Space & Tech News

Solar Storm 2018: What will be affected by the solar geomagnetic winds?​

Solar particles have been heading towards us ever since a solar flare triggered by an event known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) blasted roughly one billion tons of plasma from the Sun.

And while it could also mean the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, are possibly visible as far south as the north of Scotland, experts have warned there could be other, less welcome side effects.

Scientists have warned the geomagnetic activity could wipe out satellites, power grids and mobile phone signals.

A statement on the US-based Space Weather Prediction Centre said that during solar storms, the ionosphere, or upper Earth atmosphere, is heated up to such an extent that it could cause “extra drag” on satellites in low-earth orbit.


The Space Weather Prediction Centre said: ”The local heating also creates strong horizontal variations in the ionospheric density that can modify the path of radio signals and create errors in the positioning information provided by GPS.

“While the storms create beautiful aurora, they also can disrupt navigation systems such as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and create harmful geomagnetic induced currents (GICs) in the power grid and pipelines.”

The most powerful solar flare ever recorded was also the first one to be observed, on September 1, 1859, by British astronomer Richard Carrington.

It was visible to a naked eye (in white light), and produced stunning auroras visible as far down as Cuba and Hawaii – as well as setting telegraph systems on fire.


The flare left a trace in Greenland ice in the form of nitrates and beryllium-10, which allow its strength to be measured today.

It has since been discovered that solar flares are common occurrences. Other similar events were recorded in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2011 and 2012, 2013, and 2014.

With the modern world’s increasing reliance on technology, solar flares consequently pose bigger problems in the 21st century than they did in the 19th.

Scientists writing in the journal Space Weather have suggested that a 2001 power failure in New Zealand was caused by a solar storm.

Writing on the earthsky.org website, Deborah Byrd said: “Storms on the sun are a natural occurrence. They have been happening for billions of years.

“They are not dangerous to our human bodies on Earth’s surface. But they can affect some earthly technologies, such as power grids and satellites in orbit around Earth.

“If the effects of a particularly large solar storm were headed toward Earth, we would know several days in advance and have time to prepare.

“Scientists are beginning to become more aware of this issue, with an eye to preparing for such an event.

Catching a Jumbo squid on camera for Blue Planet II

New Delhi: After revealing that the Kepler Space Telescope will run out of fuel within several months, NASA has announced that it will be launching its next planet-hunting spacecraft on April 16.

According to reports, the spacecraft will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

On March 28, the American space agency will discuss the upcoming launch of the mission called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS is expected to find thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighborhood.

The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.

Powerful telescopes like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can then further study these exoplanets to search for important characteristics, like their atmospheric composition and whether they could support life, NASA said.

TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.

According to a NASA overview of the mission, TESS scientists expect the mission will catalogue more than 2,000 planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets.

Of these, approximately 300 are expected to be Earth-sized and super Earth-sized exoplanets, which are worlds no larger than twice the size of Earth.

China's defunct Tiangong-1 space station is careening through low-Earth orbit right now, and is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere sometime between March 30 and April 2. Most of the 9-ton (8,500 kilograms) space station will probably burn to bits in the atmosphere — but a few thousand chunks of hot, mangled debris are still likely to survive the trip and land on our planet's surface.

Your odds of being conked on the head by any of this debris are low — about one in 292 trillion, or roughly a million times less likely than hitting the Powerball jackpot. Right now, the potential impact site of the space station covers about one-third of the planet, and a huge majority of that zone is water.

However, if by some truly cosmic coincidence you do find a piece of Tiangong-1 in your neighborhood — or if some debris washes up on a shore near you — here's some advice on your best course of action: Don't touch it.

"There are two reasons why you should not approach and touch a piece of space debris," Robert Z. Pearlman, a space historian and editor of collectSPACE.com, told Live Science. "The first is it is a health risk.

Presumably, Pearlman said, the space station is carrying all manner of hazardous materials not safe for human contact, including fuel tanks with noxious fuel inside. "Also, because this vehicle is going to be ripped apart by the process of reentry, whatever does survive to the ground could have very sharp edges," Pearlman added. "It’s not something you want to have your kids run out to touch."

Finders keepers?
The second reason not to rush out and bag a chunk of Tiangong-1 is the galaxy of legal trouble it could land you in.

