Astronomy and Space

Advances in the investigation of the physical universe we live in.
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Exoplanets

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Drake equation for alien life gets an upgrade
22 May 2013 by Lisa Grossman

The planet-spotting Kepler telescope seems doomed, but its discoveries along with a new version of the famous Drake equation will sharpen the hunt for ET

AN ICONIC tool in the search for extraterrestrial life is getting a 21st-century reboot – just as our best planet-hunting telescope seems to have died. Though the loss of NASA's Kepler telescope is a blow, the reboot could mean we find signs of life on extrasolar planets within a decade.

The new tool takes the form of an equation. In 1961 astronomer Frank Drake scribbled his now-famous equation for calculating the number of detectable civilisations in the Milky Way. The Drake equation includes a number of terms that at the time seemed unknowable – including the very existence of planets beyond our solar system.

But the past two decades have seen exoplanets pop up like weeds, particularly in the last few years thanks in large part to the Kepler space telescope. Launched in 2009, Kepler has found more than 130 worlds and detected 3000 or so more possibles. The bounty has given astronomers the first proper census of planets in one region of our galaxy, allowing us to make estimates of the total population of life-friendly worlds across the Milky Way.

With that kind of data in hand, Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckons the Drake equation is ripe for a revamp. Her version narrows a few of the original terms to account for our new best bets of finding life, based in part on what Kepler has revealed. If the original Drake equation was a hatchet, the new Seager equation is a scalpel.

Seager presented her work this week at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, entitled "Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era". The timing could not be more prescient. Last week Kepler suffered a surprise hardware failure that knocked out its ability to see planetary signals clearly. If it can't be fixed, the mission is over.

"When we talked about the post-Kepler era, we thought that would be three to four years from now," co-organiser David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said last week. "We now know the post-Kepler era probably started two days ago."

But Kepler has collected data for four years, slightly longer than the mission's original goal, and so far only the first 18 months' worth have been analysed. That means it may have already gathered enough information to give alien-hunters a fighting chance.

The original Drake equation includes seven terms, which multiplied together give the number of intelligent alien civilisations we could hope to detect (see diagram). Kepler was supposed to pin down two terms: the fraction of stars that have planets, and the number of those planets that are habitable.

To do that, Kepler had been staring unflinchingly at some 150,000 stars near the constellation Cygnus, looking for periodic changes in brightness caused by a planet crossing, or transiting, a star's face as seen from Earth. This method tells us a planet's size and its rough distance from its host star.

Size gives a clue to a planet's composition, which tells us whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Neptune. Before Kepler, only a few exoplanets had been identified as small enough to be rocky, because other search methods were better suited to spotting larger, gas giant worlds.

"Kepler is the single most revolutionary project that has ever been undertaken in exoplanets," says Charbonneau. "It broke open the piggybank and rocky planets poured out." A planet's distance from its star is also crucial, because that tells us whether the temperature is right for liquid water – and so perhaps life – to exist.

But with Kepler's recent woes, hopes of finding enough potentially habitable planets, or Earth twins, to satisfy the Drake equation have dimmed. The mission was supposed to run for three-and-a-half years, which should have been enough to pinpoint Earth-sized planets with years of a similar length. After the telescope came online, the mission team realised that other sun-like stars are more active than ours, and they bounce around too much in the telescope's field of view. To find enough Earths, they would need seven or eight years of data.

It was a relief when the mission was extended until 2016, and that much more of a blow when the telescope abruptly failed last week. NASA has a few last-ditch ideas for reviving the mission (see "Kepler's emergency surgery"), but chances are the telescope is dead.

Kepler's principal investigator William Borucki is optimistic that a few Earth twins around sun-like stars lurk in the existing data. Sun-like stars are not the only ones that can host habitable planets, though. The Seager equation focuses in on red dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than the sun. That makes it easier to detect rocky planets around them at the right distance for life, because the planets have tighter, briefer orbits. What's more, red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy: projections based on Kepler data suggest that the nearest habitable Earth-sized world could orbit a red dwarf as close as 6.5 light years away.

Even better, it will be easier to probe these planets for gases associated with life, because tighter orbits mean that more of the star's light will filter through a planet's atmosphere on the way to us, picking up telltale clues to its composition. Seager's goal is to find the fraction of habitable Earth-sized worlds in our galactic neighbourhood with detectable atmospheric biosignatures – in other words, inhabited worlds. She has already put the number of inhabited planets that the James Webb space telescope might see at less than 10.

"Just like with the Drake equation, some of the terms are always speculative," Seager says.

So is it possible the work will lead us to discover aliens next door? "Of course I think it's possible. Why else would I be working so hard?" she says.

If Seager or someone else detected biosignatures, we would spend more time looking in those places for hints of intelligence, says Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute. "You'd know that's an inhabited world, not just a habitable world. And then you can ask the question, did they develop any technology we might detect?"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... rade.html?
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Re: Astronomy and Space

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o8TssbmY-GM
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Panspermia

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Asteroid Named After Iain M. Banks of The Culture......

Post by monster_gardener »

Thank You Very Much for maintaining the Forum, Admins Typhoon & YMix.

