Space News thread

[Takeovers]

Flying through the Falcon factory



For those who want some very good explanations to go with it, look at this reddit post

http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comme...nz&sh=6afd944c

You can see the rocket assembled from barrel sections to the full first stage with engines. Get a look inside the tank.

[misskit]

China Tests Self-sustaining Space Station in Beijing


Volunteers smile to a camera from inside a simulated space cabin in which they temporarily live as a part of a scientistic Lunar Palace 365 Project, at Beihang University in Beijing, China, July 9, 2017.


BEIJING —
Sealed behind the steel doors of two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, university students are trying to find out how it feels to live in a space station on another planet, recycling everything from plant cuttings to urine.

They are part of a project aimed at creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that provides everything humans need to survive.

Four students from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics entered the Lunar Palace-1 on Sunday with the aim of living self-sufficiently for 200 days.

They say they are happy to act as human guinea-pigs if it means getting closer to their dream of becoming astronauts.

"I'll get so much out of this," Liu Guanghui, a PhD student, who entered the bunker on Sunday, said. "It's truly a different life experience."

President Xi Jinping wants China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send the first probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018 and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036. The Lunar Palace 365 experiment may allow them to stay there for extended periods.

For Liu Hong, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the project's principal architect, said everything needed for human survival had been carefully calculated.

"We've designed it so the oxygen [produced by plants at the station] is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals, and the organisms that break down the waste materials," she said.

But satisfying physical needs is only one part of the experiment, Liu said. Charting the mental impact of confinement in a small space for such a long time is equally crucial.

"They can become a bit depressed," Liu said. "If you spend a long time in this type of environment it can create some psychological problems."

Liu Hui, a student leader who participated an initial 60-day experiment at Lunar Palace-1 that finished on Sunday, said that she sometimes "felt a bit low" after a day's work.

The project's support team has found mapping out a specific set of daily tasks for the students is one way that helps them to remain happy.

But the 200-day group will also be tested to see how they react to living a for period of time without sunlight. The project's team declined to elaborate.

"We did this experiment with animals... so we want to see how much impact it will have on people," Liu, the professor, said.

https://www.voanews.com/a/china-test...-/3934938.html

[Takeovers]

Earth and Mars move into a phase of opposition, when the sun is between the two. At that time communication with satellites and rovers on the ground is interrupted. NASA is bringing the rovers into a safe position where they need no commands to operate.

Important mainly for the Opportunity rover. It needs a position where the solar panels point towards the sun so it has enough power to survive.

Curiosity has a nuclear battery for power and is not that dependend on the sun.

Both rovers will have some oberervation tasks programmed for that period but no movements to avoid risks.

[Luigi]

I want this new AR Lunar Model.



The Lunar Pro is a softball-sized, one-pound orb that recreates the moon and all its craters, edges, and other topography based on NASA's lunar orbiter data. It's made at a resolution of 4,000 DPI, which is incredibly precise. It's then molded with a poly resin material that is hand-painted to mimic what the moon looks like. It comes shockingly close.

With a free AR app from your phone, you can hone in on famous landmarks, like the Apollo landing site or the Mare Marginis plain, dead volcanoes, craters, seas, and lava flows. As you spin the moon on its stand, more facts, photos, and other locations pop up on the app.

[misskit]

Beam me up, Scotty! Scientists teleport photons 300 miles into space

Star Trek tech is still way off but successful test of quantum entanglement at Earth-space distance boosts hope for building an unhackable quantum internet

Chinese scientists have teleported an object from Earth to a satellite orbiting 300 miles away in space, in a demonstration that has echoes of science fiction.

The feat sets a new record for quantum teleportation, an eerie phenomenon in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another – in effect teleporting it to a distant location.

Scientists have hailed the advance as a significant step towards the goal of creating an unhackable quantum internet.

“Space-scale teleportation can be realised and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum internet,” the authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China, wrote in the paper.

The work may bring to mind Scotty beaming up the Enterprise crew in Star Trek, but there is no prospect of humans being able to materialise instantaneously at remote locations any time soon. The teleportation effect is limited to quantum-scale objects, such as fundamental particles.

In the experiment, photons were beamed from a ground station in Ngari in Tibet to China’s Micius satellite, which is in orbit 300 miles above Earth.

The research hinged on a bizarre effect known as quantum entanglement, in which pairs of particles are generated simultaneously meaning they inhabit a single, shared quantum state. Counter-intuitively, this twinned existence continues, even when the particles are separated by vast distances: any change in one will still affect the other.

Scientists can exploit this effect to transfer information between the two entangled particles. In quantum teleportation, a third particle is introduced and entangled with one of the original pair, in such a way that its distant partner assumes the exact state of the third particle.

For all intents and purposes, the distant particle takes on the identity of the new particle that its partner has interacted with.

