Astronauts breeze through spacewalk to rig station for U.S. space taxis

Two U.S. astronauts whipped through a third spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Sunday to rig parking spots for new U.S. space taxis.

Station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts expected to spend about seven hours installing antennas, cables and navigation aides on the station's exterior truss. Instead, the astronauts, who were making their third spacewalk in eight days, were back inside the space station in 5.5 hours.

The purpose of the outings was to prepare berthing slips for spaceships being developed by Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

Wilmore and Virts floated outside the Quest airlock shortly after 7 a.m. EST/1200 GMT, a NASA Television broadcast showed. Their job was to install more than 400 feet (122 meters) of cables, a pair of antennas and reflectors that the new spaceships will use to navigate toward and dock with the station, a $100 billion laboratory that flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.

After the spacewalk, Virts reported that a small amount of water had seeped into his helmet, a situation that also occurred after a spacewalk last week.

"It's no issue to crew safety," mission commentator Daniel Huot said.

In July 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned when water began leaking into his helmet. NASA immediately aborted the spacewalk and suspended spacewalks while engineers figured out the cause of the problem. The incident with the suit Virts was wearing is unrelated, NASA said.

Sunday's outing followed two spacewalks last week to rig power and data cables for a pair of docking port adapters that are due to arrive later this year. One adapter will be installed at the berthing slip once used by NASA's space shuttles, which were retired in 2011. The second docking system will be located at an adjacent hatch on the Harmony connecting node.

Since the shuttles' retirement, the United States has been dependent on Russia to fly crew to and from the station, a joint project of 15 nations.

NASA aims to break Russia's monopoly before the end of 2017 by buying rides from Boeing and SpaceX.

Article: Reuters

Scientists discover black hole so big it contradicts growth theory

Scientists say they have discovered a black hole so big that it challenges the theory about how they grow.

Scientists said this black hole was formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.

But with measurements indicating it is 12 billion times the size of the Sun, the black hole challenges a widely accepted hypothesis of growth rates.

"Based on previous research, this is the largest black hole found for that period of time," Dr Fuyan Bian, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University (ANU), told Reuters on Wednesday.

"Current theory is for a limit to how fast a black hole can grow, but this black hole is too large for that theory."

The creation of supermassive black holes remains an open topic of research. However, many scientists have long believed the growth rate of black holes was limited.

Black holes grow, scientific theory suggests, as they absorb mass. However, as mass is absorbed, it will be heated creating radiation pressure, which pushes the mass away from the black hole.

"Basically, you have two forces balanced together which sets up a limit for growth, which is much smaller than what we found," said Bian.

The black hole was discovered a team of global scientists led by Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, China, as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provided imagery data of 35 percent of the northern hemisphere sky.

The ANU is leading a comparable project, known as SkyMapper, to carry out observations of the Southern Hemisphere sky.

Bian expects more black holes to be observed as the project advances.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

Pink cloud from NASA rocket lights up sky over U.S. Southwest

An unusual pink cloud that lit up the sky over New Mexico and Arizona early on Wednesday was caused by a NASA research rocket launched to study the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere, scientists said.

The cloud stunned many residents who posted photographs online and speculated on social media about its cause, with theories ranging from shootings stars to the sprightly fictional character Peter Pan.

But researchers at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico said the fluffy phenomenon had a much more Earth-bound explanation.

They said it was caused by a Terrier-Black Brant rocket designed to reach an altitude of more than 100 miles (160 km) that released a small quantity of vapor - "about as much as is contained in a BBQ grill propane tank" - into the near-vacuum of space to study the formation of the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is the outer layer of the atmosphere that extends to about 370 miles (600 km) into space.

The White Sands scientists said in a statement the colorful cloud was formed "as the sun illuminates the vapor before it diffuses harmlessly away into space."

Ground stations across the U.S. Southwest took a variety of measurements during the experiment, the researchers said. The data will be used to develop enhanced models of ionospheric disturbances in near-Earth space and their effects on modern technologies.

(Reporting by Daniel Wallis in Denver; Editing by Bill Trott)

NASA investigating helmet water leak after spacewalk

Two U.S. astronauts finished a 6-1/2-hour spacewalk on Wednesday to prepare parking spots for new commercial space taxis then discovered water had leaked into a spacesuit helmet, a problem that led to the near-drowning of another astronaut in 2013, officials said.

Unlike the 2013 incident, astronaut Terry Virts was not in any danger, said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias.

Virts discovered a small amount of water was floating in his helmet after he and spacewalk partner Barry "Butch" Wilmore had returned to the station's airlock following a successful outing.

"I really can't see any immediate danger," station flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy radioed to ground control teams at Mission Control in Houston.

In July 2013, NASA hastily aborted a spacewalk when the helmet worn by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano began filling with water. By the time he returned to the airlock, his vision was blocked and communications equipment had stopped working.

NASA suspended spacewalks while engineers searched for the cause of the problem.

Engineers do not yet know why Virts’ helmet leaked, nor if the issue is related to the previous problem, Navias said.

