Progress on Space Elevator Technology
For over a century, space exploration enthusiasts have proposed building an elevator into low earth orbit using a very long cable stretching from the surface of the earth into space. Huge technical (particularly material) obstacles have prevented this dream from becoming a reality. But technology marches on, and some researchers have made progress:
Funded by NASA and the Spaceward Foundation, the yearly contest offers a $2 million first prize to any group whose machine can quickly climb a kilometer-long ribbon tethered to a helicopter, while receiving power remotely from the ground. On Tuesday, LaserMotive became the first team in competition history to qualify for the $900,000 second prize.The LaserMotive machine consists of a motor that pulls the device up the 2,953-foot-long ribbon, photovoltaic cells that power the motor, and a ground-based laser that provides the light for the cells. LaserMotive set a new record for the competition, and became the first team to ever reach the top of the ribbon. However, they had to settle for the $900,000 second prize, as securing the $2 million first prize requires not only reaching the top of the ribbon, but doing so at an average speed of 11 miles per hour. Sadly, the LaserMotive machine ran slightly slower than that mark.
Link | Image: NASA
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One-Way Mars Missions?
Photo: NASA
Going to Mars is costly. The conventional thinking of round-trip missions is losing more and more ground to an idea made public last year. Theoretical physicist/cosmologist Paul Davies addressed the NASA Astrobiology Science Conference, and laid out a solid (and sometimes humorous) case for the One Way Ticket plan.
He points out the commercial angle, saying that not only would a patent trade emerge from discoveries, but televised coverage of the pioneers would be lucrative as well. And those pioneers? He says our planet is full of risk-takers seeking adventure that would fill the role nicely.
By comparison, a one-way trip to Mars would not be so risky. But it does need a spirit of adventure of the sort that the early explorers had, in particular the people who opened up Antarctica. These people often went knowing that there was a high probability that they would not come back, and that if they didn’t come back, they were going to their deaths. I’m not suggesting that going to Mars necessarily means an instant death, but it may mean a premature death, it may mean your life expectancy is shortened by a little bit. But as I said, people attempt that risk in all sorts of other walks of life.
And what I have in mind is not just four miserable people sitting around on the martian surface waiting to die, (laughter) but that they would actually be doing useful job work.
You wouldn’t be going there as tourists, you wouldn’t be going there for fun. You’d be going there to do science, and emailing all this stuff back. Your publication record would be sensational. (laughter) You would no doubt have all sort of honors heaped on you.
But you wouldn’t be coming home.
Link. Previously on Neatorama: Chart of Missions to Mars
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5 Frightening (But True) Space Stories
There are no aliens in these stories from NASA and the Soviet space program, just true tales of how being an astronaut is no picnic. Decompression? Landing in the wrong place? Using the toilet without a toilet? Not pleasant!
On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard wet his pants aboard Freedom 7, but Apollo bathroom facilities would get a lot worse before they got any better. I don’t think I’m the only guy to find something fundamentally frightening about a urinal that consists only of a “condom-like fitting,” a valve and the empty void of outer space. I keep thinking about that scene from “Goldfinger.”
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NASA’s Lost Female Astronauts
NASA introduced the idea of female astronauts much earlier than you might realize. After all, the Soviets had launched a female cosmonaut!
In the late 1950s, the United States government contemplated training women as astronauts, and newly released medical test results show that they were just as cool and tough as the men who went to the moon.“They were all extraordinary women and outstanding pilots and great candidates for what was proposed,” said Donald Kilgore, a doctor who evaluated both male and female space flight candidates at the Lovelace Clinic, a mid-century center of aeromedical research. “They came out better than the men in many categories.”
The times being what they were, the program was scrapped, and US women did not make it into space until 1983. Link
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New Saturn Ring Discovered
Using infrared, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted an enormous ring encircling Saturn, previously undetected by other telescopes. The ring is likely composed of ice crystals shed by Phoebe, the farthest Saturnian moon. The new ring reaches 11 million miles (18 million km) away from the planet.
“This is one supersized ring,” said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons’ worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn.”
The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn’s moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance — one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol… The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn’s moons are all going the opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield.
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Gigagalaxy Zoom
This is what I ended up with after just a minute of playing around with Gigagalaxy Zoom, a project by the European Southern Observatory. Start with the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the naked eye, zoom into a section of it, then zoom to the next stage! There are lots and lots of variations, and cool nebulas to explore!
