A SETI Institute seminar about the lakes on Saturn’s exotic moon Titan:
What do we know about the composition, surface, depth and distribution of liquid on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan?
Stanford University’s Howard Zbker uncovers some of the mysteries of Titan’s lakes by analyzing data from the Cassini altimeter and radiometer.
Check out this cool Rosetta Comet Viewer Tool at ESA, which was originally developed by Swedish space enthusiast and image processing expert Mattias Malmer. He took images of Comet 67P/C-G from the Rosetta probe and combined them in a way that lets the user rotate, zoom-in and out from, and highlight particular areas on the comet.
More about the viewer at:
Screen capture of Rosetta comet viwer tool.
Larger image
The Mars Society‘s annual conference began this morning in Washington D.C. You can watch the presentations live via Ustream.
See the conference program for the list of talks and panels.
An announcement from the New Worlds Institute:
Space Settlers Wanted
New Worlds 2015 Conference to Focus on
Colonizing the Moon, Mars and Free Space
Austin Texas | October 16 & 17
“New Worlds 2015 is going to be something new in the space field, something that steps out of the airlock of what a space event is supposed to be ”
— Rick Tumlinson
Recently billionaires such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon, PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, Paul Allen of MicroSoft, Richard Branson and many others have begun to build spaceships designed to carry regular people into space. Some such as Musk declare outright that they intend to put the first settlers on Mars. Joining them are national entities like the United Arab Emirates who just announced a multi-billion dollar space program aimed at the Red Planet, China which is designing its own Moon base plans, and other countries and projects to be announced soon. NASA is also rapidly moving towards supporting the opening of space to citizens as a focus of its human spaceflight program.
Register Now for New Worlds 2015
Special Early Bird Pricing Still Available
Elon Musk says he’ll be landing on Mars by 2030,” Meagan Crawford, New Worlds Executive Director added. She continued: “The premise of the Institute and New Worlds Conference is that while these bright minds work to build new space ships to carry people out into space, someone needs to focus on what we will do when we get there – how we will live, prosper and create the next level of human civilization.”
Featured talks on colonizing the Moon, Mars and Free Space, space solar power, the space station and its relevance to colonizing the solar system will join presentations by New Space start ups and businesses leaders working to create a space economy. Stories from real space fliers and astronauts will be interspersed between sessions by top experts in such areas as biology, engineering, design, science and space systems. Short, high-level talks on such things as life extension, farming on Mars, the military in space, and genetic engineering will round out the event. On Friday parallel events will include workshops on crowdsourcing settlement solutions, empowering women in space and other important aspects of the space revolution.
“The age of human space exploration is just beginning and this event is a sampler of the different ideas and opportunities the Institute will be looking to cultivate, It’s a starting point for professionals and students to tell the community their dreams” said Jay Milla, Executive Producer of the event. “We’re also including art, music and various workshops for people to ‘think tank’ what is to come. Your crazy idea is welcome here!”
New Worlds 2015 will feature a student competition called “Cities in Space” in which middle and high school students will create 3D or video models of a 10,000 person colony. Students of all ages are encouraged to attend and participate in both the conference sessions and the cultural events such as the art show and the concert. The New Worlds Institute is offering extreme discounts to students, with prices starting at just $15 a day, to encourage the active participation of the future space settlers. Students are encouraged register now to reserve this special discounted price.
The New Worlds Institute announced today it’s inaugural event, to be held in the Palmer Event Center in Austin, Texas October 16-17. New Worlds 2015 is a different kind of space event. The renaissance affair will be a conference, a gathering of minds, a series of workshops, an art exhibit, a cultural experience, a concert, and most importantly, it will be an all-inclusive discussion about humanity’s future as we migrate to new worlds.
The core premise of the event and the organization is that the first settlers of the Solar System are alive right now, and it is time to begin to focus on the technologies, tools and culture they will need to open the frontier. This is the purpose of New Worlds 2015.
“New Worlds 2015 is going to be something new in the space field, something that steps out of the airlock of what a space event is supposed to be,” said Rick Tumlinson, Founder of the New Worlds Institute. “Our goal is to take the serious core of science and engineering we will need to build new communities in space and wrap it in a cultural experience that is fun, challenging and generally mind blowing.”
Learn More about VIP and Sponsorship packages;
designed for space enthusiasts and small businesses
While the Institute itself intends to focus on serious research into the technologies and engineering challenges needed to create real human cities in space, the group believes that there also needs to be a cultural element included in what it calls the “breakout”. Thus the event will feature such unusual elements as an art show and a rock concert/dance party featuring the techno-rock band Arc Attack, known for using Tesla coils and amazing lightning effects in its show, complimented by performance artists Nadis Warriors and The Clergy.