NASA managers plan to meet on Friday to decide whether to proceed with Sunday’s outing, he added,

During Wednesday’s spacewalk, the astronauts removed a cover protecting the space shuttle’s docking port, one of two sites being reconfigured for new spaceships under development by Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The work paves the way for the arrival later this year of two international docking port adapters, which will be installed during four more spacewalks NASA plans in 2015.

The spacewalkers finished routing two power and data cables on Wednesday then greased the grapple fixture at the end of the station’s robot arm.

They also prepared the Tranquility connecting node for the September arrival of an experimental inflatable habitat built by privately owned Bigelow Aerospace. Sunday's spacewalk is devoted to setting up a new communications system for the visiting vehicles.

The station, a partnership of 15 nations, is a collection of laboratories and platforms for materials and life science experiments, Earth studies, physics and other investigations that take advantage of the microgravity environment and unique vantage point of space. The Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday it would remain part of the international outpost until 2024, a four-year extension proposed by the United States.

Source: Reuters

Did dark matter kill the dinosaurs?

Every so often, the fossil record shows, ecological disasters wipe large numbers of species off the face of Earth. These mass extinctions occur roughly every 26 million to 30 million years—about the same interval at which our solar system passes through the plane of the Milky Way. Putting two and two together, some researchers have proposed that clouds of dust and gas in the galactic plane might disrupt the orbits of far-flung comets and trigger planet-smacking collisions. A new study suggests an additional culprit may lie behind those times of woe: dark matter.

Some of Earth’s past mass extinctions have been caused by the impacts of extraterrestrial objects, such as the asteroid that struck near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Others have occurred during extended periods of geological disruption that include region-smothering volcanic eruptions. Both kinds of catastrophes seem to occur on a cycle of about 30 million years, notes Michael Rampino, a geoscientist at New York University in New York City. 

“It’s always been a mystery as to how extraterrestrial impacts could cause these long-lived geological effects,” he says. But invisible dark matter, he proposes, could trigger both extraterrestrial impacts and geological upheavals in one fell swoop.

Scientists still don’t know what dark matter is, but its gravitational pull on other objects in space shows that there’s a lot of it out there. Researchers estimate that in the plane of the galaxy, each square light-year contains about one solar mass of dark matter. Like the clouds of dust and gas that astronomers can see, clouds of dark matter may be perturbing the orbits of distant comets, causing them to fall into the inner solar system where they can strike Earth.

But those clouds could directly affect Earth as well, Rampino says. As the solar system passes through this purported haze of particles clogging the galactic plane, some get trapped by Earth’s gravity, Rampino suggests. These particles orbit Earth’s core and eventually fall to the center of the planet, where they interact with normal matter or one another, releasing energy that gets transformed into heat.

In the time it takes for the solar system to cross the galactic plane, interactions with dark matter could raise the temperature of Earth’s core by hundreds of degrees Celsius, Rampino reported online this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Then, over millions of years, that heat could be carried to Earth’s surface via massive plumes of hot buoyant rock that, in turn, create volcanic hot spots or slowly rip apart continents—possibly altering global climate or making huge swaths of the planet so inhospitable that millions of species perish.

The idea that dark matter might cause both extraterrestrial impacts and geological upheavals “is intriguing,” says Dennis Kent, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. “One of those sources of environmental disruption might be tolerable,” he notes, but together they might pack a one-two punch that is too much for many ecosystems to bear. Indeed, he adds, some rather large impacts that weren’t accompanied by widespread geological devastation—such as an object that slammed into what is now the Chesapeake Bay nearly 35 million years ago, leaving a now-buried crater—don’t seem to have caused significant ecological damage.

Credits: Sciencemag

[EXCLUSIVE] If you are still thinking that there are 9 planets in our Solar System...?! Think again !

Way out beyond Mars, but before you get to Jupiter, is a planet.

You read that right. There's a planet between Mars and Jupiter.

You may not have heard of it, but it was discovered in 1801 -- 129 years before Pluto. It originally was called a planet, then later an asteroid and now it's called a dwarf planet.

Its name is Ceres (pronounced like series) and you'll likely be hearing a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

Ceres is one of five named dwarf planets recognized by NASA and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The other four are Eris, Pluto, Makemake and Haumea.

But Ceres is the first of these worlds to get a visitor from Earth: NASA's Dawn spacecraft is arriving on March 6.

"Ceres is a 'planet' that you've probably never heard of," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Ceres may be considered a dwarf planet, but it's "the giant of the main asteroid belt," Dr. Marc Rayman, chief engineer and mission director of the Dawn mission, told CNN. "It is not only the largest object between Mars and Jupiter, it is the largest object between the sun and Pluto that a spacecraft has not yet visited."

"We are tremendously excited," Rayman said. "We have guided this robotic probe for well over seven years on an interplanetary journey of more than 3 billion miles. Along the way we sailed past Mars. We spent 14 months orbiting and scrutinizing the giant protoplanet Vesta. ... Now, finally, we are on the verge of conducting the first exploration ever of the first dwarf planet."

