Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An experiment designed by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and carried into space on a NASA sounding rocket has detected a diffuse cosmic glow that appears to represent more infrared light than is produced by the known galaxies in the universe, officials at the US space agency announced on Thursday.
The researchers detected the surplus of infrared light in the dark space between galaxies, and they believe that the glow is from orphaned stars that had been ejected from galaxies. Furthermore, the Caltech researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Science, could redefine the scientific definition of a galaxy to indicate that they do not have set boundaries but are vast and interconnected.
The observations were obtained from NASA’s Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) rocket, and according to the agency, they are helping to settle an ongoing debate about whether this background infrared light (which had previously been detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope) originated from streams of far-flung stars that are too distant to be observed individually, or if it comes from the first galaxies to form in the universe.
[ Watch the Video: NASA Rocket Experiment Finds Flood Of Cosmic Light ]
In the new study, Caltech physics professor Jamie Bock, senior postdoctoral fellow Michael Zemcov and their colleagues report that the best explanation is that the cosmic light came from stars that had been ejected from their parent galaxies and flung out into space as those galaxies collided and merged with other galaxies. These previously undetected stars could actually reside in what was thought to be dark spaces between galaxies, they added.
“We think stars are being scattered out into space during galaxy collisions,” Zemcov, lead author of the study and an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “While we have previously observed cases where stars are flung from galaxies in a tidal stream, our new measurement implies this process is widespread.”

Image Above: This graphic illustrates how CIBER team measures a diffuse glow of infrared light filling the spaces between galaxies. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Bock, who is the principal investigator on the CIBER project (which originated at Caltech) as well as a senior research scientist at JPL, added that even though the stars cannot be seen individually, the total combined light that they produce is “about equal to the background light we get from counting up individual galaxies.”
Previously, Spitzer observed a patchy pattern of infrared light known as the cosmic infrared background. However, the space telescope only looks at the universe in longer wavelengths. Using suborbital sounding rockets, CIBER was able to capture wide-field pictures of the cosmic infrared background at two infrared wavelengths shorter than Spitzer. Due to the glow of Earth’s atmosphere at those wavelengths, the measurements had to be done from space.
During the CIBER flights, the cameras used for the experiment were launched into space, capturing images for approximately seven minutes before transmitting the data back to Earth. Once the researchers received that data, they masked out galaxies and bright stars, then eliminated light coming from any other local sources. Ultimately, they wound up with a map showing fluctuations in the remaining infrared background light, according to NASA.
The splotches that remained were far larger than individual galaxies, and the brightness of their fluctuations allowed the study authors to measure the total amount of background light. To their surprise, their maps revealed a tremendous excess of light beyond that produced by galaxies. Furthermore, the CIBER data found that the infrared background light has a blue spectrum, meaning that it becomes brighter when viewed at shorter wavelengths.
“This is evidence the light comes from a previously undetected population of stars between galaxies. Light from the first galaxies would give a spectrum of colors that is redder than what was seen,” NASA explained. “Future experiments can test whether stray stars are indeed the source of the infrared cosmic glow. If the stars were tossed out from their parent galaxies, they should still be located in the same vicinity.”
“The CIBER team is working on better measurements using more infrared colors to learn how the stripping of stars happened over cosmic history,” the agency added. Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Seoul National University, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), and other US and international universities also took part in the study.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The first images captured with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array’s (ALMA) new high-resolution capabilities have given researchers their best look ever at the process of planet formation around an infant star, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have announced.
In order to obtain the revolutionary new observations, researchers focused ALMA at a young, Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years away known as HL Tauri (HL Tau for short). A planet-forming disk surrounds HL Tau, the researchers noted, and the new images have shown the material left over from star birth in unprecedented detail.
For instance, ALMA has detected previously unseen features in the system, including multiple concentric rings separated by clearly defined gaps. That discovery suggests that, despite the relatively young age of the star, the planetary formation process is already well underway.
“These features are almost certainly the result of young planet-like bodies that are being formed in the disk,” ALMA Deputy Director Stuartt Corder explained in a statement Thursday. “This is surprising since HL Tau is no more than a million years old and such young stars are not expected to have large planetary bodies capable of producing the structures we see in this image.”
“When we first saw this image we were astounded at the spectacular level of detail. HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets. This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation,” added Catherine Vlahakis, ALMA Deputy Program Scientist and Lead Program Scientist for the ALMA Long Baseline Campaign.
According to the researchers, all stars are believed to form within gas and dust clouds that collapse under gravity, and over time, those particles begin to stick together and grow into increasingly larger rocks and pebbles. Eventually, those objects settle into a thin protoplanetary disk in which asteroids, comets, and planets form.
After those planetary bodies acquire enough mass, they cause dramatic changes to the structure of their natal disk, causing rings and gaps to form as the planets sweep debris, dust and gas out of their orbits and into more restricted zones. Thanks to the new images captured by ALMA, these features can now be observed in unprecedented detail, providing astronomers with the clearest-ever pictures of the planetary genesis process.
“The logistics and infrastructure required to place antennas at such distant locations required an unprecedented coordinated effort by an expert international team of engineers and scientists,” ALMA Director Pierre Cox said. “These long baselines fulfill one of ALMA’s major objectives and mark an impressive technological, scientific and engineering milestone.”