"According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a country’s spacecraft is their legal property until they say that it’s not their legal property,” Pearlman said. "No matter where it lands — whether it lands in the ocean and sinks to the bottom of the sea, or whether it lands on their own land or some other country’s land — it belongs to that country of origin."

Part of this legal framework is for your protection, Pearlman said; it makes China legally liable for any damage to person or property that their out-of-control space station may cause. (Again, such damage is unlikely to happen.)

However, it also means that pocketing a piece of Tiangong-1 is tantamount to theft of government property. Believe it or not, people have gone to jail for this.

"Following the Challenger explosion [in 1986], there was a gentleman in the Coast Guard who kept a piece of debris for 25 years," Pearlman said. "He was the cook onboard the ship working on the investigation. While his fellow sailors were out helping with recovering pieces, he decided to use a bucket to scoop up a tile floating in the water and keep it for himself. He put it away for 25 years and then listed it on eBay as 'the ultimate Christmas gift.'"

When NASA found out, the man was arrested. He was found guilty of theft of government property, and sentenced to two years probation. He got off easy; he could have received a $10,000 fine, 10 years in prison, or a combination of both.

Space debris can become a legally legitimate souvenir, however, once the government of origin officially concludes its investigation. Until then, it's probably best to treat any pieces of Tiangong-1 like what they are: hot, mangled wreckage.

So, what should you do if you find a piece of what you think is space debris? "The best thing to do is to contact your local authorities," Pearlman said. "They will contact the federal authorities and arrange for the proper collection and appropriate return to the Chinese government."

"All that being said," Pearlman jokes, "if a piece of debris lands in my backyard — it's mine, all mine!"

Astronomer Ed Shaya was in his office looking at data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2012 when he noticed something unusual: The light from a galaxy had quickly brightened by 10 percent. The sudden bump in light got Shaya instantly excited, but also nervous. The effect could be explained by the massive explosion of a star -- a supernova! -- or, more troublingly, a computer error.

“I just remember on that day, not knowing whether I should believe it or not,” he remembers. Rather than celebrate, he thought, “Did I make a mistake? Am I doing this all wrong?”


Stellar explosions forge and distribute materials that make up the world in which we live, and also hold clues to how fast the universe is expanding. By understanding supernovae, scientists can unlock mysteries that are key to what we are made of and the fate of our universe. But to get the full picture, scientists must observe supernovae from a variety of perspectives, especially in the first moments of the explosion. That’s really difficult -- there’s no telling when or where a supernova might happen next.

A small group of astronomers, including Shaya, realized Kepler could offer a new technique for supernova-hunting. Launched in 2009, Kepler is best known for having discovered thousands of exoplanets. But as a telescope that stares at single patches of space for long periods of time, it can capture a vast trove of other cosmic treasures --especially the kind that change rapidly or pop in and out of view, like supernovae.

“Kepler opened up a new way of looking at the sky,” said Jessie Dotson, Kepler’s project scientist, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “It was designed to do one thing really well, which was to find planets around other stars. In order to do that, it had to deliver high-precision, continuous data, which has been valuable for other areas of astronomy.”

Originally, Shaya and colleagues were looking for active galactic nuclei in their Kepler data. An active galactic nucleus is an extremely bright area at the center of a galaxy where a voracious black hole is surrounded by a disk of hot gas. They had thought about searching for supernovae, but since supernovae are such rare events, they didn’t mention it in their proposal. “It was too iffy,” Shaya said.

Unsure if the supernova signal he found was real, Shaya and his University of Maryland colleague Robert Olling spent months developing software to better calibrate Kepler data, taking into account variations in temperature and pointing of the instrument. Still, the supernova signal persisted. In fact, they found five more supernovae in their Kepler sample of more than 400 galaxies. When Olling showed one of the signals to Armin Rest, who is now an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltlimore, Rest’s jaw dropped. “I started to drool,” he said. The door had opened to a new way of tracking and understanding stellar explosions.

Today, these astronomers are part of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey, a collaboration between seven scientists in the United States, Australia and Chile looking for supernovae and active galactic nuclei to explore the physics of our universe. To date, they have found more than 20 supernovae using data from the Kepler spacecraft, including an exotic type reported by Rest in a new study in Nature Astronomy.

“We have some of the best-understood supernovae,” said Brad Tucker, astronomer at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, who is part of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey.




Why do we care about supernovae?

