one of the first ones observed the “Oh-My-God particle.”) Lower energy cosmic rays are thought to spring from the lingering remnants of stellar explosions called supernovas. But such clouds are far too small to produce the highest energy cosmic rays. Instead, theorists generally expect that the most energetic cosmic rays rev up over millions of years in unidentified accelerators the size of galaxies.
The Telescope Array aims to help solve that mystery. When a high-energy cosmic array strikes the atmosphere, it disappears in an avalanche of lower energy particles. Those particles trigger the detectors in the array, enabling researchers to deduce the direction and energy of the original cosmic ray. From 2008 to 2013, researchers spotted 72 cosmic rays with energies above 57 exaelectron volts—15 million times the highest energy achieved with a particle accelerator. And 19 of them appear to cluster in a hotspot in the sky about 20° in radius, as Hiroyuki Sagawa, a co-representative for the Telescope Array team from the University of Tokyo, reported today in a press conference at the university. [emphasis mine]
The low number of detections, 19 out of 72 total, that seem to come from this wide 20 degree region, suggests that this report falls most certainly under the heading of “the uncertainty of science.” I would not be surprised at all if this conclusion does not stand up after further research.
Nonetheless, the article is worth reading because it outlines nicely this astronomical mystery. Something out there accelerates these particles to these high energies, and astronomers do not yet know what that something is.
ISEE-3 engine burn tomorrow
The private effort to resurrect the 1970’s sun-observing space probe ISEE-3’s will attempt its first full engine burn on July 8.
They hope to get the spacecraft back into one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points where it can be controlled reliably from Earth and can thus resume its study the solar wind, as originally designed. They have most of July to make the burn that will shift the orbit appropriately, so if this first attempt fails they can still make it happen.
Obamacare causes wait time in California emergency rooms to skyrocket
Finding out what’s in it: Because their doctors are no longer accepting their Obamacare health plans, patients are flocking to emergency rooms in California, thus increasing the average wait time for treatment to five hours.
I think this quote from the article summarizes the situation quite nicely:
California doctor Robert Subers told his local news station he cannot accept some Obamacare insurance because the payments are so low he would end up owing money out of his own pocket for each visit. “If it was supposed to increase access to care, Obamacare, and if it was supposed to bring down healthcare costs, I’m trying to find out where it’s done either,” he said.
Buran moved to new exhibition location
After sitting in Gorky Park since 1995, the prototype of Russia’s space shuttle, Buran, was moved this past weekend to Moscow’s official outdoor exhibition center.
Back in 2003, when I was in Moscow interviewing people for Leaving Earth, my apartment was within walking distance of Gorky Park. I went over there to take a look. You could get to within a few feet of the prototype, which was sitting with no display signs or security other than a simple fence. It looked quite dilapidated (I would post the photographs I took but this was the last time I used my film camera, and they are all slides.)
The article above has some nice details describing the history of Buran, and why it only flew once. Definitely worth reading.