“This is truly one of the most remarkable images ever seen at these wavelengths,” added NRAO astronomer Crystal Brogan. “The level of detail is so exquisite that it’s even more impressive than many optical images. The fact that we can see planets being born will help us understand not only how planets form around other stars but also the origin of our own Solar System.”
The new high-resolution capabilities which allowed the new images to be captured were achieved by spacing ALMA’s antennas up to 15 km (almost 10 miles) apart, the researchers said. Using this baseline at millimeter wavelengths enabled a resolution of 35 milliarcseconds, which is roughly equal to being able to see a penny from more than 110 km (68 miles) away, and astronomers ultimately plan to expand the baseline to 16 km for even clearer images.
Image 2 (below): This is a composite image of the young star HL Tauri and its surroundings using data from ALMA (enlarged in box at upper right) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (rest of the picture). This is the first ALMA image where the image sharpness exceeds that normally attained with Hubble. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
VIDEOS:
> ESOcast 69: Revolutionary ALMA Image Reveals Planetary Genesis
> Watch the Video: Zooming In On The Location Of HL Tauri
> Artist’s Impression Of The Disc Around A Young Star
> Artist’s 3D Impression Of The Disc Around The Young Star HL Tauri
—–
GET PRIMED! Join Amazon Prime – Watch Over 40,000 Movies & TV Shows Anytime – Start Free Trial Now
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
None of us can take an actual guided tour around the International Space Station (ISS), but a newly-released NASA video offers the next best thing – a virtual look around the facility. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, serving as tour guide for the journey, traveled about 450 miles around the Earth in the 90 seconds it took him to float around 200 feet from one end to the other.

On the video, which Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing calls “hypnotic,” Weisman starts in the back of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) at the very rear of the ISS, and as he begins floating forward, he promises to “pass some fun things on the way.”
Along the way he greets cosmonauts Yelena Serova and Maxim Surayev and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, then travels through the space station’s Functional Cargo Block (FCB) and over the crew quarters before reaching the front end of the ISS.
As Time.com’s Alexandra Sifferlin pointed out, this isn’t the first video tour of the space station. During Expedition 31 back in 2012, astronaut Don Pettit shot footage of his travels through the ISS using a 3D camera, pointing the cameras outside the station portals to give viewers a look at a docked Russian Soyuz capsule and the station’s many trusses and solar panels.
NASA also posted Pettit’s video on YouTube earlier this week, noting that red-blue stereoscopic 3D vision glasses were required to view the footage in three-dimensions. Unlike Weisman’s tour through the facility, Pettit does not speak throughout his film. Rather, it is a series of different scenes from throughout the space station set to a musical score – but what incredible shots they are!

Over the summer, Weisman, his NASA colleague Steve Swanson, and Alexander Gerst of the ESA conducted an experiment using a 3D camera. In order to analyze the phenomenon of water surface tension in the ISS’s microgravity environment, the trio of crew members “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water roughly the same size as a softball, then used another 3D camera to record the results.

Footage from both the submerged camera and external ones are included in a pair of videos posted on YouTube Monday by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and according to Mariella Moon of Engadget, it looks like NASA is planning to release additional 3D videos in the near future, as the cameras used to take them tend to fare better while in space.
“See, the radiation out there affects ordinary cams, burning out hundreds to thousands of pixels – enough for them to need replacing every 8 to 12 months,” she explained in an article Tuesday. “The astronauts noticed, however, that the first $21,000 3D camera brought aboard the station in 2011 remained largely the same through the years.”
In a statement released earlier this week, NASA explained that the 3D videos “will give viewers a more realistic representation of living and working on the International Space Station and other fascinating images from the nation’s space program.” The space agency cited the iconic films of the Apollo and Mercury astronauts floating in orbit and walking on the surface of the moon as inspiration for the growing playlist of videos on its YouTube playlist.
“Delivering images from these new and exciting locations is how we share our accomplishments with the world,” explained Rodney Grubbs, program manager for NASA’s Imagery Experts Program at Marshall. “As the industry made advances in technology, from film to digital cameras and then cameras with better resolutions, we all benefited by seeing sharper and cleaner images from space.”
“Shooting in 3-D hasn’t changed much in 50 or 60 years,” he added. “The camera still has two distinct left and right lenses, but now we record to two separate flash memory cards, one for the left camera eye and one for the right. We don’t have to transmit taped footage and re-record it here. We can simply download an exact copy of those digital files to the ground, merge them in our editing software here, and create the same 3D image they had in orbit.”
While NASA did note that standard two-dimensional versions of both the tour video and the water surface tension video were also available, it did not drop any hints as to when the public might expect the next wave of 3D videos to be released.
“Scientists and engineers also are interested in this investigation of 3-D cameras for possible future use to determine proximity in space and for rendezvous and docking operations,” the agency said. “In the meantime, Grubbs and his team are now planning to send up a camera that could shoot nearly six times the resolution of an HD camera, encouraging the crew to record more video to share with the public.”
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Hundreds of people in the eastern US recently reported seeing what is being described as three unique fireball events on Monday evening, including one which was apparently man-made.
According to Robert Lundsford of the American Meteor Society, the organization had received more than 700 reports of witnesses seeing a bright fireball from Georgia and South Carolina and as far north as Ohio and Michigan. This event took place around 6:23pm EST on Monday, November 3, 2014, and many of those reporting the fireball told the society that it was vivid green in color.