A longstanding mystery in astrophysics is how and why stars explode in different ways. One kind of supernova happens when a dense, dead star called a white dwarf explodes. A second kind happens when a single gigantic star nears the end of its life, and its core can no longer withstand the gravitational forces acting on it. The details of these general categories are still being worked out.

The first kind, called “type Ia” (pronounced as “one a”) is special because the intrinsic brightness of each of these supernovae is almost the same. Astronomers have used this standard property to measure the expansion of the universe and found the more distant supernovae were less bright than expected. This indicated they were farther away than scientists had thought, as the light had become stretched out over expanding space. This proved that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate and earned those researchers the Nobel Prize in 2011. The leading theory is that a mysterious force called “dark energy” is pushing everything in the universe apart from everything else, faster and faster.

But as astronomers find more and more examples of type Ia explosions, including with Kepler, they realize not all are created equal. While some of these supernovae happen when a white dwarf robs its companion of too much matter, others are the result of two white dwarfs merging. In fact, the white dwarf mergers may be more common. More supernova research with Kepler will help astronomers on a quest to find out if different type Ia mechanisms result in some supernovae being brighter than others -- which would throw a wrench into how they are used to measure the universe’s expansion.

“To get a better idea of constraining dark energy, we have to understand better how these type Ia supernovae are formed,” Rest said.




Another kind of supernova, the “core collapse” variety, happens when a massive star ends its life in an explosion. This includes “Type II” supernovae. These supernovae have a characteristic shockwave called the “shock breakout,” which was captured for the first time in optical light by Kepler. The Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey team, led by team member Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, spotted this shock breakout in 2011 Kepler data from a supernova called KSN 2011d, an explosion from a star roughly 500 times the size of our Sun. Surprisingly, the team did not find a shock breakout in a smaller type II supernova called KSN 2011a, whose star was 300 times the size of the Sun -- but instead found the supernova nestled in a layer of dust, suggesting that there is diversity in type II stellar explosions, too.

Kepler data have revealed other mysteries about supernovae. The new study led by Rest in Nature Astronomy describes a supernova from data captured by Kepler’s extended mission, called K2, that reaches its peak brightness in just a little over two days, about 10 times less than others take. It is the most extreme known example of a “fast-evolving luminous transient” (FELT) supernova. FELTs are about as bright as the type Ia variety, but rise in less than 10 days and fade in about 30. It is possible that the star spewed out a dense shell of gas about a year before the explosion, and when the supernova happened, ejected material hit the shell. The energy released in that collision would explain the quick brightening.

Why Kepler?

Telescopes on Earth offer a lot of information about exploding stars, but only over short periods of time -- and only when the Sun goes down and the sky is clear — so it’s hard to doent the “before” and “after” effects of these explosions. Kepler, on the other hand, offers astronomers the rare opportunity to monitor single patches of sky continuously for months, like a car’s dashboard camera that is always recording. In fact, the primary Kepler mission, which ran from 2009 to 2013, delivered four years of observations of the same field of view, snapping a picture about every 30 minutes. In the extended K2 mission, the telescope is holding its gaze steady for up to about three months.





With ground-based telescopes, astronomers can tell the supernova’s color and how it changes with time, which lets them figure out what chemicals are present in the explosion. The supernova’s composition helps determine the type of star that exploded. Kepler, on the other hand, reveals how and why the star explodes, and the details of how the explosion progresses. Using the two datasets together, astronomers can get fuller pictures of supernovae behavior than ever before.

Kepler mission planners revived the telescope in 2013, after the malfunction of the second of its four reaction wheels -- devices that help control the orientation of the spacecraft. In the configuration called K2, it needs to rotate every three months or so -- marking observing “campaigns.” Members of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey made the case that in the K2 mission, Kepler could still monitor supernovae and other exotic, distant astrophysical objects, in addition to exoplanets.

The possibilities were so exciting that the Kepler team devised two K2 observing campaigns especially useful for coordinating supernovae studies with ground-based telescopes. Campaign 16, which began on Dec. 7, 2017, and ended Feb. 25, 2018, included 9,000 galaxies. There are about 14,000 in Campaign 17, which is just beginning now. In both campaigns, Kepler faces in the direction of Earth so that observers on the ground can see the same patch of sky as the spacecraft. The campaigns have excited a community of researchers who can advantage of this rare coordination between Kepler and telescopes on the ground.


