Category Archives: Off-Earth Advances

Atlantis Launches on Mission to Service Hubble Telescope (video)

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The NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis took off this afternoon at 2:01 EDT, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission —STS-125— will be the last scheduled mission to service the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, in an effort to extend its working life at least 5 more years into the future. It will entail at least 5 planned spacewalks to repair and upgrade the telescope’s equipment and power-sourcing.

When the Hubble program was first to be abandoned, it sparked a worldwide public outcry, and a movement to save the Hubble, which is responsible for a great number of major scientific discoveries made since it first began looking deep into the unknown remote universe. Its images of galaxies, star clusters, and the massive brilliant nebulae where new stars form, has allowed scientists to reconfigure the way we concieve of the shape and nature of our universe.

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Last Mission to Service Hubble Telescope in Works, to Be Shown Live on TV

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The US-based Science Channel will be showing the last mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope live. The mission is the last of its kind in a prolonged service regime planned for the telescope, after a global campaign to prevent the project’s premature cancellation. The Hubble Space Telescope is the single most successful technical instrument in terms of producing new discoveries from probing the distant universe.

The Hubble Telescope's 1996 'Deep Field' image, showing hundreds of previously undiscovered galaxies clustered in a 'small' patch of distant space

NASA lists the “top five discoveries” made by use of the Hubble Space Telescope. All involve the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, and all give us vital background information on the evolution of stars, star systems and the life of the universe itself. Our understanding of general cosmology, and of physics at the interstellar and quantum levels, has been vastly expanded due to the hundreds of major discoveries achieved with this instrument.

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3-month Mars Rover Missions Still Going After 5 Years

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mars-opportunity-1271st-sol-300sqThe twin Mars rover projects NASA launched over 5 years ago, which landed the Spirit rover on 3 January 2004 and the Opportunity rover on 24 January 2004, which planned only 3 months of research, are still roving, gathering data and transmitting new discoveries back to Earth, after 5 years at work on the desolate red planet. Specifically, the rovers have revealed a great deal of information about water around the Martian equator billions of years in the past.

The rovers are exposed to extreme conditions at all times, and program directors are enthusiastic about the resilience shown by the rovers. Some wear is evident, and failing parts that can’t be repaired have limited the rovers’ operative functionality: Spirit must move in reverse at all times, due to a “jammed wheel” and Opportunity’s robotic arm is limited by a failed electrical wire.

Spirit set up for the Martian winter at its “winter haven” (image below), perched atop a hill to keep from getting buffeted by debris rolling into the crater below.

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The rovers alternate between periods of rest, to protect against unnecessary environmental perils, and roving, from one site to another, and across wide ranges, like the craters and plateaus they have explored for signs of mineral evidence of water.

According to the BBC:

Spirit is exploring a 150km-wide bowl-shaped depression known as Gusev Crater. It has found an abundance of rocks and soils bearing evidence of extensive exposure to water.

Opportunity is on the other side of the planet, in a flat region known as Meridiani Planum.

Opportunity has demonstrated that there was water present, which flowed over the Martian surface, depositing sedimentary rock that can now be studied by the rover. If the rovers continue to operate for one full additional year, they could potentially produce another four times as much data as they were initially expected to produce for their planned 3-month mission.

Below is a view of the Victoria Crater, shot in panoramic view by a camera attached to one of the rovers. High resolution panoramic images were one of the popular early products of the twin rover missions, and have continued to provide valuable information about the Martian environment and history.

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In December, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) discovered evidence of carbonate minerals, necessary for making some of the rocks already known to exist, and indicative of a less acidic water environment at some point in the Martian past, evidence that could indicate there was microbial life or that it could still be hidden somewhere in the Martian environment.

The MRO has also been providing high-resolution images and chemical-spectral scans that help describe the composition of the Martian soil and indicate what sort of physical interactions may have taken place between rock formations and liquids or gases running over the Martian surface, which is helpful to reconstructing the now absent atmosphere that would have permitted a warmer and more life-sustaining climate.