That fireball was preceded earlier in the day by one that appeared over Arkansas at 9:30am CST and followed by one spotted over Chicago at about 6:30 p.m. CST, Space.com’s Calla Cofield reported on Wednesday. The Arkansas fireball was believed to be genuine, and was also spotted over Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama, according to Lundsford, but the Chicago one was a different story – it was apparently a promotional stunt by the Red Bull energy drink company.

As Chicago Tribune reporter Quinn Ford wrote on Tuesday, the so-called “bright white-yellowish object with a tail” that was reported by at least nine people was actually three skydiving members of the Red Bull Air Force that had flares shooting from their shoes as they “drifted toward North Avenue Beach.” The company said the event was staged to promote the “Red Bull Art of Can” exhibit in Millennium Park.
Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society, told Ford that the organization initially thought the Chicago object was a meteor or a piece of “space junk” burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, but eventually he and his colleagues realized that there would have been more eyewitnesses to such an event. The other two events, however, were definitely fireballs and not marketing stunts, Hankey told the Chicago Tribune.
As Josh Barrett of SpaceAlabama.com and WAAY-TV in Huntsville explained, the Earth is currently traveling through a field of debris left over from the comet Encke, which causes the Taurid meteor shower. The Taurids, he said, are characteristically made up of larger comet pieces, meaning they burn larger and brighter as they travel throughout the sky at speeds of up to 70,000 miles an hour.
“Last night was a very busy evening as far as fireballs are concerned,” Bill Cooke, the head of the Marshall Space Flight Center’s Meteoroid Environments Office, told SpaceAlabama.com. Cooke told Barrett that this was “normal activity” and that “nothing unusual” was going on. The first meteors in the northern Taurid shower were witnessed on October 31, Cooke told Space.com, and are expected to last through the weekend.
Cooke also told Cofield that since the Arkansas fireball traveled from east to west, it was most likely part of the Taurids. The 6:22pm EST fireball, on the other hand, would not have been part of the meteor shower because it was traveling from west to east. The latter meteor was approximately as bright as a quarter moon and was most likely as big as a baseball or softball, while the other was about as bright as a crescent or quarter moon, he added.
—–
Keep an eye on the cosmos with Telescopes from Amazon.com
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
NASA’s Curiosity rover team announced a major milestone on Tuesday, as samples obtained from the base of Mount Sharp in late September provided the mission’s first confirmation of a mineral previously mapped from orbit.
The samples, collected by Curiosity from a target known as Confidence Hills within the Pahrump Hills rock outcrop, was found by the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument to contain far more hematite than any rock or soil sample analyzed to date during the two-year-old mission, the US space agency explained.
Hematite is an iron-oxide mineral which reveals clues about the ancient environmental conditions that were present when it formed. In 2010, prior to the selection of Curiosity’s landing site, instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided evidence of the mineral in the geological unit that includes Pahrump Hills.
“This connects us with the mineral identifications from orbit, which can now help guide our investigations as we climb the slope and test hypotheses derived from the orbital mapping,” Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, explained in a statement.

Image Above: Signature of Hematite in ‘Confidence Hills’ Martian Rock. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“We’ve reached the part of the crater where we have the mineralogical information that was important in selection of Gale Crater as the landing site,” added Curiosity science team member Ralph Milliken, an assistant professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and head of the team that identified minerals based on observations of Mount Sharp using the orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).
“We’re now on a path where the orbital data can help us predict what minerals we’ll find and make good choices about where to drill,” Milliken noted. “Analyses like these will help us place rover-scale observations into the broader geologic history of Gale that we see from orbital data.”
Rocks previously analyzed by Curiosity were found to contain magnetite and other iron-oxide minerals, according to NASA, and one way to form hematite is to put magnetite in oxidizing conditions. The most recent sample was found to contain approximately eight percent hematite and four percent magnetite, while samples collected en route to Mount Sharp were found to contain a maximum of one percent hematite and far larger amounts of magnetite.
CheMin Deputy Principal Investigator David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said that there was “more oxidation involved in the new sample,” and even though it was only partially oxidized, the preservation of magnetite and olivine indicates a gradient of oxidation levels. That gradient, NASA officials explained, could have provided a source of chemical energy for microbes.
The Pahrump Hills outcrop where the most recent samples were found include several layers uphill from its lowest tier, which is where the Confidence Hills sample was obtained from. These layers vary in texture, and the Curiosity team believes that they could also vary in concentrations of hematite and other minerals. The NASA researchers are now using the rover to survey the outcrop and assess possible targets for close inspection and drilling.
“The mission may spend weeks to months at Pahrump Hills before proceeding farther up the stack of geological layers forming Mount Sharp,” the agency said. “Those higher layers include an erosion-resistant band of rock higher on Mount Sharp with such a strong orbital signature of hematite, it is called ‘Hematite Ridge.’ The target drilled at Pahrump Hills is much softer and more deeply eroded than Hematite Ridge.”
—–
Shop Amazon.com – LEGO Ideas NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover 21104
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An unusual object located at the center of the Milky Way is most likely not a hydrogen gas cloud headed towards the galaxy’s black hole, but a pair of binary stars that had been orbiting it together before merging into a single, extremely large star, researchers from the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy have discovered.
