Tag: science

Privately-built weather satellite constellation to be built

9:25 am

The competition heats up: A private company, dubbed Spire, has announced its intention to launch a 20-satellite constellation of weather satellites, all cubesats, by the end of 2015.

Spire raised $25 million in Series A funding during the summer of 2014, bringing its total amount to $29 million. The company already has customers in a variety of verticals, but Platzer said weather was planned to be a focus from the company’s inception.

…With the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facing an impending weather data gap, an increasing amount of focus has been placed on leveraging commercial options as well. Last year NOAA issued a Request for Information (RFI) on RO that piqued interest from the commercial sector. Congress has also urged the agency to leverage private sector capabilities.

For years I argued that there is no justification for the federal government to provide free weather satellite data to private companies like the Weather Channel. There is more than enough profit to be made tracking and predicting the weather for these companies to launch their own orbiting networks, just as the television and communications industries do. Thus, it is good to see a new start-up take advantage of this need and to push to make a business out of it.

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Update on Philae on Comet 67P/C-G

9:01 am

The Rosetta team has provided a detailed update describing their so far unsuccessful search for Philae on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

In addition, the update also looks into the possibility that Philae might wake up in the late spring when the comet’s orbit and rotation changes enough so its solar panels are more exposed to the Sun.

Bottom line: Don’t expect them to find the lander from images. Right now it is a mere three pixels in size. And whether it will come back to life as well also remains unknown.

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The surprisingly dark and organic surface of Comet 67P/C-G

9:02 am

Link here.

The first surprising result emerging from VIRTIS’s study of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is the measurement of its albedo, or how much sunlight is reflected by the surface of the nucleus. With an albedo of only 6%, about half as much as the Moon’s, 67P/C-G is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System. Such a low reflecting power indicates that the surface of the comet contains minerals such as, for example, iron sulfides, but also carbon-based compounds. The low albedo also indicates that there is little or no water ice on the outermost layers of the surface of the nucleus.

“This clearly doesn’t mean that the comet is not rich in water, but only that there is no water ice in the outermost shell, just over one millimetre thick,” explains Fabrizio Capaccioni, VIRTIS Principal Investigator from INAF-IAPS in Rome, Italy. “The reason for this is rooted in the recent history of the comet’s evolution, since repeated passes in the vicinity of the Sun cause surface ice to sublimate.”

This result, combined with other Rosetta data, also suggests that during each pass the dust that did not escape along the comet’s tail settled back down to coat the surface and hide the lower layers of water ice.

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JPL releases movie of asteroid fly-by

12:38 pm

Using 20 radar images of asteroid 2004 BL86 as it flew past Earth on January 26, scientists at JPL have created a movie showing the orbital motion of the asteroid’s moon.

The images also show one of the most spherical asteroids I have ever seen. Like Ceres, the larger size has helped shape the asteroid into a more typical-looking planetary sphere.

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Got $500? You too can get a scientific paper published!

11:33 am

A Harvard scientist used a random text generator to create a fake science paper entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and was able to get it accepted at 17 journals. [Note: the link includes an auto-download of the pdf of the scientist’s fake paper.]

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Essentially, these fake journals are scams to get $500 from scientists, generally from third world countries who can’t get their papers published in the bigger first world journals. (What does that tell us about those bigger first world journals?)

The best line of the article however was this: “Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources.” [emphasis mine] It seems to me that if you are a journalist writing about a particular field, you should be reasonably educated on that field and be able to spot a fake journal. I certainly can. That it is assumed that mainstream journalists who report on medicine cannot speaks volumes about the quality of the field.

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Solar system of ancient Earths found

8:49 am

Worlds without end: Using archived Kepler data astronomers have identified a solar system of five Earth-sized exoplanets, orbiting a red dwarf star about 117 light years from Earth.

The paper describes Kepler-444, a star that’s 25 percent smaller than our sun and is 117 light years from Earth. The star’s five known planets have sizes that fall between Mercury and Venus. Those planets are so close to their star that they complete their orbits in fewer than 10 days. At that distance, they’re all much hotter than Mercury and aren’t habitable.

The important detail from this discovery is that the star is very ancient, more than 11 billion years old, which means these planets are that old as well. In other words, planets began forming the same time as the first stars. Which also means that there has been plenty of time in the universe for other intelligent life to form, besides our own.

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Asteroid that flew past Earth has its own moon

11:19 pm

Radar images of the large asteroid 2004 BL86 as it flew past the Earth today have revealed that it has its own small moon.

The new images also show a second object positioned close to 2004 BL86. Benner told Space.com that the second object is a moon, with a diameter between 164 and 328 feet (50 and 100 m). Previous studies of the light around 2004 BL86 had already identified a moon orbiting the asteroid, and the new images confirm that discovery, he added. About 17 percent of asteroids in 2004 BL86’s size range have smaller objects trailing along with them.

Boulders and other small-scale features on the surface of the asteroid are coming into focus in the new images, as is the overall shape of the asteroid, according to Benner. He compared the object to another asteroid that made a close flyby of Earth six years ago, called 2008 EV5. It appears that 2004 BL86, like 2008 EV5, has an equatorial ridge around its middle, which makes it look “kind of like a muffin, or perhaps a top,” said Benner, who’s based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

This data is from radar data collected early in the fly-by, so we should expect even more details to come out in the next day or so.

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Comet 67P/C-G’s water output has increased

9:20 am

Data from a U.S. instrument on Rosetta has shown that the water venting off of Comet 67P has increased significantly since the spacecraft arrived.

“In observations over a period of three months [June through August, 2014], the amount of water in vapor form that the comet was dumping into space grew about tenfold,” said Sam Gulkis, principal investigator of the MIRO instrument at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of a paper appearing in the special issue [of Science].

The amount of water at the maximum level averages about 40 ounces every second.

In related Rosetta news today, data from the comet is showing that the dust leaving its surface is dust that had settled back down after the comet’s last close pass to the Sun.

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Water flows on Vesta?

10:26 pm

Some data produced by Dawn while it was in orbit around the asteroid Vesta have suggested to some scientists that liquid water might have helped create a handful of the surface features on the asteroid.

The theory is interesting and might be true. I also wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it, because this interpretation of the data is somewhat tentative and based on a lot of assumptions.

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