Asteroid Named After Iain M. Banks, recently deceased author of "The Culture"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

Latest News

July 4th, 2013 in Book News

In recent months, the astronomer José Luis Galache at the Minor Planet Center put forth a request that an asteroid be named after Iain M. Banks. Sadly, it was too late for Iain to hear of it, but on the 23rd of June this was approved by the International Astronomical Union.

Asteroid Iainbanks now resides in the Main Asteroid Belt of the Sol system; with a size of 6.1 km (3.8 miles), it takes 3.94 years to complete a revolution around the Sun. It is most likely of a stony composition.

Read more about the asteroid on the MPC Blog , where you can also view an interactive sketch of its orbit around the sun.
http://www.iain-banks.net/2013/07/04/as ... ain-banks/
Asteroid Iainbanks resides in the Main Asteroid Belt of the Sol system; with a size of 6.1 km (3.8 miles), it takes 3.94 years to complete a revolution around the Sun. It is most likely of a stony composition.

The Culture is an advanced society in whose midst most of Mr Banks’s Sci-Fi novels take place. Thanks to their technology they are able to hollow out asteroids and use them as ships capable of faster-than-light travel while providing a living habitat with centrifugally-generated gravity for their thousands of denizens. I’d like to think Mr Banks would have been amused to have his own rock.
Actually the Culture is much more into Orbitals as in Halo there ;) but why quibble.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_%28The_Culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_% ... _influence

Asteriod Ian Banks Orbital ;) elements.......

http://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/ ... bit+Sketch
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Re: Astronomy and Space

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full navigation launch of reusable Grasshopper rocket

Rocket lifts off, goes up more than 1000 feet and returns tail first to launch pad.

Link includes video
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Re: Astronomy and Space

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Typhoon wrote:arXiv | Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883
A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.
Did a doomsday comet almost end life on earth?
By Tuan C. Nguyen | October 19, 2011, 6:00 AM PDT

In 1883, a mysterious photograph surfaced depicting what appeared to be unidentified flying objects crossing the heavens above. Considering that photographic technology was really rough around the edges back in those days, you can see how easily the objects can be made out to be almost anything from a flock of birds to, as some scientists have recently suggested, massive chunks from a comet that came within a hair’s breath of ending all life as we know it.

Now that I have your attention, let’s backtrack a bit. That year in mid-August Astronomer Jose Bonilla of the Zacatecas Observatory in Mexico peered through a telescope and saw what he described as a swarm of objects, misty in appearance, passing in front of the sun. Like any good scientist would have done, Bonilla dutifully published the details of his observations in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Far from being alarmed, the journal’s editor dismissed it as nothing more than perhaps migrating geese or, somewhat more insultingly, a speck of dust on the telescope lens. It seemed the most logical explanation at the time since no one else had reported seeing the same event.

But what’s particularly unsettling about the report was that Bonilla claimed to have watched the unidentified objects move across the sky over the course of two days, which suggests there may be something more dramatic happening here. Now a trio of Mexican astronomers (Hector Javier Durand Manterola, Maria de la Paz Ramos Lara, y Guadalupe Cordero) have released a paper claiming that the objects in question were actually fragments from a colossal comet named Pons-Brooks, which may have narrowly missed striking the earth by a mere 300 miles. We’re talking a massive ball of ice and dust weighing more than a billion tons breaking apart into 3275 scattered bits, with each measuring 50 to 800 meters across. They estimate that one chunk of the comet pelting the earth would have been equivalent to the explosive impact felt at Tunguska in 1908. A sequence of 3275 Tunguska events over the course of two days basically would have amounted to nothing short of mass extinction or, as if you prefer a fancier term, Armageddon.

So how did the researchers deduce that the object in question was a killer comet instead of, you know, a mob of angry birds? In their paper titled “Interpretation of the observations made in 1883 in Zacatecas (Mexico): A fragmented Comet that nearly hits the Earth,” the authors surmised that comets are “the only bodies in the Solar System which are surrounded by a bright mistiness.” They attempt to bolster their argument by reasoning that when a comet swings that close to the earth, a strong visual effect occurs where an object easily visible from one standpoint can be out of the line of sight at another.

“It’s like a bird flying by just outside your window; someone looking out a different window wouldn’t have seen it, but a bird a few hundred meters away would be visible to both,” wrote Phil Plait on Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog, where he assessed the findings.

However, if the blog’s name is any indication, the tone of his article was highly skeptical of the researchers’ account of what may have happened that day. For instance, he found it questionable that there wasn’t a subsequent meteor shower, which normally occurs following disintegration. And while its plausible that parallax may have come into play, the effect is a temporary one, meaning the comet should have appeared visible elsewhere before and after Bonilla’s observations were made. Add to that a series of questionable mathematical calculations that have the hurling bundle of debris as stretching a few thousand kilometers across when in fact just the material surrounding an intact comet “can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers across” and the theory starts to, well, crumble.

Plait writes:

If there were hundreds of objects this size, there would’ve been millions as small a few centimeters across. Objects that size make brilliant fireballs as they burn up in our atmosphere, and would’ve been visible during the day, even with the Sun shining. Again, no reports of any meteor storms, despite a comet being a few thousand kilometers away and a million kilometers long.

Also, the Earth is moving, and covers a lot of ground (OK, space) in a day. Having the Earth move at least 2.5 million km during that time, and never getting closer or farther than 500 – 65,000 km is too much to ask.