A recent possible sighting got astronomers riled up on Super Bowl Sunday this year, even if they weren’t into the game. On that “super” day, the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN) reported a supernova in the same nearby galaxy Kepler was monitoring. This is just one of many candidate events that scientists are excited to follow up on and perhaps use to better understand the secrets of the universe.

A few more supernovae may come from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, (TESS) which is expected to launch on April 16. In the meantime, scientists will have a lot of work ahead of them once they receive the full dataset from K2’s supernova-focused campaigns.

“It will be a treasure trove of supernova information for years to come,” Tucker said.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The latest predictions for the demise of China's Tiangong-1 see the space station smashing into Earth's atmosphere anytime between early Saturday morning, Pacific time, and late Sunday night, but the forecast has been trending toward the latter half of that window of time.

Calmer-than-expected solar activity and space weather caused predictions to shift several hours from what I initially reported here Thursday.

Of course, by now you probably know the re-entry of the Chinese space station Tiangong-1 (Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in English) is no prank, despite all the uncertainty around the time and place of its crash landing. The 9-ton spacecraft is widely believed to be out of control and on a collision course with Earth's atmosphere.

Over the past few days, the European Space Agency, the California-based Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) and other space junk watchers have begun to predict a more specific time when Tiangong-1 will likely break up into fireballs shooting across the sky, perhaps leaving some smaller bits to impact the surface.

CORDS has zeroed in on early April 1, while the US military's Joint Space Operations Center predicts an earlier re-entry at 5:52 p.m. PT Saturday, March 31, with a margin of error of 14 hours.

ESA took a pass on declaring a specific time, saying instead it expects Tiangong-1 to reenter between the evening PT Saturday and early Sunday evening.





Meanwhile, satellite watcher Marco Langbroek shared the above map that gives a better idea of where the space station could come down. It's most likely to be along the white lines. It's important to notice that Tiangong-1 is very, very likely to come down in the ocean or somewhere rural, but there are some cities with a population over 1 million in the predicted flight path; those are indicated by red dots.

Virgin Galactic successfully tested spacecraft today; first since 2014

Virgin Galactic successfully tested its rocket-powered spacecraft today for the first time since 2014
TechCrunch | by Matt Burns | April 5, 2018

Virgin Galactic took to the skies today for the first test of its rocket-powered spacecraft in over three years. The SpaceShipTwo launch platform deployed the USS Unity at a set altitude where the space craft will fire its engines for as long as 30 seconds bringing the craft to 1 1/2 the speed of sound. This was the first powered test of the Unity since the SpaceShipTwo Enterprise broke up during a test flight in late 2014.

After the accident Richard Branson’s space program reworked a lot of components but as of late ramped up testing including releasing the Unity for glide testing.

For today’s test two pilots — Mark “Forger” Stucky and Dave Mackay — were at the controls of the VSS Unity as its dropped from its mothership. Unlike the original SpaceCraftTwo vehicle, the Unity is built by The Spaceship Company, a subsidiary of Virgin Group, which is also building two more spaceships for the space company.

Virgin Galactic has yet to announce target altitude or speed for this test. This is a big test for the company and it has been relatively quiet about its existence — a stark difference from Elon Musk’s SpaceX .

Update: Richard Branson just released a bit of info minutes after the flight.

Virgin Galactic was founded and so far existed to provide a reusable platform to reach sub-orbital altitudes of about 68 miles above the Earth. It’s capable of carrying passengers who are expected to pay around $250,000 for the trip and today’s showed that the company is back on the track to be a viable space delivery system. It’s unlikely the company could have survived another fatal disaster.

In the search for life beyond Earth, scientists have turned up some very interesting possibilities and clues. On Mars, there are currently eight functioning robotic missions on the surface of or in orbit investigating the possibility of past (and possibly present) microbial life. Multiple missions are also being planned to explore moons like Titan, Europa, and Enceladus for signs of methanogenic or extreme life.

But what about Earth’s closest neighboring planet, Venus? While conditions on its surface are far too hostile for life as we know it there are those who think it could exist in its atmosphere. In a new study, a team of international researchersv addressed the possibility that microbial life could be found in Venus’ cloud tops. This study could answer an enduring mystery about Venus’ atmosphere and lead to future missions to Earth’s “Sister Planet”.