New images from Dawn, taken when the probe was about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from Ceres, show craters and what NASA calls mysterious bright spots. Rayman said its surface is pretty beaten up and that the craters that are "scars from life in the rough and tumble asteroid belt."

Why study a beaten-up space rock? Rayman said because it's a survivor -- and a mysterious one. Made up of rock and ice, Ceres may even have liquid water deep beneath its surface -- "perhaps as ponds or lakes or even oceans," Rayman said.

He said Ceres "appears to have been in the process of growing to become a full-sized planet when Jupiter terminated its growth nearly 4.6 billion years ago."

So by studying Ceres, scientists learn more about how the rest of the solar system formed. And he said, we should study Ceres because it's there -- and we need to understand the universe we live in. 

"We should study it because we hunger for knowledge and understanding. Grand undertakings like this nurture our spirit," Rayman said.

Rayman said that if you had learned about the solar system 200 years ago, "you would have learned that Ceres was a planet, just as people who learned about the solar system in more recent generations learned that Pluto is."

Speaking of Pluto, the most famous of the dwarf planets gets its own visitor in July. The New Horizons spacecraft is closing in for a flyby of Pluto and its moons.

This talk of planets and dwarf planets is still a little confusing, so here's the most recent tally: NASA currently recognizes eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and the five named dwarf planets we listed earlier.

But a sixth possible dwarf planet already is on NASA's watch list.

Called 2012 VP113, it's believed to be one of the most distant objects in our solar system. On its Solar System Exploration website, NASA says the object was nicknamed "Biden" after Vice President Joseph Biden because of the VP in its initial designation. It will be up to the IAU to decide whether i2012 VP113 is a dwarf planet and whether it gets an official name.

But expect the numbers for planets in our solar system to keep changing. Mike Brown, the CalTech astronomy professor who helped discover dwarf planet Eris and who takes responsibility for killing off Pluto as a full-fledged planet, has his own tally listing more than 360 possible dwarf planets. And NASA has said there may be many more dwarf planets that we haven't found yet.

So Ceres, and its cousins, may soon outnumber the traditional planets you learned about in grade school.

VIDEO of the Ceres Planet here

Read more on CNN

[VIDEO] Exclusive: Orbital explosion probe said to find debris in engine: sources

Last October's explosion of Orbital ATK Inc's Antares rocket may have been triggered when debris inadvertently left in a fuel tank traveled into the booster's main engine, two people familiar with investigations into the accident told Reuters.

The sources said the preliminary findings suggest that a simple assembly mistake by Orbital ATK could have caused the explosion, which destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.

Orbital initially linked the explosion to a problem with the turbo pump in one of the two Soviet-era NK-33 engines that power the rocket. GenCorp Inc's Aerojet Rocketdyne unit refurbishes the old motors and resells them as AJ-26 motors.

Orbital ATK on Friday acknowledged that so-called "foreign object debris" was one of more than a half dozen credible causes of the explosion, but said it was not "a leading candidate as the most probable cause of the failure."

Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski said the company-led "accident investigation board," which includes officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, had not identified any evidence of mishandling of the flight hardware by Orbital.

He said Orbital continued to compare data from the October explosion with a May 2014 test stand failure of a different AJ-26 engine, and prior failures involving AJ-26 ground tests in 2009, 2011 and 2012.

No details have been released on the May 2014 test stand incident, but sources familiar with the earlier investigation said it was likely linked to faulty "workmanship" on the original motor, and additional inspections had been mandated to prevent mishaps with other engines. Orbital also successfully launched one Antares rocket in July 2014, after the May incident.

NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said NASA was conducting its own internal "lessons learned" review of the accident, but declined to give any details about individual aspects of the investigation.

She agreed with Orbital that foreign object debris was always considered as a possible cause in aerospace accidents.

If the investigations confirm that debris from the fuel tanks caused the Antares explosion, that could have significant financial and legal effects for Orbital ATK, which was formed by the merger of Orbital Sciences Corp and Alliant Techsystems.

The new findings could also open the door for a legal claim against Orbital by GenCorp, which took a $17.5 million loss in October, after Orbital said the accident had prompted it to accelerate plans to switch to a different engine.

One source said the Orbital investigation could end without declaring a single "root cause" for the explosion. Probes of past accidents have had similar results.

Several sources said it may be difficult to determine conclusively whether the debris entered the engine before the explosion, or as a result of it.

Glenn Mahone, spokesman for Aerojet Rocketdyne, declined to comment on the investigations, noting that they were still underway. He also declined to comment on the cause of the May test stand failure, which is part of the investigation.

One of the sources familiar with the probe said investigators found particles of a crystallized desiccant, or drying agent, in the turbo pump and other parts of the AJ-26 engine. The crystals could have caused sparks and triggered a fire when they hit the turbo pump in the oxygen-rich environment, the source said.

Desiccants are often used to control moisture in fuel tanks but need to be removed before takeoff, the sources said.