And for those very same reasons, Donald K. Yeomans, Manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, finds the paper to be nothing more than a runaway case of unsubstantiated speculation.

“It’s virtually impossible that a comet would come this close, suddenly appear to only one person and then disappear, and not have meteor showers associated with it,” he told SmartPlanet. ” It’s ridiculous I think. I’m surprised that this story had legs.”

He also added that astronomers have very reliable coordinates for the orbits of Brooks-Swift and Pons–Brooks, the two known comets spotted that year. The closest, he says, that the fragments from either comet could have approached the Earth in 1883 was several million miles.

But the overarching problem Yeomans and Plait have hinted at is how a theory, no matter how tenuous or ill-conceived, can easily be spread through news media reports without any semblance of rigorous skepticism. In this case, the analysis was fished from arXiv, an online archive of pre-prints, scientific papers that have yet to be published in a peer-review journal. Although that shouldn’t prevent journalists from bringing them to light, such a tiny detail would have at least given us all a more accurate picture of what happened on that fateful night.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinkin ... earth/8964
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Life on Mars?...

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Phil Plait - Author of Bad Astronomy & Death from the Skies.

Post by monster_gardener »

Endovelico wrote:
Typhoon wrote:arXiv | Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883
A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.
Did a doomsday comet almost end life on earth?
By Tuan C. Nguyen | October 19, 2011, 6:00 AM PDT

In 1883, a mysterious photograph surfaced depicting what appeared to be unidentified flying objects crossing the heavens above. Considering that photographic technology was really rough around the edges back in those days, you can see how easily the objects can be made out to be almost anything from a flock of birds to, as some scientists have recently suggested, massive chunks from a comet that came within a hair’s breath of ending all life as we know it.

Now that I have your attention, let’s backtrack a bit. That year in mid-August Astronomer Jose Bonilla of the Zacatecas Observatory in Mexico peered through a telescope and saw what he described as a swarm of objects, misty in appearance, passing in front of the sun. Like any good scientist would have done, Bonilla dutifully published the details of his observations in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Far from being alarmed, the journal’s editor dismissed it as nothing more than perhaps migrating geese or, somewhat more insultingly, a speck of dust on the telescope lens. It seemed the most logical explanation at the time since no one else had reported seeing the same event.

But what’s particularly unsettling about the report was that Bonilla claimed to have watched the unidentified objects move across the sky over the course of two days, which suggests there may be something more dramatic happening here. Now a trio of Mexican astronomers (Hector Javier Durand Manterola, Maria de la Paz Ramos Lara, y Guadalupe Cordero) have released a paper claiming that the objects in question were actually fragments from a colossal comet named Pons-Brooks, which may have narrowly missed striking the earth by a mere 300 miles. We’re talking a massive ball of ice and dust weighing more than a billion tons breaking apart into 3275 scattered bits, with each measuring 50 to 800 meters across. They estimate that one chunk of the comet pelting the earth would have been equivalent to the explosive impact felt at Tunguska in 1908. A sequence of 3275 Tunguska events over the course of two days basically would have amounted to nothing short of mass extinction or, as if you prefer a fancier term, Armageddon.

So how did the researchers deduce that the object in question was a killer comet instead of, you know, a mob of angry birds? In their paper titled “Interpretation of the observations made in 1883 in Zacatecas (Mexico): A fragmented Comet that nearly hits the Earth,” the authors surmised that comets are “the only bodies in the Solar System which are surrounded by a bright mistiness.” They attempt to bolster their argument by reasoning that when a comet swings that close to the earth, a strong visual effect occurs where an object easily visible from one standpoint can be out of the line of sight at another.

“It’s like a bird flying by just outside your window; someone looking out a different window wouldn’t have seen it, but a bird a few hundred meters away would be visible to both,” wrote Phil Plait on Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog, where he assessed the findings.

However, if the blog’s name is any indication, the tone of his article was highly skeptical of the researchers’ account of what may have happened that day. For instance, he found it questionable that there wasn’t a subsequent meteor shower, which normally occurs following disintegration. And while its plausible that parallax may have come into play, the effect is a temporary one, meaning the comet should have appeared visible elsewhere before and after Bonilla’s observations were made. Add to that a series of questionable mathematical calculations that have the hurling bundle of debris as stretching a few thousand kilometers across when in fact just the material surrounding an intact comet “can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers across” and the theory starts to, well, crumble.

Plait writes:

If there were hundreds of objects this size, there would’ve been millions as small a few centimeters across. Objects that size make brilliant fireballs as they burn up in our atmosphere, and would’ve been visible during the day, even with the Sun shining. Again, no reports of any meteor storms, despite a comet being a few thousand kilometers away and a million kilometers long.

Also, the Earth is moving, and covers a lot of ground (OK, space) in a day. Having the Earth move at least 2.5 million km during that time, and never getting closer or farther than 500 – 65,000 km is too much to ask.

And for those very same reasons, Donald K. Yeomans, Manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, finds the paper to be nothing more than a runaway case of unsubstantiated speculation.

“It’s virtually impossible that a comet would come this close, suddenly appear to only one person and then disappear, and not have meteor showers associated with it,” he told SmartPlanet. ” It’s ridiculous I think. I’m surprised that this story had legs.”

He also added that astronomers have very reliable coordinates for the orbits of Brooks-Swift and Pons–Brooks, the two known comets spotted that year. The closest, he says, that the fragments from either comet could have approached the Earth in 1883 was several million miles.

