Young Indian students have made the country proud once again by winning around 50% of the design prizes in NASA. A Class VII student from Pune deserves special mention as he won the 1st prize. Reports said that NASA had received about 600 entries from across 18 countries and Indian students managed to grab 12 prestigious 1st prizes at the NASA Space Settlement Contest competition. About three dozen teams from 12th grade and below were sent by India. 

The 7th grader, who won the prize is named Chaitanya Vashistha and he is a student of Pune?s Wadgaonsheri's St. Arnold Central school. "It's a matter of great delight and brings a lot of pride to us as it was a competition organized by such a eminent and recognized research center NASA," said his father. 

"This space research has motivated the students to hope that some day they will go and settle and explore in the field of astronomy," said Nalini Sengupta , principal of Vidya valley school, which was among the winners. 

Indian students claimed 15 3rd prizes, including artistic Merit and Literary Merit prize.

Our Milky Way galaxy is a massive collection of stars and dust, planets and black holes that, altogether, stretches some 100,000 light-years across. For the past ten years, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been snapping photos of the galactic disk, from the bright dense core to the wispy spiral arms. The Spitzer team took some two million shots, and now they've stitched them all together to produce an absolutely staggering panorama of our home galaxy.

At the highest resolutions, the panorama had to be broken up into eight sections, each 67,500 pixels across and capping out at a whopping 1.38 gigabytes. If you wanted to print out the full image, you'd need a space 150 feet wide.

But there's a curious feature about the Milky Way, and our vantage point of it. We reside in the Orion spiral arm, out on the edge of the galaxy. So, from here, says NASA in a video describing the new Spitzer panorama, most of the galaxy looks like a flat disk. Though the photo would be 150 feet wide, it would only be 4 feet tall. And that photo, says NASA, would contain more than half of all the stars in the Milky Way.
Alongside the full resolution photographs, NASA has also produced a set of interactive viewers that let you scroll and zoom your way around the galaxy.



video link>>

Facebook has assembled a lab and team of experts tasked with connecting the social network's next five billion users to the website (and the rest internet).

The Connectivity Lab was revealed on Thursday: it employs "the same engineering talent behind Facebook's infrastructure team and the Open Compute Project," the company said, and also has new hires from UK high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) aircraft company Ascenta.

"Connecting the whole world will require inventing new technology," explained the social network's chief Mark Zuckerberg in a post. "That's what our Connectivity Lab focuses on, and there's a lot more exciting work to do here."

The Connectivity Lab plans to use solar-powered drones and satellites fitted with communications gear to relay internet access to areas of medium and low population density, along with new laser-based technologies to create a high-bandwidth transmission network.To achieve this, Facebook has also hired an undisclosed number of people from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's Ames Research Center, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

One of the main areas of development for the technology is laser-based transmission technologies to help form connectivity links between Facebook's planned fleet of solar-powered drones flying at 20km above sea level.

"We're looking for some fantastic people in aerodynamics, physics, communications systems, to really help us solve this problem together," Yael Maguire, a member of the Connectivity Lab, explained in a video giving more info on the scheme.


Although Facebook pretty much makes all of its money from advertising and has a direct business incentive to bring more people online and into its billion-strong social network, Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated an idealistic streak borne out of a conviction that the more connected people are with one another, the better life can be.

Facebook's older internet sibling, Google, has a similar view (and similar scheme via its Loon broadband balloons), and both companies have had to walk a tightrope between their left-leaning connect everyone! idealism on one side and the demands of the commercial market on the other.

Given the ambitious goals of Zuckerberg and his connectivity-boosting Internet.org charity and the far-reaching effects of a global connectivity system controlled by a private company, we can only hope he doesn't lose his balance.

A venture capital firm plans to launch hundreds of miniature satellites—capable of beaming websites to the world's most remote areas for free—into space by 2015. (NASA)

Since you're reading this, chances are you're one of many around the globe for whom "surfing the web," as it was once called, has become a way of life. But at last count, more than 5 billion people—roughly three quarters of the world's population—have yet to benefit from what is arguably one of the most important advancements of the last quarter century.

