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Category: space – Page 1,009

NASA Cuts A Huge Check To Underwrite Asteroid Mining

NASA awarded $125,000 to a mining company to develop technology to extract minerals embedded in asteroids.

NASA will pay Deep Space Industries (DSI) for technology to return mined minerals from asteroids to Earth’s orbit. DSI is developing a way to use aerobraking to bring minerals back to Earth.

DSI said the grant will support the company’s research into creating aerobrakes out of materials found on near-Earth asteroids.

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Second ‘Great Spot’ found at Jupiter, cold and high up

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Another “Great Spot” has been found at Jupiter, this one cold and high up.

Scientists reported Tuesday that the dark expanse is 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) across and 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) wide. It’s in the upper atmosphere and much cooler than the hot surroundings, thus the name Great Cold Spot. And unlike the giant planet’s familiar Great Red Spot, this newly discovered weather system is continually changing in shape and size. It’s formed by the energy from Jupiter’s polar auroras.

A British-led team used a telescope in Chile to chart the temperature and density of Jupiter’s atmosphere. When the researchers compared the data with thousands of images taken in years past by a telescope in Hawaii, the Great Cold Spot stood out. It could be thousands of years old.

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Life On Earth To Hit Brick Wall In Another 500 Million Years

From the archives.

Our Earth and Sun continue to have a delicate relationship. Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center.

Complex life here on earth will hit a habitability wall in only 500 million years; not in an almost languorous 1.75 billion years, as reported in a recent global media flap.

The flap — spurred by a paper in the journal Astrobiology — failed to cover earth’s future carbon dioxide (CO2) “compensation limit,” says James Kasting, a prominent planetary scientist at Penn State University, whose own models were used by the paper’s authors.

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Next Job for US Air Force: Space Cop?

The United States Air Force may become a sort of space cop in the not-too-distant future.

An off-Earth economy cannot truly take off unless moon miners and other pioneering entrepreneurs are able to operate in a safe and stable environment, said Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Schilling, of Air University.

“The [U.S.] Navy secures the freedom of action for commerce globally for the good of all humankind, and I think it’s going to take a force very similar to that to provide the predictability and security that the marketplace of space will need,” Schilling said Tuesday (April 4) during a panel discussion at the 33rd National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “I think that would be the role of the United States Air Force moving into the future.” [Home on the Moon: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Infographic)].

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Atmosphere around super-Earth detected

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around the super-Earth GJ 1132b. This marks the first detection of an atmosphere around a low-mass super-Earth, in terms of radius and mass the most Earth-like planet around which an atmosphere has yet been detected. Thus, this is a significant step on the path towards the detection of life on an exoplanet. The team, which includes researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, used the 2.2-m ESO/MPG telescope in Chile to take images of the planet’s host star, GJ 1132, and measured the slight decrease in brightness as the planet and its atmosphere absorbed some of the starlight while passing directly in front of their host star.

While it’s not the detection of life on another planet, it’s an important step in the right direction: the detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth GJ 1132b marks the first time an atmosphere has been detected around a planet with a mass and radius close to Earth’s mass and radius (1.6 Earth masses, 1.4 Earth radii).

Astronomers’ current strategy for finding life on another planet is to detect the chemical composition of that planet’s atmosphere, on the lookout for certain chemical imbalances that require the presence of living organisms as an explanation. In the case of our own Earth, the presence of large amounts of oxygen is such a trace.

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If an AI Doesn’t Take Your Job, It Will Design Your Office

Arranging employees in an office is like creating a 13-dimensional matrix that triangulates human wants, corporate needs, and the cold hard laws of physics: Joe needs to be near Jane but Jane needs natural light, and Jim is sensitive to smells and can’t be near the kitchen but also needs to work with the product ideation and customer happiness team—oh, and Jane hates fans. Enter Autodesk’s Project Discover. Not only does the software apply the principles of generative design to a workspace, using algorithms to determine all possible paths to your #officegoals, but it was also the architect (so to speak) behind the firm’s newly opened space in Toronto.

That project, overseen by design firm The Living, first surveyed the 300 employees who would be moving in. What departments would you like to sit near? Are you a head-down worker or an interactive one? Project Discover generated 10,000 designs, exploring different combinations of high- and low-traffic areas, communal and private zones, and natural-light levels. Then it matched as many of the 300 workers as possible with their specific preferences, all while taking into account the constraints of the space itself. “Typically this kind of fine-resolution evaluation doesn’t make it into the design of an office space,” says Living founder David Benjamin. OK, humans—you got what you wanted. Now don’t screw it up.

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Dwarf planet Ceres and the case of the vanishing ice volcanoes

The solitary mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres may be slowly disappearing, following in the footsteps of earlier peaks.

New research suggests that the outer layer of the icy world may be slowly shifting over time, allowing the peak to gradually stretch out and sink into the crust. Similar mountains may have peppered the planet in the past and flattened out over time.

“It’s sort of like if you spill some syrup or honey on a plate and you watch it spread out over time, not instantaneously like water does but a little more slowly, it eventually gets to a flatter, broader shape; it’s the same process,” Michael Sori, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. [NASA Probe Snaps Stunning New Pics of Dwarf Planet Ceres].

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