But the overarching problem Yeomans and Plait have hinted at is how a theory, no matter how tenuous or ill-conceived, can easily be spread through news media reports without any semblance of rigorous skepticism. In this case, the analysis was fished from arXiv, an online archive of pre-prints, scientific papers that have yet to be published in a peer-review journal. Although that shouldn’t prevent journalists from bringing them to light, such a tiny detail would have at least given us all a more accurate picture of what happened on that fateful night.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinkin ... earth/8964
Thank YOU VERY MUCH for your post, Endovelico.

Thanks for the update......

I sometimes read Phil Plait's blog but I had missed this one......

Glad to get his take on this......

Thanks again,

Your friend, MG
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Google-doodle-honors-Maria-Mitchell-first-professional-woman

Post by monster_gardener »

Thank you Very Much for the Thread, Typhoon.
Today’s Google Doodle honors Maria Mitchell (Aug. 1, 1818—Jun. 28, 1889), the first professional woman astronomer in the U.S. and the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born to a Quaker family on Nantucket, she grew up stargazing with her father’s telescope. On October 1, 1847, while working as a librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, she discovered a new comet, which became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” King Frederick VI of Denmark sent her a medal in honor of her discovery.

.............

There’s even a crater on the Moon named after her, “Mitchell’s Crater.”

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/01/goo ... z2akN39eZ3
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/01/goo ... stronomer/
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Charger-1 pulsed-power device

Post by Endovelico »

UAHuntsville student seeking ‘Holy Grail’ of rocket propulsion system

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Can a device formerly used to test nuclear weapons effects find a new life in rocket propulsion research? That is the question in which researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville seek an answer.

A new massive device is being assembled at the university’s Aerophysics Research Center on Redstone Arsenal, where a team of scientists and researchers from UAHuntsville’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Boeing and Marshall Space Flight Center’s Propulsion Engineering Lab are busy putting together a strange looking machine they’re calling the “Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator.” It’s a key element in furthering the development of nuclear fusion technology to drive spacecraft.

The huge apparatus, known as the Decade Module Two (DM2) in its earlier life, was used on a contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for research into the effects of nuclear weapons explosions.

UAHuntsville was first informed about its availability in 2009, several years after the research contract for which it was originally designed came to an end. Reassembling several huge pieces of industrial equipment, the components were delivered in five shipments to the Aerophysics Research Center from San Leandro, Calif. When assembled, the unit will tip the scales at nearly 50 tons, and will be “one of the largest, most powerful pulse power systems in the academic world,” according to university officials.

With all units now in place, UAHuntsville engineering professor and project head Dr. Jason Cassibry says the team is busy cleaning up the components, which picked “a lot of dirt” after sitting in a lab for nearly 10 years, then being shipped across the country. Refurbishment will include replacement of about 100 large resistors, and securing 15,000 gallons of transformer oil for the Marx tank, which holds the capacitors and prevents arcing between them. “That’s a big hurdle, but we’ll get there,” says Cassibry. “We’re interested in deep space exploration. Right now humans are stuck in low earth orbit, but we want to explore the solar system. We’re trying to come up with a system that will demonstrate ‘break even’ for thermonuclear propulsion.”

Despite the hydrogen bomb images this machine may evoke, Cassibry cautions it is completely safe. More importantly, research using the Charger-1 pulse power generator could change the entire way rockets are propelled and revolutionize space travel. Since the dawn of spaceflight in the late 1950s, the world’s rockets have relied on chemical reactions of various fuels, such as kerosene or liquid hydrogen, to provide the thrust needed to launch and propel spacecraft. Launch vehicles have to be designed to carry thousands of tons of fuel, and rocket engines that could lift these massive loads along with the relatively lightweight payloads.

Nuclear fusion propulsion would reduce fuel needed to a few tons instead of thousands of tons. More importantly, it could reduce a trip to Mars to six weeks instead of six months, which reduces bone density loss and other effects of prolonged weightlessness on crew members. A launch would be somewhat like assembling the international space station, Ross Cortez explains. He is an aerospace engineering Ph. D candidate from Alpharetta, Ga. (Milton High School). Multiple launch vehicles would put the required components into orbit, where the spacecraft would then be assembled. The pulsed fusion engine would then launch the spacecraft from this higher Earth orbit. After achieving mission velocity, the engines would be turned off and the spacecraft would coast to its destination.

Crew members would feel the power as a series of pulses like a light tapping – not the common misconception of a full-throttle acceleration that would keep them pinned to the backs of their seats. Cortez describes the fusion principle as “taking two light atoms and smashing them together, which releases massive amounts of energy.” Similar to the process used by the Sun for billions of years, atoms of heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, combine with isotopes of lithium to release the energy required for thrust. Another way to look at it, Cortez says, is to liken it to a lightning strike, when an electrical current blasts through the fuel to compress the atoms, which achieve the reactions needed. Cortez likes to use a colorful analogy to explain the process. “Imagine using a 1-ton TNT equivalent explosive and putting it out the back end of a rocket. That’s what we’re doing here.” Those pulses come from a bank of large capacitors, known as a Marx bank, which stores electrical charges for release on command. The wires, some composed of lithium 6 and others of lithium deuteride, provide the power pulses.