Writing in Monday’s edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, UCLA physics and astronomy professor Andrea Ghez and her colleagues reached the conclusion after studying the object, known as G2, during its closest approach to the black hole this summer. Their observations, they said, were designed to test the theory that G2 was a gas cloud with a mass of approximately three Earth masses.
In actuality, the authors determined that the movement of the now-combined binary stars was choreographed by the black hole’s powerful gravitational field. Had it been a hydrogen cloud, they noted, it likely would have been torn apart by the black hole, and the resulting “celestial fireworks” would have had a dramatic impact on the black hole, which was formed out of the collapse of matter and is so dense that nothing can escape its gravitational pull.
“G2 survived and continued happily on its orbit; a simple gas cloud would not have done that,” Professor Ghez, who is also the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics at UCLA and a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, explained in a statement Monday. “G2 was basically unaffected by the black hole. There were no fireworks.”
Black holes cannot be observed directly, as not even light can escape their gravity, but their influence on nearby stars can be used to analyze them, according to the researchers. Ghez, who has studied thousands of stars in the neighborhood of the supermassive black hole, said that G2 appears to be one of an emerging class of stars located near the black hole that are created because the powerful gravity causes binary stars to merge into one.
[ Listen to the Podcast: Supermassive Black Holes – With Guest Dr. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann ]
The professor noted that massive stars found in the Milky Way typically come in pairs, and that the star at the center of the new study suffered an abrasion to its outer layer but should be fine on the whole. The research was conducted at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which is home to the world’s two largest optical and infrared telescopes.
When two binary stars near the black hole combine, the resulting star continues to expand for more than a period of one million years before settling back down, Ghez explained. She noted that this phenomenon “may be happening more than we thought. The stars at the center of the galaxy are massive and mostly binaries. It’s possible that many of the stars we’ve been watching and not understanding may be the end product of mergers that are calm now.”
Based on their observations, the team behind this new study determined that G2 appears to currently be in the inflated stage, and is undergoing something Ghez refers to as “spaghetti-fication,” a phenomenon that takes place near black holes in which large objects become elongated. In addition, the gas at G2’s surface is being heated by surrounding stars, creating a massive cloud of gas and dust that has enveloped most of the massive star.
The researchers said they would have been unable to successfully complete their research without the 10-meter telescopes at the Keck Observatory, which use adaptive optics in order to correct the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and give the astronomers a better look at the space surrounding the supermassive black hole.
“We are seeing phenomena about black holes that you can’t watch anywhere else in the universe. We are starting to understand the physics of black holes in a way that has never been possible before,” Ghez explained. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine Chair in Astrophysics, the Preston Family Graduate Student Fellowship and the Janet Marott Student Travel Awards.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
With just eight days remaining until Rosetta’s Philae lander is scheduled to touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P/C-G), the actual landing site has been rechristened from Site J to Agilkia, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Tuesday.
According to the agency, the new moniker is in honor of Agilkia Island, an island located on the Nile River in southern Egypt. A complex of ancient Egyptian buildings, including the Temple of Isis, was relocated to Agilkia from the island of Philae when the latter was flooded during the building of the Aswan dams last century, the ESA explained.
“The name was selected by a jury comprising members of the Philae Lander Steering Committee” as part of a contest sponsored by the ESA and the German, French and Italian space agencies that ran from October 16-22, the group added. “Agilkia was one of the most popular entries – it was proposed by over 150 participants.”
The overall winner of that competition was Alexandre Brouste of France, and as a result, he will be invited to ESA’s Space Operations Control Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to follow the landing live on November 12. More than 8,000 entries from 135 countries were submitted during the one-week duration of the contest, the agency said.
Steering Committee chairman Felix Huber of the DLR German Aerospace Center said the decision was “very tough… We received so many good suggestions on how to name Site J, and we were delighted with such an enthusiastic response from all over the world. We wish to thank all participants for sharing their great ideas with us.”
“Participants proposed names in a variety of languages, both ancient and modern; some were even in Esperanto. There were also some interesting acronyms, curious sequences of digits, and onomatopoeic words,” the ESA added. “The entries covered a tremendous range of themes, from abstract concepts to the names of places on Earth.”
As with the winning entry, the organization noted that several of the suggestions built upon the Egyptian origins of the names given to the Rosetta orbiter and Philae lander – which themselves were so named in recognition of the work accomplished in decoding the sacred writing system used by ancient Egyptians, hieroglyphics.
Several of the names referred back to the history of exploration on Earth, while others invoked mythological names such as the gods and goddesses of water, fertility, life and creation worshipped by ancient cultures, the ESA said. Other names honored the work of space exploration pioneers, comet researchers or science fiction authors.
“Fictional characters from films, television shows, literary and musical works were also proposed. Some even referred to the virtual astronauts of the Kerbal Space Program, a popular online space exploration game,” the agency said. Other suggestions referenced the cooperative aspects of the many European countries involved in the mission, its technological and scientific breakthroughs, or tongue-in-cheek references to its unusual appearance.
In the end, however, Agilkia won out, and according to ESA Rosetta mission manager Fred Jansen, “it couldn’t be a more appropriate name. The relocation of the temples of Philae Island to Agilkia Island was an ambitious technical endeavor performed in the 1960s and 1970s to preserve an archaeological record of our ancient history.”