The study, titled “Venus’ Spectral Signatures and the Potential for Life in the Clouds“, recently appeared in the journal Astrobiology. The study was led by Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center and included members from NASA’s Ames Research Center, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California State Polytechnic University, the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, and the University of Zielona Góra.




For the sake of their study, the team considered the presence of UV contrasts in Venus’ upper atmosphere. These dark patches have been a mystery since they were first observered nearly a century ago by ground-based telescopes. Since then, scientists have learned that they are made up of concentrated sulfuric acid and other unknown light-absorbing particles, which the team argues could be microbial life.

As Limaye indicated in a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison press statement:

“Venus shows some episodic dark, sulfuric rich patches, with contrasts up to 30 – 40 percent in the ultraviolet, and muted in longer wavelengths. These patches persist for days, changing their shape and contrasts continuously and appear to be scale dependent.”

To illustrate the possibility that these streaks are the result of microbial life, the team considered whether or not extreme bacteria could survive in Venus’ cloud tops. For instance, the lower cloud tops of Venus (47.5 to 50.5 km above the surface) are known to have moderate temperature conditions (~60 °C; 140 °F) and pressure conditions that are similar to that of Earth at sea level (101.325 kPa).

This is far more hospitable than conditions on the surface, where temperatures reach 737 K (462 C; 860 F) and atmospheric pressure is 9200 kPa (92 times that of Earth at sea level). In addition, they considered how on Earth, bacteria has been found at altitudes as high as 41 km (25 mi). On top of that, there are many cases where extreme bacteria here on Earth that could survive in an acidic environment.


As Rakesh Mogul, a professor of biological chemistry at California State Polytechnic University and a co-author on the study, indicated, “On Earth, we know that life can thrive in very acidic conditions, can feed on carbon dioxide, and produce sulfuric acid.” This is consistent with the presence of micron-sized sulfuric acid aerosols in Venus upper atmosphere, which could be a metabolic by-product.

In addition, the team also noted that according to some models, Venus had a habitable climate with liquid water on its surface for as long as two billion years – which is much longer than what is believed to have occurred on Mars. In short, they speculate that life could have evolved on the surface of Venus and been swept up into the atmosphere, where it survived as the planet experienced its runaway greenhouse effect.

This study expands on a proposal originally made by Harold Morowitz and famed astronomer Carl Sagan in 1967 and which was investigated by a series of probes sent to Venus between 1962 and 1978. While these missions indicated that surface conditions on Venus ruled out the possibility of life, they also noted that conditions in the lower and middle portions of Venus’ atmosphere – 40 to 60 km (25 – 27 mi) altitude – did not preclude the possibility of microbial life.

For years, Limaye has been revisiting the idea of exploring Venus’ atmosphere for signs of life. The inspiration came in part from a chance meeting at a teachers workshop with Grzegorz Slowik – from the University of Zielona Góra in Poland and a co-author on the study – who told him of how bacteria on Earth have light-absorbing properties similar to the particles that make up the dark patches observed in Venus’ clouds.




While no probe that has sampled Venus’ atmosphere has been capable of distinguishing between organic and inorganic particles, the ones that make up Venus’ dark patches do have comparable dimensions to some bacteria on Earth. According to Limaye and Mogul, these patches could therefore be similar to algae blooms on Earth, consisting of bacteria that metabolizes the carbon dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere and produces sulfuric acid aerosols.

In the coming years, Venus’ atmosphere could be explored for signs of microbial life by a lighter than air aircraft. One possibility is the Venus Aerial Mobil Platform (VAMP), a concept currently being researched by Northrop Grumman (shown above). Much like lighter-than-air concepts being developed to explore Titan, this vehicle would float and fly around in Venus’ atmosphere and search the cloud tops for biosignatures.

Another possibility is NASA’s possible participation in the Russian Venera-D mission, which is currently scheduled to explore Venus during the late 2020s. This mission would consist of a Russian orbiter and lander to explore Venus’ atmosphere and surface while NASA would contribute a surface station and maneuverable aerial platform.

Another mystery that such a mission could explore, which has a direct bearing on whether or not life may still exist on Venus, is when Venus’ liquid water evaporated. In the last billion years or so, the extensive lava flows that cover the surface have either destroyed or covered up evidence of the planet’s early history. By sampling Venus’ clouds, scientists could determine when all of the planet’s liquid water disappeared, triggering the runaway greenhouse effect that turned it into a hellish landscape.

