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Showing posts with label italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label italy. Show all posts

Tuesday 11 November 2014

SpaceX will launch micro-satellites for low cost internet

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Elon Musk has confirmed that SpaceX is working on micro-satellites. Following a story in The Wall Street Journal, he tweeted this morning that SpaceX is developing “advanced micro-satellites operating in large formations” with an official announcement due in two to three months.

It said SpaceX is planning a launch of 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds. A fleet that size would be 10x bigger than the largest current deployment managed by  Iridium Communications.

Sorce : next web

Monday 10 November 2014

3D-printed moonbase? ESA suggested future moon colony

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The European Space Agency (ESA) has proven that its project to 3D-print a base on the Moon is possible. In a latest video the agency shows how 3D-printing robots may be used to build the base using lunar material.

The ESA started investigation of the lunar base possibility in 2013, working alongside its industrial and architectural partners. The creation of the reliable semi-spherical structures on the surface of the moon could be fulfilled within the next 40 years, and 90 percent of the materials needed would be derived from the moon itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk9PWUGkz7o

latest details of the new concept, which is, however, still "firmly on the drawing board," were discussed at a conference this week at ESA's technical center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

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ISS crew lands, brings space-born flies to Earth

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Three crew members of the International Space Station have safely returned to Earth aboard a Soyuz-13M spacecraft, bringing back good memories and results of their 165-day shift in orbit – including a space-born generation of experimental fruit flies.

The spacecraft carrying the commander of the ISS Expedition 41 Russian cosmonaut Maksim Surayev, as well as two flight engineers, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, landed some 80 km from Arkalyk, Kazakhstan.

As part of their mission, the crew completed some 2,640 orbits covering more than 70 million miles and have participated in a number of experiments, including breeding of fruit flies that could potentially shed light on long-term space flight effects on human beings.

Sunday 9 November 2014

Evidence of 'Starquakes' on Neutron Star

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An earthquake can be a pretty awe-inspiring natural event - a testament to the sheer power and size of shifting landmass. But what about seismic activity on a star? NASA's Fermi satellite recently spotted evidence of seismic waves rippling throughout a high-energy neutron star, resulting in an intense "storm" of high-energy blasts.

The star in question, called SGR J1550-5418, is a magnetar - an incredibly dense and highly magnetized neutron star that spins at an exceptionally high speed. The typical neutron star boasts a magnetic pull trillions of times stronger than the Earth's. A magnetar, by comparison, is about 1,000 times more magnetic than that.

Within the last four decades, only 23 magnetars in all have been identified, and among these stars, only three massive flares have ever been seen. The flares were related to "starquakes," in which instability of a neutron's pressing magnetic field literally shakes its surface.

"Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) has captured the same evidence from smaller and much more frequent eruptions called bursts.

Source : nature world news

Saturday 8 November 2014

Is Earth the only technologically-intensive civilization in Universe?

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A new study has revealed that the combination of earth-based science of sustainability and the space-oriented field of astrobiology can shed light on the future of technological civilization on Earth and is the planet first and only technologically-intensive culture in Universe.
Human-caused climate change, ocean acidification and species extinctions may eventually threaten the collapse of civilization, according to some scientists, while other people argue that for political or economic reasons industrial development should be allowed without restrictions.

In the paper, two astrophysicists argue that these questions may soon be resolvable scientifically, thanks to new data about the Earth and about other planets in our galaxy, and by combining the earth-based science of sustainability with the space-oriented field of astrobiology .

Astrophysicists Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan call for creation of a new research program to answer questions about humanity's future in the broadest astronomical context.

The authors explained that the point would be to see that Earth's current situation might, in some sense, be natural or at least a natural and generic consequence of certain evolutionary pathways.

The researchers also showed that how habitability studies of exoplanets hold important lessons for sustaining the civilization we have developed on Earth.

According to the results, studying past extinction events and using theoretical tools to model the future evolutionary trajectory of humankind and of still unknown but plausible alien civilizations could inform decisions that would lead to a sustainable future.

Source : Zee news

Hubble spots massive 'eye in the sky'

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It might look like a giant eye in the sky, or something from a science fiction fiction film, but in fact this incredible image reveals just how violent planet formation is.


Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, it shows the huge dusty debris discs around stars.