While the NASA investigation had not finalized the root cause of the accident, there were multiple signs that suggested some "foreign object debris" had been ingested into the engine from the fuel tanks, one source said.

Antares had four previous successful flights. The Oct. 28 explosion was the first accident since NASA began using commercial providers to fly cargo to the space station.

Orbital already faces steep bills for damage to the launch site, and the need to buy a different rocket to launch its next cargo ship to the space station.



In December, the company said it would buy a booster from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, to meet its obligations under a $1.9 billion cargo supply contract with NASA.

Orbital is one of two companies NASA hired to fly 40,000 pounds of cargo each to the station following the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011. Privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, has the other contract, valued at $1.6 billion.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by David Gregorio)

[VIDEO] Spacewalking astronauts rig station for new U.S. space taxis

A pair of U.S. astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Saturday to begin rigging parking spots for two commercial space taxis.

Station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer Terry Virts, 47, left the station’s Quest airlock shortly before 8 a.m. EST/1300 GMT to begin a planned 6-1/2-hour spacewalk, the first of three outings over the next eight days.

The work will prepare docking ports for upcoming flights by Boeing Co and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which are developing capsules to ferry crew to and from the station, which flies about 260 miles (418 km) above the Earth.

The United States has been dependent on Russia for station crew transportation since the space shuttle were retired in 2011.

The first test flight of a new U.S. crew craft isn’t expected until late 2016, but the station, a $100 billion laboratory owned by 15 nations, needs to undergo a significant transformation to prepare for the new vehicles, NASA said.

That work began on Saturday with Wilmore and Virts installing six cables to a docking port on the station’s Harmony module, the same site where space shuttles used to berth.

"This will be the most complicated cable-routing task that we have performed (by spacewalkers) to date,” Karina Eversly, lead spacewalk official, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

After two more spacewalks scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 25, and Sunday, March 1, the station will be outfitted with a total of 764 feet (233 m) of new cabling, as well as a communications system to support Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s upgraded Dragon capsules.

The work sets the stage for the launch and installation of two international docking systems, built by Boeing and scheduled for launch aboard SpaceX Dragon cargo ships later this year.



To make room for a second berthing port on Harmony and two docking slips for cargo ships, NASA also plans to relocate another module using the station’s robot arm.

"We're doing a lot of reconfiguration this year," Kenneth Todd, station operations manager, said at the news conference. "We are really trying to take the station into this next phase.”

Credits: Reuters

Giving shape to black holes' intense winds

By looking at the speed of ambient gas spewing out from a well-known quasar, astronomers are gaining insight into how black holes and their host galaxies might have evolved at the same time.

Using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) , researchers were able to use the X-ray spectra of an extremely luminous black hole (quasar PDS 456) to detect a nearly spherical stream of highly ionized gas streaming out of it.

The discovery allowed astronomers to measure, for the first time, the strength of ultra-fast black hole winds and show that they are mighty enough to affect the fate of their host galaxies.

The evolution of galaxies is connected to the growth of supermassive black holes in their centers. During the quasar phase, a huge luminosity is released as matter falls onto the black hole, and radiation-driven winds can transfer most of this energy back to the host galaxy.

"We know that black holes in the centers of galaxies can feed on matter, and this process can produce winds. This is thought to regulate the growth of the galaxies," said Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology, the principal investigator of NuSTAR and a co-author on a new paper about the results appearing in the Feb. 19 issue of the journal Science. 

"Knowing the speed, shape and size of the winds, we can figure out how powerful they are."

Supermassive black holes blast matter into their host galaxies, including X-ray-emitting winds traveling at up to one-third the speed of light. In the new study, astronomers determined that PDS 456, an extremely luminous active black hole, or quasar, has winds that carry more energy every second than what is emitted by more than 1 trillion suns.

That's enough of a punch to affect the entire galaxy and its ability to make stars.
"By looking at this huge spherical outflow, we can now see a mechanism to explain the correlation between black hole and galaxy formation," said Bill Craig of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Space Science Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley.

NuSTAR and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton simultaneously observed PDS 456, located more than 2 billion light-years away, on five separate occasions in 2013 and 2014. The space telescopes complement each other by seeing different parts of the X-ray light spectrum: XMM-Newton sees low-energy X-rays and NuSTAR sees high-energy X-rays. Their goal was to look for iron, which is blown from the black hole winds along with other matter.

The researchers looked for scattered light signatures from iron atoms originating from the sides of the supermassive black hole.
The NuSTAR's higher-energy X-ray data, when combined with observations from XMM-Newton, provided the key information, proving that the winds emanate not in a beam but in a nearly spherical fashion.

With the shape and extent of the winds determined, the researchers could then determine the power of the wind and the degree to which they can quench the formation of new stars.

The new report demonstrates that a supermassive black hole and the galaxy that nurtures it are connected by high-speed winds. As the black holes bulk up in size, their winds push vast amounts of matter outward through the galaxy, which ultimately stops new stars from forming.

The above story is based on materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Mars exploration: NASA's MAVEN spacecraft completes first deep dip campaign

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution has completed the first of five deep-dip maneuvers designed to gather measurements closer to the lower end of the Martian upper atmosphere.