Quantum teleportation could be harnessed to produce a new form of communication network, in which information would be encoded by the quantum states of entangled photons, rather than strings of 0s and 1s. The huge security advantage would be that it would be impossible for an eavesdropper to measure the photons’ states without disturbing them and revealing their presence.

Ian Walmsley, Hooke professor of experimental physics at Oxford University, said the latest work was an impressive step towards this ambition. “This palpably indicates that the field isn’t limited to scientists sitting in their labs thinking about weird things. Quantum phenomena actually have a utility and can really deliver some significant new technologies.”

Scientists have already succeeded in creating partially quantum networks in which secure messages can be sent over optical fibres. However, entanglement is fragile and is gradually lost as photons travel through optical fibres, meaning that scientists have struggled to get teleportation to work across large enough distances to make a global quantum network viable.

The advantage of using a satellite is that the particles of light travel through space for much of their journey. Last month, the Chinese team demonstrated they could send entangled photons from space to Earth. The latest work does the reverse: they sent photons from the mountaintop base to the satellite as it passed directly overhead.

Transmitting into space is more difficult as turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere can cause the particles to deviate, and when this occurs at the start of their journey they can end up further off course.

The latest paper, published on the Arxiv website, describes how, more than 32 days, the scientists sent millions of photons to the satellite and achieved teleportation in 911 cases.

“This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet,” the team write.

A number of teams, including the European Space Agency and Canadian scientists, have similar quantum-enabled satellites in development, but the latest results suggest China is leading the way in this field.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...les-into-space

[misskit]

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA —
A NASA spacecraft circling Jupiter is revealing the up-close beauty of our solar system's biggest planetary storm.

Juno flew directly over Jupiter's Great Red Spot on Monday, passing an amazingly close 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the monster storm. The images snapped by JunoCam were beamed back Tuesday and posted online Wednesday. Then members of the public — so-called citizen scientists — were encouraged to enhance the raw images.

Swirling clouds are clearly visible in the 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm, which is big enough to swallow Earth and has been around for centuries.

https://www.voanews.com/a/spacecraft...m/3943884.html

[David48atTD]

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has flagged a potential return visit to Adelaide, as his company SpaceX prepares to unveil a
revised plan for an unmanned mission to Mars.

Mr Musk made a brief visit to the South Australian capital earlier this month to announce Tesla's plan to build the "world's most powerful" lithium ion battery array
near Jamestown in the state's Mid North.

In September last year, the SpaceX founder used the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city
of Guadalajara to unveil ambitious plans to build a human colony on Mars.

The vision included using a massive rocket and a fleet of spaceships to achieve a self-sustaining population on the Red Planet this century.

Adelaide is hosting this year's International Astronautical Congress in late September.

"I'm thinking probably the upcoming ISC in Adelaide might be a good opportunity to do the updated version of the Mars
architecture," Mr Musk told a space conference in Washington DC overnight.
"Because it's evolved quite a bit since that last talk."


He suggested SpaceX may abandon plans to land an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule on Mars — which had been suggested
for as early as next year.

"The key think that we figured out is, is how do you pay for this whole, something to go to Mars?," he told conference delegates.
"It's super expensive.

"If we downsize the Mars vehicle, make it capable of doing earth orbit activity as well as Mars activity then maybe we can pay for it using earth orbit activity.

"That's one of the key elements in the new architecture. It's similar to what was at ISC.
"It's a little bit smaller — still big — but I think this one's got a shot at being real on the economic front."

Here

[Takeovers]

I was disappointed about cancelling Dragon missions to Mars like many others. Critics of SpaceX are having a field day. But SpaceX is still on track to Mars. They now fully concentrate on that new vehicle. It will be smaller than previously intended for complex reasons. Partly because it is almost impossible to find a location where to build a launch pad. They have LC-39A, where Apollo 11 on Saturn was launched to the moon and where many SpaceShuttles launched. It is still too smal for what they wanted. They could rework it but they would have to take it out of service for a long time which they can not afford. They need to fly from there to earn money they will spend on Mars.

They now are planning to build the largest vehicle possible for that pad. Still the largest launch vehicle ever, much larger than Saturn 5 and the new SLS. Likely fully paid by SpaceX. It does not look like NASA will participate.

[misskit]

Apollo 11 Bag Laced with Moon Dust Sells for $1.8 Million



NEW YORK —
A bag containing traces of moon dust sold for $1.8 million at an auction Thursday following a galactic court battle.

The collection bag, used by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, was sold at a Sotheby's auction of items related to space voyages. The buyer declined to be identified. The pre-sale estimate was $2 million to $4 million.

The artifact from the Apollo 11 mission had been misidentified and sold at an online government auction, and NASA had fought to get it back. But in December, a federal judge ruled that it legally belonged to a Chicago-area woman who bought it in 2015 for $995.

more https://www.voanews.com/a/bag-moon-d...s/3952781.html

[Takeovers]

Google streetview now has the ISS mapped.

https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5604...7i10000!8i5000

Don't get confused by the mark that it is a ISS mockup. It is not, it is the real thing and you can walk right through it.