Conventional Hybrid Super-computer Reaches 1,000 Trillion CPS

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A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.

The Roadrunner, like other hybrid super-computers, is made up of thousands of distributed computing “nodes”, each with its own microprocessor and separate memory store. There is a time-lapse between memory retrieval and central processing registry of computation, which means researchers have to come up with creative ways to narrow the ever-widening gap between computation and memory-retrieval time, a barrier difficult to overcome due to the physical limitations of the raw materials.

Roadrunner’s specific hybrid design is a breakthrough because it allows some improvement on this front. According to the Los Alamos website:

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons.

It is believed the petaflop speed will allow Roadrunner to be useful in calculating the rapid evolution of supernovae, the massive explosions that sometimes result from dying stars, a process which, if understood, can help to explain to astronomers, physicists and cosmologists, not only how the details of cosmic radiation have played out but also: what can be expected in the evolution and decay of certain star systems, and what that means for the physics of stars and galaxies, forces like gravity, the nature of black holes and, ultimately, provide some of the information necessary for testing sweeping theories about the beginnings of our universe.

The Milagro Cosmic Ray Observatory at Los Alamos, using special code designed to trace fluctuation and tranmission of radiation, to map the celestial background and study the effects of interstellar radiation on the Earth and near-Earth objects, would be the forum through which such applications for Roadrunner would be explored. In Milagro’s work with specially designed code to study radiation physics, according to Los Alamos itself:

The major application areas addressed were radiation transport (how radiation deposits energy in and moves through matter), neutron transport (how neutrons move through matter), molecular dynamics (how matter responds at the molecular level to shock waves and other extreme conditions), fluid turbulence, and the behavior of plasmas (ionized gases) in relation to fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is also expected the petaflop speed will be useful in testing medical advances, potentially projecting cell reaction to chemical treatments, radiation innovations, gene therapy and other complex metabolic interventions that could adversely affect or significantly improve patient prognoses. John Turner, a Los Alamos researcher, says his team expects “proposals in cosmology, antibiotic drug design, HIV vaccine development, astrophysics, ocean or climate modeling, turbulence, and we hope many others”.

The Lab’s website also reports plans to use Roadrunner, starting in 2010, to test means of improving nuclear weapons technology, to enhance performance, and facilitate higher levels of maintenance and security, with a state goal of “maintaining confidence in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without actual nuclear testing”.

Molecular computing innovations, like 16-bit, 128-bit or 1,024-bit simultaneous molecular processing hubs, could allow processor speeds to accelerate exponentially, once such technologies are developed and able to be specialized, mass-produced and widely distributed. Research into nano-scale molecular chemical brains or chemical computational network nodes means “nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.”

Computing speed is relevant not only to improving the performance of super-computers and later commercial microprocessors, enabling more advanced research, but also to the practical application of computational solutions for new zero-emissions models of energy capture, storage and distribution, distributed cloud computing processing platforms, the next generation of hyper-convergent online services, neural nets and artificial intelligence.

Physicists in Japan Plan to Create New Universe in Lab

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A cluster of galaxies, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, example of our universe's ongoing expansion, diffusion of matter and energy: new universe would not be a copy, but would evolve its own materials and physical laws.USING THE HIGGS FIELD, SCIENTISTS THEORIZE IT IS POSSIBLE TO CAUSE A ‘BABY UNIVERSE’ TO BREAK OFF FROM OUR OWN, SAFELY

A radical new project could permit human beings to create a “baby universe” in a laboratory in Japan. While it sounds like a dangerous undertaking, physicist Nobuyuki Sakai and his research team at Yamagata University believe that if the project is successful, the space-time around a tiny point within our universe will be distorted in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid space, and eventually break off, separate in all respects from our experience of space and time, causing no harm to the fabric of our universe.