"During normal science mapping, we make measurements between an altitude of about 150 km and 6,200 km (93 miles and 3,853 miles) above the surface," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. "During the deep-dip campaigns, we lower the lowest altitude in the orbit, known as periapsis, to about 125 km (78 miles) which allows us to take measurements throughout the entire upper atmosphere."

The 25 km (16 miles) altitude difference may not seem like much, but it allows scientists to make measurements down to the top of the lower atmosphere. At these lower altitudes, the atmospheric densities are more than ten times what they are at 150 km (93 miles).

"We are interested in the connections that run from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere and then to escape to space," said Jakosky. "We are measuring all of the relevant regions and the connections between them."

The first deep dip campaign ran from Feb. 10 to 18. The first three days of this campaign were used to lower the periapsis. Each of the five campaigns lasts for five days allowing the spacecraft to observe for roughly 20 orbits. Since the planet rotates under the spacecraft, the 20 orbits allow sampling of different longitudes spaced around the planet, providing close to global coverage.

This month's deep dip maneuvers began when team engineers fired the rocket motors in three separate burns to lower the periapsis. The engineers did not want to do one big burn, to ensure that they didn't end up too deep in the atmosphere. So, they "walked" the spacecraft down gently in several smaller steps.

"Although we changed the altitude of the spacecraft, we actually aimed at a certain atmospheric density," said Jakosky. "We wanted to go as deep as we can without putting the spacecraft or instruments at risk."

Even though the atmosphere at these altitudes is very tenuous, it is thick enough to cause a noticeable drag on the spacecraft. Going to too high an atmospheric density could cause too much drag and heating due to friction that could damage spacecraft and instruments.

At the end of the campaign, two maneuvers were conducted to return MAVEN to normal science operation altitudes. Science data returned from the deep dip will be analyzed over the coming weeks. 

The science team will combine the results with what the spacecraft has seen during its regular mapping to get a better picture of the entire atmosphere and of the processes affecting it.

One of the major goals of the MAVEN mission is to understand how gas from the atmosphere escapes to space, and how this has affected the planet's climate history through time. In being lost to space, gas is removed from the top of the upper atmosphere. But it is the thicker lower atmosphere that controls the climate. MAVEN is studying the entire region from the top of the upper atmosphere all the way down to the lower atmosphere so that the connections between these regions can be understood.

Credits: ScienceDaily

Mars One mission: Watch the trailer for £4bn colonisation programme

Five Britons have been shortlisted for a one-way trip to Mars as they hope to become the first humans to step foot on the Red Planet.

Four women and a man from the UK are among the final 100 candidates for the Mars One Project which plans to set up a permanent human settlement on the planet by 2024.
More than 200,000 people applied for the controversial privately-funded mission that organisers have estimated will cost £3.9 billion and is set to be filmed for a reality television series.

Hannah Earnshaw, 23, a PhD student in astronomy at Durham University, is among the British hopefuls, who include students and researchers in physics and astrophysics, a science lab technician and a manager for Virgin Media.

She said: "Human space exploration has always interested me so the opportunity to be one of the people involved was really appealing. The future of humanity is in space.
"My family is pretty thrilled. They're really happy for me. Obviously it's going to be challenging, leaving Earth and not coming back. I've had support from my friends and family and we can still communicate via the internet."

Ms Earnshaw said she will now be tested in groups on her response to stressful situations before finding out at the end of the year if she has made the list of 24 people chosen for the mission.
There will then be eight or nine unmanned trips to Mars before the first group of four astronauts will be launched into space in 2024, she said.

Ms Earnshaw said she was "not surprised" by scepticism surrounding the project. Last year researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reportedly found that any manned mission to Mars would result in the crew dying after 68 days, while critics have pointed out that the estimated cost of Mars One is a fraction of the amount proposed by Nasa.

Ms Earnshaw said: "It's a very ambitious mission and requires lots of things going right for humans to leave the planet. But this project is encouraging other people to talk about the wider implications.
"It's definitely feasible. Space travel is risky but at the same time, there is a time scale in place."

The other British hopefuls are Dr Maggie Lieu, 24, a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Birmingham, Oxford University student Ryan MacDonald, 21, from Derby, Alison Rigby, 35, a science laboratory technician, from Beckenham, Kent, and Clare Weedon, 27, a systems integration manager for Virgin Media, from Addlestone, in Surrey.

In total, 50 men and 50 women have been shortlisted from around the world, including 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Oceania.

They were selected from a pool of 660 candidates after taking part in online interviews with the mission's chief medical officer Norbert Kraft, where they were tested on their understanding of the risks involved, team spirit and motivation to be part of the expedition.

Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, said: "The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars. These aspiring martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be."

Candidates that were not selected will have a chance to re-apply in a new application round that will open in 2015.