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First Clown in Space
Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte is paying $35 million to catch a ride to the International Space Station on a Russian spacecraft later this month. Laliberte calls himself “the first clown in space.”
Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte told reporters he plans to tickle the professional astronauts while they’re sleeping, and he’s also bringing red clown noses to try to lighten things up on the orbiting station.
“I’m a person with a pretty high spirit, who’s there to crack jokes and make jokes to those guys, and while they’re sleeping, you know, I’ll be tickling them,” Laliberte said.
Laliberte will also use his trip to raise awareness of world drinking water issues. Link -via Dave Barry’s Blog
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The Evolution of Space Food
The following is a reprint
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Throughout history, intrepid adventurers and successful armies of conquest have marched on their stomachs. The wagon trains and cattle drives that opened the American frontier would have stalled without Cookie and his chuck wagon. Camp cooks have always ruled their little kingdoms, be they isolated lumber camps, mine operations, or construction projects. All of which NASA researchers took into consideration as they prepared to breach the frontiers of space. MERCURY POISONING?
The menu consisted of unidentified snacks: cubes textured like dog biscuits, freeze-dried powders as appetizing as Mojave Desert dust, and tubes of glutinous matter resembling toothpaste but not nearly as flavorful. The cubes crumbled, the powders wouldn't dissolve, and those tubes - they were the first to go. Fit fare for Martians, maybe, but not for humans. (Photo: NASA) NAME THAT FOOD
This was one step for mankind, but still a long way from the real thing. Maybe that's why astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard a Gemini flight in 1965. Gus Grissom ate it, but Young was officially reprimanded (the first astronaut to be reprimanded for anything). THE AGE OF TANG
Grissom may have washed down that sandwich with a swig of Tang. Pillsbury/General Foods had been trying unsuccessfully to foist the powdered orange drink on a highly suspecting public for three years. But once Tang qualified for the space program, sales shot up. Everybody wanted to try the "drink of the astronauts." THE END OF HIGH-FLYING HASH As the Apollo program went into orbit, NASA's faith in the skills of their astronauts improved. This time it actually provided them with spoons - another leap forward. But special containers had to be designed to overcome the near-weightlessness of the cabin. Nobody wanted their pea soup stuck to the ceiling any more than they wanted to have to chase after shrimp that had floated off their dinner tray. Another boon was hot water to rehydrate those powders; that meant fewer lumps and better flavor. Still, no one in orbit was getting fat. PLEASE PASS THE POTATOES
Skylab, launched in 1973, changed everything - it had an actual dining area, with a table and chairs (that diners had to strap themselves to). Utensils now included not only a knife, fork, and spoon, but also a pair of scissors for opening food packets. A refrigerator and a freezer completed the homelike atmosphere. With things looking up on the equipment side, the food side got better, too. Astronauts could now select from 72 items. They seemed to have everything but a maître d' and a decent wine list. EATING LIKE EARTHLINGS Given the confined dining space, an astronaut's food choices were more contingent on the development of packaging, preparation, and serving equipment than on available foods. The concoctions were already available. Earthbound, we've got egg substitutes, hamburger extenders, chocolate bars without cocoa, artificially flavored and colored fruit, and so on. In space, so do the astronauts - but they've had to wait for suitable packaging. PACKAGING THE MOVABLE FEAST
Space shuttle meals limit each astronaut to one pound of packaging waste daily, a day's food supply having a gross weight of 3.8 pounds, including snacks (this means that more than 25 percent of a meal package is meant to be thrown away - and if you think that's a lot, have a look at almost any frozen dinner available to us nonastronauts). Months ahead of a flight, astronauts plan their own meal. Engineers review their choices to make sure they won't weigh too much (the meals, not the astronauts). Then nutritionists review the menus to ensure the shuttle won't be harboring a junk food addict or a budding anorexic. Too much packaging and too much waste food (what we Earthlings call leftovers) could screw up the garbage compactor. Just prior to the flight, the food packages are individually color-coded and stored in the shuttle galley. A MEAL THAT STICKS TO YOUR ... TABLE To an astronaut, the single most important technological advance for space flight wasn't all-purpose duct tape or crazy glue, it was Velcro. The individual packages containing a full meal could be Velcroed to a tray and all opened at the same time. Previously, packages had to be opened one at a time and consumed before the next was opened. Otherwise, the first package could float away while the astronaut snipped at the top of another. Shuttle crews can now have a full-course hot meal reconstituted in a recognizable form and on a dinner tray within 35 minutes. Not bad. KITCHEN WIZARDRY NASA chefs were no slouches. When the tricks of conventional cookery didn't work, they invented some of their own. Many of their offerings were provided with varying amount of water removed from them. "Add water and eat" or "Add water, heat, and eat" were about the only directions astronauts needed. Breakfast was a breeze: cereal, sugar, and powdered milk in a single pouch. Add water, and voila! It would snap, crackle, and pop with the best of them, even if it didn't come with a prize. You can taste some of this handiwork in commercially available camping and trail foods. (And we can thank NASA impetus for those small, full-panel pull-off lids on cans - they thought of them first.) THE LONG HAUL