The project takes as its starting point two basic theories about the foundations of our universe: the big bang and inflation theory. The big bang theory, as many readers are well aware, observes that all objects in the known universe appear to be moving away from one another, suggesting that the universe was jump-started when all matter and energy were concentrated in an inconceivably tiny space, allowing them to overcome binding forces and causing a cosmic explosion.

It is well-tested and consistent with all currently accepted models for general cosmology, as tested against advanced theoretical and observational physics. But it is only one piece of the puzzle. Inflation is a key theory, developed in 1981, when MIT physicist Alan Guth observed that there appeared to have been a period immediately following the big bang when the universe “inflated” rapidly, allowing distinct regions of matter and energy to function comfortably free from any forces that might cause them to collapse against each other or disrupt each other’s evolution.

This project is not exactly theoretical physics at work. It is closer to a physical application of observed phenomena, in combination, with the aim of achieving an as yet untested physical effect. Inflation theory helps provide the means of understanding how that effect might be brought about.

As reported by the New Scientist:

Inflation theory, subsequently modified by Linde, relies on the fact that the ‘vacuum’ of empty space-time is not a boring, static place. Instead, it is subject to quantum fluctuations that cause strange bubbles to appear at random times. These bubbles of ‘false vacuum’ contain space-time with different —and very curious— properties.

The space-time inside these false vacuums is organized and kept constant by a phenomenon known as the ‘Higgs field’. It is believed that with the constant provided by the Higgs field, these bubbles of ‘false vacuum’ can be induced to withstand contact with the high pressure exterior vacuum and subsequently to expand through a kind of cosmic inflation like the one which followed the big bang at the beginning of our universe.

The key is a monopole, a unique sperical particle with only a north or south pole, only one charge. Adding mass and energy to this already extremely dense particle, could cause it to expand “eternally”, providing the trigger needed to make the bubble of false vacuum into an ever-expanding universe, akin to our own, but entirely separate and likely to develop its own physical properties, laws and materials.

Here is the key to the “new universe” paradigm for the project. It would not be simply an extension of our own universe, a space where strange things happen. The New Scientist reports physicist Nobuyuki Sakai’s discoveries regarding this process as follows:

[T]he baby universe has its own space-time and, as this inflates, the pressure from the true vacuum outside its walls continues to constrain it. As these forces compete, the growing baby universe is forced to bubble out from our space-time until its only connection to us is through a narrow space-time tunnel called a wormhole…

Eventually, the “umbilical” connection between our space-time and the baby universe would be effectively cut, and the baby universe would enter into its own unique process of unending expansion. From our perspective, it would be lost inside a microscopic “black hole”, which will not appear to expand into our space-time. Hawking radiation will be emitted and the tiny black hole will “evaporate”, sealing the separation between the two universes.

Ultimately, this evaporation is what makes the project possible, but is also, perhaps, its most serious obstacle. It is expected that the separation between our space-time and the baby universe would occur so quickly, it might be impossible —within the limitations of our physical universe— to observe its having been created.

The above text was originally published at Sentido.tv, 2 August 2006 (now CafeSentido.com), but since there has not been a declared or proven success as yet in creating an entirely new universe in the lab, The Hot Spring takes up the issue for examination, and adds new information relating to progress in the field. Research by Stefano Ansoldi and Eduardo Guendelman appears to indicate that:

A particular kind of baby universe solution, involving string-like matter, is studied to show that it can be formed by “investing” an arbitrarily small amount of energy, i.e. it can appear from an almost flat space at the classical level.

What this means is that the field of physics, as a whole, may be closer to understanding what actual properties need to be thoroughly understood and observed in a closed environment, in order to implement which processes that would allow for the generation of a true “baby universe”, emerging from within our own space-time but affecting it in no noticeable lasting way.

In April, the physicist Peter Higgs predicted the “God particle” would be found by the new CERN particle accelerator, sometime in early 2009. Higgs theorized that a yet-to-be observed fundamental particle knows as the Higgs boson, is the source of all matter in the universe, making the cosmos and existence as we know it possible.

