Washington, U.S.A. —  NASA was named the best place to work in the federal government among large agencies in a survey released today by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization. This ranking, which reflects NASA’s highest results since this index was developed, makes clear that the agency’s work force is focused on carrying out the nation’s new and ambitious space program.

“The best workforce in the nation has made NASA the best place to work in federal government,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who is accepting the award at a ceremony this morning in Washington, D.C. ”Our employees are carrying out the nation’s new strategic missions in space with heart-stopping landings on Mars, cutting-edge science and ground-breaking partnerships with American companies to resupplying the space station. They are truly leading in the innovation economy.”

The rankings are based on responses from nearly 700,000 federal workers. The Best Places to Work rankings are based on data from the Office of Personnel Management’s annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted from April through June 2012 and additional survey data from nine agencies plus the Intelligence Community. This is the seventh edition of the Best Places to Work rankings since the first in 2003.

NASA’s Stennis Space Center was ranked second in the sub-agency component category.

During the past year, NASA’s employees continued to implement America’s ambitious space exploration program, landing the most sophisticated rover on the surface of Mars, carrying out the first-ever commercial mission to the International Space Station and advancing the systems needed to send humans deeper into space.

Just last week, NASA announced the next Mars rover mission and recently announced the first year-long crew stay on the International Space Station. As the agency continues developing the capabilities to explore the solar system and beyond, as well as understand our home planet and make life better here, workers with a wide range of skills and interests will be critical.

For more about NASA, visit: http://www.nasa.gov.

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Washington, U.S.A. – NASA is seeking proposals from accredited U.S. universities focused on innovative, early-stage space technologies that will improve shielding from space radiation, spacecraft thermal management and optical systems.

Each of these technology areas requires dramatic improvements over existing capabilities for future science and human exploration missions. Early stage, or low technology readiness level (TRL) concepts, could mature into tools that solve the hard challenges facing future NASA missions. Researchers should propose unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies that address the specific topics described in this new solicitation.

“Both science and human deep space missions pose serious challenges that require new, innovative technological solutions,” said Space Technology Program Director Michael Gazarik at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Radiation, thermal management and optical systems were all identified in the National Research Council’s report on NASA Space Technology Roadmaps as priority research areas. This call seeks new ideas in these areas.”

Space radiation poses a known danger to the health of astronauts. NASA is seeking proposals in the area of active radiation shielding (such as “shields” of electromagnetic force fields surrounding a spacecraft to block incoming radiation) or new, multifunction materials that are superior to those that exist today are sought. NASA also is interested in new technologies for active monitoring and read-out of radiation levels astronauts receive during long space trips.

Current space technology for thermal management of fuels in space is limited. NASA is seeking early-stage technologies to improve ways spacecraft fuel tanks and in-space filling stations store cryogenic (very low temperature) propellants, such as hydrogen, over long periods of time and distances. NASA also is seeking novel, low-TRL heat rejection technologies which operate reliably and efficiently over a wide range of thermal conditions.

The next generation of lightweight mirrors and telescopes requires advanced optical systems. NASA is seeking advancement of early-stage active wavefront sensing and control system technologies that enable deployable, large aperture space-based observatories; technologies which enable cost-effective development of grazing-incidence optical systems; and novel techniques to focus and detect X-ray photons and other high-energy particles.

NASA expects to make approximately 10 awards this fall, based on the merit of proposals received. The awards will be made for one year, with an additional year of research possible. The typical annual award value is expected to be approximately $250,000.

Image Courtesy of  NASA

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A team of astronomers from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and Monash University in Australia have collaborated to put together a new theory that explains how black holes grow to be massive so quickly. With this theory, astronomers and astrophysicists are closer to understanding the nature of black holes.

These outer space oddities are born as the result of a star’s death: when a star collapses upon itself and continues to do so until it becomes a tiny point in space-time. A black hole’s mass is highly compressed, so its gravity is large enough to distort time.

Black holes eat anything and everything: stars, nebulas, planets, space debris, and even light, all of which spiral into the tiny point known as the event horizon. Black holes are hundreds to billions times more massive than the sun. Many galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centers, including our very own Milky Way.

No one can observe black holes because they cannot be seen (they absorb all light and do not reflect any), but evidence for their presence can be located in distortions in space and light. Smaller black holes are usually found in binary systems, in which the black hole slowly eats away at its companion star.

Most black holes have been feeding since the early years of the Universe. While eating, a disk of gas and other materials (called the accretion disk) forms around them, slowing down their munching and growing time. Astronomers and astrophysicists have determined that certain black holes can grow considerably by eating or crashing into each another to create one massive black hole, and supermassive black holes are usually the result of galaxies colliding. These collisions, though, are quite rare.

Still, the nature of other large black holes cannot be explained. How do other black holes – those that do not collide with anything and that are not in any binary systems – grow to be so big in such a little amount of time? Usually, when black holes feed, a disk (called the accretion disk) of gas and other materials forms around them. This accretion disk is what slows down their munching and growing time.