Only within the last few years has there been a real concerted effort to bridge the widening "digital divide." In New Zealand, Google is currently testing high-altitude balloons that could function as versatile, floating cellular towers. Meanwhile, rival and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has made finding a solution a personal crusade. His internet.org project, announced last year, is a collaboration between the world's largest social network and mobile phone companies to explore ways to expand affordable Internet access to poor and remote areas. The company is even reportedly in talks to enlist drones to distribute wireless Internet to under-served communities.     

And then there's Syed Karim, a lesser-known entrepreneur who has something with an even larger scope in mind. The former head of product development at Chicago Public Radio has laid out plans for a network of miniature satellites that could beam information from the World Wide Web to virtually anyone with a WiFi-enabled device—for free. It can, for instance, serve as an emergency information lifeline for victims of natural disasters, or allow those living under oppressive regimes to explore a marketplace of ideas and knowledge without the threat of censorship.

To explain, let's begin with a brief lesson in how the web is set up. The Internet, and in particular high-speed broadband, is made possible through a sprawling web of infrastructure that involves a host of network centers and service providers strung together by fiber optic cables. In developed regions, cellular towers further extend the web's reach wirelessly to phones and other mobile devices. Outside of this, only satellite systems can relay packets of data to the world's remaining blind spots.

The Outernet, as Karim envisions it, will be comprised of hundreds of toaster-sized satellites that, once in orbit, take data transmitted from ground stations and deliver it around the world for free as up-to-date web content.

The initiative, subsidized by venture capital firm Digital News Ventures, is seeking to raise “tens of millions” through donations on its website. The short-term goal is to secure enough funding to test the technology aboard the International Space Station, launching the first wave of satellites in June 2015.

In essence, the technology is—at least initially—actually a form of broadcasting, as users will only be able to freely download information from a limited number of non-commercial websites chosen by the community. Potential candidates include websites like Wikipedia, Khan Academy and Bitcoin. Users would be able to access anything on and within the sites that are chosen for the project—and in pages like Wikipedia, for instance, move between topics—but wouldn't be able to type in a web address at random, as many of us who use the Internet now do. Karim reasons that narrowing the project's scope not only makes it more feasible, but will also show how the ability to simply download a few basic websites can potentially have a huge impact. The company doesn't mention putting a data cap on the service.

“Outernet is not the Internet," Karim tells Fast Company. "It is simply the fastest and least expensive way to deliver rich content to the large fraction of humanity who cannot afford the information that many take for granted. Once that is addressed, then we'll work on the more complicated—and significantly more expensive—task of providing low-cost two-way Internet access.”

Karim and his team already have their work cut out for them. While land-based networks are designed to work as smooth and efficient information pipelines, packet data being sent out from moving satellites often runs into interference from space debris that can cause significant transmission latency. Anyone who's ever signed onto the Internet aboard a cruise ship, which relies on satellite signals, can attest to how painstakingly slow just downloading a file can be.

The project developers say they'll get around this problem by utilizing what's called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), an experimental protocol technology developed by space agencies to transfer data more efficiently across long distances.

Edward Birrane, head of Telecom Protocols, explained to Fast Company how this works:  

“These protocols and techniques give an Internet-like data exchange to spacecraft, allowing Outernet ground systems to patiently accumulate data over multiple passes, over multiple days, or over multiple weeks without fear of timeouts, expired networking sessions, or powering on-and-off the ground terminal,” Birrane says. “For the Outernet datacasting solution, telecommunications protocols such as DTN give the needed ability to stitch together large files—such as Wikipedia entries—as they are received bit-by-bit from those fast-traveling spacecraft.”

It's not clear how much funding the project has managed to raise so far, nor how much it would take to sustain something like this beyond the initial launch. For now, the biggest obstacle facing the researchers is simply getting the free-floating transponders into space. Though the cube-shaped micro-satellites are quite remarkable, packing an impressive array of communication instruments into a portable device that weighs less than three pounds, the costs of space freight service remains astronomical. For instance, Karim says a price quote from space transport firm SpaceX runs about $57 million for a 28,660 pound payload. 

Professor Chris Adami of Michigan State Universitymay have solved Stephen Hawking’s black hole mystery. For years physicists worldwide have been trying to solve the mysteries of black holes — fascinating objects with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them.

