Information freedom for open source users.

An anonymous reader writes “Japan’s IKAROS spacecraft has already successfully deployed the first solar sail in space, but today it made the only first that really matters: it successfully captured the sun’s rays with its 3,000-square-foot sail and used the energy to speed its way through space. Each photon of light exerts 0.0002 pounds of pressure on the 3,000-square-foot sail, and the steady stream of solar exposure has succeeded in propelling the nearly 700-pound drone.”

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FleaPlus writes “The German Aerospace Center is planning to launch a novel reusable spacecraft in 2011, incorporating flat, damage-resistant tiles. Nitrogen will be pumped through the porous tiles, creating a protective gas layer that actively cools and shields the hottest parts of the spacecraft from the searing heat of reentry. The 12.5M€ unmanned ‘SHEFEX II’ project is a major technological step toward the team’s eventual goal of a reusable space glider which will be cheaper and easier-to-build than NASA’s space shuttle.”

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bennyboy64 writes “An Australian company is developing a laser tracking system that will help prevent collisions between satellites and space debris, ZDNet reports. ‘The trouble is it’s [debris] in orbit and travelling at orbital speeds, which means that it is travelling at about 30,000 kilometres an hour,” said the CEO of the Australian company. ‘If even a tiny little piece runs into a satellite it’ll destroy it or punch a hole through a person if they’re out there space walking.’”

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TravisTR passes along a story about the death of Nemesis. “The data that once suggested the Sun is orbited by a distant dark companion now raises even more questions… The periodicity [of mass extinctions] is a matter of some controversy among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what? … another idea first put forward in the 1980s is that the Sun has a distant dark companion called Nemesis that sweeps through the Oort cloud every 27 million years or so, sending a deadly shower of comets our way. … [Researchers] have brought together a massive set of extinction data from the last 500 million years, a period that is twice as long as anybody else has studied. And their analysis shows an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%. That’s a clear, sharp signal over a huge length of time. At first glance, you’d think it clearly backs the idea that a distant dark object orbits the Sun every 27 million years. But ironically, the accuracy and regularity of these events is actually evidence against Nemesis’ existence.”

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blackbearnh writes “For years, people have been using SETI@Home to help search for signs of extraterrestrial life in radio telescope data. But Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, wants to take things to the next level. Whereas SETI@Home basically used people’s computers as part of a giant distributed network to run a fixed set of filters written by SETI researchers, Tarter thinks someone out there may have even better search algorithms that could be applied. She’s teamed with a startup called Cloudant to make large volumes of raw data from the new Allen telescope available, and free Amazon EC2 processing time to crunch the data. According to Tarter: ‘SETI@Home came on the scene a decade ago, and it was brilliant and revolutionary. It put distributed computing on the map with such a sexy application. But in the end, it’s been service computing. You could execute the SETI searches that were made available to you, but you couldn’t make them any better or change them. We’d like to take the next step and invite all of the smart people in the world who don’t work for Berkeley or for the SETI Institute to use the new Allen Telescope. To look for signals that nobody’s been able to look for before because we haven’t had our own telescope; because we haven’t had the computing power.’”

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PhrostyMcByte writes “12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour.”

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japan_dan writes “Two ESA spacecraft will observe 21 Lutetia during Rosetta’s flyby on 10 July: Rosetta from 3,160 km and Herschel from 450 million km. Herschel’s PACS and SPIRE spectrometers will view Lutetia in far infrared, while Rosetta will gather data in a variety of wavelengths. Since the observations will be coordinated during and at closest approach, scientists will later be able to correlate the data to produce a map of the thermal radiation emitted by Lutetia. There are a pair of animations modelling the expected temperature distribution over Lutetia at the link. The joint observations are part of a series of 8 sessions planned in the next couple of years by Herschel scientists to study objects that will be visited by spacecraft.”

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krou writes “Six months of work has produced a remarkable full-sky map from Planck. ‘It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes. Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. … Of particular note are the huge streamers of cold dust that reach thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane. “What you see is the structure of our galaxy in gas and dust, which tells us an awful lot about what is going on in the neighborhood of the Sun; and it tells us a lot about the way galaxies form when we compare this to other galaxies,” observed Professor Andrew Jaffe, a Planck team member from Imperial College London, UK.’ The ESA has more details on their website, with a higher-res JPG available.”

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An anonymous reader noted a report of the first ever alien planet actually photographed. Every other planet so far “observed” has been done by measuring wobbles of stars pulled by planetary gravity. But this one is a photograph. And that’s just plain cool.

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kaulike writes “The European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite, launched in March 2009, has provided a spectacular, highly detailed map of our favorite gravity well. This map shows the normalized surface of the earth as defined by gravity, showing the relative altitude differences from the average for each surveyed point. The article provides the helpful metaphor that a ball resting on this surface would not roll anywhere, even though there would be visual slopes, as gravity is equalized across the globe. There is a fascinating deep area in the Indian ocean (-100M) and a high area near Iceland (+80M), proving conclusively that our world is not homogeneous in terms of density (or practically any other measure). Does anyone know whether these anomalies correspond to known geographic phenomena? Deposits of heavy metals perhaps, or hotspots where the mantle is thinner? I know little about geodetic stuff, but I’m curious about the reasons for wrinkles in the data set.”