The astronomers that are part of the research team have developed a theory to account for this mystery. They created computer simulations of a black hole that have two accretion disks orbiting it at different angles. As the simulations continue over time, the disks eventually spread, then collapse. This collapse allows the black hole to swallow heaps of produced gas and enables it to grow 1,000 times faster, according to the University of Leicester press release.

“If two guys ride motorbikes on a Wall of Death, and they collide, they lose the centrifugal force holding them to the walls and fall,” Andrew King clarified. King, one of the astronomers that is part of the team, is from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester.

The team will publish their research in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Their simulations can be found here.

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On March 17th, NASA’s spacecraft MESSENGER revealed surprising details about Mercury’s interior and topography, changing astronomers’ understanding of the small planet and how it was formed.

MESSENGER (MErcury Space Surface ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is the first spacecraft sent to orbit and study Mercury, which orbits the Sun a mere 36 million miles away. It’s the innermost and hottest planet in our solar system. MESSENGER was launched in August 2004. Before traveling to Mercury, it made a series of flybys around the Earth (once) and Venus (twice).

MESSENGER finally arrived at Mercury on March 18, 2011 and went around three times. Using radio signals, the spacecraft studied Mercury’s gravitational field, magnetic field, topography, internal geological structure, and chemical composition. Because the results of MESSENGER’S flybys around Mercury were so valuable, its mission was extended to last for another year in November 2011.

Mercury’s topography has changed many times since Mercury was fully formed, meaning that there has been a considerable amount of geological activity. For that reason, before studying any of the planet’s internal structure and history, MESSENGER first produced an accurate map of Mercury’s gravitational field using information derived from the planet’s topography and spin state.

Thereafter, two studies were conducted simultaneously, examining Mercury’s internal structure and geography. In one study, the researchers involved with MESSENGER discovered that the planet’s core was much larger than previously thought: it takes up 85 percent of the planet’s radius. Furthermore, it is liquid instead of solid. Previously, scientists assumed that Mercury would have been cooled enough by now for the core to be solid.

Above the core lies an unusual layer that is composed of solid sulphur and iron – a layer not found in the other rocky planets in the Solar System. The outer layers of the internal structure consist of a solid silicate crust and mantle. It is thought that inside the larger liquid core lies a smaller solid core composed of sulphur and iron.

The other study of Mercury’s topography produced other surprising discoveries. When MESSENGER’s Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) produced a topographic model of the northern hemisphere and areas in the mid-latitude range, researchers learned that the elevation spread is smaller than similar regions on the Moon and Mars. The area that sticks out the most is lowlands that contain the northern volcanic plains.

Moreover, according to the Carnegie Institute for Science’s press release,

“… the interior plains of Caloris impact basin — 1,550 kilometers (960 miles) in diameter — have been modified so that part of the basin floor now stands higher than the rim. The elevated portion appears to be part of a quasi-linear rise that extends for approximately half the planetary circumference at mid-latitudes. These features imply that large-scale changes to Mercury’s topography occurred after the era of impact basin formation and large-scale emplacement of volcanic plains had ended.”

This new knowledge of Mercury’s internal structure and topography gives insight as to how Mercury formed thermally and how the planet’s magnetic field is generated. Details of the findings of each study from MESSENGER’s mission will appear in two separate papers, which will appear on March 23 in the journal Science.

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On February 27, the team of astronomers involved with NASA’s spacecraft Kepler published their most recent catalog of exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which are planets beyond our solar system) that Kepler has detected.

Data from the newest catalog is cumulative and includes information from the two catalogues created in June 2010 and February 2011. As of now, the total number of exoplanets Kepler has detected is 2,321, which orbit 1,790 stars. A full 93% are smaller than Neptune, the smallest of the gas giants in the solar system. Over 200 are Earth-sized and more than 900 are smaller than twice the size of the Earth’s diameter. There are 46 exoplanets located in the habitable zone, 10 of which are Earth-sized.

“With each new catalog release a clear progression toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is emerging,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in California, states in NASA’s press release. “This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant.”

Furthermore, the percent for more than one planet orbiting a star has increased to 20 percent from last year’s 17 percent (many other planets are rogue, unattached to a parent star, twirling alone in space). More and detailed statistics can be found here.

Three methods can be utilized to find exoplanets: gravitational lensing, radial-velocity, and transiting. Kepler largely uses the latter method, using the software Transiting Planet Search (TPS) pipeline module, because it has proven to produce more results compared to the former two. Transiting works as thus: one measures a star’s periodic drop in brightness due to an object – in the most hopeful scenario, a planet – passing in front of the star.

Sifting through 150,000 stars, Kepler detected around 5,000 transit signals, through which the spacecraft had more to sort. One can easily misidentify an object to be an exoplanet when using the transiting method; one may instead find a binary star system, which contains two stars that orbit and eclipse one another. To confirm its detection of a planet, Kepler has to record the transit at least three times.

Kepler was launched in mid-2009 to find Earth-like exoplanets that are able to sustain water and life. These planets would have to be located in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet must orbit a star in order for liquid water to exist on its surface. Kepler goes about attempting to detect exoplanets by looking at their parent stars first, largely searching for G-type stars, or Sun-like stars (or at least stars a part of the Main Sequence), which astronomers believe to be ideal parent stars.