Discussion about the behavior of black holes was recently re-energized when Hawking wrote that event horizons do not exist. Although he’s a world-renowned expert on these enigmatic objects, over the years Hawking has edited his theory and continues to investigate black holes with great enthusiasm and passion.

One of several mysteries in the debate about the behavior of black holes is what takes place with information — matter or energy and their features at the atomic and subatomic level — in black holes.

“In 1975, Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t all black. They actually radiate a featureless glow, now called Hawking radiation,” Adami posited. “In his original theory, Hawking stated that the radiation slowly consumes the black hole and it eventually evaporates and disappears, concluding that information and anything that enters the black hole would be irretrievably lost.”

However, this theory produced a basic problem, called the information paradox. Now, Adami thinks he’s solved the puzzle.“According to the laws of quantum physics, information can’t disappear,” Adami noted. “A loss of information would imply that the universe itself would suddenly become unpredictable every time the black hole swallows a particle. That is just inconceivable. No law of physics that we know allows this to happen.”

According to Adami, the information is held in the stimulated emission of radiation, which must occur with the Hawking radiation. Stimulated emission makes the black hole glow in the information it consumed.

“Stimulated emission is the physical process behind LASERS (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). Basically, it works like a copy machine: you throw something into the machine, and two identical somethings come out.“If you throw information at a black hole, just before it is swallowed, the black hole first makes a copy that is left outside. This copying mechanism was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1917, and without it, physics cannot be consistent,” Adami explained.Although physicists will undoubtedly spend countless hours attempting to determine whether Adami has actually solved the puzzle, the MSU professors says that “Stephen Hawking’s wonderful theory is now complete.”

Additional details about Adami’s work are available in the journal journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

In 1986, NASA’s Solar System Exploration Committee (SSEC) published its report Planetary Exploration through Year 2000: An Augmented Program. Leading the pack of proposed advanced robotic planetary missions was Mars Rover Sample Return (MRSR), a mission NASA and contractor scientists and engineers had studied in 1984-1985 at the request of the SSEC. At the same time, enthusiasm was building in Congress for joint U.S.-Soviet space ventures.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Strategy Advisory Group created the Mars Study Team (MST) in the autumn of 1986 to look at “a potential opportunity not previously examined; namely, a Mars Rover/Sample Return (MRSR) mission which would involve a significant aspect of international cooperation” with “minimum technology transfer, maximum sharing of scientific results, and independent credibility of each mission role.” The MST included many participants from the 1984-1985 MRSR studies, as well as scientists and engineers from NASA Headquarters, the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Branch in Flagstaff, Arizona, and NASA Ames Research Center.

The MST assumed that NASA would provide the mission’s large sample-collection rover and an unnamed “international partner” would provide the spacecraft that would convey the Mars samples to Earth. This division of labor reflected the institutional preference of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the home of NASA’s robotic planetary program. In addition to the Rover and its lander, the NASA spacecraft would include a Rover Support Orbiter (RSO) which would relay radio signals from the Rover to Earth.

The international MRSR mission would commence in 1996 with up to three launches to Earth orbit. The launch vehicles used would depend on the mission design selected; if, for example, the NASA spacecraft entered Mars orbit by aerocapture (“the preferred option”), then its mass would be low enough (2709 kilograms) that a solid-propellant Inertial Upper Stage could push it out of Earth orbit toward Mars. This in turn meant that it could reach Earth orbit on board a Space Shuttle orbiter.

If, on the other hand, the NASA spacecraft fired a rocket motor to slow down so that Mars’s gravity could capture it into orbit, the braking propellant it would need would boost its mass to 3571 kilograms. The 1984-1985 MRSR studies had tapped the powerful liquid-propellant Centaur G-prime upper stage for Earth-orbit departure. The Centaur G’, a variant of the U.S. Air Force Centaur G, was designed to reach orbit in the Shuttle payload bay. Citing safety concerns in the wake of the January 1986 Challenger Shuttle accident, however, NASA had in June 1986 banned Centaur G’ from the Shuttle. The NASA MRSR spacecraft and its Centaur upper stage would thus use a Titan IV or other large expendable rocket to attain Earth orbit.