“We plug the wire array into this machine,” explains Cortez, “and a massive jolt of energy is fed into the array, which vaporizes into a plasma which we collapse into a Z-pinch.” The Z-pinch effect, he explains, is the compression derived from the plasma’s own magnetic fields. Cassibry says the Z-pinch is “the equivalent to 20 percent of the world’s power output in a tiny bolt of lightning no bigger than your finger.”

Energy gain is another important factor in nuclear fusion propulsion where, Cortez says, “we need to get more energy from the reaction than we use to initiate it.” That would be a major breakthrough, but Cassibry says an important milestone will be to simply achieve “break even” – the point where the energy derived from the pulse system equals the energy put into it. Though the concept of nuclear propulsion has been around for decades, Cortez says it has only been recently that engineers have been able to create the needed reactions and control them. This has been the Holy Grail of energy propulsion technology. The massive payoff is that energy gain, where we get more energy out of the reaction than we put in. This is what everyone has pursued since the time we first started thinking about this.”

The researchers say Charger – 1 is an important tool that will help them ultimately achieve the goal of practical thermonuclear propulsion.

“Charger 1 won’t come close to break even, but will give us ability to conduct experiments that optimize fusion energy output,” says Cassibry. “Our ultimate goal is to build a break even fusion system that will propel humans throughout the solar system.”

http://www.uah.edu/news/research/3855-a ... fsDN-Wgp3s
I may not live long enough to see it, but it sounds exciting.
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Re: Charger-1 pulsed-power device

Post by monster_gardener »

Endovelico wrote:
UAHuntsville student seeking ‘Holy Grail’ of rocket propulsion system

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Can a device formerly used to test nuclear weapons effects find a new life in rocket propulsion research? That is the question in which researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville seek an answer.

A new massive device is being assembled at the university’s Aerophysics Research Center on Redstone Arsenal, where a team of scientists and researchers from UAHuntsville’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Boeing and Marshall Space Flight Center’s Propulsion Engineering Lab are busy putting together a strange looking machine they’re calling the “Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator.” It’s a key element in furthering the development of nuclear fusion technology to drive spacecraft.

The huge apparatus, known as the Decade Module Two (DM2) in its earlier life, was used on a contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for research into the effects of nuclear weapons explosions.

UAHuntsville was first informed about its availability in 2009, several years after the research contract for which it was originally designed came to an end. Reassembling several huge pieces of industrial equipment, the components were delivered in five shipments to the Aerophysics Research Center from San Leandro, Calif. When assembled, the unit will tip the scales at nearly 50 tons, and will be “one of the largest, most powerful pulse power systems in the academic world,” according to university officials.

With all units now in place, UAHuntsville engineering professor and project head Dr. Jason Cassibry says the team is busy cleaning up the components, which picked “a lot of dirt” after sitting in a lab for nearly 10 years, then being shipped across the country. Refurbishment will include replacement of about 100 large resistors, and securing 15,000 gallons of transformer oil for the Marx tank, which holds the capacitors and prevents arcing between them. “That’s a big hurdle, but we’ll get there,” says Cassibry. “We’re interested in deep space exploration. Right now humans are stuck in low earth orbit, but we want to explore the solar system. We’re trying to come up with a system that will demonstrate ‘break even’ for thermonuclear propulsion.”

Despite the hydrogen bomb images this machine may evoke, Cassibry cautions it is completely safe. More importantly, research using the Charger-1 pulse power generator could change the entire way rockets are propelled and revolutionize space travel. Since the dawn of spaceflight in the late 1950s, the world’s rockets have relied on chemical reactions of various fuels, such as kerosene or liquid hydrogen, to provide the thrust needed to launch and propel spacecraft. Launch vehicles have to be designed to carry thousands of tons of fuel, and rocket engines that could lift these massive loads along with the relatively lightweight payloads.

Nuclear fusion propulsion would reduce fuel needed to a few tons instead of thousands of tons. More importantly, it could reduce a trip to Mars to six weeks instead of six months, which reduces bone density loss and other effects of prolonged weightlessness on crew members. A launch would be somewhat like assembling the international space station, Ross Cortez explains. He is an aerospace engineering Ph. D candidate from Alpharetta, Ga. (Milton High School). Multiple launch vehicles would put the required components into orbit, where the spacecraft would then be assembled. The pulsed fusion engine would then launch the spacecraft from this higher Earth orbit. After achieving mission velocity, the engines would be turned off and the spacecraft would coast to its destination.

Crew members would feel the power as a series of pulses like a light tapping – not the common misconception of a full-throttle acceleration that would keep them pinned to the backs of their seats. Cortez describes the fusion principle as “taking two light atoms and smashing them together, which releases massive amounts of energy.” Similar to the process used by the Sun for billions of years, atoms of heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, combine with isotopes of lithium to release the energy required for thrust. Another way to look at it, Cortez says, is to liken it to a lightning strike, when an electrical current blasts through the fuel to compress the atoms, which achieve the reactions needed. Cortez likes to use a colorful analogy to explain the process. “Imagine using a 1-ton TNT equivalent explosive and putting it out the back end of a rocket. That’s what we’re doing here.” Those pulses come from a bank of large capacitors, known as a Marx bank, which stores electrical charges for release on command. The wires, some composed of lithium 6 and others of lithium deuteride, provide the power pulses.

