Competition for Bigelow! A Russian company has unveiled its own space hotel, set for launch in 2016. More here.
Russia has lost contact with a major new telecommunications satellite hours after its launch today.
Revenge and the abuse of power: The Obama Justice Department has begun an investigation of Standard & Poor.
The Titan Mare Explorer: A nautical mission to an alien sea.
If [NASA] green-lights the mission, the capsule will lift off in 2016. By 2023, TiME will be about 800 million miles away in Titan’s north-polar region, home to its biggest lakes and seas. The capsule will take photographs, collect meteorological data, measure depth, and analyze samples. TiME will have no means of propulsion once it is on Titan, so it will float, carried by breezes across the sea’s surface. Then, by the mid-2020s, it will enter a decade-long winter of darkness as the moon’s orbit takes it to the dark side of Saturn, away from the sun and communication. It won’t have a line of sight to Earth to beam back more data until 2035.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found another cave on Mars. The cropped version of the image, shown below, shows a remarkably symmetrical crater that probably has more similarities to sinkholes on earth. In the center is a 100 foot wide skylight into a cave. The crater is almost certainly formed partly by material dropping into the cave.
A Tennessee woman has been ordered to remove the American flag she raised outside her optometry office.
In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website, two Chinese scientists have proposed using a solar sail for deflecting any asteroid that happens to be aimed at the earth. The diagram to the right is their simulated mission to impact the asteroid Apophis, which will pass close to the earth in 2029 and — depending on whether that flyby puts it through a very small 600 meter-wide mathematical “keyhole” — could then return in 2036 on a collision course.
The idea is to use the sail to slow the spacecraft down enough so that it starts to fall towards the sun. The sail is then used to maneuver it into a retrograde orbit. When it impacts the asteroid the impact will therefore be similar to a head-on collision, thereby imputing the most energy in the least amount of time with the least amount of rocket fuel. In their Apophis simulation, a mission, weighing only 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds), launched around 2025, and hitting the asteroid in this manner in 2026, would deflect its flyby in 2029 enough to guarantee it will not fly through the “keyhole” and therefore eliminate any chance of it hitting the earth in 2036.
Obviously many questions must be answered before such a mission should fly.
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Fly me to the moon! Two stories today (here and here) from Russia about a possible tourist flight around the moon by 2016-2017.
Union civility: An Ohio business owner, harassed for years for running a non-union business, was shot last week when he surprised a vandal scrawling “scab” on his car.
What caused a giant arrow-shaped cloud on Saturn’s moon Titan?
American manned space: dependent on the Russians in more ways than you think.
As commentators from around the country gnash their teeth at U.S. dependence upon Russia to move cargo and astronauts to the mostly U.S. built/funded International Space Station (ISS), they’ve missed the bigger boat: With one exception, all the commercial spaceflight offerings currently in the works have Soviet or Russian engines as a key part of the rockets involved.
The Allen Telescope Array and the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) saved by private donations.
The images from Dawn keep rolling in. The picture on the right, released two days ago, shows the asteroid’s terminator. What makes it intriguing is the weird looking crater near the bottom of the image. It appears to have formed at impact on the wall of a cliff, something that at first glance seems impossible.
This is what I think happened: The impactor sliced down the wall of the cliff, but because of Vesta’s low gravitational field the impact scar never collapsed downward, filling in.
I once wrote an article about asteroids for Astronomy where I described these objects as having the consistency of mashed potatoes and ice cream sundaes. This image illustrates this nicely. The asteroid’s weak gravitational field limits the density of its material, so that puffy strange formations such as this crater can form.
About Obama’s clash with a Tea party activist during his bus tour this week: How long do you think it will take for the press to go after that activist to try to destroy him for daring to challenge this Democratic President?
I give it one week.
Union civility: “You may first beat them repeatedly with a tire iron.”
Things are so good on Juno ten days after launch that mission controllers have canceled a rocket burn to adjust the spacecraft’s course.
Russians to display a new rocket and manned spacecraft design at an international air show in Russia today.
According to Russian space officials today, the next Soyuz tourist flight to ISS will be in 2014.
The article above contradicts yesterday’s story where the head of the Russian space agency suggested that Russia is going to shift its focus from manned space. I suspect both stories reflect an underlying political battle going on within the Russian government.
Serious questions raised about the EPA process that designates a species as endangered.
Saving a failed orbiting satellite with engineering.
Remarks by the head of the Russian space agency on Thursday suggested Russia is going to shift its space effort away from manned space.
Though it is not yet official, it appears the sun is blank of sunspots today, for the first time since January 16.
Solar scientists have concluded that the solar minimum of the past four years has ended and that the sun is now moving towards solar maximum. The recent activity in August has seemed to confirm this. However, once the minimum has ended, the sun should not have any further blank days until the maximum is over and the sun is ramping back down to solar minimum. That the sun should appear blank again during its ramp up to solar maximum is quite unusual, probably unprecedented, and is further evidence that the sun is heading towards a period of little or no solar activity.