And all that while, NASA was gearing up to feed astronauts for prolonged periods. THe orbiting space station has facilities to provide frozen, refrigerated, and thermostabilized food (heat-treated to kill off the bad stuff). NASA had to give up its passion to just add water - the space station couldn't generate enough - which meant that astronauts could finally eat fresh food. Moreover, every four astronauts had their own microwave/convention oven; no more line ups to liquefy and heat those first cups of morning coffee. With all these technical advances has come a quantum expansion of the menu. Astronauts can choose from nine different cereals, some with fruits; nine different chicken entrees; ten different vegetables; four flavors of yogurt; regular, decaf, or Kona (excuse me!) coffee - and that's just for starters. CHECK, PLEASE!
The menu on space flights seem to have reached such gourmet standards that private citizens are paying millions just for a short hop. Of course, there's still no wine list, but when tourists can plan their own menus months before tying on the bib - that gives NASA a lot of time to procure the best ingredients, not to mention using the acumen of expert chefs and the latest technology to ensure optimal quality and freshness. CHIX IN SPACE NASA knows that accessing remote space frontiers may require space flights that last for years, so they've started to figure out ways to fashion a self-contained, self-sustaining food system - shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not to mention Silent Running. The cities in space that cosmologist Stephen Hawking talks about will require the same approach. NASA has already sent (unplanted) tomato and mung bean seeds into orbit, as well as chicken embryos, just to find out what effects, if any, space travel would have on them. As it turned out, the effects were negligible. And NASA scientists have been fiddling with hydroponics (that is, grown only in water) lettuce in space simulation labs. Help in this regard has come from the private sector: The tomato seeds courtesy of H.J. Heinz, and KFC footing some of the bill for the "Chix in Space" experiments. (We're getting kind of bored with "spacecraft metallic" anyway: Make way for billboards in space!) |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
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Unfortunately
for the early Mercury astronauts, Buck Rogers and Isaac Asimov had more
influence on their meals than Martha Stewart might have. 
Gemini
astronauts had it better. Packaging improved. The ever-adventurous food
scientists at NASA now dared to identify the food for their astronauts
- for example, shrimp, chicken, applesauce. 
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Making Babies in Space May Be Difficult
Some animals have been bred in space, but not mammals. Japanese researchers are looking into the possibility, and doing experiments with mice on earth that mimic lower gravity space conditions.
To test these effects, the researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction.
Fertilization took place normally, suggesting that microgravity hadn’t harmed the sperm. But as the embryos continued to develop inside the clinostat, many developed problems. Their cells had trouble dividing and maturing.
There were some baby mice produced after the embryos were implanted, but not many survived compared to a control group. Link -via Digg
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
[YouTube - Link]
In December of 1995, astronomers did a risky experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope. They pointed it to a region in space the size of a speck of dust that is seemingly empty and kept the telescope watching for 10 days.
They could’ve very well ended up with a blank image – but what they saw instead was something completely mindboggling.
Here’s a wonderful clip by Tony Darnell of Deep Astronomy about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field that illustrates just how humblingly small us humans are in the grand scheme of the universe.
– via gizmodo
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Apollo 11 in Pictures
40 years ago today, Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Canaveral. The Big Picture celebrates with a collection of large images of the mission. This photograph was taken by astronaut Michael Collins as the Eagle approached the Command Modeule to rendezvous for the trip home. Link -via the Presurfer
(image credit: NASA)
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Warp Drive Theoretically Possible
Like Star Trek, only real. Physicist Richard Obousy speculates about a means of faster-than-light travel and dubs it ‘warp drive’. The picture above is of the ship that he proposes be built to test his idea, which works like this:
The shape of the warpship was chosen to optimize the manipulation of surrounding dark energy, creating a spacetime bubble. How exactly the bubble would be created is still a mystery. But once the bubble gets created, spacetime at the front of the warpship would be compressed, and behind, it would expand. Inside the bubble, spacetime remains unchanged; therefore the warpship floats in the center of stationary space while the bubble moves through spacetime.