For much of the time Kepler began exploring, it mostly detected gas giants tens of times larger than Jupiter. As the spacecraft endured, it began, recently, to find numerous smaller rocky planets. Soon after, astronomers working with Kepler have calculated that there are more of these kinds of planets than there are gas giants.

Kepler’s latest milestone includes Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which were detected this January and are the first Earth-sized planets known to exist. Another milestone occurred in December 2011, when Kepler discovered super-Earth Kepler-22b, the first known exoplanet in the habitable zone.

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An international team of astronomers, led by astrophysicist Francesco Tombesi, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has discovered what causes galaxies to acquire large bulges in their centers: outflows from supermassive black holes that lie in the bulges.

A black hole is an invisible tiny “hole” in space. It is a former star that collapses on its own gravity, which is so strong that nothing, even light, can escape — hence the name “black hole,” coined by physicist John Wheeler in 1967. Black holes feed on objects surrounding them: nebulas, planetary objects, light — anything. Whatever enters a black hole gets spewed out eventually in the form of jets of x-rays and radiation. These jets allow astronomers to view the black hole’s spectrum, which tells them what elements the black hole swallowed and spat out.

Over the years, astronomers have learned that galaxies, even our very own Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes — black holes that are really, really big — at their centers. Surrounding the supermassive black holes are large clouds of gas, where stars are born left and right. The gravity of these black holes also attract fast moving stars, creating the galaxies’ bulges, which then grow large. As to how this is has puzzled astronomers for years.

Tombesi and his colleagues have encountered a distinct kind of “outflow” from the clouds of gas after studying the spectrographs of forty-two galaxies from the All-Sky Slew Survey Catalog from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer Satellite. In spectroscopy, astronomers look at absorption spectra — essentially pictures of the electromagnetic spectrum — which present light absorbed from the light sources, such as stars, nebulas, galaxies, and, in this case, black holes. With the absorption spectra, astronomers can gauge the light source’s composition of elements by looking for any black lines that vertically cross the spectrum.

While researching the spectra of x-rays from the forty-two galaxies, Tombesi and the team learned that the supermassive black holes absorbed fluorescent iron. They then found out that 40% of these galaxies had such an outflow flow, which suggests that the outflow is common in black holes at the center of galaxies. The x-rays’ wavelengths were shorter than their normal length, indicating that the galaxies were blueshifted (i.e. moving towards us). This outflow was dubbed “ultra-fast outflows,” or UFOs, by Tombesi according to NASA.

“They have the potential to play a major role in transmitting feedback effects from a black hole into the galaxy at large,” Tombesi says in NASA’s press release.

Ultimately, he and his colleauges learned that UFOs halt supermassive black holes’ growth by taking away the mass it would potentially eat. Furthermore, UFOs can slow down or even completely discontinue star formation in the galactic centers by removing gas from the galactic bulge.

Tombesi and his team hope to further study UFOs and their development with Japan’s Astro-H X-ray telescope, which is scheduled to be launched in 2014.

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A team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has discovered a “waterworld” planet beyond the solar system.

This exoplanet (i.e. extrasolar planet), dubbed GJ1214b, is located in the constellation Opphiuchus, 40 light-years away from the Earth. It is 2.7 times the size of the Earth and roughly seven times Earth’s weight. At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the watery exoplanet orbits a red dwarf every 38 hours and has a surface temperature of 450º F (230º C).

GJ1214B was first discovered in 2009 by a team of astronomers, led by David Charbonneau of CfA, with the groudbased project MEarth (pronounced “mirth”). Charbonneau and his team were able to detect GJ2124b through transiting, a widely-used method used to search for exoplanets in which one looks to see if a star’s light slightly drops periodically. If it does, a planetary body has traveled in front of the star.

A year later, in 2010, astrophysicist Jacob Bean and his colleagues (also working at CfA) learned that GJ1214b’s atmosphere was chiefly composed of gaseous water. And in 2012, the current group of astronomers working at CfA has confirmed that GJ1214b is indeed veiled in a watery haze.

“GJ1214b is like no planet we know of,” Zachary Berta – an astronomer who is the head of the team – states in CfA’s press release.

Using the parent star’s light, he and his colleagues learned which gases comprise the larger exoplanet’s atmosphere, through which the light passed. With that knowledge, they concluded the GJ1214b and its atmosphere were not mostly made of water, but also hazy – and quite steamy.

The team of was also able to calculate the density of GJ1214b, knowing its size and mass: 2g/cm3. In comparison, Earth’s density = 5.5 g/cm3, and water on Earth 1 gm/cm3. GJ1214b’s larger density suggests that it has more water and less solid material.

“The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’ – substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta explains. Furthermore, GJ1214b cannot harbor any bodies of liquid water due its temperature and proximity to its parent star.

He and his colleagues utilized Hubble to measure GJ1214b’s light spectrum. The spectrum is apparently not restricted to any particular wavelengths, which indicates and further proves the state of the atmosphere. The team is also currently attempting to study the exoplanet’s sunsets through infrared using the Hubble; they can see through the atmosphere more easily with infrared than if they used visible light, which is shorter in wavelength and, hence, cannot traverse thick mediums readily.

