On April 23 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Planetary Resources, Inc. announced and revealed their plans to search for and mine asteroids for their precious metals and water. With this mission, its members hope to provide more resources for the Earth and humans and reduce the cost of space travel. Billions to trillions of dollars can be contributed to the global gross domestic profit.

As for a more intrinsic motivation, Planetary Resources also hopes to advance human exploration in space.

The money and means largely come from the founders and backers of the group, which include Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page, Eric Anderson (who founded Space Adventures, which arranged space flights for millionaires) Ross Perot Jr. (the chairman of the Board of Perot Systems), Charles Simonyi (who was a part of the team that devised Microsoft Office Suite), filmmaker James Cameron, and Peter Diamandis (founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation).

Asteroids are space junk – leftovers from when the planets in our solar system fully formed. Their sizes range from several meters to over one thousand kilometers across. Composition varies, though they are mostly made of metals, some of which are present on Earth (“common” ones such as iron and nickel) and some of which are rare on our planet (platinum, for example.) Some asteroids consist of a significant amount of frozen water along with metals.

“Everything we hold of value on Earth — metals, minerals, energy, water, real estate — are literally in near-infinite quantities in space,” Diamandis tells ABC News.

To conserve time, money, and fuel, Planetary Resources plans to mine asteroids near Earth. Thousands possibly float nearby – many of them too small to be detected. Most that will be mined would be more reachable than the Moon since Earth’s gravitational tends to capture smaller space objects, including asteroids.

The mission is divided into sections. Before getting straight to the mining, the group will first build a low-orbiting telescope that will be able to sieve out the asteroids that show the most promise for harvesting (ten percent of over a thousand). The approximate launch date has not yet determined.

Then comes the actual mining. Subsequent to finding the asteroids via telescope, the group will launch space probes containing unmanned robots, which will be sent out by rocket boosters built by private American companies, by the Russians, or by any other source willing to build them for affordable prices.

As Phillip Plait in writes in his blog “Bad Astronomy,” volatiles (oxygen, nitrogen, and water) will be garnered primarily for the sake of having additional resources. The water will either be converted into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen, or it can be broken down to its basic elements for easier and cheaper transport.

After the volatiles, the robots will mine for the precious metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, and ruthenium, and others, all of which are difficult to access on Earth and only exist on the planet because of impacts from asteroids.

“When the availability of these metals increase[s], the cost will reduce on everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer monitors, catalysts,” Diamandis continues. “And with the abundance of these metals, we’ll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive fuel cells.”

To further save costs, the robots will have the option of storing the metals and water in supply depots in space instead of bringing to resources back to Earth straight away.

Is Planetary Resources’ plan is completely ludicrous? Not really. Mining asteroids is not is not a novel concept. Plait continues writes that he thinks “getting to the asteroids will do just fine,” and to American astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who recently appeared on the Daily Show, the idea is “not bulls#*t.”

The article Billionaire Group Announces Plans for Asteroid Mining appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

NASA has renamed its newest Earth-observing satellite in honor of the late Verner E. Suomi, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin who is recognized widely as “the father of satellite meteorology.” The announcement was made Jan. 24 at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in New Orleans.

NASA launched the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP, on Oct. 28, 2011, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NPP was renamed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP. The satellite is the first designed to collect critical data to improve short-term weather forecasts and increase understanding of long-term climate change.

“Verner Suomi’s many scientific and engineering contributions were fundamental to our current ability to learn about Earth’s weather and climate from space,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Suomi NPP not only will extend more than four decades of NASA satellite observations of our planet, it also will usher in a new era of climate change discovery and weather forecasting.”

The Suomi NPP mission is a bridge between NASA’s Earth Observing System satellites to the next-generation Joint Polar Satellite System, or JPSS, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program. JPSS is the civilian component of the former National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), which was reorganized by the Obama Administration in 2010.

“The new name now accurately describes the mission,” said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Suomi NPP will advance our scientific knowledge of Earth and improve the lives of Americans by enabling more accurate forecasts of weather, ocean conditions and the terrestrial biosphere. The mission is the product of a partnership between NASA, NOAA, the Department of Defense, the private sector and academic researchers.”

Verner Suomi pioneered remote sensing of Earth from satellites in polar orbits a few hundred miles above the surface with Explorer 7 in 1959, and geostationary orbits thousands of miles high with ATS-1 in 1966.