“We plug the wire array into this machine,” explains Cortez, “and a massive jolt of energy is fed into the array, which vaporizes into a plasma which we collapse into a Z-pinch.” The Z-pinch effect, he explains, is the compression derived from the plasma’s own magnetic fields. Cassibry says the Z-pinch is “the equivalent to 20 percent of the world’s power output in a tiny bolt of lightning no bigger than your finger.”

Energy gain is another important factor in nuclear fusion propulsion where, Cortez says, “we need to get more energy from the reaction than we use to initiate it.” That would be a major breakthrough, but Cassibry says an important milestone will be to simply achieve “break even” – the point where the energy derived from the pulse system equals the energy put into it. Though the concept of nuclear propulsion has been around for decades, Cortez says it has only been recently that engineers have been able to create the needed reactions and control them. This has been the Holy Grail of energy propulsion technology. The massive payoff is that energy gain, where we get more energy out of the reaction than we put in. This is what everyone has pursued since the time we first started thinking about this.”

The researchers say Charger – 1 is an important tool that will help them ultimately achieve the goal of practical thermonuclear propulsion.

“Charger 1 won’t come close to break even, but will give us ability to conduct experiments that optimize fusion energy output,” says Cassibry. “Our ultimate goal is to build a break even fusion system that will propel humans throughout the solar system.”

http://www.uah.edu/news/research/3855-a ... fsDN-Wgp3s
I may not live long enough to see it, but it sounds exciting.
Thank You VERY MUCH for your post, Endovelico.

SECONDED!

Orion Must Rise........

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_O ... pulsion%29

Daedalus Must Fly.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus_Project

Charger Must Race......
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Curiosity Probe's 1st Year on Mars condensed to 2 minutes...

Post by monster_gardener »

Thank You Very Much for the Thread, Typhoon.

Curiosity Probe's 1st Year on Mars condensed to 2 minutes.......

8Alq08Poqb0
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Big Solar Flare reported. Aurora & other Effects

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Thank You VERY Much for the Thread, Typhoon.

Big Solar Flare reported. Aurora & other Effects, telcom & power outages, expected.

Video at link

http://www.inquisitr.com/914975/solar-f ... d-by-nasa/
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Re: Astronomy and Space

Post by Typhoon »

UA astronomers take sharpest photos ever of the night sky

Adaptive optics has revolutionized ground-based telescopes.
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Re: Charger-1 pulsed-power device

Post by Typhoon »

Endovelico wrote:
UAHuntsville student seeking ‘Holy Grail’ of rocket propulsion system

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Can a device formerly used to test nuclear weapons effects find a new life in rocket propulsion research? That is the question in which researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville seek an answer.

A new massive device is being assembled at the university’s Aerophysics Research Center on Redstone Arsenal, where a team of scientists and researchers from UAHuntsville’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Boeing and Marshall Space Flight Center’s Propulsion Engineering Lab are busy putting together a strange looking machine they’re calling the “Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator.” It’s a key element in furthering the development of nuclear fusion technology to drive spacecraft.

The huge apparatus, known as the Decade Module Two (DM2) in its earlier life, was used on a contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for research into the effects of nuclear weapons explosions.

UAHuntsville was first informed about its availability in 2009, several years after the research contract for which it was originally designed came to an end. Reassembling several huge pieces of industrial equipment, the components were delivered in five shipments to the Aerophysics Research Center from San Leandro, Calif. When assembled, the unit will tip the scales at nearly 50 tons, and will be “one of the largest, most powerful pulse power systems in the academic world,” according to university officials.

With all units now in place, UAHuntsville engineering professor and project head Dr. Jason Cassibry says the team is busy cleaning up the components, which picked “a lot of dirt” after sitting in a lab for nearly 10 years, then being shipped across the country. Refurbishment will include replacement of about 100 large resistors, and securing 15,000 gallons of transformer oil for the Marx tank, which holds the capacitors and prevents arcing between them. “That’s a big hurdle, but we’ll get there,” says Cassibry. “We’re interested in deep space exploration. Right now humans are stuck in low earth orbit, but we want to explore the solar system. We’re trying to come up with a system that will demonstrate ‘break even’ for thermonuclear propulsion.”

Despite the hydrogen bomb images this machine may evoke, Cassibry cautions it is completely safe. More importantly, research using the Charger-1 pulse power generator could change the entire way rockets are propelled and revolutionize space travel. Since the dawn of spaceflight in the late 1950s, the world’s rockets have relied on chemical reactions of various fuels, such as kerosene or liquid hydrogen, to provide the thrust needed to launch and propel spacecraft. Launch vehicles have to be designed to carry thousands of tons of fuel, and rocket engines that could lift these massive loads along with the relatively lightweight payloads.

Nuclear fusion propulsion would reduce fuel needed to a few tons instead of thousands of tons. More importantly, it could reduce a trip to Mars to six weeks instead of six months, which reduces bone density loss and other effects of prolonged weightlessness on crew members. A launch would be somewhat like assembling the international space station, Ross Cortez explains. He is an aerospace engineering Ph. D candidate from Alpharetta, Ga. (Milton High School). Multiple launch vehicles would put the required components into orbit, where the spacecraft would then be assembled. The pulsed fusion engine would then launch the spacecraft from this higher Earth orbit. After achieving mission velocity, the engines would be turned off and the spacecraft would coast to its destination.