The bubble itself, containing the warpship, “drives the spacecraft forwards at arbitrarily high speeds,” said Obousy. This means the warpship can travel faster than the speed of light.
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Russians Tried to Beat Apollo 11 in the Race to the Moon by Crash Landing a Spacecraft
A newly released recording from a British control room monitoring lunar activity in the late 1960s revealed that the Russian actually tried to beat the Americans in the race to the Moon: just hours before the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, a Russian spacecraft Luna-15 crash-landed there:
Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, was among the team listening to transmissions coming from the area of space and began tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission.
The recordings from Jodrell’s Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted off. [...]
People in Jodrell’s control room can then be heard shouting "it’s landing" and "it’s going down much too fast" as they track Luna 15’s final moments before it crashes.
A voice is later heard saying: "I say, this has really been drama of the highest order."
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Silly Experiments in Spaaaace!
Koichi Wakata, a Japanese Astronaut who is working aboard the International Space Station was given the task to perform a few silly experiments in Zero-G requested by the Earth People of Japan. They consist of the mundane such as performing push-ups, squirting water from a tube, backflips and so forth but then some of them are bizarre like the “flying magic carpet” request! Oh, how I wish I were in space like Koichi and the other fine men and women of the ISS crew! I would see to it if I could perform the moonwalk in Zero-G! 
The 16 space experiments in a nifty list – Link (also from Pink Tentacle)
Via – Pink Tentacle
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The Terrible Thing of Alpha Nine!
(Cartoon Brew link)
Space explorers go to Alpha Nine to check out the monster, which turns out to be what you’ve secretly thought space aliens were really all about. This animation was Jake Armstrong’s thesis film at the School of Visual Arts. -via Dark Roasted Blend
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In Microgravity, a CD Player Becomes a Gyroscope
[YouTube - Link]
NASA International Space Station Science Officer Don Pettit demonstrates how a spinning CD acts as a stabilizing gyroscope in microgravity. When two and three CD players are combined in perpendicular planes, they provide a relatively stable platform.
– via reddit
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Lunar Leftovers: How the Moon Became a Trash Can
We normally associate space itself as being littered with the detritus of our nascent attempts at interstellar travel. The moon, however, is chock full of the remains of our various attempts to explore it. So, what exactly is up there? Moreover, does any of the stuff on the moon still work or is it just one giant cosmic trash can?
If HG Wells and others were correct and there were civilizations on the moon then they would have expelled a communal gasp of horror in 1959 when the first piece of man made technology hit the moon dust. Looking now like some steam punk version of what we regularly send spinning in to space, Luna 2 was launched by the Soviets when the Cold War was at its height. The collision with the moon at least proved on thing – that our nearest neighbor in space has no appreciable magnetic field. To add insult to injury, half an hour after Luna 2 hit the moon, so did the third stage of its rocket.
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Saturn by Cassini
The Big Picture Blog from the Boston Globe has pictures from NASA sent back by the Cassini spacecraft as it passed Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been functioning in space for almost five years now, and the pictures are awesome!
Cassini looks toward Rhea’s cratered, icy landscape with the dark line of Saturn’s ringplane and the planet’s murky atmosphere as a background. Rhea is Saturn’s second-largest moon, at 1,528 km (949 mi) across. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired on July 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million km (770,000 mi) from Rhea.
Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI)
See also: Saturn’s Newest Moon
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The Triple Galaxy
The Hubble Space Telescope took a closer look at this triple galaxy group on April 1 and 2 after 140,000 people around the world voted on six potential targets.
The areas have previously only been photographed by ground-based telescopes:
The Arp 274 galaxy group won the competition with more than 67,000 votes. Hubble’s image suggests the galaxies may not be close enough together to interact as they appear to be in the image taken by the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.
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Cartwheel in the Sky
This is the magnificent Cartwheel galaxy, a stellar structure which measures more than 100,000 light years across.
It was released to promote a 24-hour webcast from observatories around the world, marking the International Year of Astronomy.
The kaleidoscopic galaxy lies 500million light years from Earth, and its unusual shape is due to a catastrophic collision with one of the smaller galaxies on the lower left hundreds of millions of years ago.
The smaller galaxy produced compression waves in the gas of the Cartwheel as it plunged through it, which triggered bursts of star formation, lighting up the rim.