He was best known for his invention of the “spin-scan” camera which enabled geostationary weather satellites to continuously image Earth, yielding the satellite pictures commonly used on television weather broadcasts. He also was involved in planning interplanetary spacecraft missions to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Suomi spent nearly his entire career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where in 1965 he founded the university’s Space Science and Engineering Center with funding from NASA. The center is known for Earth-observing satellite research and development. In 1964, Suomi served as chief scientist of the U.S. Weather Bureau for one year. He received the National Medal of Science in 1977. He died in 1995 at the age of 79.

“It is fitting that such an important and innovative partnership pays tribute to a pioneer like Verner Suomi,” said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “Suomi NPP is an extremely important mission for NOAA. Its advanced instruments will improve our weather forecasts and understanding of the climate and pave the way for JPSS, our next generation of weather satellites.”

Suomi NPP currently is in its initial checkout phase before starting regular observations with all of its five instruments. Commissioning activities are expected to be completed by March. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Suomi NPP mission for the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The JPSS program provides the satellite ground system and NOAA provides operational support.

The article NASA Renames Earth-Observing Mission, Honoring Satellite Pioneer appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

In 2009, NASA launched Kepler to search for planets outside the solar system – called extrasolar planets, or exoplanets – that are Earth-sized and have a chance of harboring life. As of December 2011, the spacecraft has discovered 2,326 exoplanets, over a hundred of which are likely candidates to meet the requirements.

A team of astronomers at NASA decided in early January to give Kepler an additional mission of hunting for extrasolar moons, or exomoons. The team believes in the potential existence of exomoons. Natural satellites only survive half the time when they and their companion planets are still undergoing evolution, though the many moons in our solar system increase the possibility.

With this new mission, titled Hunt of Exomoons with Kepler (HEK), Kepler may find life on these moons as well as on exoplanets and help astronomers understand planetary evolution and the formation of natural satellites. Kepler will first look at the exoplanets cataloged thus far to see if any of them have any such natural satellites. The exomoons would have to be similar in size, or larger, than our Moon because they would be easiest for the spacecraft to detect.

It is also possible that exomoons are capable of harboring life. In our solar system, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus have liquid water beneath their surfaces. It is not known for sure if these two large moons contain life, though the presence of water heightens the probability as well as the probability that exomoons may be habitable.

Kepler will attempt to search for exomoons through two means: dynamical effects and eclipses features. With dynamical effects, the spacecraft would observe and measure the gravitational effect between the exoplanet and the exomoon (i.e. how much they tug on each other).

The amount of gravitational effects on the two bodies would determine whether or not the system would be a planet-moon system or a binary-planet system (it would be easy for the former to be mistaken with the latter). With eclipse features, Kepler would be on the lookout for solar and lunar eclipses, involving the exomoon, its companion planet, and their star. Kepler would see if the exomoon may make subtle changes in a star’s brightness through eclipsing the star, which would drop a bit in brightness.

Once Kepler finds an exomoon, it would be able to determine its size and mass based on the gravitational effect and eclipse features. Upon discovering the size and mass, it would then calculate the density. Thereafter, the exomoon’s composition can be determined, giving insight as to how to the exomoon formed and, ultimately, revealing the process of planetary evolution.

“Extrasolar moons represent an outstanding challenge in modern observational astronomy,” writes head author David Kipping in the team’s paper. Kipping,  a member of the team at NASA, is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Their detection and study would yield a revolution in the understanding of planet/moon formation and evolution, but perhaps most provocatively, they could be frequent seats for life in the Galaxy.”

The article Kepler Now on the Hunt for Exomoons appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Space junk is rising exponentially, becoming a real and increasing danger to satellites and the International Space Station. According to a report from the National Research Council, an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the US government on science, the litter around the Earth´s orbit needs to be cleaned up.

This alert means that experts will have to use specific technologies to attract the rummage and throw it away, maybe to another orbit it is not harmful. As the report remarked there are 22,000 objects in orbit, plus an assortment of smaller ones that travel with enough speed to cause some damages to spaceships and satellites.

Regarding this point, retired Nasa senior scientist Donald Kessler, who headed the National Academy of Sciences report, told The Guardian, “the average impact velocity is 10km per second, and at 2km per second, the energy of the collision is equivalent to the particle´s mass in TNT.” In addition as he remarked to The Independent, “we’ve lost control of the environment”.

Since Science started to study the space, 54 years ago, many old satellites parts, spent rockets, pollution from the launches and civilization litter has converted Earth´s atmosphere into a dumping site for nuclear waste. As a consequence,s scientists have to come up with agreements to limit new space junk.