The international partner MRSR spacecraft would comprise the orbiter/Earth Return System (ERS) and the lander/Sample Return System (SRS). In the MST’s scenario, the international partner spacecraft would have about three times the mass of its NASA counterpart. The team acknowledged that this might “exceed the near-term, single launch capability of any international partner.” It suggested that the international partner might launch its spacecraft and Earth-departure upper stage separately on a pair of rockets and link them in Earth orbit.

Launch from Earth orbit on the nominal departure date of 17 November 1996, would see the two MRSR spacecraft arrive at Mars on 17 September 1997, after an Earth-Mars transfer lasting 302 days. The NASA lander/Rover/RSO combination would capture into an elliptical Mars orbit with a period of one martian day and the international partner spacecraft would enter a low circular orbit. The two orbiters would then certify landing site safety through “coordinated orbital reconnaissance.” The RSO would image objects on the surface smaller than 1.5 meters wide using a telescopic camera with a one-meter aperture.

The MST noted that the dust storm season would begin shortly after the two MRSR spacecraft reached Mars, and that this might delay the MRSR landings. After clearance was given to land on Mars, the SRS would separate from the ERS, land, and activate its radio beacon. The Rover on its lander would then separate from the RSO and home in on the beacon to land close by.

The MST’s agile Rover, which it called “one of the most complex elements of the MRSR mission,” would be scaled to negotiate rocks and other obstacles up to 1.5 meters high (image at top of post). The 606.5-kilogram vehicle would comprise three “cabs,” each with two wheels, linked by “passive axial flexural ties which [would] permit yaw, pitch, and roll motions.”

The front cab would carry two robotic arms capable of brandishing a variety of sampling tools, plus a sampling drill and 90 kilograms of sample science equipment. A steerable binocular vision system would be mounted on a stalk on top of the center cab, and an antenna linking the Rover to the RSO would be mounted on top of the vision system. The aft cab would include the radioisotope thermal generator that would power the Rover.

The Mangala Valles region of Mars. Image: NASA

Based on analysis of Viking Orbiter images, the MST proposed 11 candidate MRSR landing sites. Of these, the near-equatorial east Mangala Valles site was most thoroughly characterized. Mangala Valles consists of overlapping channels of different ages and characteristics, the most extensive of which is 80 kilometers long. The Rover would conduct four traverses with a total of 28 sampling stops. Each traverse would start and end at the SRS. The first and shortest traverse would measure seven kilometers long and include three sampling stops, while the last and longest would cover 86 kilometers and have seven stops. After each traverse, the Rover would hand its samples to the SRS, which would place them into a sample canister. In all, it would collect about five kilograms of martian rock, sand, dust, and other materials.

After handing over the last of its samples, the Rover would move a safe distance away from the SRS. The SRS ascent vehicle would then carry the sample canister into Mars orbit. The ERS would then rendezvous with it and take it on board. The Rover, meanwhile, would begin an open-ended extended mission lasting at least two years.

On 14 August 1998, after 332 days near Mars, the ERS would fire its rocket motors to depart Mars orbit for a 357-day trip to Earth. The Mars samples would arrive in Earth orbit on 6 August 1999, where they would be retrieved and transferred to an Earth-orbiting space station for preliminary analysis and planetary protection quarantine.

The MST envisioned a second MRSR mission overlapping the first. The second mission would begin in late 1998 and would reach Mars at the end of 1999 (in the midst of another martian dust storm season). After a 489-day stay at Mars, the second mission’s ERS would depart Mars for Earth in early 2001. Its samples would reach Earth orbit late in that year. The second Rover’s extended mission would last until at least late 2003.

The MST’s “very preliminary” cost estimate for the NASA portion of the 1996 and 1998 MRSR missions was between $2 billion and $2.2 billion. The team called its international MRSR mission “technically feasible,” though it cautioned that “[a]ll technical issues need to be addressed again in greater depth” before a decision to proceed could be made. Studies planned for 1987-1988 would, the MST explained, add further detail to the scenario of an international mission with a NASA lander/Rover. They would also examine an international scenario in which NASA contributed the lander/SRS and orbiter/ERS spacecraft, as well as a NASA-only scenario. “NASA intends to be prepared for any opportunity that may arise regarding Mars sample return,” the MST declared.