NASA is currently investigating other concepts to explore Venus’ hostile surface and atmosphere, including an analog robot and a lander that would use a Sterling engine to turn Venus’ atmosphere into a source of power. And with enough time and resources, we might even begin contemplating building floating cities in Venus atmosphere, complete with research facilities.

NASA has a lot of experience when it comes to developing supersonic aircraft. In fact, testing supersonic craft was how NASA got its start, back when it still known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Beginning with the Bell X-1, the tradition of using X-planes and other experimental aircraft continues, and has progressed to hypersonic scramjets and spaceplanes (like the X-37).

And now, for the first time in decades, NASA is looking to develop a new supersonic aircraft. But whereas previous aircraft were developed for the sake of breaking speed records, the purpose of this latest X-plane is to create a Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST). NASA hopes that this craft will provide crucial data that could enable the development of commercial supersonic air travel over land.

To that end, NASA awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company on April 2nd to build the X-plane and deliver it to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California by the end of 2021. As Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics, indicated in a recent NASA press release, this project is like revisiting the old days of NASA research.




“It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” he said. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”

In the past, supersonic commercial flights were available, for people who could afford them at least. These included the British-French Concorde (which operated until 2003) and the Russian Tupolev Tu-144 (retired in 1983). However, these craft were incapable of conducting supersonic flights over land because of how breaking the sound barrier would generate a sonic boom – which are extremely loud and potentially harmful.

As a result, current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations ban supersonic flight over land. The purpose of this latest aircraft – known as the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator – is to conduct supersonic flights that create sonic booms that are so quiet, they will be virtually unnoticeable to people on the ground. The key is how the X-plane’s uniquely-shaped hull generates supersonic shockwaves.

With conventional aircraft designs, shockwaves coalesce as they expand away from the airplane’s nose and tail, resulting in two distinct sonic booms. In contrast, the X-plane’s hull design sends shockwaves away from the aircraft in a way that prevents them from coming together. Instead, much weaker shockwaves are sent to the ground that would be heard as a series of soft thumps.



Since the 1960s, NASA has been testing the idea using vehicles like the F-5E Tiger II fighter jet. This aircraft, which flew test flights in 2003-2004 as part of NASA’s Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstration program, had a uniquely-shaped nose and demonstrated that boom-reducing theory was sound. More recent flight testing, wind-tunnel testings, and advanced computer simulations tools have also indicated that the technology will work.

As Peter Coen, NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology project manager, stated:

“We’ve reached this important milestone only because of the work NASA has led with its many partners from other government agencies, the aerospace industry and forward-thinking academic institutions everywhere.”

The X-plane’s configuration will be based on a QueSST design that Lockheed Martin developed in 2016 in partnership with NASA, and which completed testing in a wind tunnel at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in 2017 . The proposed aircraft will measure 28.65 meters (94 feet) long, have a wingspan of about 9 meters (29.5 feet), and have a takeoff weight of 14,650 kg (32,300 lbs).

Based on the company’s design, the X-plane will be powered by a single General Electric F414 engine, the same used by F/A-18E/F fighters. It will be flown by a single pilot and have a top speed of Mach 1.5 (1590 km; 990 mph) and a speed of Mach 1.42 (1513 km; 940 mph) at a cruising altitude of 16764 meters (55,000 feet).



As Shin indicated, the development of the X-plan is a joint effort involving all of NASA’s aeronautics research centers:

“There are so many people at NASA who have put in their very best efforts to get us to this point. Thanks to their work so far and the work to come, we will be able to use this X-plane to generate the scientifically collected community response data critical to changing the current rules to transforming aviation!”

The program is divided into three phases which are tentatively scheduled to run from 2019 to 2025. Phase One, which will run from 2019 to 2021, will consist of a critical design review in preparation for construction. If successful, construction will begin at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Work‘s facility in Palmdale, followed by a series of test flights and culminating with the delivery of the craft to NASA.

Phase Two, scheduled to begin in 2022, will consist of NASA flying the X-plane in the supersonic test range over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California to see if it is safe for operations in the National Airspace System. Phase Three, running from 2023 to 2025, will consist of the first community response test flights (staged from Armstrong Air Force Base) followed by further test flights over four to six U.S. cities.

