Massive Lightning Near Space Shuttle Endeavour

>The space shuttle Endeavour is seen on launch pad 39a as a storm passes by prior to the rollback of the Rotating Service Structure (RSS), Thursday, April 28, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. During the 14-day mission, Endeavour and the STS-134 crew will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre. Launch is targeted for Friday, April 29 at 3:47 p.m. EDT. Photo credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

via Space Shuttle Endeavour (201104280022HQ) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Squids In Space–Seriously

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The last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor will be both manned and squidded.

The most famous science experiment on board, of course, will be the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which will set up shop at the ISS to measure cosmic rays, dusting for the fingerprints of dark matter and antimatter. So that’s cool. But is it as cool as baby squid in space?

…why exactly would you want to put squids in space? I mean, besides the cool factor, what is there to be gained? I did a little more poking around, and, bless the internet, there’s a webpage on the project. It turns out that the particular species of squid to be shipped off-planet is our old friend the bobtail squid.

What makes this squid unique is its light organ, which glows at night and hides its shadow from prey lurking underneath. The light is powered by a particular bioluminescent bacteria (Vibrio fishceri) that the squid draws in from the surrounding water. Every day it expels the old bacteria and takes in a new batch. Newly born squid can’t produce the light, but within several hours they become bioluminescent as they take in the bacteria. This development gives scientists a close look at morphogenesis, which is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape—one of the fundamentals of development biology. The squid experiment came about when Ned [faculty sponsor] learned about the work of Dr. Jamie S. Foster at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Dr. Foster’s work is focused on what happens to this morphogenesis process under micro-gravity conditions.

A-ha! So the real question is morphogenesis under micro-gravity, or, what is the effect of gravity on how an organism makes its shape? And the squid/bacteria symbiosis happens to be a good model system to answer this question.

If you’re having a hard time making that connection, it’s because a critical piece of information was omitted from the otherwise excellent summary above. That is, when a newly born squid takes in the bacteria that it needs to produce light, those bacteria induce an serious physical restructuring of the squid’s body so that it can host them appropriately. The baby squid actually changes shape as a result of taking in bacteria.

Which is a pretty wild thing to study all by itself, on Earth, but when you decide to study it in space . . . whoa.

via Squids In Space–Seriously.

>A Star as Old as the Universe Found in Milky Way — A Galactic Mystery

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“This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself.”

Anna Frebel, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe — a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way’s oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a “cannibal” phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.

Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies with just a few billion stars, compared to hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. In the “bottom-up model” of galaxy formation, large galaxies attained their size over billions of years by absorbing their smaller neighbors.

“If you watched a time-lapse movie of our galaxy, you would see a swarm of dwarf galaxies buzzing around it like bees around a beehive,” explained Frebel. “Over time, those galaxies smashed together and mingled their stars to make one large galaxy — the Milky Way.”

If dwarf galaxies are indeed the building blocks of larger galaxies, then the same kinds of stars should be found in both kinds of galaxies, especially in the case of old, “metal-poor” stars. To astronomers, “metals” are chemical elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Because they are products of stellar evolution, metals were rare in the early Universe, and so old stars tend to be metal-poor. …

via A Star as Old as the Universe Found in Milky Way — A Galactic Mystery.

>China confirms plans to build own orbital station

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Chinese space officials have confirmed plans to build a 60-ton space station by 2020 and develop a space freighter for hauling supplies to the station, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office unveiled on Monday a blueprint of the future orbital station, which will comprise an 18.1-meter core module and two 14.4-meter lab modules.

“The 60-ton space station is rather small compared to the International Space Station (419 tons), and Russia’s Mir Space Station (137 tons), which served between 1996 and 2001,” China Daily quoted Pang Zhihao, a space researcher and deputy editor-in-chief of the Space International magazine.

“But it is the world’s third multi-module space station, which usually demands much more complicated technology than a single-module space lab,” the researcher said.

China’s ambitious space program enjoyed a sound success in the past decade, including putting a human into orbit and launching a lunar probe.

In preparation for the construction of the orbital station, Beijing is planning to launch the space module Tiangong-1 and the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft in the second half of this year on the first unmanned rendezvous and docking mission.

Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 10 spacecraft are expected to dock with Tiangong-1 in 2012.

via China confirms plans to build own orbital station | World | RIA Novosti.

>Saturn linked to icy moon Enceladus via beam of electrons

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Saturn is linked to its moon Encleadus by powerful electrical currents with beams of electrons flowing back and forth between the two cosmic bodies, scientists revealed today.

The discovery was made using instruments on board NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that arrived at Saturn in 2004.

Scientists have long been intrigued by Enceladus, which orbits 112,000 miles above Saturn.

Cassini spotted ice volcanoes erupting from the surface of the moon in 2005 and scientists believe this could be evidence of a massive underground ocean.

The craft has passed the 310mile-wide moon 14 times since it arrived, gradually unlocking its secrets.

Scientists studying resulting data have found that the jets of gas and icy grains emitted from the south pole of Enceladus, form an ionsphere when they become electrically charged.