After four decades of theoretical testing and exploration, the mechanisms of particle colliders have advanced enough that Higgs now believes this fundamental building block of the physical universe may be observed under controlled conditions. Observing and studying the Higgs boson would allow particle physicists to better calibrate the approach that might be taken to using the Higgs field to set in motion the inflation of a new universe out of our own.

NASA's Phoenix Lander Finds Water on Mars for First Time

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Mars Phoenix Lander, on the Red PlanetNASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has found water on the Martian surface, in the form of ice, after just 62 days on the Red Planet. The find is the first confirmed evidence that water exists on the planet, meaning we now know it is technically possible for life as we know it to have existed there in the past or to exist there now. The sample was collected from the Martian soil by the lander’s robotic arm, then heated in its Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), which identifies the chemical signature of vapors.

The Mars Odyssey orbiter had previously detected what was considered hard evidence of the presence of water ice on Mars, but there had never been direct physical contact and confirmation. The Phoenix project’s lead scientist, William Boynton, said this was the first time Martian water was “touched and tasted”.

Some believe the presence of water suggests the possibility of “terraforming” projects, in which Earth-like colonies could be created to support human life on the otherwise inhospitable planet, whose characteristic red soil is extremely iron-rich. But atmospheric composition is far from adequate for supporting an Earth-like environment. The Mars Phoenix Lander is also on Twitter, where updates are provided regarding the nature of its mission and some of the images coming back.

Phoenix Lander diagram, provided by NASA

The Mars Phoenix Lander is not a rover and so will not be exploring the terrain around the site where it has located water. But since its mission has been more productive than expected, NASA has announced it will extend the mission by up to 90 days, in which time, Phoenix may be able to dig two new trenches and take additional samples. The lander will also analyze in its onboard laboratories the content of soil and ice samples to determine whether there is organic material there, either living or in fossil form.

Spaceblooms: Is Future of Farming in Outer Space?

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xflora-562x316.jpgSpace flora or “xflora”, a category of synthetic biochemical organism, engineered to exist in floating colonies in space, combines nano-technology with and biotechnology. While it sounds near impossible, the concept is to create organisms that can feed from their environment, even where that environment would be deadly (for chill, high radiation or lack of nutrients) to Earthborne organisms, and that can be harvested freely as future “off-Earth” human colonies or transports may require.

One of the most obvious applications would be the potential for such vegetation to greatly extend the viable length of space journeys, providing a “native” farming option for astronauts, and a potential means of adaptation to life in zero-gravity, zero-atmosphere space.

NASA is reportedly working on potential test projects for space flora, and specifically the application of such technologies to creating an environment on Mars where human beings could take shelter and use space-age subsistence farming to keep a research colony going.

An astonishing array of ambitions accompany this field of research, including the hope of being able to implant nanotechnology into the cells of individual plants, to enable them to find light more efficiently, and to promote blooming on cue, and the ability to manipulate up or down the crop density for a given spacebloom.

The future-set web report Spacebloom: a Field Guide to Cosmic Xflora relays from the 23rd century the (currently future) history of space flora and off-Earth self-sustaining farming. The site’s “intro” section speaks of a 150 year period of massive innovation and quips that “The roots of this knowledge explosion can be traced to the middle of the 21st century, when, after many decades of empty rhetoric and grandiose posturing, a worldwide focus on equal access to all levels of education was realized.”

The key to the story, be it theory or practice, is that the field of spacebloom research has been opened, at NASA and by curious seekers, and it will be fed by the imagination of many. The goal of achieving self-propagating, self-reproducing synthetic organisms that can both harvest nourishment from and provide nourishment efficiently in outer space, takes us far beyond the scope of current thought in the realm of agriculture, with possible lessons, potential hazards, and many tempting possibilities, even for the realm of agricultural practice on Earth.