According to CfA, theorists have predicted GJ1214b’s formation:

“GJ1214b formed farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system’s history. In the process, it would have passed through the star’s habitable zone. How long it lingered there is unknown.”

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NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) may decide to withdraw from the ExoMars Program due to hefty budget cuts.

Recently, President Barack Obama filled out the 2013 Federal Budget Request, which will be released today. NASA received a massive blow to its budget, prompting its administrators to debate which programs should be cut. A decision weighed between exploring the planets in our solar system or adventuring out into the cosmos. In the end, several programs for planets were cut. Mars was hit the most. According to Associated Press, the current budget for Mars missions is $518.7 million, and more than $200 million has been slashed.

“To me, it’s totally irrational and unjustified,” Edward Weiler, who is formerly NASA’s associate administrator for science, says to MSNBS.com. Weiler quit because he, according to MSNBC, tried to prevent Mars from being in the pool for the cuts. “We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue.”

The ExoMars Program is a collaboration of NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency). Their goal, according to the website, is to “search for evidence of past and present life on Mars.” Two missions have been planned thus far. The first, led by the ESA, is to send a satellite launched by NASA to Mars in 2016 that will search for traces of methane in the atmosphere.

The second plans to send, in 2018, two rovers (one American and one European), which will drill into the red planet’s surface. This mission will be both led and launched by NASA, who will have provided the materials and technical attributes. NASA promised to provide $1.4 billion for both missions.

If NASA truly withdraws, ESA will look to involve Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. They worry, however, that Roscosmos does not have the same technical skills and assets as NASA. Furthermore, ESA would have to deal with the fact that the program will have lost a large amount of money – the missions would be hindered and delayed.

NASA has been in a bind with costs, using much their budget, for example, to replace the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope with their current successful Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, which was originally estimated to cost $3 billion, would be more than a hundred times powerful than Hubble.

“Even in these times of fiscal restraint, President Obama has laid out an ambitious plan of exploration and discovery for NASA that includes robotic missions to Mars as well as the ultimate goal of a human mission,” NASA HQ in Washington tells BBC. “It would not be appropriate to comment on specifics of the president’s budget before it is released on 13 February.”

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On February 2, a team of astronomers detected an exoplanet (short for extrasolar planet) located in the habitable zone, a slim area in which a planet must be located, so that it is not too close nor too far away from the star it orbits, thus having a surface temperature that can sustain liquid. This newly discovered exoplanet may be able to sustain water and even life.

Using data from the European Southern Observatory, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile, the astronomers – from the University of California in Santa Cruz and the private research organization Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC – found the exoplanet through discerning the gravitational tug it and its parent star impose on each other. The system lies 22 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

“This is basically our next-door neighbor,” Steven Vogt tells Space.com. Vogt, one of the members of the team, is an astronomer at the University of California. “It’s very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one.”

“We’ve been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars,” he adds, “because with today’s technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards.”

The star, dubbed GJ 667C, is a part of a triple star system. Unlike its companion stars, which are orange K dwarfs, GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf: it is much smaller and less luminous than the Sun and emits infrared light, which is less intense in light and temperature. GJ 667C’s composition is very different from that of the Sun’s, lacking elements heavier than hydrogen and helium such as carbon, iron, and silicon that are needed to form planets.

“We shouldn’t have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets,” says Vogt.

The exoplanet, named GJ 667Cc, is a super-Earth, roughly 4.5 times the size of the Earth. Because of the absence of heavy elements, much of GJ 667Cc’s mass comes from ice and gas. The orbital period of GJ 667Cc measures 28 days, which would seem dauntingly close to us compared to the Earth’s orbital period.

A planet that takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun (for instance) would roast; however, GJ 667C’s weak temperature and light, and the fact that GJ 667Cc receives 10 percent of the light the Earth receives from the Sun, counterbalance the closeness of the exoplanet, creating a comfortable region in which to dwell.

Furthermore, GJ 667Cc is in the right spot to absorb the same amount of energy that the Earth absorbs from the Sun to have an atmosphere. In the Carnegie Institution for Science press release, Guillem Anglada-Escudé – co-leader of the study and lead writer of the team’s paper that will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters – states, “This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it.”

GJ 667Cc has a sibling, GJ 667Cb, which is around the size of the Earth. Unlike GJ 667Cc, GJ 667Cb has a much smaller orbital period. Hence, it is too close and has too high a temperature to sustain liquid.

Only one other exoplanet located in the habitable zone has been discovered before, Kepler-22b, which was detected by the NASA spacecraft Kepler on December 5, 2011. Astronomers believe that Kepler-22b, which is 2.4 times the Earth’s size, may also maintain water and life.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.esa.int

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Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has captured the best and most complete glimpse yet of what lies beyond the solar system. The new measurements give clues about how and where our solar system formed, the forces that physically shape our solar system, and the history of other stars in the Milky Way.