This has led to the discovery of a new current system, caused by a dynamo effect, due to the motion of Enceladus and its ionsphere passing through the magnetic bubble that surrounds Saturn.

Jupiter has a similar current system that links it to at least three of its moons. Satellites orbit inside its magnetosphere – its giant magnetic bubble – forming the flowing spots that appear in the planet’s upper atmosphere. …

via Saturn linked to icy moon Enceladus via beam of electrons | Mail Online.

>Do Aliens Speak Particle-Tongue?

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Extraterrestrials may have a better way to communicate across space than radio waves or optical beams. A team of scientists suggests ET could encode neutrinos, for example.

These particles of matter are similar to electrons, but since they have no electric charge, they can pass through anything. This makes them ideal for long-distance travel, as neutrinos are undisturbed by gas, dust and other matter that can block radio waves and other types of electromagnetic radiation.

Astronomers have been scouring the galaxy for decades for alien-produced radio signals — and more recently for non-naturally occurring light pulses, as well — to no avail.

“We really have no clue as to how some advanced civilization might want to transmit to us, nor do we have any really good idea why they would want to transmit to us,” physicist John Learned, with the University of Hawaii, told Discovery News.

“Everything that we’re doing is exploratory science: You don’t know the game; you don’t know if you’re in the game; you don’t know the rules of the game… which is what makes it so much fun,” said Learned, who, along with colleagues, has written a series of articles about how neutrinos could be used for communication.

ET could, for example, send out a neutrino beam at precise (and non-naturally occurring) energy levels that would be sure to catch a scientist’s eye.

“If there’s a civilization, like our civilization, which is at the stage of setting up large neutrino detectors, then one would see this signal of a unique signature and you would right away say: ‘What the heck is going on here? This is certainly not a natural signature.’ This is something that would really get your attention on the very first (detection.) …

via Do Aliens Speak Particle-Tongue? : Discovery News.

>Carbon monoxide found in Pluto’s air

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After nearly two decades of searching, astronomers have detected carbon monoxide in Pluto’s thin atmosphere, as they expected. But they didn’t expect to find so much of it. Pluto’s dramatic seasonal changes serve as further evidence that the dwarf planet is one surprising little bugger.

“Everything about Pluto is surprising,” Jane Greaves, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me. Greaves presented the new results today at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Wales.

Five years ago, Pluto was at the center of a controversy over the definition of planethood — which resulted in the creation of the dwarf-planet category, a new class of celestial objects. More recent observations have pointed up still more peculiarities about Pluto. For example, scientists have found that the faraway world’s surface features are changing, that its atmosphere contains clouds, and that it might even harbor a pool of liquid beneath its icy shell.

Pluto’s thin atmosphere, which was previously known to contain nitrogen and methane, is thought to freeze out and rise up as the world traces its eccentric orbit around the sun. Traces of frozen carbon monoxide have been detected on Pluto’s surface, which led astronomers to assume that carbon monoxide gas should be found in the atmosphere as well.

via Cosmic Log – Carbon monoxide found in Pluto’s air.

>Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly, Likely Solved

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The debate has been raging ever since an astronomer named John Anderson first noticed the anomaly in 1980. Anderson created an impossibly complicated algorithm so that he and other JPL scientists could use the radio transmission data to study gravitational effects in the outer solar system.

But it didn’t seem to work. Or rather, he noticed a small discrepancy between the Doppler shifts predicted by his algorithm, and the actual shifts being measured in the radio signals coming from the Pioneer spacecraft.

Dark Matter Drag?

The discrepancy is 10 billion times smaller than the acceleration due to gravity, but it was unmistakably there in Anderson’s calculations. (The canonical number, for those who care, is 8.74 x 10-10 m/s2.)

What could be causing this discrepancy? Theories have abounded over the years. One popular hypothesis is that there are huge quantities of dark matter — as yet undetected — hanging around in the universe and exerting a little extra drag on the spacecraft, thereby slowing them down.

Another possible explanation is that gravity doesn’t follow an inverse square law as formulated by Isaac Newton; this falls under the rubric of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), the focus of a flurry of technical papers over the last 10-15 years. It’s among the alternatives to dark energy to explain the fact that the expansion of our universe is accelerating.

Evidence for this hypothesis appeared to be bolstered in 1994, when Los Alamos cosmologist Michael Martin Nieto noticed that the value for the deviations of the Pioneer spacecraft was almost exactly equivalent to cosmic acceleration (the speed of light multiplied by Hubble’s constant).

For Nieto, and others who noticed this strange coincidence, “The Pioneer anomaly could be the first evidence that gravity deviates from an inverse square dependence,” he told Popular Science last year. “It could be huge.” …

On the more mundane side of things, there was always the possibility that the culprit might just be heat. Specifically, heat from the plutonium inside the spacecrafts’ generators, some of which got converted into electricity while the rest of it radiated into space. If it did so unevenly, radiating more heat in one direction than in another — only a 5 percent difference is required — that might be sufficient to give rise to the Pioneer anomaly. …

Previous calculations have only estimated the effect of reflections. So Francisco and co used a computer modeling technique called Phong shading to work out exactly how the the emitted heat is reflected and in which direction it ends up traveling.