Created by collisions between leftover objects from planet formation, were imaged around stars as young as 10 million years old and as mature as more than 1 billion years old in Nasa's images.


The researchers discovered that no two "disks" of material surrounding stars look the same.


“We find that the systems are not simply flat with uniform surfaces,” Schneider said.


Source: dailymail

Thursday 6 November 2014

Rosetta spacecraft set to land on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko

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An artist's impression of the Philae probe setting down on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

If you have an interest in space exploration, you could not have picked a better time in history to be alive than right now. Data and images stream back to Earth daily at an unprecedented rate from robotic spacecraft active at far-flung destinations all over the solar system. To use an old political quote – we've never had it so good.

In the past 50 years we've exploded out of our "little blue dot" to leave boot prints on the moon, land on Venus, Mars and Saturn's moon Titan, and to orbit Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, asteroids and comets, giving us incredible visual vistas of all.

What's missing is a detailed view of dwarf planet Pluto, but we'll have that when the New Horizons spacecraft gets there next year.

There's also another missing first about to be achieved next week – we're going to make a soft landing on the surface of a comet.

Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko had to wait around patiently for billions of years for humans to discover it in 1967. However, it's been a much shorter wait for an opportunity to get up close and personal with it – we're landing a probe on the frozen dumbbell-shaped comet next Wednesday, November 12.

The Rosetta spacecraft, carrying the Philae probe, was launched  from French Guiana in February 2004 by the European Space Agency. It arrived in August this year and has already given us great views of the comet.

It was named for the Rosetta Stone found in Egypt that was crucial in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Similarly the "lander" is named for the Nile River island Philae, where an obelisk also assisted in solving the puzzle of these symbols.

Saturday 1 November 2014

Universe may face a darker future

Artist’s impression of exocomets around Beta Pictoris

New research offers a novel insight into the nature of dark matter and dark energy and what the future of our Universe might be.

Researchers in Portsmouth and Rome have found hints that dark matter, the cosmic scaffolding on which our Universe is built, is being slowly erased, swallowed up by dark energy.

The findings appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society. In the journal cosmologists at the Universities of Portsmouth and Rome, argue that the latest astronomical data favours a dark energy that grows as it interacts with dark matter, and this appears to be slowing the growth of structure in the cosmos.

Professor David Wands, Director of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, is one of the research team.

He said: "This study is about the fundamental properties of space-time. On a cosmic scale, this is about our Universe and its fate.

"If the dark energy is growing and dark matter is evaporating we will end up with a big, empty, boring Universe with almost nothing in it.

"Dark matter provides a framework for structures to grow in the Universe. The galaxies we see are built on that scaffolding and what we are seeing here, in these findings, suggests that dark matter is evaporating, slowing that growth of structure."

Cosmology underwent a paradigm shift in 1998 when researchers announced that the rate at which the Universe was expanding was accelerating. The idea of a constant dark energy throughout space-time (the "cosmological constant") became the standard model of cosmology, but now the Portsmouth and Rome researchers believe they have found a better description, including energy transfer between dark energy and dark matter.

Research students Valentina Salvatelli and Najla Said from the University of Rome worked in Portsmouth with Dr Marco Bruni and Professor Wands, and with Professor Alessandro Melchiorri in Rome. They examined data from a number of astronomical surveys, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and used the growth of structure revealed by these surveys to test different models of dark energy.
Professor Wands said: "Valentina and Najla spent several months here over the summer looking at the consequences of the latest observations. Much more data is available now than was available in 1998 and it appears that the standard model is no longer sufficient to describe all of the data. We think we've found a better model of dark energy.

"Since the late 1990s astronomers have been convinced that something is causing the expansion of our Universe to accelerate. The simplest explanation was that empty space – the vacuum – had an energy density that was a cosmological constant. However there is growing evidence that this simple model cannot explain the full range of astronomical data researchers now have access to; in particular the growth of cosmic structure, galaxies and clusters of galaxies, seems to be slower than expected."
Professor Dragan Huterer, of the University of Michigan, has read the research and said scientists need to take notice of the findings.

He said: "The paper does look very interesting. Any time there is a new development in the dark energy sector we need to take notice since so little is understood about it. I would not say, however, that I am surprised at the results, that they come out different than in the simplest model with no interactions. We've known for some months now that there is some problem in all data fitting perfectly to the standard simplest model."