Those agreements are intended to make sure what is sent into orbit eventually falls back to Earth and burns. However, as the report highlighted, this time is completely different due to two different events. In 2007, China destroyed an orbiting weather missile with a weapon, and in 2009 two satellites crash-in-orbit. Both events created so much junk in the orbit they changed everything.

As Kessler said to the outlet media, “those two single events doubled the amount of fragments in Earth orbit and completely wiped out what we had done in the last 25 years.”

Which is the best method to clean it up?

In the study they don´t mention much about the clean up possibility, although that´s when the polemic comes up. On the one hand, some experts agree with Kessler about a company’s idea of a satellite that is armed with nets that could be sprung on wayward junk. Attached to the net is an electromagnetic tether that could either pull the debris down to a point where it would burn up harmlessly or boost it to safer orbit.

On the other hand, a report from US Defence Department science mentions all sorts of unusual techniques. The report by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is called “Catcher’s Mitt” and it mentioned harpoons, nets, tethers, magnets and even a giant dish or umbrella-shaped device that would sweep up tiny pieces of litter.

Any programme will have to face legal obstacles since current principles allow countries to rescue only their own objects. Nasa estimates that about 30% of space junk can be attributed to the United States.

In addition in foresee of future cleaning up operations, 12 countries set up the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee in 1993 to supervise the programme.

Although Nasa had identified the need for removing debris, the agency and US government had not fully examined the economic, technological, political and legal considerations, the report added.

“The longer you wait to do this the more expensive it’s going to be. Given the economy, we’ll probably end up putting it off, but that’s really not very wise. This scenario of increasing space debris will play out even if we don’t put anything else in orbit,” Kessler said.

The article Space Junk Increase Threat to Earth´s Orbit appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

NASA is planning to use a “laser broom” to clean up the cloud of space trash that is currently orbiting around our planet. While the pieces floating around the earth are only fragments and often very small, they than cause a terrible problem for astronauts if they hit the weak points of a space shuttle – just as they are capable of taking out important satellites and break down communication here on earth.

The situation is as following: close to ten million human-made objects are at present time floating around our planet, approximately 800-2.000 kilometers above the surface where commercial and military satellites also move around.

This ‘cloud’ consists of around 20.000 piece of space-junk larger than five centimeters and can be spotted through telescopes from earth. The largest fragments come from space collisions, old satellites and wasted rocket fuel-tanks. Half a million fragments are only more than a centimeter big but they are capable of causing huge damage if they collide with other objects because of the high speeds that occurs when moving in such a low orbit.

For this reason, NASA has just announced the approval of funding for a new project that will test the idea of “sweeping” the space-junk out of the earth’s close orbit by directing relatively weak laser beams at the fragments to change their direction or speed. The goal is to reduce the risk of collisions. “It actually doesn’t sound completely implausible that it will work on smaller object” Peter Davidsen, a system engineer from the Danish company Terma, says to the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. “The volume of space-junk will continue to grow in the future and at the moment we don’t have many option other than keeping our fingers crossed that it won’t hit anything important.”

Around this time last year, Davidsen was in fact sitting in the control room at Terma, who produce aerospace, defense and security applications, crossing his fingers that a large piece of Russian space-junk would pass by the Danish research satellite ‘Oersted’ – a project he had worked on for 18 years. This was the first time that a Danish project had been warned by the US of a ‘near miss’ in space and the case received a lot of attention at the time. “Since then, we have actually received more warnings like it – usually a couple of them every three months” Davidsen explains.

Other examples have not been so fortunate. In February 2009, the old Russian military satellite Kosmos 2251 collided with a satellite owned by the American company Iridium. To put the damage in perspective, Iridium makes some of the satellite phones that are used to pass on information in and out of Libya at the moment, where ordinary communication systems have been paralyzed.

The NASA “laser broom” is expected to be situated near the poles where most of the trash accumulates. They will be connected with grand telescopes which will guide the laser beams in the sky. The project is not expected to be too expensive since construction takes place on earth and will only use relatively weak lasers which will not require any specialized equipment.

Engineers at the Ames research centre in California, assigned to develop the project, have calculated that the “broom” will be able to sweep enough space-junk aside to significantly decrease the risk of the so-called Kessler syndrome – a domino effect of collisions already predicted back in 1978 which could cause the destruction of virtually all satellites with unimaginable consequences for the earth’s communication systems.

The current way of avoiding this situation has been to install a type of control system in newer satellites. This way, some are able to change course in orbit while eventually, they will fall down to earth after use.

The article NASA Launches ‘Laser Broom’ Project to Combat Space Trash appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.