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

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

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.”

Link -via Digg

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

“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.

Link

Link via Dark Roasted Blend

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

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

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

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by arbyn.

(image credit: NASA)

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.

Link

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."

Link – via 80beats

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

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

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

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

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sunnyspeaks.

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sunnyspeaks.

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.

link

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!

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.

link

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.

link

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.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

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.

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by lir.

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.

Link

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