Crew members would feel the power as a series of pulses like a light tapping – not the common misconception of a full-throttle acceleration that would keep them pinned to the backs of their seats. Cortez describes the fusion principle as “taking two light atoms and smashing them together, which releases massive amounts of energy.” Similar to the process used by the Sun for billions of years, atoms of heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, combine with isotopes of lithium to release the energy required for thrust. Another way to look at it, Cortez says, is to liken it to a lightning strike, when an electrical current blasts through the fuel to compress the atoms, which achieve the reactions needed. Cortez likes to use a colorful analogy to explain the process. “Imagine using a 1-ton TNT equivalent explosive and putting it out the back end of a rocket. That’s what we’re doing here.” Those pulses come from a bank of large capacitors, known as a Marx bank, which stores electrical charges for release on command. The wires, some composed of lithium 6 and others of lithium deuteride, provide the power pulses.

“We plug the wire array into this machine,” explains Cortez, “and a massive jolt of energy is fed into the array, which vaporizes into a plasma which we collapse into a Z-pinch.” The Z-pinch effect, he explains, is the compression derived from the plasma’s own magnetic fields. Cassibry says the Z-pinch is “the equivalent to 20 percent of the world’s power output in a tiny bolt of lightning no bigger than your finger.”

Energy gain is another important factor in nuclear fusion propulsion where, Cortez says, “we need to get more energy from the reaction than we use to initiate it.” That would be a major breakthrough, but Cassibry says an important milestone will be to simply achieve “break even” – the point where the energy derived from the pulse system equals the energy put into it. Though the concept of nuclear propulsion has been around for decades, Cortez says it has only been recently that engineers have been able to create the needed reactions and control them. This has been the Holy Grail of energy propulsion technology. The massive payoff is that energy gain, where we get more energy out of the reaction than we put in. This is what everyone has pursued since the time we first started thinking about this.”

The researchers say Charger – 1 is an important tool that will help them ultimately achieve the goal of practical thermonuclear propulsion.

“Charger 1 won’t come close to break even, but will give us ability to conduct experiments that optimize fusion energy output,” says Cassibry. “Our ultimate goal is to build a break even fusion system that will propel humans throughout the solar system.”

http://www.uah.edu/news/research/3855-a ... fsDN-Wgp3s
I may not live long enough to see it, but it sounds exciting.
I agree.

This type of research is far far more interesting the various current ventures in commercial space-flight which still use the now-ancient system of chemical reaction propulsion.
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Epsilon

Post by Endovelico »

Japan's new rocket blasts off in laptop-controlled launch
by Staff Writers - Tokyo (AFP) Sept 14, 2013

Image


Japan's new solid-fuel rocket successfully blasted off Saturday carrying a telescope for remote observation of planets in a launch coordinated from a laptop computer-based command centre.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Epsilon rocket from the Uchinoura Space Centre in Kagoshima, southwestern Japan, at 2:00 pm (0500 GMT).

Spectators cheered in Kagoshima as well as at a public viewing site in Tokyo.

More than 900 people who gathered at the Tokyo event clapped and took photos with cellphones as a huge screen showed the rocket lift off in a cloud of white smoke and orange flame.

The three-stage Epsilon -- 24 metres (79-feet) long and weighing 91 tonnes -- released the "SPRINT-A" telescope at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) as scheduled, JAXA said.

SPRINT-A is the world's first space telescope for remote observation of planets including Venus, Mars and Jupiter from its orbit around Earth, according to the agency.

Lift-off had originally been scheduled for August 27 but the first attempt was suspended with just seconds to go after a ground control computer falsely detected a positional abnormality.

Japan hopes the rocket, launched with just two laptop computers in a pared-down command centre, will become competitive in the global space business.

The Epsilon is about half the size of the nation's liquid-fuelled H2-A rocket, and a successor to the solid fuel M-5 rocket that was retired in 2006 due to its high cost.

The small-sized rocket is equipped with artificial intelligence "for the first time in the world" that allows autonomous launch checks by the rocket itself, JAXA has said.

At the control centre only eight workers were engaged in the launch operation, compared with some 150 people usually needed when Japan launches its mainstream H2-A rocket.

The agency has halved the production and launch costs to 3.8 billion yen ($37 million) compared with the previous M-5 rocket.

http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Jap ... h_999.html
Well done, Japan!
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Re: Astronomy and Space

Post by Hoosiernorm »

Has anyone seen much about the series of fireballs in North America? On Sept 21st there was one over Alberta Canada followed up by one on the following Wednesday visible over Chicago. I was over by Sparta Kentucky Friday night and had one pass directly over me. It was like lightening but it just kept getting brighter until it looked like it was daylight for a fraction of a second. There was another one Saturday Night into Sunday morning over Alabama, Tennessee and eastern Kentucky. That seems like quite a few in a short period of time.

http://www.amsmeteors.org/
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Scott Carpenter, 2nd American to orbit the Earth dies......

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Scott Carpenter, 2nd American to orbit the Earth dies......
Scott Carpenter, the fourth U.S. astronaut to fly in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died Thursday at a Denver hospice.

Carpenter’s wife, Patty, confirmed his death to Fox News. Carpenter, 88, of Vail, Colo., recently suffered a stroke.