The Earth-orbiting spacecraft observed four separate types of atoms including hydrogen, oxygen, neon and helium. These interstellar atoms are the byproducts of older stars, which spread across the galaxy and fill the vast space between stars. IBEX determined the distribution of these elements outside the solar system, which are flowing charged and neutral particles that blow through the galaxy, or the so-called interstellar wind.

“IBEX is a small Explorer mission and was built with a modest investment,” said Barbara Giles, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The science achievements though have been truly remarkable and are a testament to what can be accomplished when we give our nation’s scientists the freedom to innovate.”

In a series of science papers appearing in the Astrophysics Journal on Jan. 31, scientists report finding 74 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms in the interstellar wind. In our own solar system, there are 111 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms. This translates to more oxygen in any part of the solar system than in nearby interstellar space.

“Our solar system is different than the space right outside it, suggesting two possibilities,” says David McComas, IBEX principal investigator, at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Either the solar system evolved in a separate, more oxygen-rich part of the galaxy than where we currently reside, or a great deal of critical, life-giving oxygen lies trapped in interstellar dust grains or ices, unable to move freely throughout space.”

The new results hold clues about the history of material in the universe. While the big bang initially created hydrogen and helium, only the supernovae explosions at the end of a star’s life can spread the heavier elements of oxygen and neon through the galaxy. Knowing the amounts of elements in space may help scientists map how our galaxy evolved and changed over time.

Scientists want to understand the composition of the boundary region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere. The heliosphere acts as a protective bubble that shields our solar system from most of the dangerous galactic cosmic radiation that otherwise would enter the solar system from interstellar space.

IBEX measured the interstellar wind traveling at a slower speed than previously measured by the Ulysses spacecraft, and from a different direction. The improved measurements from IBEX show a 20 percent difference in how much pressure the interstellar wind exerts on our heliosphere.

“Measuring the pressure on our heliosphere from the material in the galaxy and from the magnetic fields out there will help determine the size and shape of our solar system as it travels through the galaxy,” says Eric Christian, IBEX mission scientist, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The IBEX spacecraft was launched in October 2008. Its science objective is to discover the nature of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium at the edge of our solar system.

The Southwest Research Institute developed and leads the IBEX mission with a team of national and international partners. The spacecraft is one of NASA’s series of low-cost, rapidly developed missions in the Small Explorers Program. Goddard manages the program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) spacecraft, Kepler, detected eleven planetary systems, which, overall, contain 26 new exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which exist beyond out solar system). Located in the Lyra and Cygnus constellations, each system contains two to five planets. The systems have been dubbed Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-25, Kepler-26, Kepler-27, Kepler-28, Kepler-29, Kepler-30, Kepler-31, Kepler-32, and Kepler-33.

The sizes of the exoplanets range from 1.5 to 5 times the size of Earth to larger than Jupiter. All of them orbit their parent stars closely; none of them lie in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet is not too close or too far away from a star so that it can sustain water and life. Each of their orbits is closer than that of Venus. The farthest exoplanet has years that last fewer than 200 days and the surface temperature of hundreds of degrees.

Kepler primarily detects planets through a process known as transiting, in which it measures a star’s periodic change in brightness generated by a planet crossing its parent star, causing the star’s light to drop a bit in brightness.

The NASA spacecraft was able to find these newer exoplanets by means of measuring Transit Timing Variations (TTVs). With this method, Kepler calculates changes in the acceleration of planets due to the gravitational pull on one another from being so close together. TTVs help Kepler find the more distant – hence fainter – star systems.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the press release on NASA’s Kepler website.

“Now,” Hudgins continues, “in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

Kepler has been in space for nearly three years. Its mission is to search for Earth-like exoplanets that orbit stars in the habitable zone. Ever since its launch in March 2009, Kepler has made numerous momentous findings, especially in the last couple of months.

On December 5, the spacecraft detected Kepler-22b, the first planet to be found in a habitable zone, and on December 20, it discovered the first two Earth-sized exoplanets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f. Kepler’s most recent significant detection occurred earlier this month: exoplanets KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02, and KOI-961.03, the tiniest exoplanets thus far.

Based on the diversity of the types of exoplanets, astronomers believe they will attain a better understanding of how planets form.

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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.

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Astronomers part of the international collaboration Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) calculated the approximate number of planets based on statistical analyses from multiple surveys gathered from observatories, institutions, and ground-based telescopes, including NASA’s spacecraft Kepler, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Niels Bohr Institute, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA).

PLANET has taken 16 years to find planets, and six to make a statistical hypothesis (from 2002 to 2007). It is estimated that there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and that each one has 1.6 planets in orbit on average, coming to a total of 160 billion hypothetical planets. This number is much, much higher than the number originally predicted.

Astronomers use three methods to search for planets. The first one is called transiting, in which one observes a stars’ level of brightness. If the level slightly drops, the dip acts as a signal that a planet is crossing the star during its orbit. The second method is the radial-velocity method. When planets orbit a star, the star does not remain stationary.