The data gathered from these community response tests will then be delivered to the FAA and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) – currently targeted for delivery in 2025 – so they can adopt new rules based on perceived sound levels. If the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator should prove to be effective, commercial supersonic flights over land may finally become feasible.

And be sure to enjoy this video of the X-plane’s development, courtesy of NASA:

61 years of progress

Seen here is the Norwich City Council’s first computer, being delivered to the City Treasurer’s Department in Bethel Street, Norwich in 1957. The City of Norwich, and its forward-thinking Treasurer, Mr A.J. Barnard, were pioneers in the application of computer technology to the work of UK local authorities and businesses. In 1953-4, Mr Barnard and his team began looking for an electronic system to handle its rates and payroll. They began discussions with Elliott Brothers of London in 1955, and the City Council ordered the first Elliott 405 computer from them in January 1956. It was delivered to City Hall in February 1957 and became operational in April 1957.



Yeah, technology has definitely changed over the years that's for sure.

Tour of the Moon in 4K

Ever dreamed of visiting the moon? You can with the 4K video below all made possible by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

From Space.com:

Images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) are not only helping planners with future human missions to the moon, but they are also revealing new information about the moon's evolution and structure.

A new NASA video, posted on YouTube, features more than half a dozen locations of interest in stunning 4K resolution, much of it courtesy of LRO data. NASA also highlighted the individual sites in a Tumblr post that delves deeper into their geology, morphology and significance.

LRO has been circling the moon since 2009 and has made a range of discoveries at Earth's closest large celestial neighbor. [More Amazing Moon Photos from NASA's LRO]

Click to expand...

Step outside on a clear night, and you can be sure of something our ancestors could only imagine: Every star you see likely plays host to at least one planet.

The worlds orbiting other stars are called “exoplanets,” and they come in a wide variety of sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets about as big around as Earth or Mars. They can be hot enough to boil metal or locked in deep freeze. They can orbit their stars so tightly that a “year” lasts only a few days; they can orbit two suns at once. Some exoplanets are sunless rogues, wandering through the galaxy in permanent darkness.

That galaxy, the Milky Way, is the thick stream of stars that cuts across the sky on the darkest, clearest nights. Its spiraling expanse probably contains about 400 billion stars, our Sun among them. And if each of those stars has not just one planet, but, like ours, a whole system of them, then the number of planets in the galaxy is truly astronomical: We’re already heading into the trillions.




We humans have been speculating about such possibilities for thousands of years, but ours is the first generation to know, with certainty, that exoplanets are really out there. In fact, way out there. Our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, was recently found to possess at least one planet – probably a rocky one. It’s 4.5 light-years away – more than 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers). The bulk of exoplanets found so far are hundreds or thousands of light-years away.

The bad news: As yet we have no way to reach them, and won’t be leaving footprints on them anytime soon. The good news: We can look in on them, take their temperatures, taste their atmospheres and, perhaps one day soon, detect signs of life that might be hidden in pixels of light captured from these dim, distant worlds.

The first exoplanet to burst upon the world stage was 51 Pegasi b, a “hot Jupiter” 50 light-years away that is locked in a four-day orbit around its star. The watershed year was 1995. All of a sudden, exoplanets were a thing.



But a few hints had already emerged. A planet now known as Tadmor was detected in 1988, though the discovery was withdrawn in 1992. Ten years later, more and better data showed definitively that it was really there after all.

And a system of three “pulsar planets” also had been detected, beginning in 1992. These planets orbit a pulsar some 2,300 light-years away. Pulsars are the high-density, rapidly spinning corpses of dead stars, raking any planets in orbit around them with searing lances of radiation.

Now we live in a universe of exoplanets. The count of confirmed planets is 3,700, and rising. That’s from only a small sampling of the galaxy as a whole. The count could rise to the tens of thousands within a decade, as we increase the number, and observing power, of robotic telescopes lofted into space.

How did we get here?

We’re standing on a precipice of scientific history. The era of early exploration, and the first confirmed exoplanet detections, is giving way to the next phase: sharper and more sophisticated telescopes, in space and on the ground. They will go broad but also drill down. Some will be tasked with taking an ever more precise population census of these far-off worlds, nailing down their many sizes and types. Others will make a closer inspection of individual planets, their atmospheres, and their potential to harbor some form of life.

