Some say it’s far too early or even that such act is a sign of insolence, or even a straight joke.
Fact is U.S Congress issued this Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which includes exploration of commercial flights and asteroid mining.
It closes with a disclaimer: “the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.”
Some progress.
AIDA, joint cooperation between European and US space agencies: IT’s main goal is to to assess the possibility of deflecting an asteroid by impact.
They will send two spacecrafts to a double asteroid system, Didymos.
“The AIM spacecraft is set to rendez-vous with the asteroid system a few months prior to the impact to fully characterise the smaller of the two bodies, dubbed “Didymoon”.
In addition to this AIM will release a set of Cubesats in deep space and a lander on the surface of the smaller asteroid. We will thus demonstrate deep-space inter-satellite linking for the first time between the main spacecraft, the cubesats and the lander.
“AIM is a unique mission as it will be the first time that a spacecraft will investigate the surface, subsurface and internal properties of a small binary Near-Earth Asteroid, in addition to performing various important technology demonstrations that can serve other space missions. This knowledge is not only important for Planetary Defense, but it has great implications for our understanding of the history of the Solar System. Our current understanding is that these small asteroids are the outcome of collisions and other effects that made them what they are now. Having crucial information on their internal properties will allow us to feed small body population evolution models to draw a more reliable story of the Solar System.”
From NASA press release:
“New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.” … read full post, orelse go to the paper supporting this claim“
Christopher Watson on what to look for in a potential new earth. From BBC news.
“(…) Water in liquid form is thought to be a necessity for life on Earth.(…) Based on this, let’s look at the classical definition for the habitable zone as the region around a star, such as our own Sun, where the temperature of any orbiting planet permits water in liquid form.
Greenhouse gases (…) The very latest habitable zone definitions use simulations of these cloud and greenhouse effects – widening and blurring the crude classical definition.
Throw into the mix that we currently can’t study the atmospheres of rocky terrestrial exoplanets (and therefore have no idea whether they have clouds, greenhouse gases, or even an atmosphere at all!) – then to say “that planet is habitable” is impossible, for the time-being at least.
(…) High doses of radiation also tend to be harmful to biological material, and X-rays are capable of dissociating water – thereby depleting any water supply. Not ideal.
(…) Based on our knowledge of how life evolved on Earth, it is unlikely that even simple life would have time to evolve around stars that are all that much hotter than our Sun.
(…) a planet in the habitable zone of a red dwarf now was probably once scorching hot, and in the future will be freezing cold.
(…) Just over 20 years ago we didn’t know of ANY planets beyond our Solar System (we now know of thousands of candidates!) and only in the last few years have we been able to find small, rocky alien worlds.
The pace of discovery is astonishing and in 20 years’ time I suspect I will look back at this article and find I was totally wrong about everything.
This is what progress is.”
posted by NASA by Max Gleber, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“(…) NASA uses an arsenal of instruments to learn more about how these storms progress as they form. These devices orbit Earth on a fleet of spacecraft, including Aqua, Terra, the Global Precipitation Measurement core observatory, NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite,Calipso, Jason-2 and CloudSat.
“There are typically multiple instruments on every spacecraft with various purposes that often complement each other,” said Eric Moyer, the Earth science operations manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We can see the progression of a storm from one day to the next using the Terra and Aqua satellites—a morning and afternoon view of every storm system, every day.”
(…) NASA’s RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station measures surface winds over the ocean and is used to gather data on tropical cyclones. (…)
Passive microwave imagers aboard NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement and NASA-NOAA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership missions can peer through cloud canopies, allowing scientists to observe where the water is churning in the clouds.
(…) Computer modeling is another powerful NASA research tool.
NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO works to improve the understanding of hurricanes and assess models and procedures for quality. (…)
NASA also conducts field missions to study hurricanes. (…) The most recent NASA field mission to study hurricanes was the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3. For three consecutive years, the HS3 mission investigated the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The mission used the Global Hawk, a high-altitude long-endurance aircraft capable of flights of 26 hours at altitudes above 55,000 ft. (…)
In 2016, NASA is launching the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, a constellation of eight small satellites.CYGNSS will probe the inner core of hurricanes in such detail to better understand their rapid intensification. One advantage of CYGNSS is that it can get frequent measurements within storms. (…)
For more on NASA’s hurricane observations and research, visit:
From Los Angeles Times, back in February 10, 1985:
“Pan Am Has 90,002 Reservations : Public Interest Grows in Flights to the Moon
February 10, 1985|ROBERT E. DALLOS | Times Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Now that the airlines have been deregulated, they may fly just about anywhere they wish. And Pan American World Airways (…) has a list of 90,002 persons who hold reservations for the flights–to the moon.
Pan Am insists its moon-flight reservations program, established in 1968, is not a publicity stunt. (…)
The cards, says Pan Am, are not transferable and card holders must produce them before they can buy tickets to the moon. Although no deposits were required for the reservations, one would-be passenger was so anxious to secure his place in line that he sent along a check for $1 million. The check wasn’t cashed, Arey says. (…)
If your ticket is still valid and you happen to be travveling for business reasons so that you have to fill a expense claim: Buzz Aldrin’s voucher could be a good template.
Yes everybody now believes there’s water on the moon. “Moonshine: Diurnally varying hydration through natural distillation on the Moon, detected by the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND)” by authors Dana M. Hurley,G. Chin,R.Z. Sagdeev,I.G. Mitrofanov,W.V. Boynton,L.G. Evans,M.L. Litvak,T.P. McClanahan,A.B. Sanin,R.D. Starr,J.J. Su now tells us that it is theoretically possible to use water that is in the surface and thin atmosphere.
Not as simple a process as we use on earth, but basically it gets to vaporize water into a condenser that would funnel distilled water to a recipient. Sunlight would provide the necessary energy to power the system.
This application, found by Reddit user shrubit shows Space X filing for a plan to provide a satellite network that could provide internet connectivity to a vast of people currently out of the grid.
This attempts is a different approach to the same issue Google’s Loon Project and Facebook’s Aquila.
As reported in this article from TU Wien in Vienna, recent developments in theoretical physics have shown how we may reduce the mathematical description of physical events into analogous models using less dimensions than previously thought.
In a way, 3D models would be re-written as instances of 2D systems. Our universe complexity may be understood in less dimensions that are dreamt in our minds.
For the first time astronomers were able to detect light bouncing off planets our of the solar system.
The new method developed by a group of Portuguese astronomers may give researchers more information on the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Radial Velocity is currently used to find planets. Starting in the ’90s t has been sucessfully applied to hundreds of planets now. It provides good information on the orbit and mass, but are not so good in providing evidence of atmosphere composition. We can see a bit more, now.
To be precise:
“Methods. Our method makes use of the cross-correlation function (CCF) of a binary mask with high-resolution spectra to amplify the minute planetary signal that is present in the spectra by a factor proportional to the number of spectral lines when performing the cross correlation. The resulting cross-correlation functions are then normalized by a stellar template to remove the stellar signal. Carefully selected sections of the resulting normalized CCFs are stacked to increase the planetary signal further. The recovered signal allows probing several of the planetary properties, including its real mass and albedo.
Results. We detect evidence for the reflected signal from planet 51 Peg…
Conclusions. We confirm that the method we perfected can be used to retrieve an exoplanet’s reflected signal, even with current observing facilities. The advent of next generation of instruments (e.g. VLT-ESO/ESPRESSO) and observing facilities (e.g. a new generation of ELT telescopes) will yield new opportunities for this type of technique to probe deeper into exoplanets and their atmospheres.”
Orbital Insight uses image processing, neural networks, machine learning, and statistical analysis in search of insights from satellite images
The convergence of more powerful big data analysis tools, more intelligent machine learning algorithms, and more readily available satellite imagery has laid the groundwork for Orbital Insight. Many of Orbital’s customers are companies seeking information independent from government sources.
So far, the company claims to have developed data products that forecast endofseason crop harvest based upon midseason spectral analysis and quarterly retail performance based upon counting cars in parking lots, as well as measure the rate of construction in China’s real estate sector and the fluctuations in global crude oil inventories months ahead of similar figures reported by other organizations. More…
