Kepler mission to hunt for planets just our size

The United States is scheduled to launch on Friday an orbiting telescope designed to help answer one of the oldest and deepest questions of astronomy: Are we – or at least our planet’s microbes – alone in the galaxy? The Kepler spacecraft will stare at a patch of sky – the same 100,000 stars near the northern constellation Cygnus, all at once – for at least 3-1/2 years. The goal is to detect Earth-like planets orbiting their host stars at distances thought to be sweet spots for life. Dubbed habitable zones, these are orbits where a planet is bathed in light that is strong enough to permit liquid water to collect and remain a persistent feature of the planet’s surface. If all goes well, Kepler’s journey will start with the launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida at around 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

Site – http://features.csmonitor.com

Less Than 20 Years Until First Contact?

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has come online with its initial configuration of 42 antennas. The project, led by the SETI Institute, is a non-governmental project funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in which eventually 350 small radio antennas will scan the sky for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Senior SETI scientist Seth Shostak said that the array could become strong enough by 2025 to look deep enough into space to find extraterrestrial signals. “We’ll find E.T. within two dozen years,” he said. That’s, of course, assuming the distance we can look into space will be increased with new instruments yet to be built, and that the projected computing power under Moore’s Law actually happens. Shostak estimated that if the assumptions about computing power and the strength of forthcoming research instruments are correct, we should be able to search as far out as 500 light years into space by 2025, a distance he predicted would be enough–based on scientist Frank Drake’s estimate of there being 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of creating radio transmitters–to find evidence of intelligent life that is broadcasting its existence.

Site – http://www.universetoday.com

Asian nations vie for stake in moon

When India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter reaches its destination on 8 November, it will join two others – and neither is American, Russian or European. For the first time, probes from China, Japan and India will be orbiting the moon. This signals the latest stage in a new space race in which Asian nations are seeking a place alongside the established space powers. Both China and India are looking for helium-3 in the lunar crust as a possible fuel for nuclear fission reactors on Earth. The moon is estimated to have a millions tonnes of the stuff, the result of billions of years of bombardment by the solar winds.

Site – http://www.newscientist.com

Liquid Mirror Telescopes on the Moon

“It’s so simple,” says Ermanno F. Borra, physics professor at the Optics Laboratory of Laval University in Quebec, Canada. “Isaac Newton knew that any liquid, if put into a shallow container and set spinning, naturally assumes a parabolic shape—the same shape needed by a telescope mirror to bring starlight to a focus. This could be the key to making a giant lunar observatory.” Borra, who has been studying liquid-mirror telescopes since 1992, and Simon P. “Pete” Worden, now director of NASA Ames Research Center, are members of a team taking the idea for a spin. “A mirror that large could peer back in time to when the universe was very young, only half a billion years old, when the first generation of stars and galaxies were forming,” Borra exclaimed. “Potentially more exciting is pure serendipity: new things we might discover that we just don’t expect.” Says Worden: “Putting a giant telescope on the Moon has always been an idea of science fiction, but it soon could become fact.”

Site – http://spacefellowship.com

Newly found planets make case for ‘crowded universe’

European astronomers have found a trio of “super-Earths” closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it.  The discovery demonstrates that planets keep popping up in unexpected places around the universe.  The announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth’s size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz.  He was part of the Swiss-French team using the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in the desert in Chile.  The mass of the smallest of the super-Earths is about four times the size of Earth.  Scientists are more interested in the broader implications of the finding: The universe is teeming with far more planets than thought.  Using a new tool to study more than 100 stars once thought to be devoid of planets, the Swiss-French team found that about one-third had planets that are only slightly bigger than Earth.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

Yes, there’s ice on Mars

“Whoohoo! Was keeping my eye on some chunks of bright stuff & they disappeared! Sublimated! So it can’t be salt, it’s ice.” That’s the triumphant verdict of the Mars lander Phoenix, which yesterday boldly declared, after 24 Martian days of scratching the planet’s surface, that yes, there is ice on Mars.