Rather, it moves in a small circular motion, causing the planet’s gravitational pull. Lastly, the third method is gravitational microlensing. In relation to an observer on Earth, two stars, one in front of the other, seem to form a straight line. The foreground star causes light from the background star to curve, thus magnifying the latter. If there is a slight temporary difference in the light curve from the foreground star, a planet is orbiting the star.

With the former two methods, astronomers can only find low-mass planets closely orbiting stars. They are what the Kepler spacecraft uses to hunt for planets. The third one, on the other hand, is more sensitive: astronomers can find planets of all sizes (from Mercury-sized to Jupiter-sized) and those that are near and far from their parent stars. In addition, planets’ masses can be determined.

“Together,” Uffe Gråe Jørgensen states in the Niels Bohr Institute press release, “the three methods are, for the first time, able to say something about how common our own solar system is.” Jørgensen is the head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science research group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Based on the collected data, astronomers predict that Earth-like planets (small and rocky) are much more common in the galaxy than gas giants like Jupiter. According to Stephen Kane – who is a part of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California – in the HubbleSite press release, “This is encouraging news for investigations into habitable planets.”

Ultimately, this new hypothesis significantly increases the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life, even sentient life.

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Working with the Palomar Observatory near San Diego and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and using NASA’s spacecraft Kepler, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology have found three teeny, rocky, extrasolar planets (otherwise known as exoplanets, which lie beyond our solar system).

NASA launched Kepler in 2009 to search for Earth-like planets that orbit stars in the habitable zone, a region colloquially called the “Goldilocks Zone”, in which a planet must not be too close or too far from a star, so that its temperature would be just right to be habitable for life. Kepler uses a method called transiting to accomplish its mission: it sees if any stars have slight dips in brightness caused by a planet, which eventually eclipses its parent star sometime during its orbit.

The freshly discovered planetary system’s star is named KOI-961 (KOI is an acronym for Kepler Object in Question). Approximately 130 light-years from the Earth, KOI-961 is a red dwarf – a pipsqueak of a star compared to the Sun, which is six times larger. KOI-961 is similar to a nearby star, Barnard’s Star, which is also a red dwarf. Astronomers used information about Barnard’s Star to determine KOI-961′s characteristics, which were then used to calculate its companion planets’ sizes.

The planets’ names are KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02, and KOI-961.03 and have the radii of 0.78, 0.73, and 0.57 times that of the Earth, respectively. The smallest, KOI-961.03, is about the size of Mars, and the other two are about the size of Venus. All three do not lie in habitable zones; they orbit their parent star too closely, and one year equals two days.

Due to their incredibly close orbits, they are too hot to form liquid, let alone for life to thrive. Temperatures are hundreds of degrees, with the closest, KOI-961.01, having a surface temperature of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (500°C).

This planetary system is the tiniest known to astronomers. John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and co-author of the team’s paper, states in the Caltech press release, “It’s actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system. The discovery is further proof of the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy.”

Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, making up eight out of every ten stars. Because of their ubiquity, Kepler may find more planetary systems with red dwarfs as parent stars. “That boosts the chances of other life being in the universe – that’s the ultimate result here,” Johnson says.

In the past, Kepler has found numerous gas giants around the sizes of Jupiter and Neptune. Its most recent discoveries occurred in December 2011, when it detected Kepler-22b, the first planet discovered to orbit in the habitable zone, and Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, the first Earth-sized exoplanets detected.

The more planets Kepler detects nowadays, the more they become smaller and rockier, it seems. Kepler’s last two discoveries increases the probability that there may be more rocky exoplanets than astronomers thought, thereby, boosting the chance of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

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An international team of astronomers has produced a map that covers a billion light-years worth of dark matter in the universe. Never before has dark matter been mapped on such a large scale.

Two members of the team, Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, presented their findings at the 119th meeting of American Astronomical Society, held last week.

The project took place at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLensS) in Hawaii and collected data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. For more than five years, the team accumulated images of ten million galaxies – six billion light-years away – from four different regions in the sky during each of the seasons. Essentially peering at the universe when it was but six billions years old, they studied  how dark matter warped the light emitted by the galaxies.

The process of producing the map was completed through a method called gravitational lensing, in which bodies (e.g. galaxies, or, in this case, dark matter) are so massive that they curve space-time and distort light, making it travel in a curve, rather than in a line. By studying the distortions of the galaxies’ light, the team was able to determine the structure of the dark matter and plot its distribution.

“It is fascinating to be able to ‘see’ the dark matter using space-time distortion,” says Waerbeke at the American Astronomical society meeting. “It gives us privileged access to this mysterious mass in the Universe which cannot be observed otherwise. Knowing how dark matter is distributed is the very first step towards understanding its nature and how it fits within our current knowledge of physics.”

The universe is more or less a cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies. Dark matter is impossible to be detected by itself, making it seem invisible, though it makes its presence known through warping space-time and light. The mysterious substance makes up a whopping 23 percent of the universe, with dark energy taking up 72 percent and everything else (stars, planets, etc.) only 4 percent.

With creating such a large map of the cosmic web, astronomers and cosmologists are becoming closer to understanding the nature of dark matter and, ergo, a large portion of the universe. Dr. Heymans, a lecturer of physics and astronomy, says, “By analyzing light from the distant Universe, we can learn about what it has travelled through on its journey to reach us.

