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Archive for the ‘space’ category: Page 959

Mar 2, 2016

Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts Just Got Even More Interesting

Posted by in categories: energy, space

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are a source of endless fascination. But despite a decade of observations, not all astronomers are sure that they’re real. A study out in Nature today, which reports the very first recurring FRB, is now causing lingering skepticism to evaporate.

“I think this is pretty huge,” Peter Williams, an astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo. “For awhile, I wasn’t sure these things were genuinely astrophysical. This paper settles the question.”

And Williams is not one to take splashy new claims about FRBs—high energy radio pulses of unknown origin, which flit across the sky for a fraction of a second—lightly. In fact, he’s spent the last week raising major doubts about another recent study, which, as Gizmodo and other outlets reported, claimed to have pinpointed the location of an FRB in space for the first time.

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Mar 1, 2016

There Will Be Netflix on Mars

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, space

How Legos, lasers, and reindeer are building the interplanetary internet.

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Mar 1, 2016

Quarks To Quasars Photo 2

Posted by in categories: particle physics, space

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Feb 29, 2016

America’s Space Heritage Is Rotting ‘In Place’

Posted by in category: space

New book chronicles American space history left rotting at the pad; not just at Cape Canaveral but across the U.S. Not sure what can be done with behemoth launch pads, but perhaps a non-profit effort at restoring them or at least cleaning them up might be worth the effort.


Large swaths of America’s space heritage have literally been left to rot at the launch pad as is poignantly made clear in Abandoned In Place, a new book that chronicles long-neglected and largely forgotten aspects of U.S. space history.

Author Roland Miller’s oversized collection of photos and essays documents some 60 years of U.S. space history mostly at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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Feb 29, 2016

Time travel a step closer as physicists say we live in a universe-sized ‘flicker book’

Posted by in categories: physics, space, time travel

TIME throughout the universe is like a giant ‘flicker book’ which can be broken into an almost infinite number of separate moments, scientists said today.

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Feb 29, 2016

NASA Venus Landsail Rover Could Launch In 2023

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

NASA’s study of a Venus landsail rover for possible launch as early as 2023 continues via its Innovative Advanced Concepts office. Geoffrey Landis, the rover’s study scientist fills me in on the latest. Ironically, the optimal landing site is near that of the Soviet Venera 10 lander.


NASA continues working towards a Venus landsail surface rover that could see launch as early as 2023 and mark the first time in a generation that any probe has landed on the planet’s hot, rocky surface. After a five month journey from Earth, the lander-rover — about the size of a windsurfing board — would begin a nominal 50-day surface mission.

If funded, NASA would launch this landsail “Zephyr” rover as a $400 million Discovery class mission with a coupled orbiter and lander. Once safely in Venus orbit, the rover-lander would detach for its journey through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Following an upright wheels-down landing, pyrotechnics would then cut the rover loose to explore the surface.

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Feb 27, 2016

Astronomers Create Largest-Ever Catalog Of Cosmic Voids

Posted by in category: space

We might not think it, but we live in a pretty crowded part of the universe. But more than half our cosmos is made up of largely empty voids where there’s virtually nothing for hundreds of millions of light years of spacetime. At great distances, we still aren’t sensitive to dwarf galaxies that may lie within such voids. But even in the midst of such emptiness, these voids do have a few luminous elliptical galaxies not unlike the one seen here. Kudos to the team that crafted this new catalog map of these empty spots in our cosmos.


Astronomers have released the largest and most extensive catalog of cosmic voids ever generated — extending out some 8 billion light years in an area covering a quarter of the sky, mostly observable from the Northern hemisphere.

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Feb 26, 2016

NASA’s IBEX Observations Pin Down Interstellar Magnetic Field

Posted by in categories: materials, particle physics, space

The new paper is based on one particular theory of the origin of the IBEX ribbon, in which the particles streaming in from the ribbon are actually solar material reflected back at us after a long journey to the edges of the sun’s magnetic boundaries. (NASA Image)

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – The new paper is based on one particular theory of the origin of the IBEX ribbon, in which the particles streaming in from the ribbon are actually solar material reflected back at us after a long journey to the edges of the sun’s magnetic boundaries.

A giant bubble, known as the heliosphere, exists around the sun and is filled with what’s called solar wind, the sun’s constant outflow of ionized gas, known as plasma.

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Feb 26, 2016

Scientists have estimated that the universe won’t end for at least 2.8 billion years

Posted by in category: space

What a relief.


One day, the Universe is going to die out — that’s something scientists can agree on.

But exactly how and when that will happen is a more of a gray area, and it’s not something we’ve really had to worry about, with current predictions putting any such event tens of billions of years in the future — long after our Sun burns out.

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Feb 26, 2016

Can SkyFi Really Give the Entire World Free Internet?

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites, space

Wifi distribution across this planet is patchwork of crazy: You can tweet from Mt. Fuji but lord help you if you want to send an email in Cuba. Thursday, Israeli company SkyFi announced it will be the one to finally soak the world in wifi from space.

In a press release announcing $3 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners and the Liberty Israel Venture Fund, the company said it would get around the problems preventing reliable wifi from traditional satellites by launching nano satellites whose 55-centimeter diameter antenna could be folded up to make launching cheaper, then expanding once in orbit.

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