Reference:

A Preliminary Study of Mars Rover/Sample Return Missions, The Mars Study Team, Solar System Exploration Division, NASA Headquarters, January 1987.

NASA now receive applications to digging the moon

In what can be considered a giant step towards mining minerals of the moon, the National Aeronautics and Space USA has begun accepting applications from potential partners.

The move, part of a plan unveiled in January, aims to find private financing to help its experts design and build lunar prospecting robots, the first major step required to explore Earth’s natural satellite for valuable resources.

Unlike some loaded business figures who have set up their own space mining endeavours, NASA only counts on a budget set by the U.S. government, which has refused to provide any further funding for the so-called Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown (Lunar CATALYST) initiative.

In a teleconference late last month, Jason Crusan, director of NASA’s advanced exploration systems, said business partners could support commercial activities on the moon while enabling new science and exploration missions of interest to NASA and the larger scientific and academic communities.

Experts claim space mining is a necessity as many metals that underpin our modern economy are quickly being depleted. Without any new technological advances, metals like zinc and gold are expected to run out in 100 years, they claim.

But the road ahead doesn’t look easy. In fact, a study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published last month highlights just how problematic this space mining/travelling business could be.


Source:www.resourceclips.com

This artist’s concept shows a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies, and fundamental aspects of their behavior have baffled scientists. Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech

Last week, famed physicist Stephen Hawking made headlines with this bold statement: “there are no black holes.”

Those words come directly from Hawking’s latest paper, but they are contained within a larger point involving the mechanics of a black hole and its famous “event horizon.” (That’s the area thought to exist around a black hole from which nothing, not even light, can escape.) To be clear, Hawking was not claiming that black holes don’t exist. Astronomers have been observing black holes for decades, said Joseph Polchinski, theoretical physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

What Hawking did was propose an explanation to one of the most puzzling problems in theoretical physics. How can black holes exist when they seem to break two fundamental laws of physics — Einstein’s laws of relativity and quantum mechanics? We’ll explain.

First, a quick Physics 101 reminder. Einstein’s theory of general relativity first conceived a black hole as an object with a gravitational pull so powerful that anything — gas, dust, stars, planets, whole galaxies, even light — that crossed the event horizon would fall in and be forever trapped and ultimately crushed, never to escape.

But with the emergence of quantum mechanics in the mid-20th century, many believed that this information — the particles and matter sucked into the black hole — had to be conserved, somewhere. According to quantum mechanics, a black hole could shred a book into its subatomic particles, but as long as all the pieces still existed, it was possible to reconstruct that book, Polchinski explained.

Then Hawking published a paper on black holes in the 1970s, and everything changed. He proposed that in fact, black holes were losing mass and would eventually evaporate. If they evaporated, they would take all traces of what fell into them with it. The information would not, in fact, be conserved. It would vanish.

Suddenly, science didn’t make sense. The field of physics was faced with a giant dilemma.

This question of what ultimately happens to all the stuff drawn into the black hole has become known as “the information paradox.”

“This is a paradox that hasn’t been completely resolved,” said Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. “There are various ideas for how it could be resolved, but I think no one has convinced the other members of the community that his idea is correct.” That includes, he said, Hawking’s latest proposal, which reimagines the event horizon.

In a nutshell, Hawking seems to be saying this: instead of an event horizon, there is something else he calls an “apparent horizon.” In this apparent horizon, matter and energy is temporarily suspended, but then released. If this is true, it changes black holes as we know them.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who is famous for his work in studying black holes, announced last week “there are no black holes.” But what did he mean by that? Photo by Karwai Tang.

“The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,” Hawking wrote in his paper.

According to his proposal, black holes do trap information for a long time, but that information can, eventually, escape, Polchinski said. He added that Hawking’s proposal remains untested.

“The broader picture is right now that we really have this conflict between two theories, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity, both of which we have strong reason to believe are true. And yet when you combine them, they make this prediction of information loss that we believe is false,” Polchinski said.