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Don't Worry Folks: That Flash Over Virginia Was Just ... Russian Rockets?!
To be fair, the Russians aren’t attacking. In fact, the US military knew this was coming and expected it. Debris from launched spacecraft and rocketry regularly fall back into the atmosphere. Stilll, residents who didn’t know that might well have thought that the Russians were invading when they dialed 911. Things might have gone rather differently a few decades ago.
The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.
The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world’s first two-time space tourist — to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.
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A Tribute to Space Bat
We all are still in mourning for Space Bat who took the ultimate ride to the Heavens and beyond by holding on to dear life to the Discovery Space Shuttle. This is a tribute to remember what the brave little guy did by being the first and tragically last Bat to go to space…we’ll always remember you Space Bat…Godspeed! 
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Bat Boards Discovery, Stowaway Unlikely to Have Survived
Hitchhikers in space … wasn’t there a book about that? An apparently injured bat was expected to simply fly away when the spacecraft gunned the engines before take-off but inexplicably clung to the outside of the ship as it made its way up. It is speculated that the bat may have been injured and unable to fly away. There was, needless to say, no sign of the bat when the Discovery docked at the International Space Station.
NASA officials noticed the bat before shuttle’s liftoff and brought in a wildlife expert to look at video images of it. The expert said it appeared to be a free-tailed bat that probably had a broken left wing and an injured right shoulder or wrist.
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Teens Launch Balloon into Space, Take Pictures for Less than $100
Who needs NASA? Spending less than it costs to take an airplane ride, a handful of industrious Spanish students sent a balloon 100,000 feet into space, tracking it by radio signal via Google Earth.From 20 miles above the Earth’s surface, their handmade spacecraft took compelling photographs of the planet from above which they recovered when they found the landed balloon just over five miles from where they launched it.
The pupils’ incredible school science project has already caught the attention of the University of Wyoming in the US, and the Meteotek team keep those interested updated with regular blogs and updates to their Twitter feed.
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You Can Choose Hubble’s Next Target
As part of the International Year of Astronomy, the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic observations, you get to decide where to point the Hubble next.
“Hubble’s Next Discovery – You Decide allows people across the world to vote online and select the next object modern astronomy’s most famous telescope will view. Six objects, which the Hubble has never before viewed, are available for voting.”
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Your Very Own Art Studio in a Subway Car
London artists now have a solution to the dilemma of renting expensive studio space to work in. Furniture designer Auro Foxcraft purchased four old Underground subway cars for 200 pounds each and mounted them to a rooftop, creating some unique, affordable office space.
Located atop a warehouse in Shoreditch, London, Village Underground as it’s called, only costs artists 15 pounds a week. And while the roof is a work area for artists the warehouse below is used to exhibit their work.
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Ashes of Gene Roddenberry to be Sent into Space, Never to Return
They will blast off sometime next year.
The couple's cremated remains will be sealed into specially made capsules designed to withstand the rigors of space travel. A rocket-launched spacecraft will carry the capsules, along with digitized tributes from fans. The Roddenberrys' remains — and the spacecraft — will travel ever deeper into space and will not return to earth, company spokeswoman Susan Schonfeld said.
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Next Generation Space Toilet
Leave it to Japan to fiddle with the adult diaper technology and develop the next-generation space toilet. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has teamed up with engineers from the private sector to complete the project in the next five year:
Clean and easy to use, the envisioned space toilet is designed to be worn like a diaper around the astronaut’s waist at all times. Sensors detect when the user relieves him or herself, automatically activating a rear-mounted suction unit that draws the waste away from the body through tubes into a separate container. In addition to washing and drying the wearer after each use, the next-generation space toilet will incorporate features that eliminate unwanted sound and odor.
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Christmas Eve Greetings From Space
Back on December 24, 1968 the crew of the Apollo 8 space mission were to make history for two things. They were the first human beings to circle another celestial body in space and they were also to take one of the most iconic pictures of the Earth rising behind the Moon on Christmas Eve which can be seen here on the post Alex had put up: The First Earthrise. Here you’ll hear them wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Peace to everyone.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and any other holidays out there! Have a Happy New Year! 
via – Wired
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Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy blog has selected his ten favorite astronomy pictures from the year 2008. His descriptions are as entertaining as the pictures! This one shows spiral galaxy NGC 7331, which is about 50 million light years away. Link -Thanks, Amos Kenigsberg!
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