“In eight days’ time, Philae will be deployed from the orbiter onto Agilkia. On 12 November, we’ll be attempting a unique comet landing, an even more ambitious endeavor to unlock secrets of our most remote origins,” he added. On that day, Rosetta is scheduled to release Philae at 08:35 GMT/09:35 CET. The landing is expected to take place seven hours later, and confirmation is anticipated at approximately 16:00 GMT/17:00 CET, the ESA noted.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The deep belt-like grooves that encircle Vesta’s equator were likely caused by a massive impact on the south pole of the asteroid, according to research currently available online and scheduled for publication in the February 2015 edition of the journal Icarus.
As part of the study, senior author Peter Schultz, a professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University, and his colleagues used computer simulations and an ultra-high-speed cannon at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California to discovered the processes through which those deep surface grooves formed.
“Vesta got hammered. The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior,” Schultz, who was joined on the research project by former Brown graduate student and current Johns Hopkins University researcher Angela Stickle and D.A Crawford of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said in a statement Monday.
The study authors suggest that the Rheasilvia basin on the asteroid’s south pole was created by the impact of an object that collided with it at an angle instead of straight on. While they said the collision would have been a glancing blow, it still would have done enough damage to cause rocks deep within Vesta’s interior to crack and crumble seconds after impact, with major faults forming the canyons near its equator just minutes later.
“As soon as Pete and I saw the images coming down from the Dawn mission at Vesta, we were really excited,” explained Stickle. “The large fractures looked just like things we saw in our experiments. So we decided to look into them in more detail, and run the models, and we found really interesting relationships.”

During the study, the research team used the Ames Vertical Gun Range, a cannon with a 14-foot barrel that is used to simulate collisions on celestial bodies. They explained that the NASA instrument uses a combination of gunpowder and compressed hydrogen gas to launch projectiles at blinding speed, up to 16,000 miles per hour.
Using the Vertical Gun Range, Schultz and his team launched small projectiles at softball-sized spheres built from an acrylic material known as PMMA, which is usually clear but turns opaque at high stress points upon impact. By analyzing the impacts using special high-speed cameras capable of capturing one million shots per second, the study authors were able to witness how collision-related stress propagated through the material.
Their experiments revealed that the damage starts from the impact point, but quickly causes failure patterns to form inside the sphere, opposite the region where the actual collision took place. Those failures, the researchers said, grow inwards toward the center of the sphere, then spread outwards toward the edges.
“The researchers showed that the outward-blooming ‘rosette’ of damage extending to the surface is responsible for the troughs that form a belt around Vesta’s equator,” Brown’s Kevin Stacey explained. “The results answer some questions about Vesta’s belt that had long been puzzling. Chief among them is the orientation of the belt with respect to the crater. The belt’s angle isn’t exactly what would be expected if it were caused by the Rheasilvia impact.”
“These new experiments suggest that the crooked belt is the result of the angle of impact,” Stacey added. “An oblique impact causes the damage plane to be tilted with respect the crater. The orientation of Vesta’s belt sheds light on the nature of the impact. The researchers conclude that the object that created Rheasilvia came in at an angle less than 40 degrees, traveling at about 11,000 miles per hour.”
Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the solar system, recently played a key role in research which revealed water has existed on Earth longer than previously believed. In that study, scientists compared meteorite samples from the asteroid to ancient, unaltered meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites, and found that they had matching hydrogen isotope ratios, and thus matched the chemical fingerprints of Earth’s hydrogen.
—–
Join Amazon Student – FREE Two-Day Shipping for College Students
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A feature designed to slow down Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo for re-entry was deployed prematurely, potentially playing a role in the Friday crash that killed one of the vehicle’s pilots, investigators revealed on Sunday.
According to Laura Mandaro of USA Today, National Transportation Safety Board’s Acting Chairman Christopher Hart revealed during a media briefing that one of the pilots unlocked a lever designed to move the aircraft into its unique “feathered” position too soon, causing it to be detached from its mothership ahead of schedule.
Hart said that, based on a preliminary review of the telemetry and optical data from the test flight, it was concluded that the “feather” parameters on the craft switched from locked to unlocked approximately nine seconds into the flight. The slow-down process requires a two-step process, he noted, and while the lever was manually unlocked, Mandaro reported that the craft moved into a feathering position on its own roughly 11 seconds into the voyage.
Despite the discovery, however, Hart said that it was too soon to confirm any possible cause of the crash, according to BBC News. Despite media speculation that the fuel tanks or engines might have been at fault, Hart said that both were found intact and that neither showed any signs that they were breached. The NTSB noted that nearly all of SpaceShipTwo’s parts have been recovered, the British news agency said, but they also cautioned that the probe into the incident was still far from over.
“Investigators have warned it could take up to a year for the full report into the crash to be completed,” Guardian reporters Juliette Garside, Ed Pilkington and Mark Tran wrote on Monday. They added that the NTSB was looking at pilot error and mechanical failure as possible causes, and that the debris suggested the craft broke apart while in flight.
SpaceShipTwo experienced a “serious anomaly” during a test flight on Friday before crashing into California’s Mojave Desert. The crash killed one pilot, 39-year-old Michael Alsbury, and injured the other, 43-year-old Peter Siebold, both of whom were employed by Virgin Galactic partner Scaled Composites.