Over the past 40 years, physicists have proposed multiple solutions, forcing the field to rethink black-hole behavior. In 1992, for example, Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius and John Uglom proposed an idea known as “complementarity.”

Then there’s the complicated “firewall paradox.” In 2012, Polchinski and his colleagues found a problem with the event horizon. As particles enter the event horizon, they’re ripped apart. As these particles break down, their research showed, they release a burst of energy, creating a firewall around the center of the black hole. This has become known as “the firewall paradox.” This notion of the event horizon as a highly energetic region throws another wrench in Einstein’s theory, which said that nothing special should happen at the event horizon.

That’s where Hawking’s latest paper comes in, suggesting physicists need to rethink that event horizon. His latest proposal suggests that there is in fact no event horizon to burn up. Instead, the apparent horizon becomes the real boundary.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone, said Matt Strassler, blogger and visiting theoretical physicist at Harvard University. The entire theoretical physics community is still working on these problems, and this represents merely one proposal among dozens.

“There’s all sorts of cacophony in the field … The problem is no one can come up, so far, with something you can actually calculate. So it’s ideas and proposals and approximations and guesses,” he said.

Notably, Hawking’s work has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains no equations, so there’s no way to test his new ideas, Polchinski said. Because of that, he added, his statement about black holes can’t be considered a breakthrough in science — yet.

Hawking’s paper appeared online last week on an online server for research articles operated by Cornell University called arXiv.

How can any of these paradoxes around black holes be answered? For now, the mathematical formulas to test and solve these new hypotheses simply aren’t there, Strassler said, adding that these are conceptual problems, not just a math problems.

“These aren’t the kind of calculations you can just throw at a computer. Even to figure out what questions you need to ask isn’t obvious,” he said. “The calculations themselves involve very, very subtle effects that a computer would never be able to keep track of.”

The problems have everyone in the field confused, Polchinski said, but that confusion is thrilling for physicists. Solving a paradox is the way the field advances, he said.

“It’s not so much that there’s a mistake, but somehow, some assumption that we believe about quantum mechanics and gravity is wrong, and we’re trying to figure out what it is,” Polchinski said. “It’s confusion, but it’s confusion that we hope makes us ripe for advance.”

A Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts successfully docked with the International Space Station early Thursday, bringing the size of the crew at the orbiting outpost to six. The new crew's six-month mission will include a spacewalk with the Olympic torch.

American Michael Hopkins and Russians Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky traveled six hours in the capsule from the Russian-leased launch pad in Kazakhstan before linking up with the space station's Russian Poisk research module at 6.45 a.m. Moscow time (0245GMT).

Kotov is the most experienced member of the crew with two previous six-month missions in space under his belt, while Hopkins and Ryazansky are both on their first missions.

The incoming crew entered the station nearly two hours after the docking, where they were welcomed by Russia's Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA's Karen Nyberg and Italy's Luca Parmitano, who have been on the orbiting lab since May and will be returning to Earth in November.

Kotov and Ryazansky will have the honor of taking the Olympic torch into open space in November as part of the relay of the Olympic flame ahead of the Winter Games being held in Russia's Sochi in February. The torch will not be lit however, because of safety concerns. It will only arrive at the station in November with the next mission.

Shortly after entering the station, Hopkins, Kotov and Ryazansky had a chat via a video-link with their families back at the Baikonur launch pad where they had seen them off more than eight hours before.

Radiant but visibly tired, the astronauts were yawning as they were talking to their families. They had been up for about 20 hours.

Hopkins' mother described the launch as a "heart-stopping experience."

"It was a pretty good ride, mom. It was a lot of fun," Hopkins replied in the live broadcast on NASA TV.

Dont miss this exclusive video, 360 panels of this pics moves and represents a day. these are timelapse from photos taken ever 10 sec a day mid-2009 to mid-2010 over explorium San Francisco.