Phong shading was dreamt up in the 1970s and is now widely used in many rendering packages to model reflections in three dimensions. It was originally developed to handle the reflections of visible light from 3D objects but it works just as well for infrared light, say Francisco and co.

In particular, Phong shading has allowed the Portuguese team to include for the first time the effect of heat emitted from a part of the spacecraft called the main equipment compartment. It turns out that heat from the back wall of this compartment is reflected from the back of the spacecraft’s antenna. Since the antenna points Sunward, towards Earth, reflections off its back would tend to decelerate the spacecraft. “The radiation from this wall will, in a first iteration, reflect off the antenna and add a contribution to the force in the direction of the sun.”

via Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly May Finally Be Solved : Discovery News.

I was really hoping for some momentous variation in the force of gravity, but it seems that possibility with regard to the Pioneer data, has been vanquished.

>Voyager 1 mission: A new frontier in quest to understand the cosmos

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In a small room at Caltech, space physicist Ed Stone and four of his colleagues puzzle over a trove of data that has just arrived from the bulbous edge of the solar system.

“What, exactly, are we looking at?” Stone asks.

The data form a map of invisible matter, a slush of atomic particles once part of stars that exploded around 10 million years ago. The information has come from Voyager 1, the spindly little spacecraft that rocketed from Florida more than 30 years before and is still traveling, farther from Earth than any human-made object ever has.

Stone and his associates are stumped. “What are we going to find?” Stone wonders. “Right now, I don’t think anybody knows.”

The godfather of the interstellar mission called Voyager is now 75. He is rail thin, and his shoulders have a faint slope. A crown of gray hair circles the top of his otherwise bald head. He is wearing his standard work attire: gray sport jacket, gray pants, gray shoes, gray socks — and a white shirt.

Despite his uncertainty, his voice is calm. “Eventually,” he assures the others, “we’re going to figure this out.”

Stone is agnostic about God, but has a belief that knowing about the cosmos brings deeper understanding of Earth. Although he and the other scientists might not comprehend Voyager’s observations right now, experience tells him their meanings will be divined.

He also believes they will learn much more. Voyager 1 is close to bursting out of the solar system. Once it makes it beyond the influence of the sun, the spacecraft will enter part of the universe that scientists have only been able speculate about: Deep space.

“We’re very, very close,” Stone says, after the meeting with his collaborators. “We can’t say for sure how long it is going to take to get there. My best guess is four years, maybe five.”

That would make him 79 or 80. Projections have fallen short at times during this mission. Deep space still might be a decade away.

“Will I be around when Voyager finally makes it?” Stone draws a breath. For a moment, he is silent. …

What he lacks in zippy personality, his colleagues say, he makes up for by usually being the smartest — and most humble — person in the room. Few, if anyone, can recall him losing his cool or even being mildly dejected. “He is a leader regarded as above the fray,” says science writer Timothy Ferris, who helped Sagan create the Voyager discs.

“Stone is pretty much universally admired, and that is very unusual for someone in his position.”

In 2001, at age 65, Stone retired from JPL and returned to Caltech to teach physics. By then, much of the machinery on the Voyagers had been shuttered to save power for the final push. Their next important discoveries would come only as they began escaping the solar system.

Science has created models of deep space, but no one can say for sure what it is like — its temperatures, its composition or the speed of its interstellar wind. Most important, no one knows exactly how deep space relates to the formation of Earth.

Stone, still the lead scientist, oversees a slimmed-down Voyager team — about 20 researchers who must find time for the mission among their other projects. Some are at Caltech and JPL, others at universities and laboratories scattered across the country.

They follow the probes, especially Voyager 1, with mounting interest. Running on dwindling plutonium, using antiquated computers and recording data on eight-track tapes that get sent to Earth on faint radio waves, Voyager 2 races through space about 9 billion miles away and Voyager 1, 11 billion.

If it reaches deep space, scientists will ask Voyager 1 to perform one more great task before it runs out of power, to use a collection of measuring devices, including one known as a cosmic-ray spectrometer, which Stone helped design, to gather information and send it back to Earth. Humans then will have their first definitive look at the great beyond. ….

via Voyager 1 mission: A new frontier in quest to understand the cosmos – latimes.com.

>Asteroid as strong as 15 atomic bombs whizzes by earth

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An asteroid as strong as 15 atomic bombs whizzed past earth last night at just ten times the distance of the moon.

Astronomers first spotted the cigar-shaped rock spinning through space on Monday evening and tracked it.

The star-gazers were baffled by why the asteroid ‘blinked’ at them until they realised that due to is long shape, the darkness came when it rotated slightly out of view.

Thankfully, the 50m long rock that could have destroyed a small country went barely noticed as it passed earth at a distance of some 2,085,321 miles.

‘Usually, when we see an asteroid strobe on and off like that, it means that the body is elongated and we are viewing it broadside along its long axis first, and then on its narrow end as it rotates,’ Don Yeomans from Nasa told news.com.au.

via Asteroid as strong as 15 atomic bombs whizzes by earth | Mail Online.