We hope that by mapping more dark matter than has been studied before, we are a step closer to understanding this material and its relationship with the galaxies in our Universe.”

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Beginning January 17, NASA will fly an airborne science laboratory above Canadian snowstorms to tackle a difficult challenge facing the upcoming Global Precipitation Measurement satellite mission — measuring snowfall from space.

GPM is an international satellite mission that will set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space, providing next-generation observations of worldwide rain and snow every three hours. It is also the first mission designed to detect falling snow from space.

“Snow is notoriously hard to measure as it falls,” said Walter Petersen, the GPM ground validation scientist at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. “Snowflakes contain varying amounts of air and water, and they flutter, wobble, and drift as they leave the clouds.” Knowing how “wet” a snowflake is allows scientists to measure overall water content. A wet, heavy snow can shut down a city, and melted snow is a crucial source of freshwater in many areas.

Working with Environment Canada, NASA’s GPM Cold-Season Precipitation Experiment will measure light rain and snow in Ontario from January 17 to February 29. The field campaign is designed to improve satellite estimates of falling snow and test ground validation capabilities in advance of the planned launch of the GPM Core satellite in 2014.

NASA’s DC-8 airborne science laboratory will fly out of Bangor, Maine, carrying radar and a radiometer that will simulate the measurements to be taken from space by GPM. At an altitude of 33,000 feet (10 kilometers), the DC-8 will make multiple passes over an extensive ground network of snow gauges and sensors at Environment Canada’s Center for Atmospheric Research Experiments north of Toronto.

The GCPEx field experiment will help scientists match measurements of snow in the air and on the ground with the satellite’s measurements. “We will be looking at the precipitation and the physics of precipitation, such as snowflake types, sizes, shapes, numbers, and water content,” Petersen said. “These properties affect both how we interpret and improve our measurements.”

GPM’s Core satellite is being built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with instruments provided by NASA and its mission partner, the Japanese Aerospace and Exploration Agency. The spacecraft will orbit Earth at a 65-degree inclination, covering the world from the Antarctic Circle to the Arctic Circle.

GPM will carry a microwave radiometer and a dual-frequency precipitation radar that distinguishes a snowflake’s size and shape, which affects how much water it holds. Knowing these microphysical properties will lead to more accurate estimates of rain and snowfall, especially during winter and at high latitudes where snow is the dominant form of precipitation.

The Ontario region is prone to both lake effect snow squalls and widespread snowstorms. If the opportunity exists, the DC-8 also will fly over blizzards along the northeastern United States. While the DC-8 flies above the clouds, two other aircraft, one from the University of North Dakota and another from Canada, will fly through the clouds, measuring the microphysical properties of the raindrops and snowflakes inside.

Advanced ground radars will scan the entire air column from the clouds to the Earth’s surface. ”These multiple measurements of snowfall provide a complete picture, a complete model, of the snowfall process from top to bottom,” Petersen said. NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., manages the DC-8 flights for the GCPEx mission.

The aircraft is based at the center’s aircraft operations facility in Palmdale, Calif. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., is providing aircraft tracking and guidance through the Real Time Mission Monitor, as well as GCPEx real-time data and personnel support for the ground instruments in Canada.

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After more than three years in space, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is extending its view of the high-energy sky into a largely unexplored electromagnetic range. On January 10, the Fermi team announced its first census of energy sources in this new realm.

Fermi’s Large Area Telescope scans the entire sky every three hours, continually deepening its portrait of the sky in gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. While the energy of visible light falls between about 2 and 3 electron volts, the LAT detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion electron volts.

At higher energies, gamma rays are rare. Above 10 GeV, even Fermi’s LAT detects only one gamma ray every four months.

“Before Fermi, we knew of only four discrete sources above 10 GeV, all of them pulsars,” said David Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “With the LAT, we’ve found hundreds, and we’re showing for the first time just how diverse the sky is at these high energies.”

Any object producing gamma rays at these energies is undergoing extraordinary astrophysical processes. More than half of the 496 sources in the new census are active galaxies, where matter falling into a supermassive black hole powers jets that spray out particles at nearly the speed of light.

Only about 10 percent of the known sources lie within our own galaxy. They include rapidly rotating neutron stars called pulsars, the expanding debris from supernova explosions, and in a few cases, binary systems containing massive stars.

More than a third of the sources are completely unknown, having no identified counterpart detected in other parts of the spectrum. With the new catalog, astronomers will be able to compare the behavior of different sources across a wider span of gamma-ray energies for the first time.

Just as bright infrared sources may fade to invisibility in the ultraviolet, some of the gamma-ray sources above 1 GeV vanish completely when viewed at higher, or “harder,” energies.

One example is the well-known radio galaxy NGC 1275, which is a bright, isolated source below 10 GeV. At higher energies, it fades appreciably and another nearby source begins to appear. Above 100 GeV, NGC 1275 becomes undetectable by Fermi, while the new source, the radio galaxy IC 310, shines brightly.