Here is a "behind the scenes" on how it was made by astronauts and how much planning went into it to make it as good as it is.



A BBC article

Google Maps adds the International Space Station - BBC News

Some photos from the BBC article

[Hugh Cow]

[QUOTE=Luigi;3582233]I want this new AR Lunar Model.




Luigi, a bowling ball that you've spoonted all over is not a Lunar model, it is a bowling ball that you have an unhealthy sexual attraction to.

[Luigi]

It has sentimental value.

[BaitongBoy]

Google streetview now has the ISS mapped.

Brilliant...The last frontier...


The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin...

[Luigi]

Just a 108,500×81,500—or if you prefer 9 giga-pixels, photo of 84 Million stars in the Milky Way, occupying 24.6 gigabytes.



If you're brave enough, can download here:

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/...l/eso1242a.psb


Probably more advised to view a Zoomable version here:

VISTA gigapixel mosaic of the central parts of the Milky Way

[Klondyke]

JULY 28, 2017 / 11:37 PM /
Three-man crew reaches space station as U.S. boosts research

A new crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, giving NASA for the first time four astronauts to boost U.S. research projects aboard the orbiting laboratory.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three spaceflight veterans slipped into a docking port aboard the station at 5:54 p.m. EDT (2154 GMT) as the $100 billion research outpost sailed about 250 miles (400 km) over Germany, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

Strapped inside the capsule, which blasted off aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan six hours earlier, were Randy Bresnik, with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Sergey Ryazanskiy, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos; and Italy's Paolo Nespoli, with the European Space Agency.

The men will join two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut already aboard the station, a project of 15 nations.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKBN1AD25A

[bobo746]

The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft carrying the crew of Paolo Nespoli of Italy, Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Randy Bresnik of the U.S. blasts off to the International Space Station from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

[misskit]

A New Way to Measure the Invisible Substances That Dominate the Universe

The Dark Energy Survey is the start of the next era of cosmology

In a much-anticipated analysis of its first year of data, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) telescope experiment has gauged the amount of dark energy and dark matter in the universe by measuring the clumpiness of galaxies—a rich and, so far, barely tapped source of information that many see as the future of cosmology.

The analysis, posted on DES’s last week and based on observations of 26 million galaxies in a large swath of the southern sky, tweaks estimates only a little. It draws the pie chart of the universe as 74 percent dark energy and 21 percent dark matter, with galaxies and all other visible matter—everything currently known to physicists—filling the remaining 5-percent sliver.


more https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...survey/536028/

[Takeovers]

A New Way to Measure the Invisible Substances That Dominate the Universe

Got through to reading it. Most interesting stuff. Our understanding of cosmology is being blown away again. I got to admit, while I can wrap my head around dark matter, as exotic as it may be, I intensely dislike dark energy.

A huge force pressing on the whole universe, pushing it apart and we are not able to measure it in the lab. We can only observe it by observing the whole universe. It even seems that energy becomes bigger with the universe expanding. Shudder.

[CaptainNemo]

The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft carrying the crew of Paolo Nespoli of Italy, Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Randy Bresnik of the U.S. blasts off to the International Space Station from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

It's like a giant space spunk... a testeroid? or a haemmorhoid

[Luigi]

"12 Light Years Away" --Four Rocky, Earth-Like Planets Detected Orbiting Our Nearest Sun-like Star, Tau Ceti | UNTOLD UNIVERSE

A new study by an international team of astronomers reveals that four Earth-like planets orbit the nearest sun-like star, tau Ceti, which is about 12 light years away and visible to the naked eye. These planets have masses as low as 1.7 Earth mass, making them among the smallest planets ever detected around nearby sun-like stars. Two of them are super-Earths located in the habitable zone of the star, meaning they could support liquid surface water.

[Takeovers]

Another successful launch and landing of SpaceX. Dragon CRS-12, mission 12 to the ISS for cargo and scientific experiments on the way to the ISS. It is anticipated that docking and opening Dragon will be a quick work by the ISS crew. That's because there is ice cream on board. The astronauts are always looking forward to some treats arriving.

Launch. It is day but he picture is dark, probably because the camera adjusts to the engine exhaust.





Some people viewing the launch from the beach.


The first stage landing back at the Cape in Florida.

[harrybarracuda]

An entertaining, two-part, fictional docudrama about a manned trip around the planets.

Quality stuff from the Beeb.

https://eztv.ag/search/bbc-space-odyssey

[Takeovers]

The launch and landing from NASA TV. Some breathtaking scenes. NASA have phantastic tracking cameras from the Shuttle era and can get unrivaled pictures of all phases of the flight. Well worth watching. About 8:20 minutes until landing.

[Takeovers]

Not sure I showed this before. This is the kind of tracking cameras NASA use to shoot that footage.

[Topper]

Thanks Takeovers!