SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: November 2006
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& science news > space & science news: November 2006: 1
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Space elevators: 'First floor, deadly
radiation!'
(Nov 14, 2006)
Space
elevators are touted as a novel and cheap way to get cargo, and
possibly people, into space one day. So far, they have barely left
the drawing board, but ultimately robots could climb a cable stretching
100,000 km from Earth's surface into space. But there is a hitch:
humans might not survive thanks to the whopping dose of ionising radiation
they would receive travelling through the core of the Van
Allen radiation belts around Earth.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Listening for ET’s television
(Nov 12, 2006)
The first episode of “I Love Lucy” was broadcast sometime on October
15, 1951. About 0.0002 seconds later, the signal glided over the rooftops
of the farthest city suburbs, and headed into space. It’s still going.
Every day, that first installment passes through an additional 4 thousand
trillion trillion trillion cubic kilometers of the cosmos. Given that
stars in our galactic neighborhood are separated by about 4 light-years,
it’s easy to figure that roughly 10 thousand star systems have been
exposed to “I Love Lucy” in the past five decades.
Read
more. Source: space.com |
Mars rover may get one-way ticket
(Nov 11, 2006)
The chief scientist on NASA's Mars rover mission is contemplating
whether to send Opportunity
into a large crater with no means of getting back out. The decision
could commit the rover to spending its final days exploring Victoria
Crater, a 60m-deep (200ft) depression on Mars' Meridiani plains.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Huge 'hurricane' rages on Saturn
(Nov 10, 2006)
A hurricane-like storm, two-thirds the diameter of Earth, is raging
at Saturn's south pole,
new images from NASA's Cassini
space probe reveal. Measuring 5,000 miles (8,000km) across, the storm
is the first hurricane ever detected on a planet other than Earth.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
NASA struggles to contact lost Mars probe
(Nov 10, 2006)
An unexpected break in communications has NASA struggling to restore
contact with its Mars Global
Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft. If communication cannot be restored
soon, NASA may try to diagnose the problem by having another spacecraft,
the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter, take pictures of MGS. MGS recently had
its 10-year anniversary in space
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
How the Moon sheds its skin
(Nov 9, 2006)Blasts of gas from deep beneath the lunar surface
are giving the Moon a
surprisingly fresh-faced look, suggests a new study. If they are,
our picture of the Moon’s geological past will have to change just
as dramatically. The Moon was thought to be geologically inactive.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Missing helium mystery solved: Big stars
ate it
(Nov 8, 2006)
For years, astrophysicists have tried to reconcile a cosmic discrepancy:
the universe held much less helium 3 gas than was predicted by models
of stellar evolution. But by using new 3-dimensional models, scientists
think they’ve discovered where all the helium 3 went – it was
destroyed by the very stars that were thought to eject it into space,
according to a new study.
Read
more. Source: space.com |
Monster stellar flare seen by NASA scientists
dwarfs all others
(Nov 7, 2006)
Scientists using NASA's Swift
satellite have spotted a stellar flare on a nearby star so powerful
that, had it been from our sun, it would have triggered a mass extinction
on Earth. The flare was perhaps the most energetic magnetic stellar
explosion ever detected. The flare was seen in December 2005 on a
star slightly less massive than the sun, in a two-star system called
II Pegasi in the constellation Pegasus.
Read
more. Source: NASA |
World-class radio telescopes face closure
(Nov 6, 2006)
Two of the world's best-known radio observatories – the 305-metre
Arecibo dish in Puerto
Rico and a widespread collection of telescopes called the Very
Long Baseline Array –– face the budgetary axe. Despite rising
budgets, the astronomy division of the US National Science Foundation
realised it could not afford to continue operating all its existing
instruments while also building the new cutting-edge telescopes requested
by astronomers, division director Wayne Van Citters said at a press
conference on Friday.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Solar sail mission to rise again?
(Nov 4, 2006)
The Planetary Society may once again try to fly a solar
sail after a disappointing launch failure last year. This time,
it is considering sending a new spacecraft built from spare parts
to the Lagrange point
L1 – an area in space where the gravity of the Sun and Earth
are balanced.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Shocked big bang gas a cosmic particle
accelerator?
(Nov 3, 2006)
Giant shockwaves around a distant cluster of galaxies could be generating
some of the mysterious cosmic
rays that strike Earth. They could also give us a clue as to why
the universe is threaded with magnetic fields. The cluster, called
Abell 3376, is a swarm of galaxies about 600 million light years away.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Venus's surface may be much older than
thought
(Nov 2, 2006)
The colossal outpouring of lava thought to have almost totally resurfaced
Venus 500 million years
ago never happened, a new study says. If correct, it means that a
much longer record of Venus's history is preserved on the planet's
surface. Planetary scientists estimated the age of Venus's surface
after studying radar mapping data from NASA's Magellan
spacecraft, which operated in the early 1990s.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
New Hubble instruments would illuminate
early universe
(Nov 1, 2006)
The Hubble Space Telescope
will be able to see further back in time than ever before if it is
fitted with two new instruments in a shuttle servicing mission. Hubble
needs new gyroscopes and batteries to keep it working properly. Its
existing gyroscopes, which allow Hubble to point steadily at a target,
could expire by 2008 and its batteries could die by 2010.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Deep Impact's blurry camera may study
exoplanets
(Nov 1, 2006)
An out-of-focus camera on NASA's comet-observing mission Deep
Impact might be repurposed to study Earth-like planets around
other stars. It is one of six mission concepts that received preliminary
funding from the agency on Monday –– others include dropping
a probe into Venus's atmosphere and returning a sample from an asteroid.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
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