Credits: Telegraph.co.uk

Dark matter guides growth of supermassive black holes

This illustration shows two spiral galaxies - each with supermassive black holes at their center - as they are about to collide and form an elliptical galaxy. New research shows that galaxies' dark matter halos influence these mergers and the resulting growth of supermassive black holes.
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Every massive galaxy has a black hole at its center, and the heftier the galaxy, the bigger its black hole. But why are the two related? After all, the black hole is millions of times smaller and less massive than its home galaxy.

A new study of football-shaped collections of stars called elliptical galaxies provides new insights into the connection between a galaxy and its black hole. It finds that the invisible hand of dark matter somehow influences black hole growth.

"There seems to be a mysterious link between the amount of dark matter a galaxy holds and the size of its central black hole, even though the two operate on vastly different scales," says lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

This new research was designed to address a controversy in the field. Previous observations had found a relationship between the mass of the central black hole and the total mass of stars in elliptical galaxies. However, more recent studies have suggested a tight correlation between the masses of the black hole and the galaxy's dark matter halo. It wasn't clear which relationship dominated.

In our universe, dark matter outweighs normal matter -- the everyday stuff we see all around us -- by a factor of 6 to 1. We know dark matter exists only from its gravitational effects. It holds together galaxies and galaxy clusters. Every galaxy is surrounded by a halo of dark matter that weighs as much as a trillion suns and extends for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

To investigate the link between dark matter halos and supermassive black holes, Bogdan and his colleague Andy Goulding (Princeton University) studied more than 3,000 elliptical galaxies. They used star motions as a tracer to weigh the galaxies' central black holes. X-ray measurements of hot gas surrounding the galaxies helped weigh the dark matter halo, because the more dark matter a galaxy has, the more hot gas it can hold onto.

They found a distinct relationship between the mass of the dark matter halo and the black hole mass -- a relationship stronger than that between a black hole and the galaxy's stars alone.
This connection is likely to be related to how elliptical galaxies grow. An elliptical galaxy is formed when smaller galaxies merge, their stars and dark matter mingling and mixing together. Because the dark matter outweighs everything else, it molds the newly formed elliptical galaxy and guides the growth of the central black hole.

"In effect, the act of merging creates a gravitational blueprint that the galaxy, the stars and the black hole will follow in order to build themselves," explains Bogdan.

Credits: ScienceDaily

Great Ball of Fire! Meteor Streaks Across Western Pennsylvania

A huge fireball that lit up the sky over western Pennsylvania was a meteor moving at approximately 45,000 mph. NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office says the space rock measuring 2 feet in diameter and weighing roughly 500 pounds entered Earth's atmosphere above the Pittsburgh suburbs around 4:50 a.m. Tuesday. It could be seen in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio. NASA says cameras detected the rock at an altitude of 60 miles above Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh. It flared brighter than a full moon as it descended to an altitude of 13 miles above Kittanning, northeast of Pittsburgh. The agency says the meteor likely came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

"There is a good chance of small fragments lying on the ground just to the east of Kittanning — at least four seismographs in the area recorded the pressure wave from the fireball and there are a few eyewitness reports of sonic booms around that time," WFMJ quoted William Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office as saying. "These are typical indications that meteorites have landed nearby."



You can see more pictures of the fireball on the American meteor Society' website.

Credits: NBC NEWS

Scientists still haven’t solved the mystery of the asteroid that exploded over Russia 2 years ago

Trail of the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013.

Two years after an asteroid exploded over Russia and injured more than 1,200 people, the origin of the space rock still puzzles scientists.

The 66-foot-wide (20 meters) asteroid broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, shattering windows across the area and sending many people to the hospital with lacerations from the flying glass.

Originally, astronomers thought that the Chelyabinsk meteor came from a 1.24-mile-wide (2 kilometers) near-Earth asteroid called 1999 NC43.

But a closer look at the asteroid's orbit and likely mineral composition, gained from spectroscopy, suggests few similarities between it and the Russian meteor.

"These two bodies shared similar orbits around the sun, and initial studies suggested even similar compositions," lead study author Vishnu Reddy, a scientist with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said in a statement.

However, "the composition of [the] Chelyabinsk meteorite that was recovered after the event is similar to a common type of meteorite called LL chondrites," he added. "The near-Earth asteroid has a composition that is distinctly different from this."

More generally, Reddy and his colleagues' work showed that it is difficult to make predictions about what particular asteroid could have shed pieces that slammed into Earth. Because most asteroids are so small and their orbits are "chaotic," it's hard to make a firm link, the authors said.



A paper based on the research appears in the journal Icarus.

The Russian meteor explosion has generated a great deal of interest in the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, sparking the creation of a new asteroid warning center at the European Space Agency, among other initiatives.

In a statement this week, the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to reduce the threat from asteroids, urged agencies worldwide to step up their search for dangerous space rocks. The group plans to add to that effort with the asteroid-hunting Sentinel Space Telescope, which B612 hopes to launch in 2018.

"The fact of the matter is that asteroid impacts can be prevented using technology we can employ right now," B612 co-founder Ed Lu, a former space shuttle astronaut, said in a statement.