Scientists have discovered a massive particle accelerator in the heart of one of the harshest regions of near-Earth space, a region of super-energetic, charged particles surrounding the globe called the Van Allen radiation belts. Scientists knew thatsomething in space accelerated particles in the radiation belts to more than 99 percent the speed of light but they didn't know what that something was. New results from NASA's Van Allen Probes now show that the acceleration energy comes from within the belts themselves. Particles inside the belts are sped up by local kicks of energy, buffeting the particles to ever faster speeds, much like a perfectly timed push on a moving swing.

The discovery that the particles are accelerated by a local energy source is akin to the discovery that hurricanes grow from a local energy source, such as a region of warm ocean water. In the case of the radiation belts, the source is a region of intense electromagnetic waves, tapping energy from other particles located in the same region. Knowing the location of the acceleration will help scientists improve space weather predictions, because changes in the radiation belts can be risky for satellites near Earth. The results were published in Science magazine on July 25, 2013.

In order for scientists to understand the belts better, the Van Allen Probes were designed to fly straight through this intense area of space. When the mission launched in August 2012, it had top-level goals to understand how particles in the belts are accelerated to ultra-high energies, and how the particles can sometimes escape. By determining that this superfast acceleration comes from these local kicks of energy, as opposed to a more global process, scientists have been able to definitively answer one of those important questions for the first time.

"This is one of the most highly anticipated and exciting results from the Van Allen Probes," said David Sibeck, Van Allen Probes project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It goes to the heart of why we launched the mission."

The radiation belts were discovered upon the launch of the very first successful U.S. satellites sent into space, Explorers I and III. It was quickly realized that the belts were some of the most hazardous environments a spacecraft can experience. Most satellite orbits are chosen to duck below the radiation belts or circle outside of them, and some satellites, such as GPS spacecraft, must operate between the two belts. When the belts swell due to incoming space weather, they can encompass these spacecraft, exposing them to dangerous radiation. Indeed, a significant number of permanent failures on spacecraft have been caused by radiation. With enough warning, we can protect technology from the worst consequences, but such warning can only be achieved if we truly understand the dynamics of what's happening inside these mysterious belts.

"Until the 1990s, we thought that the Van Allen belts were pretty well-behaved and changed slowly," said Geoff Reeves, the first author on the paper and a radiation belt scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. "With more and more measurements, however, we realized how quickly and unpredictably the radiation belts changed. They are basically never in equilibrium, but in a constant state of change."

In fact, scientists realized that the belts don't even change consistently in response to what seem to be similar stimuli. Some solar storms caused the belts to intensify; others caused the belts to be depleted, and some seemed to have almost no effect at all. Such disparate effects from apparently similar events suggested that this region is much more mysterious than previously thought. To understand – and eventually predict – which solar storms will intensify the radiation belts, scientists want to know where the energy that accelerates the particles comes from.

The twin Van Allen Probes were designed to distinguish between two broad possibilities on what processes accelerate the particles to such amazing speeds: radial acceleration or local acceleration. In radial acceleration, particles are transported perpendicular to the magnetic fields that surround Earth, from areas of low magnetic strength far from Earth to areas of high magnetic strength nearer Earth. The laws of physics dictate that the particle speeds in this scenario will speed up when the magnetic field strength increases. So the speed would increase as the particles move toward Earth, much the way a rock rolling down hill gathers speed simply due to gravity. The local acceleration theory posits that the particles gain energy from a local energy source more similar to the way hot ocean water spawns a hurricane above it.

Two swaths of particles surrounding Earth called the radiation belts are one of the greatest natural accelerators in the solar system, able to push particles up to 99% the speed of light. The Van Allen Probes launched in August 2012, have now discovered mechanisms behind this acceleration.

Image Credit: 

NASA/Goddard /Scientific Visualization Studio

WASHINGTON: The next robotic rover to explore Mars in 2020 should scour the surface of the red planet more closely than ever for signs of past life, a Nasa science team said Tuesday. 

The US space agency's science definition team (SDT) released a 154-page document containing its proposals for the next Mars rover, after five months of work. 

The mission would use microscopic analysis for the first time, collect the first rock samples for possible return to Earth and test ways to use natural resources on site for a future human trip, it said. 

The Mars 2020 mission would build on the work being done by Nasa's Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the red planet since August 2012 and has already found evidence of potentially habitable environments. 