Along with John Glenn, who flew three months before him, Carpenter was one of the last two surviving original Mercury 7 astronauts for the fledgling U.S. space program.

He was chosen in 1959 to be one of NASA’s first astronauts and flew on his one and only space mission on May 24, 1962, circling the Earth three times while conducting scientific experiments.

As an astronaut and aquanaut who lived underwater for the U.S. Navy, Carpenter was the first man to explore both the depths of the ocean and the heights of space.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/10/as ... ies-at-88/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Carpenter
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Chelyabinsk meteorite

Post by Endovelico »

Meet the 560kg chunk of the Chelyabinsk meteorite...

n1TL_jaVijY

Will ET be hiding inside?...
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Comet ISON

Post by Endovelico »

A potentially spectacular visit in November by an erratic traveler...

Image
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Re: Astronomy and Space

Post by Typhoon »

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Re: Astronomy and Space

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

I read a report that ISON is now visible with binoculars. Probably not the compact ones, though.

Currently moving through Virgo.
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Re: Astronomy and Space

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Link to a new high res image of ISON through an 8 inch scope. It's awesome. The tail has developed into smoke-like, feathery streamers.

http://www.damianpeach.com/deepsky/c201 ... 1_15dp.jpg
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Re: Astronomy and Space

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http://www.nbcnews.com/science/spooky-p ... 2D11690659
Spooky physics phenomenon may link universe's wormholes
Charles Q. Choi LiveScience

Wormholes
Argonne National Laboratory
This visualization of the universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Lab in Illinois and the San Diego Supercomputer Center in California.

Wormholes — shortcuts that in theory can connect distant points in the universe — might be linked with the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement, where the behavior of particles can be connected regardless of distance, researchers say.

These findings could help scientists explain the universe from its very smallest to its biggest scales.

Scientists have long sought to develop a theory that can describe how the cosmos works in its entirety. Currently, researchers have two disparate theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, which can respectively mostly explain the universe on its tiniest scales and its largest scales. There are currently several competing theories seeking to reconcile the pair.

One prediction of the theory of general relativity devised by Einstein involves wormholes, formally known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. In principle, these warps in the fabric of space and time can behave like shortcuts connecting any black holes in the universe, making them a common staple of science fiction. [ Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts ]

Intriguingly, quantum mechanics also has a phenomenon that can link objects such as electrons regardless of how far apart they are — quantum entanglement.

"This is true even when the electrons are light years apart," said Kristan Jensen, a theoretical physicist at Stony Brook University in New York.

Einstein derisively called this seemingly impossible connection "spooky action at a distance." However, numerous experiments have proven quantum entanglement is real, and it may serve as the foundation of advanced future technologies, such as incredibly powerful quantum computers and nigh-unhackable quantum encryption.

"Entanglement is one of the most bizarre but important features of quantum mechanics," Jensen said. And if entanglement really is connected to wormholes, that could help reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, the two examples of this phenomenon, on tiny and huge scales.

Entanglement and wormholes
Recently, theoretical physicists Juan Martín Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Leonard Susskind at Stanford University argued that wormholes are linked with entanglement. Specifically, they suggested that wormholes are each pairs of black holes that are entangled with one another.

Entangled black holes could be generated in a number of ways. For instance, a pair of black holes could in principle be made simultaneously, and these would automatically be entangled. Alternatively, radiation given off by a black hole could be captured and then collapsed into a black hole, and the resulting black hole would be entangled with the black hole that supplied the ingredients for it.

Maldacena and Susskind not only suggested that wormholes are entangled black holes, but they argued that entanglement in general was linked to wormholes. They conjectured that entangled particles such as electrons and photons were connected by extraordinarily tiny wormholes.

At first sight, such a claim might sound preposterous. For instance, entanglement works even when gravity is not known to play a role.

Now two independent groups of researchers suggest entanglement may indeed be linked to wormholes. If this connection is true, it could help bridge quantum mechanics with general relativity, potentially helping better understand both.

Holograms and wormholes
Jensen and his colleague theoretical physicist Andreas Karch at the University of Washington in Seattle investigated how entangled pairs of particles behave in a supersymmetric theory, which suggests that all known subatomic particles have "superpartner" particles not yet observed. The theory was one proposed to help unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.

An idea in this theory is that if one imagines certain quantum mechanical systems exist in only three dimensions, their behavior can be explained by objects behaving in the four dimensions that general relativity describes the universe as having — the three dimensions of space, and the fourth of time. This notion that actions in this universe may emerge from a reality with fewer dimensions is known as holography, akin to how two-dimensional holograms can give the illusion of three dimensions. [ 5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse ]

Jensen and Karch found that if one imagined entangled pairs in a universe with four dimensions, they behaved in the same way as wormholes in a universe with an extra fifth dimension. Essentially, they discovered that entanglement and wormholes may be one and the same.

"Entangled pairs were the holographic images of a system with a wormhole," Jensen said. Independent research from theoretical physicist Julian Sonner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supports this finding.

"There are certain things that get a scientist's heart beating faster, and I think this is one of them," Jensen told LiveScience. "One really exciting thing is that maybe, inspired by these results, we can better understand the relation between entanglement and space-time."

The scientists detailed their findings in two papers published Nov. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters
.
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