Phoenix is constantly sending back information to Earth, which is posted by the mission team using the instant messaging software Twitter (written, in touchy-feely style, in the first person as if Phoenix itself is providing its own commentary on its labours). Twitter, the ‘microblogging’ phenomenon, can thus claim to have brought the watery news to Earthlings’ attention.

Site – http://www.nature.com

Milky Way loses two (major) arms

For decades, astronomers have pictured our galaxy as sporting four major, spiral arms, however new images effectively sever two appendages, revealing the Milky Way has just two major arms.

“We’re not proposing that they change the positions of the arms,” said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. “What we’re proposing is a change in the emphasis of the arms.” Benjamin will present his team’s results today here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

The findings confirm an earlier observation by a team of astronomers, making a strong case that the Milky Way has two major spiral arms, a common structure for galaxies with bars. These major arms have the greatest densities of both young, bright stars and older, so-called red-giant stars.

Site – http://www.usatoday.com

The International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is a research facility currently being assembled in space. The on-orbit assembly of ISS began in 1998. The ISS has been continuously inhabited since the first resident crew entered the station on November 2, 2000, thereby providing a permanent human presence in space. Early crew members all came from the Russian and U.S. space programs. The ISS was also the destination of the first five space tourists. At an estimated cost of $157 billion for the ISS project from its start until the program will end in 2017, the ISS is the most expensive object ever built by humankind. This is dwarfed by the price of the Iraq War with the total cost to the U.S. economy estimated at $3 to 5 trillion in five years.

Site – http://en.wikipedia.org

The Arthur C. Clarke Gamma Ray Burst?

Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which occurred 7.5 billion light-years away, be named the Clarke Event. Even the faintest stars visible to the eye are merely hundreds or thousands of light-years distant, all well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. But staring toward the northern constellation Bootes on March 19th, even without binoculars or telescope you still could have witnessed a faint, brief, flash of light from this gamma-ray burst. The source of that burst has been discovered to lie over halfway across the Universe. The Gamma Ray Burst now holds the distinction of the most distant object that could be seen by the unaided eye and the intrinsically brightest object ever detected, the cosmic explosion is estimated to have been over 2.5 million times more luminous than the brightest known supernova.

Site – http://science.slashdot.org

Endeavour on way to international space station

In a rare middle-of-the-night launch, the shuttle blasted off with an almost blinding flash. But the darkness meant fewer pictures than usual to look for signs of possible damage to the spacecraft during the climb to orbit. NASA knew the nighttime launch would come at a photographic cost. But past successes at preventing the shuttle’s fuel tank from losing big chunks of foam insulation during liftoff and the accuracy of heat shield inspections convinced managers the night launch was a good choice. Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight. They’re also delivering the first piece of Japan’s massive Kibo space station lab, a float-in closet for storing tools, experiments and spare parts. For the first time, each of the five major international space station partners will own a piece of the real estate. At 16 days, the mission will be NASA’s longest space station trip ever and will include five spacewalks, the most ever performed while a shuttle is docked there. Three of those spacewalks will feature Dextre, which is sure to steal the show.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

Site – http://www.physorg.com

Astronomers vie to make biggest telescope

A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition. In fact, the super-sized telescopes will yield even finer pictures than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put in orbit in 1990 and was long considered superior because its view was freed from the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. But now, land-based telescopes can correct for such distortion. Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

The Universe within 1 billion Light Years

Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are not uniformly distributed in the Universe, instead they collect into vast clusters and sheets and walls of galaxies interspersed with large voids in which very few galaxies seem to exist. The map above shows many of these superclusters including the Virgo supercluster – the fairly minor supercluster of which our galaxy is just a minor member. The entire map is approximately 7 percent of the diameter of the entire visible Universe. Individual galaxies are far too small to appear on this map, each point represents a group of galaxies.

Site – http://www.ldps.ws