BBC News said that Alsbury, who was the co-pilot on Friday’s mission, was a pilot with 15 years of experience who had first flown SpaceShipTwo in 2010. On Saturday, Scaled Composites said that Siebold, the company’s Director of Flight Operations, was “alert and talking with his family and doctors.”
In a statement released Sunday on its website, Virgin Galactic said, “Over the past few days, there has been speculation about the tragic incident the resulted in the death of Scaled Composites’ pilot, Michael Alsbury, injuries to pilot Peter Siebold and the loss of SpaceShipTwo.”
“We understand that everyone is anxious to understand what happened on Friday; certainly no one wants to know more than we do,” the company added. “[But] now is not the time for speculation. Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident… to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day, and to learn from it so that we can move forward safely with this important mission.”
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In order to achieve its goals of conducting prolonged operations on Mars and sending astronauts on missions that would take them into deep space, NASA is investing in new technologies designed to help them find and use breathable air, drinkable water and other natural resources originating from places other than Earth.
“Safely sending human explorers to and from Mars will be the challenge of a generation,” the US space agency said in a statement Friday. “We don’t yet know what clues astronauts will uncover in the Martian soil or atmosphere that reveal new knowledge about our solar system, but one thing is certain, Mars contains critical resources that can sustain human presence.”
“Harvesting those resources will be key to pioneering the Red Planet,” it added. “To enable missions deeper into space than ever before, NASA is investing in technologies for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) – the ability to find and use natural resources beyond Earth… In the short-term, ISRU is one of the key capabilities NASA needs to help astronauts rely less on supplies from Earth and become more self-reliant on expeditions far from home.”
In addition to the air and water that will be required by astronauts during long-term missions, the ISRU technology will look to allow them to grow food, and perhaps even let them create their own rocket fuel, 3D printed parts and structures by using minerals obtained by local sources. These resources will be essential, as it will take over six months to reach Mars, and the orbit of the planet requires them to stay less than 30 days, or stay for more than 500.
“The ability to leverage Mars resources could greatly reduce the cost of both mission types. NASA will soon test ISRU experiments that could help overcome this challenge,” NASA said, noting that some of the instruments that will be carried to the Red Planet onboard the Mars 2020 rover will look to address some of these resource-related issues.
One of those instruments is known as the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), and it will be used to collect carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and convert it into oxygen. Once the MOXIE system is successfully demonstrated on Mars, the agency believes that it could be scaled as a way for astronauts to replenish their life support during future manned mission, and could even provide oxygen for fueling an ascent vehicle for departure.
“The ability to produce oxygen on Mars decreases the amount of cargo we will need to launch in advance of human missions or send with crews, which could significantly decrease the costs of those missions as well,” the organization explained. However, it also noted that the need to survive using localized natural resources is not limited to Mars.
To that end, NASA is developing a plan to launch the Resource Prospector with the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) experiment. The Resource Prospector, the agency said, will land on the south pole of the moon and will carry RESOLVE on a rover. The goal will be to discover, characterize and map areas containing ice and other substances in primarily shadowed areas of the moon.
“The concept includes multiple science instruments that will help identify volatiles in the lunar soil (or ‘regolith’), such as hydrogen and water ice,” NASA explained. “An on-board oven will separate the natural resources from soil samples. In the future, water and oxygen extracted from lunar soil through methods tested by RESOLVE could be used for life support,” as well as the recently discovered methane and hydrogen found in lunar craters.
Furthermore, resource-rich asteroids could ultimately serve as waypoints for deep space journey. Within the next few years, scientists and astronomers plan to move a near-Earth asteroid into orbit around the moon in what is known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). This asteroid will be explored starting in the 2020s, and one of the goals is to find opportunities to mine resources that could be turned into propellant, radiation shielding or other substances.
“NASA has initiated concept studies to examine how to harvest these resources from asteroids, in a weightless environment,” the agency noted. “With raw materials astronauts could build infrastructure like launch pads and radiation shielding that will further reduce dependence on Earth supplies and protect the crew. Perhaps the most profound moment, though, will come with the first breath of fresh air made on another planet.”
—–
FOR THE KINDLE: The History of 3D Printing: redOrbit Press
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Space exploration will once again be featured on the big screen with this week’s release of the Paramount Pictures movie Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.
In the film, a team of astronauts are charged with finding a new home for humanity after war, famine, plague and climate change wreak havoc on the Earth. In real life, however, NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are working hard to make sure our home planet never meets such a fate, while also working hard to explore the universe around us, just in case we ever do need to find a new home out there amongst the stars.
[ Watch the Music Video: Preparing America For Deep Space Exploration ]
“The cosmos beckons us to explore farther from home, expanding human presence deeper into the solar system and beyond. For thousands of years we’ve wondered if we could find another home among the stars. We’re right on the cusp of answering that question,” the US space agency explained in a statement released Friday.
“If you step outside on a very dark night you may be lucky enough to see many of the 2,000 stars visible to the human eye,” NASA added. “They’re but a fraction of the billions of stars in our galaxy and the innumerable galaxies surrounding us. Multiple NASA missions are helping us extend humanity’s senses and capture starlight to help us better understand our place in the universe.”
For example, the agency said that largely visible light telescopes such as Hubble have led scientists to learn that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and infrared missions (which include Spitzer, SOFIA and WISE) have allowed NASA personnel to analyze the stellar nurseries where new stars are formed from gases.