Direct imaging of exoplanets – that is, actual pictures – will play an increasingly larger role, though we’ve arrived at our present state of knowledge mostly through indirect means. The two main methods rely on wobbles and shadows. The “wobble” method, called radial velocity, watches for the telltale jitters of stars as they are pulled back and forth by the gravitational tugs of an orbiting planet. The size of the wobble reveals the “weight,” or mass, of the planet.



This method produced the very first confirmed exoplanet detections, including 51 Peg in 1995, discovered by astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. Ground telescopes using the radial velocity method have discovered nearly 700 planets so far.

But the vast majority of exoplanets have been found by searching for shadows: the incredibly tiny dip in the light from a star when a planet crosses its face. Astronomers call this crossing a “transit.”

The size of the dip in starlight reveals how big around the transiting planet is. Unsurprisingly, this search for planetary shadows is known as the transit method.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has found nearly 2,700 confirmed exoplanets this way. Now in its “K2” mission, Kepler is still discovering new planets, though its fuel is expected to run out soon.

Each method has its pluses and minuses. Wobble detections provide the mass of the planet, but give no information about the planet’s girth, or diameter. Transit detections reveal the diameter but not the mass.

But when multiple methods are used together, we can learn the vital statistics of whole planetary systems – without ever directly imaging the planets themselves. The best example so far is the TRAPPIST-1 system about 40 light-years away, where seven roughly Earth-sized planets orbit a small, red star.

The TRAPPIST-1 planets have been examined with ground and space telescopes. The space-based studies revealed not only their diameters, but the subtle gravitational influence these seven closely packed planets have upon each other; from this, scientists determined each planet’s mass.

So now we know their masses and their diameters. We also know how much of the energy radiated by their star strikes these planets’ surfaces, allowing scientists to estimate their temperatures. We can even make reasonable estimates of the light level, and guess at the color of the sky, if you were standing on one of them. And while much remains unknown about these seven worlds, including whether they possess atmospheres or oceans, ice sheets or glaciers, it’s become the best-known solar system apart from our own.

Where are we going?

The next generation of space telescopes is upon us. First up is the launch of TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. This extraordinary instrument will take a nearly full-sky survey of the closer, brighter stars to look for transiting planets. Kepler, the past master of transits, will be passing the torch of discovery to TESS.

TESS, in turn, will reveal the best candidates for a closer look with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently schedule to launch in 2020. The Webb telescope, deploying a giant, segmented, light-collecting mirror that will ride on a shingle-like platform, is designed to capture light directly from the planets themselves. The light then can be split into a multi-colored spectrum, a kind of bar code showing which gases are present in the planet’s atmosphere. Webb’s targets might include “super Earths,” or planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune – some that could be rocky planets like super-sized versions of our own.




Little is known about these big planets, including whether some might be suitable for life. If we’re very lucky, perhaps one of them will show signs of oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane in its atmosphere. Such a mix of gases would remind us strongly of our own atmosphere, possibly indicating the presence of life.

But hunting for Earth-like atmospheres on Earth-sized exoplanets will probably have to wait for a future generation of even more powerful space probes in the 2020s or 2030s.

Thanks to the Kepler telescope’s statistical survey, we know the stars above are rich with planetary companions. And as we stare up at the night sky, we can be sure not only of a vast multitude of exoplanet neighbors, but of something else: The adventure is just beginning.

Pizza Hut has created a way to order pizza with shoes

Pizza Hut’s newest shoes, the “Pie Tops II,” can order pizza and pause your DVR



There is no better place to cook up tech innovation than through pizza delivery.

In short order, we've gone from calling in orders by telephone (which feels prehistoric now), to sending them online, to texting them, to filling them via emoji.

Pizza Hut has concocted a fresh way to get your favorite pie to your location: Your sneakers.

For the second straight year, the pizza chain rolled out Pie Tops, a marketing stunt featuring a pair of high-top basketball sneakers capable to sending an order with the press of a button. Unlike last year, when Pizza Hut gave away a handful of Pie Tops, 50 pairs of the sneakers will be available for purchase online.

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Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles
Damian Carrington in The Guardian:


Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.

The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first*bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”

The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.

Typewriter



Washington-based artist Tyree Callahan transformed and old 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter into a functional painting device he calls a Chromatic Typewriter. He did it by replacing the ink pads of the typewriter with coloured paint pads and the letters with colour markers.