"And unlike other potentially global-scale catastrophic events, the solution is nearly purely a technical one, and with a relatively small and known cost," Lu added. "So as my friend, former Apollo 9 astronaut and co-founder of the B612 Foundation Rusty Schweickart says, 'Let’s get on with it.'"

Credits: Space.com

How our solar system survived a 'near miss' with another star – 70,000 years ago

US scientists say solar system experienced closest ever encounter with star that whizzed past at distance of a light year.

By the standards of outer space, it was the closest call yet recorded: a star that zoomed past our solar system 70,000 years ago at a distance of five trillion miles. An international team of astronomers said on Tuesday the dim star probably passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, known as the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close – five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri, said the team of researchers from the US, Europe and South America.

Their study was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Analysis of the trajectory of this recently discovered star – known as a red dwarf and christened with the name Scholz's star after its discoverer – suggests it passed roughly 0.8 light years from our solar system. Astronomically speaking, that is close.
The star is now 20 light years away, said Eric Mamajek, from the University of Rochester in New York and lead author of the study.

Using spectrographs and large telescopes in South Africa and Chile, researchers were able to go back in time and reconstruct its trajectory by calculating its speed. They were also able to determine that it is now heading away from our solar system. Until now, the top candidate for the closest fly-by of a star to the solar system was the so-called "rogue star" HIP 85605. It was forecast to come close to our solar system in 240,000 to 470,000 years from now.

But Mamajek and his colleagues also demonstrated that the original distance to HIP 85605 was probably underestimated by a factor of ten.

This above diagram shows the scale of our Solar System. The scale bar is in astronomical units (AU), with each set distance beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance (logarithmic scaling). One AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth, which is about 150 million kilometres. Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun, is about 30 AU. The Solar System is considered to reach as far as the Oort Cloud, the source of long period comets. Note the position of Voyager 1, the most distant man-made spacecraft in space. Image credit: NASA

Credits: Telegraph CO UK

A black supermoon is coming this week

The moon is going to be at its closest on Wednesday, February 18, but since it's a new moon, so you won't see a thing.

This is called a black supermoon, and it happens around three times a year. While there's nothing to look at, some superstitious people consider it significant.

Here's a look at how lunar position will block our view:

When the moon is at its closet — called perigee — during a full moon or new moon, that's called a supermoon. When the moon is full, it's a spectacular site. Those moons, which are 13,000 miles closer than average, shine up to 30% brighter and appear 14% larger in the sky than other full moons.

Here's a look at a normal full moon compared to a supermoon:

Comparison showing how much large the supermoon of March 2011 was compared to the full moon of December 2010.

But when the moon is new, like the one this Wednesday, then its invisible to us. The next supermoon, the third of six to happen in 2015, will take place on March 20th.

The last three will happen during a full moon and take place in August, September, and October. On September 28, the supermoon will occur around the same time as a total lunar eclipse, where the east coast will have prime seating for the event.

NOW WATCH: NASA has released images of the other side of the Moon that we've never seen before

The Psychology of Mars One Hopefuls

Studies show that it takes a certain kind of crazy to volunteer for a trip to Mars.
In the two years since the non-profit Mars One announced its plan to colonize the planet, more than 200,000 people have applied to be among the first humans to die on Mars (and probably do some other stuff there too). Now, the Netherlands-based organization has narrowed down the group to 660 lucky individuals. A documentary from the Guardian released on Monday gives viewers a glimpse into these space hopefuls' mindset.

“A hundred years down the line, who’s going to know who was the president of the United States or something?” asked one Mars One finalist from the United Kingdom, named Ryan, in a video made by Stateless Media. “But everyone will remember who were those first four people who stepped on Mars.”

A slew of personality traits have also been linked to risk-taking behavior, including narcissism, impulsivity, extroversion, aggression, and sensation seeking. Or, as another Mars hopeful, Dina, told Stateless Media: “It might put me in danger. But that’s the whole point.”

Humans are, by our nature, explorers. Our ancestors fanned out across the globe by land and sea, and once they reached Earth’s highest peaks and deepest trenches, we took to the stars. The Mars One astronauts will join an exclusive club of explorers who have stepped onto other worlds. They will be celebrated, remembered, deified. But they will never come back.

Though we may be genetically predisposed to explore, it takes a special kind of person to trade this blue planet for a red one. In the Psychology of Space Exploration, psychologists Albert Harrison and Edna Fiedler wrote of what previous Soviet and NASA missions have taught us about the behavioral health issues that can arise when humans are forced together in confined spaces, say, a spacecraft:

Members of isolated and confined groups frequently report sleep disturbances, somatic complaints (aches, pains, and a constellation of flulike symptoms sometimes known as the “space crud”), heart palpitations, anxiety, mood swings including mild depression, inconsistent motivation, and performance decrements. Crew members sometimes withdraw from one another, get into conflicts with each other, or get into disputes with Mission Control.

The astronauts of the Apollo 7 crew never flew again thanks to confrontations with mission control. Several other missions Soyuz 21, Soyuz T-14, and Soyuz TM-2 were shortened because of mood or other psychological health related issues. Mars One candidates will not have the option to bail out early (or ever, really).