Furthermore, missions such as Chandra, Fermi and NuSTAR have made it possible to locate and witness the final moments of massive stars, which are capable of releasing enormous amounts of energy through supernovas and form black holes, and over the past few years new advances of technology (including the Kepler Space Telescope) have allowed researchers to fully understand just how many other planets there could be outside our solar system.
[ Watch the Video: Professor Stephen Hawking On Space Exploration ]
Kepler, which is currently located from 64 million miles, examined a small region of a sky for a four-year period, measuring the change in brightness that occurred when planets passed in front of a star in its line of view. Based on those observations, the telescope was able to determine the likelihood that other planets orbit stars, and thanks to its findings, NASA was able to discover that it was possible that every star could have at least one planet.
“Solar systems surround us in our galaxy and are strewn throughout the myriad galaxies we see,” the space agency noted. “Though we have not yet found a planet exactly like Earth, the implications of the Kepler findings are staggering – there may very well be many worlds much like our own for future generations to explore.”
NASA also said that they are developing the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will search 200,000 nearby stars to find planets approximately the same size as Earth. Currently, the distance between stars is too vast for spacecraft to traverse using existing methods of propulsion, the agency said, with only Voyager 1 poised to depart the solar system in the near future – and it won’t encounter another star for a minimum of 40,000 years.
“The near-term future of exploration should be cause for much excitement, though, as humans and robotic spacecraft pioneer the path Voyager traveled, deeper into our solar system, where extra-terrestrial life may exist, and where humans could one day thrive,” NASA said, noting that life requires both heat and water in order to survive.
“On our watery planet, we find life teeming at even the most extreme temperatures,” the organization added. “Scientists are eager to know if evidence of microbial life exists on other planets and moons within our reach. On Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, there is a temperate ocean caught between a volcanic core and icy surface. Just as life exists in the dark, hot reaches of Earth’s ocean, so too could it exist on Europa, waiting to be discovered.”
[ Listen to the Podcast: The Future Of Space Exploration – With Guest Tim Folger (Part 1) ]
While a potential mission to Europa is currently being considered for next decade, the majority of the search for extraterrestrial life is currently focusing on Mars, where a fleet of NASA satellites and spacecraft are currently analyzing the surface and atmosphere in order to determine if conditions on the Red Planet had once been suitable for life. While the planet’s surface water and atmosphere have diminished significantly, NASA noted that evidence of past like could still be uncovered, and Mars could even become a future some for human space travelers.
“This Journey to Mars begins aboard the International Space Station where astronauts 250 miles above Earth are learning how to live in space for long durations – key knowledge needed for round trips to Mars, which could take 500 days or more,” NASA explained. “A new generation of US commercial spacecraft and rockets are supplying the space station and will soon launch astronauts once again from US soil.”
Other current and upcoming NASA missions include: the Orion Spacecraft, which will be used for future manned missions and will undergo its first test flight in December; New Horizons, which will study Pluto during a fly-by of the icy world in 2015; the James Webb Space Telescope, which will detect light from the universe’s first stars after launching in 2018; and a robotic spacecraft that will capture and redirect an asteroid in 2019.
“In 2020, we’ll send a new rover to Mars, to follow in the footsteps of Curiosity, search for ancient Martian life, and pave the way for future human explorers. In 2021, SLS and Orion will launch humans on the first crewed mission of the combined system,” the organization explained.
“In the mid-2020s, astronauts will explore an asteroid redirected to an orbit around the moon, and return home with samples that could hold clues to the origins of the solar system and life on Earth. In doing so, those astronauts will travel farther into the solar system than anyone has ever been,” NASA added. “It’s an exciting time as NASA reaches new heights to reveal the unknown and benefit humankind.”
—–
FOR THE KINDLE – The History of Space Exploration: redOrbit Press
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An area of intense and complex magnetic fields known as an active region rotated into view on October 18, growing into the largest phenomenon of its kind in more than two decades and producing 10 significant solar flares, NASA revealed on Friday.
Labeled AR 12192, the region was the largest active region in 24 years and was so big that it could be observed without a telescope for those looking at the sun with eclipse glasses during the partial solar eclipse on October 23. Active regions are measured in micro-hemispheres, with 1 MH equal to approximately 600,000 square miles, and AR 12192 reached 2,750 MH at its maximum, making it the 33rd largest active region ever recorded.
There have been 32,000 active regions that have been tracked and measured since 1874, the US space agency noted, and AR 12192 was the largest since AR 6368 reached 3,080 MH on Nov. 18, 1990. The five largest active regions ever observed were between 4,000 and over 6,000 MH, all of which took place between 1946 and 1951.
During its trip across the front of the sun, AR 12192 produced six X-class flares (the largest types of solar flares) and four strong M-class flares (which are one-tenth as strong as X-class flares), NASA explained. The number provides more information about its strength, in that an M2 is twice as intense as an M1, and an M3 is three times as intense.