The mission would present "a major step toward seeking signs of life," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at Nasaheadquarters. 

The next step is for Nasa to analyze the recommendations and issue a call for scientific instruments, which could include higher resolution imaging devices, microscopes, fine scale minerology, chemistry and organic carbon detection tools to scan for biosignatures on the surface of Mars. 

"To combine this suite of instruments would be incredibly powerful," said Jack Mustard, SDT chair and professor of geological sciences at Brown University. 

The rover would collect about 31 samples that might someday be returned to Earth, representing "a legacy for understanding the development of habitability on the planet," he told reporters. 

The US space agency has not yet devised the technology to bring the cache back to Earth without disturbing its contents, and no plans have been set for any potential sample-return. 

The next Nasa mission to Mars is a November launch of MAVEN, an orbiter that will study how Mars interacted with the solar wind and lost its atmosphere. 

The European Space Agency will follow in 2018 with its ExoMars rover. 

John Grunsfeld, Nasa's associate administrator for science, said the 2020 Mars rover would get the US space agency to the next step in the "quest to answer the grand questions," before a planned human mission in the 2030s. 

"Do we see any evidence of past life in those habitable environments?" he said, alluding to the aims of the future missions. 

HYDERABAD: Sky watchers would be privy to a visual treat on Wednesday night as the moon and Venus will 'appear' closest to each other at 11.48pm. Termed 'moon in conjunction with Venus', the celestial event will show Venus on the right hand side of the crescent-shaped moon.

"Moon being seen with other celestial bodies is a common phenomenon. This particular occurrence is special because despite the distance between them, Moon and Venus seem very close to each other when viewed from Earth," said Raghunandan Kumar, founder and secretary of the Planetary Society of India.

The event will occur owing to the movement of Moon around Earth. 

To witness the phenomenon, experts said, one just has to look in the western direction after sunset. Incidentally, Saturn can also be spotted in the sky towards the eastern direction as a non-twinkling object. Those who miss the sight on Wednesday, might be able to witness it on Thursday too provided the sky is clear. "If you witness the conjunction on Wednesday, you will be able to tell the gradual increasing distance between Moon and Venus in the following days. We hope the sky remains clear so that everyone can witness the celestial event," Kumar said.

Astronomers have discovered 26 new black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way, using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Using more than 150 Chandra observations, spread over 13 years, researchers identified 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date, in a galaxy outside our own.

Many consider Andromeda (M31) to be a sister galaxy to the Milky Way. The two ultimately will collide, several billion years from now.

“While we are excited to find so many black holes in Andromeda, we think it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Robin Barnard of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, and lead author of the study.

“Most black holes won’t have close companions and will be invisible to us,” Barnard said.

The black hole candidates belong to the stellar mass category, meaning they formed in the death throes of very massive stars and typically have masses five to 10 times that of our Sun.

Astronomers can detect these otherwise invisible objects as material is pulled from a companion star and heated up to produce radiation before it disappears into the black hole.

The first step in identifying these black holes was to make sure they were stellar mass systems in the Andromeda Galaxy itself, rather than supermassive black holes at the hearts of more distant galaxies.

To do this, the researchers used a new technique that draws on information about the brightness and variability of the X-ray sources in the Chandra data. In short, the stellar mass systems change much more quickly than the supermassive black holes.

To classify those Andromeda systems as black holes, astronomers observed that these X-ray sources had special characteristics: that is, they were brighter than a certain high level of X-rays and also had a particular X-ray colour.

Sources containing neutron stars, the dense cores of dead stars that would be the alternate explanation for these observations, do not show both of these features simultaneously. But sources containing black holes do.

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory added crucial support for this work by providing X-ray spectra, the distribution of X-rays with energy, for some of the black hole candidates.

“By observing in snapshots covering more than a dozen years, we are able to build up a uniquely useful view of M31,” said co-author Michael Garcia, also of CfA.

“The resulting very long exposure allows us to test if individual sources are black holes or neutron stars,” Garcia said.

The research group previously identified nine black hole candidates within the region covered by the Chandra data, and the present results increase the total to 35.

© The Astrophysical Journal.

(This article was published on June 13, 2013)