What makes for a good space traveller? Aside from intelligence and a certain degree of insanity, these candidates probably have a little extra dopamine a neurotransmitter associated with (among many, many other things) reward. Risk-takers tend to have fewer dopamine receptors in the reward circuits of their brains, according to a 2008 study. Fewer receptors to recycle free-floating dopamine means a heavier dosage of the brain chemical. Higher risks result in higher rewards, or higher levels of dopamine.

A slew of personality traits have also been linked to risk-taking behavior, including narcissism, impulsivity, extroversion, aggression, and sensation seeking. Or, as another Mars hopeful, Dina, told Stateless Media: “It might put me in danger. But that’s the whole point.”

Whatever their reasons guts, glory, or straight up genetics there is no shortage of people willing to leave this rock we call home behind. But until the Mars One non-profit actually launches four amateur astronauts toward the red planet, China (and I) still think Mars One might just be a long-running and elaborate hoax.

Credits: PSMAG

We should make first contact: scientists say it is time to search for aliens

Space experts in the US say it is time to try actively to contact intelligent life on other worlds - but others argue it might be dangerous

Humans should start sending messages to planets in habitable zones in the hope that alien life-forms might hear us, scientists have said.

Space experts at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life (SETI) project said the time has come to stop passively listening for signs of intelligence in other worlds and actively start seeking contact.

Kepler Space Telescope captured tens of thousands of stars in the constellation of Cygnus and Lyra

SETI was founded 20 years ago to monitor the cosmos for signals of alien life and involves astrophysicists from institutions like Harvard University and the University of California. However as early 1960 scientists were scanning space for clues to other civilizations. 

Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, said we should now start devising a message to send to planets which have recently been discovered in the "goldilocks zone" – areas of space where it is neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist.

Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone

"For over a half century, scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have sought evidence of the existence of other civilizations by searching for intentional radio signals," he said

"As we move into the next half century we should expand our strategies, so we are not only passively listening, but also transmitting intentional, information-rich signals.
"With recent detections of Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars, we have natural targets for such transmission projects.
"We should repeatedly target a set of nearby stars over the course of several months or years.”

The Kepler Telescope

NASA’s Kepler Telescope has so far found more than 3,800 planets in habitable zones which could hold liquid water, and life. Experts say targeting them with a signal is the best hope of making contact with new worlds.

However the content of a message has been hotly debated. To find out what humans would like to say to aliens, SETI founded a site called Earth Speaks and asked people to devise an interstellar message.

The smallest-ever planet outside our solar system has been spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope - a rocky planet similar in size to the Earth

While women tended to offer friendship, and even coffee and biscuits in their missives, men were more likely to talk about science and inquire about their civilisation. Overall the main theme was asking for help from aliens rather than seeking to impart the wisdom of Earth.

Mr Vakoch said humans have a "cosmic inferiority complex" and automatically assume that extra-terrestrials will be more technologically advanced than us and so have nothing to learn.
But he added: "Humankind has a range of experiences and insights that cannot be imagined by any other civilization.

"Though extraterrestrials may be more technologically advanced we are, they will never be more human. It’s the breadth of our human experience that we should be conveying in our interstellar messages."

The experts at SETI say that governments must start working together to devise the message. The equipment to send basic messages already exists and scientists say that reluctance ‘more political than technical.’

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI research, said some people resisted the approach, fearing it could alert our presence to dangerous extra-terrestrial races.

"It’s very controversial,” he said, “There are some people who think this might be dangerous.
"The idea that you are somehow endangering Earth I don’t think holds any water because we have been broadcasting into space willy nilly since the Second World War – televisions, FM radio and radar.

"These signals have been going into space for 70-somethng years so they are quite far out and any society that could come to Earth and incinerate Belgium, if they think they deserve it, is fully capable of picking up these broadcasts.”
But he admits that it is a gamble whether visiting aliens will come in peace.

“Nobody knows if they are friendly or not,” he added.

“You could be optimistic and think they are all friendly or figure they are like ones in the movies and hellbent on destruction. I suspect there is a whole range.

“Earth has been sitting around for 4 billion years with life on it and nobody’s thought to destroy it.

“It may be they want to proseltyse. The other thing is that they are just interested in the culture – that’s what’s special about us. Maybe they are interested in rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe they want Cliff Richard.”
However American scientist and futurist David Brin believes it is a mistake to try and contact alien worlds.

"We are the youngest of all technological races in the cosmos, like an orphan child who suddenly finds herself wandering a strange jungle that’s quiet, too quiet,” he said.

"Perhaps you have the kind of personality that says: "What the heck! I might as well shout and see what happens!"

"That’s all very well if the only one you are putting at risk is yourself. But when that risk is also imposed upon our children -- all of humanity and our planet – is it too much to ask that we discuss it first?"

The scientists were speaking at the annual Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS annual conference in San Jose.

Credits: Telegraph.co.uk