The Fermi hard-source list is the product of an international team led by Pascal Fortin at the Ecole Polytechnique’s Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet in Palaiseau, France, and David Paneque at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.

The catalog serves as an important roadmap for ground-based facilities called Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, which have amassed about 130 gamma-ray sources with energies above 100 GeV. They include the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System in Arizona, and the High Energy Stereoscopic System in Namibia.

“Our catalog will have a significant impact on ground-based facilities’ work by pointing them to the most likely places to find gamma-ray sources emitting above 100 GeV,” Paneque said.

Compared to Fermi’s LAT, these ground-based observatories have much smaller fields of view. They also make fewer observations because they cannot operate during the daytime, bad weather, or a full moon.

“As Fermi’s exposure constantly improves our view of hard sources, ground-based telescopes are becoming more sensitive to lower-energy gamma rays, allowing us to bridge these two energy regimes,” Fortin added.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. Fermi is managed by Goddard. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

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Earlier this month, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) once again found groundbreaking evidence that water once existed on Mars. The rover, Opportunity, has discovered a long, thin vein of gypsum deposit, found on the edge of the crater, Endeavor.

In January 2004, NASA sent the twin rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, to Mars as a part of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission to find clues that water once existed. Opportunity and Spirit discovered gypsum to be as much of a common mineral on Mars as it is on Earth. Gypsum, which is used as drywall and as an ingredient for plaster, is found evaporated in sedimentary environments, particularly in saline water beds (or seawater) containing high amounts of dissolved calcium sulfate (CaSO₄).

Since their landing on Mars, the rovers found, in the northern sand dunes, numerous pieces of gypsum, which were blown by winds and, hence, mixed with other minerals and materials. These dunes are similar to the White Sands National Monument located in New Mexico, where the sands are comprised of gypsum crystals. This discovery is one of the few that proves that water existed on Mars, but from where the gypsum originates baffles scientists.

Sometime in early 2010, Spirit had discontinued its mission due to being stuck and its eventual inability to communicate. Opportunity, on the other hand, has remained alive and active, and eventually found the gypsum deposit, slightly jutting out from the bedrock. The vein is approximately 2 cm wide and 50 cm long.

Although this discovery may seem redundant with the ones made in the past, it turns out that this strand of gypsum is more significant than the pieces found in dunes. Not only does it appear to have formed in place, but the deposit tells us that water once flowed through a crevice long ago.

“That can’t be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found,” remarks Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. “It’s not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it’s the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs.”

Opportunity and Spirit have analyzed most Martian areas to be acidic – and definitely not suitable for life. However, the spot in which the gypsum deposit was found does contain the substances that cause acidity. Thus, the water may have been more neutral. Not only is the vein a sure sign that Mars once did have water, it also proves that the red and dusty planet may have been more habitable than we thought.

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Earlier this week, the spacecraft, Kepler, discovered two exoplanets around the size of the earth – the first of their kind – orbiting a sun-like star. Named Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, these exoplanets are a part of the star system, Kepler-20, which lies 950 light years away from Earth near the constellation, Lyra.

“This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars and that we are able to detect them,” says Dr. Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Launched in 2009, Kepler is a space telescope built and sent by NASA to detect Earth-like exoplanets (also known as extrasolar planets, which are planets that exist outside our solar system) orbiting stars in habitable zones. Its most recent, significant discovery occurred in early December, when it detected the Neptune-sized Kepler-22b, the first of its kind that has been seen orbiting in the “Goldilocks zone” and that might possibly have water and life.

Kepler took a step closer in accomplishing its mission when it detected Kepler-20, Kepler-20e, and Kepler-20f. Kepler-20 is similar to the sun, in that it is a G-type star. It is yellowish, though a bit smaller and cooler. The star contains five planets in total, all of which orbit it closer than Mercury orbits the sun. The three other planets are gas giants, which are about the size of Neptune, and each planet orbits alternating in size.

These newly discovered exoplanets are only Earth-like in their sizes and rocky composition. Kepler-20e orbits its star every 6.1 days, and its temperature is 1400° F. Its diameter, 6900 miles, is 0.87 times the diameter of the Earth’s. Kepler-20f has an orbit of 19.6 days. It has the temperature of 800° F, and it is 1.03 times Earth’s diameter, being 8,200 miles.

Because of their close orbits and high temperatures, these two exoplanets are not able to sustain water, let alone life. For them to have water and life, they have to lie in the “Goldilocks zone,” or the habitable zone, in which a planet cannot be too close or too far (hence, too hot or too cold) from the star it orbits.

Ever since its launch in 2009, Kepler has been detecting hundreds of exoplanets, many of which are not Earth-like, being hostile and sometimes lonely, not orbiting any stars. With its most recent detection of Kepler-22b and of Kepler-20′s two Earth-like planets, Kepler has reached a new landmark, not just in its journey, but in our knowledge of the various kinds of planets that exist in the observable universe.

“This could be an important milestone,” Dr. Fressin states. “I think 10 years, or maybe even 100 years, from now people will look back and ask when was the first Earth-sized planet found. It is very exciting.”

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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.

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