The dates and peak times (in EDT) of the large solar flares from AR 12192 are as follows:
• Oct. 19, 1:01 am: X1.1
• Oct. 21, 9:59 pm: M8.7
• Oct. 22, 10:28 am: X1.6
• Oct. 24, 5:41 pm: X3.1
• Oct. 25, 1:08 pm: X1.0
• Oct. 26, 6:56 am: X2.0
• Oct. 26, 8:34 pm: M7.1
• Oct. 27, 6:09 am: M6.7
• Oct. 27, 10:47 am: X2.0
• Oct. 28, 11:32 pm: M6.6

“Despite all the flares, this region did not produce any significant coronal mass ejections” or CMEs, which are giant clouds of solar particles that could affect technology if they reach near-Earth space, explained Alex Young, a solar scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “You certainly can have flares without CMEs and vice versa, but most big flares do have CMEs. So we’re learning that a big active region doesn’t always equal the biggest events.”
“Having so many similar flares from the same active region will be a nice case study for people who work on predicting solar flares,” added Dean Pesnell, project scientist for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at the Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is important for one day improving the nation’s ability to forecast space weather and protect technology and astronauts in space.”
NASA scientists were able to capture images of the sunspot using the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), while the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) system measured X-ray output from the sun from October 19 through October 28, the agency said. AR 12192 rotated onto the far side of the sun on October 30, but NASA believes that it could continue to involve, and a new version of it could rotate back into view in 14 days.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
—–
UPDATE: November 1, 2014 (4:15 a.m.)
Virgin Galactic confirmed overnight that one of the two pilots onboard the SpaceShipTwo at the time of Friday’s test flight was killed when the vehicle crashed in California’s Mojave Desert, shortly before 11am local time. The other was reportedly able to parachute out of the vehicle and is now being treated as a local hospital for what The Guardian is calling “serious injuries”.
Neither individual’s name has been released, but both pilots were affiliated with Virgin’s partner Scaled Composites. In a blog post, Virgin Galactic chief Sir Richard Branson wrote that everyone associated with the SpaceShipTwo project was “deeply saddened by today’s events. All our thoughts are with the families of everyone affected by this tragic event, and we are doing everything we can to support them.”
According to BBC News, officials with the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were set to begin their investigation on Saturday morning. That investigation is scheduled to last several days. Officials added that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also planned to launch a probe into the incident, and local authorities will continue to be involved in the investigation.
“Our primary thoughts at this moment are with the crew and family, and we’re doing everything we can for them now,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said in a statement on Facebook. “Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what happened today. We’re going to get through it. The future rests in many ways on hard days like this, but we believe we owe it to the team, that has been working so hard on this endeavor, to understand this and to move forward. And that is what we’ll do.”
—–
ORIGINAL: October 31, 2014 (3:05 p.m.)
A “serious anomaly” suffered by Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane during a powered test flight on Friday has left one person dead and resulted in the loss of the aircraft, various media outlets are reporting.
According to Alan Boyle of NBC News, the incident occurred after the vehicle was released from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane and fired its rocket engine in flight for the first time in over nine months. Boyle, citing unnamed sources, said that SpaceShipTwo exploded in midflight, sending debris raining down into the Mojave Desert.
Virgin Galactic, via its Twitter account, confirmed that SpaceShipTwo had suffered a “serious anomaly” during the test and that the vehicle had been lost. The Richard Branson-owned space tourism company added that the status of the pilots was unknown as of shortly before 3pm EDT Friday afternoon, and that it would be working with authorities to determine the cause of the accident.
BBC News and the Associated Press (AP) both reported that the accident had resulted in one fatality, and that another individual suffered what was being described as a “major injury.” BBC News also noted that TV news images shot from a helicopter showed what appeared to be a piece of wreckage in the California desert bearing what appeared to be the Virgin logo.
“Kern County Fire Department reported it was heading to a location in the Mojave Desert. California Highway Patrol Officer Darlena Dotson said the agency was responding to a report of a crash in the Cantil area,” the AP added, while Boyle noted that Mojave airport director Stuart Witt had informed him that the crash occurred north of Mojave.
Keith Holloway, a Washington-based spokesman for the National Transportation and Safety Board, told NBC News that the agency was “in the process of collecting information,” while Ken Brown, a photographer who was covering the test flight, noted that he had witnessed an explosion high in the air and later came across SpaceShipTwo debris scattered across a small area of the desert.
“Before Friday’s flight, the most recent aerial outing was on Oct. 7, when SpaceShipTwo took an unpowered, gliding flight back to the Mojave runway,” Boyle said. “The latest test got off to a slow start. SpaceShipTwo spent more than three hours on the Mojave runway, slung beneath its WhiteKnightTwo mothership, while the ground team assessed whether the weather was right for flight.”
“The go-ahead was finally given for takeoff at 9:19am PT (12:19pm ET). “It took WhiteKnightTwo about 45 minutes to get to 50,000 feet, the altitude at which it released SpaceShipTwo for free flight,” he added. Virgin Galactic has confirmed that WhiteKnightTwo landed safely and was not damaged as a result of the mishap.
According to a statement issued on the Virgin Galactic website, “Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo earlier today. During the test, the vehicle suffered a serious anomaly resulting in the loss of the vehicle. Our first concern is the status of the pilots, which is unknown at this time. We will work closely with the relevant authorities to determine the cause of the accident and provide updates as soon as we are able to do so.”
Friday’s incident marks the second time this week that an attempted US commercial spacecraft launch has suffered a serious setback. On Tuesday evening, an unmanned commercial rocket built by Orbital Sciences, on a mission to carry supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), exploded seconds after lifting off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility launch site in Virginia. There were no injuries reported in that incident
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.