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Arvisp tips news of a discovery by astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii of the youngest known star in a nearby star-forming region. From the Yale press release:
“Astronomers think L1448-IRS2E is in between the prestellar phase, when a particularly dense region of a molecular cloud first begins to clump together, and the protostar phase, when gravity has pulled enough material together to form a dense, hot core out of the surrounding envelope. … Most protostars are between one to 10 times as luminous as the Sun, with large dust envelopes that glow at infrared wavelengths. Because L1448-IRS2E is less than one tenth as luminous as the Sun, the team believes the object is too dim to be considered a true protostar. Yet they also discovered that the object is ejecting streams of high-velocity gas from its center, confirming that some sort of preliminary mass has already formed and the object has developed beyond the prestellar phase. This kind of outflow is seen in protostars (as a result of the magnetic field surrounding the forming star), but has not been seen at such an early stage until now.”

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astroengine writes “Flying above the Australian Outback, NASA’s converted DC-8 jet videoed the violent re-entry of the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft. Flying in front of the disintegrating probe, the mission’s sample return capsule can be seen speeding though the atmosphere. According to reports, the capsule landed safely and will be collected by helicopter in the morning.” “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait posts about the successful return as well.

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An anonymous reader writes “This morning the Japanese space agency, JAXA, successfully unfurled a solar sail in space for the first time. Solar sails offer the best hope for deep space exploration because they eliminate the need to carry fuel. The Japanese spacecraft IKAROS created centripetal force by spinning, allowing it to launch the 0.0003-inch-thick sail. While deployment is a challenge in a zero-gravity environment, spacecraft — unlike airplanes — don’t have to contend with drag, so with each photon that hits the sail helps the spacecraft gather speed.”

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astroengine writes “Some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies have powerful jets blasting from their poles, and others have weak jets, but many don’t have jets at all. Why is this the case? In new simulations carried out by astronomers at NASA and MIT, it would appear that the way in which the black hole spins relative to its accretion disk may be a contributing factor. Strangely enough, the results indicate that if the black hole rotates in the opposite direction to its accretion disk, the most powerful jets form. The region between the black hole event horizon and the accretion disk still baffles scientists, so these simulations are very speculative, but the results seem to match what radio astronomers are seeing in the cores of active galaxies. Perhaps it’s time to fire up that event horizon telescope!”

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oxide7 writes “Iridium (IRDM) continues its push into the market for satellite data and telemetry services, as it announced the company that would build its second generation of satellites. Iridium’s old network of 66 satellites was designed for voice calls; the new satellites will also be able to handle data more efficiently, and include cameras as well. The company also plans to share the satellite platforms with some scientists for use in studying the Earth.”

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The Bad Astronomer writes “A rumor is spreading on the Net like wildfire that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse is about to explode in a supernova. This rumor is almost certainly not true. First, it’s posted on a doomsday forum. Second, it’s three times removed from the source, and is anonymous at each step. Third, the evidence is shaky at best. Plus, even if true, the supernova is too far away to hurt us. But other than that …”

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gyrogeerloose writes “Most of us know about the sun’s eleven-year activity cycle. However, relatively few other than scientists (and amateur radio operators) are aware that the current solar minimum has lasted much longer than expected. The last solar cycle, Cycle 24, bottomed out in 2008, and Cycle 25 should be well on its way towards maximum by now, but the sun has remained unusually quiescent with very few sunspots. While solar physicists agree that this is odd, the explanation remains elusive.”

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otter42 writes “It seems that X-37B couldn’t stay hidden forever. Launched a few weeks ago, The Flying Twinkie disappeared shortly after separation. Now it has been found in an orbit that takes it as far north as 40 degrees latitude. No additional information has been found about the spacecraft’s capabilities or purpose, except for a US Air Force statement that the satellite has no space-weapons purpose. The X-37B is intended to fly for 9 months at a time, opening the door to possible space longevity experiments in addition to its spying tasks.”

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An anonymous reader noted an article in Cosmos questions the conventional wisdom of the “follow the water” strategy of seeking extraterrestrial life, saying “There’s an awful lot of places where water could exist — either on the surface of the Earth, or deep within it — yet life is largely concentrated in a small sliver of this.”

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The Bad Astronomer writes “Astronomers have found the most massive galaxy in the near universe: an obese, bloated monster that may tip the cosmic scales at 13 trillion times the mass of the Sun, 20 times the mass of the entire Milky Way. The galaxy, called ESO 146-IG 005, sits at the center of a dense cluster of other (but much more lightweight) galaxies, and grew to its present size by eating the galaxies around it. In fact, the so-far undigested cores of at least five other galaxies are still easily seen in the cannibal’s nucleus. Astronomers are having difficulty pinning down the galaxy’s exact mass, but it’s clearly the biggest bruiser within 1.5 billion light years of home.”

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