The New Worlds Institute is producing this event as the first in a series of social gatherings and conferences meant to engage the public, the business world and the scientific community in a constructive dialog about not just how we get there, but how we stay. The two-day event will highlight concepts and ideas about building the first human communities on the Moon, Mars and in the free space between worlds.
“New Worlds 2015 is an experiment,” said Tumlinson. “Space has been boring too long. Our goal is to plant the seeds of a new and dynamic space culture that will begin to grow in the years ahead so those who will literally build the first human space colonies can be ready when the space ships are ready to carry them out there. It may sound crazy, just as 20 years before the MayFlower saying you might go across the ocean and start a new community in that New World sounded crazy. But it will also be incredibly fun.”
Register now to reserve our special early bird pricing of just $275 for both days (including lunch and admission to the Lift Off! concert on Friday night). Click here to learn more about the event, including location details, speakers, discussion topics, the student competition and more. VIP packages and small business sponsorship opportunities are available online or by contacting us directly. Please contact us to learn more about our corporate level sponsorship options and partnership opportunities.
The latest images from Rosetta at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko:
Comet’s firework display ahead of perihelion
![Outburst_in_action_node_full_image_2[1]](https://i0.wp.com/hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Outburst_in_action_node_full_image_21.jpg)
The comet reaches perihelion on Thursday, the moment in its 6.5-year orbit when it is closest to the Sun. In recent months, the increasing solar energy has been warming the comet’s frozen ices, turning them to gas, which pours out into space, dragging dust along with it.
The period around perihelion is scientifically very important, as the intensity of the sunlight increases and parts of the comet previously cast in years of darkness are flooded with sunlight.
Although the comet’s general activity is expected to peak in the weeks following perihelion, much as the hottest days of summer usually come after the longest days, sudden and unpredictable outbursts can occur at any time – as already seen earlier in the mission.
On 29 July, Rosetta observed the most dramatic outburst yet, registered by several of its instruments from their vantage point 186 km from the comet. They imaged the outburst erupting from the nucleus, witnessed a change in the structure and composition of the gaseous coma environment surrounding Rosetta, and detected increased levels of dust impacts.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Rosetta found that the outburst had pushed away the solar wind magnetic field from around the nucleus.
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“This is the brightest jet we’ve seen so far,” comments Carsten Güttler, OSIRIS team member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
“Usually, the jets are quite faint compared to the nucleus and we need to stretch the contrast of the images to make them visible – but this one is brighter than the nucleus.”
Soon afterwards, the comet pressure sensor of ROSINA detected clear indications of changes in the structure of the coma, while its mass spectrometer recorded changes in the composition of outpouring gases.
For example, compared to measurements made two days earlier, the amount of carbon dioxide increased by a factor of two, methane by four, and hydrogen sulphide by seven, while the amount of water stayed almost constant.
![Gas_changes_during_29_July_outburst_node_full_image_2[1]](https://i0.wp.com/hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Gas_changes_during_29_July_outburst_node_full_image_21.jpg?resize=500%2C409)
Meanwhile, about 14 hours after the outburst, GIADA was detecting dust hits at rates of 30 per day, compared with just 1–3 per day earlier in July. A peak of 70 hits was recorded in one 4-hour period on 1 August, indicating that the outburst continued to have a significant effect on the dust environment for the following few days.
“It was not only the abundance of the particles, but also their speeds measured by GIADA that told us something ‘different’ was happening: the average particle speed increased from 8 m/s to about 20 m/s, with peaks at 30 m/s – it was quite a dust party!” says Alessandra Rotundi, principal investigator at the ‘Parthenope’ University of Naples, Italy.
Perhaps the most striking result is that the outburst was so intense that it actually managed to push the solar wind away from the nucleus for a few minutes – a unique observation made by the Rosetta Plasma Consortium’s magnetometer.
The solar wind is the constant stream of electrically charged particles that flows out from the Sun, carrying its magnetic field out into the Solar System. Earlier measurements made by Rosetta and Philae had already shown that the comet is not magnetised, so the only source for the magnetic field measured around it is the solar wind.
![29_July_outburst_context_node_full_image_2[1]](https://i0.wp.com/hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/29_July_outburst_context_node_full_image_21.jpg)
Diamagnetic cavities provide fundamental information on how a comet interacts with the solar wind, but the only previous detection of one associated with a comet was made at about 4000 km from Comet Halley as ESA’s Giotto flew past in 1986.
Rosetta’s comet is much less active than Halley, so scientists expected to find a much smaller cavity around it, up to a few tens of kilometres at most, and prior to 29 July, had not observed any sign of one.
But, following the outburst on that day, the magnetometer detected a diamagnetic cavity extending out at least 186 km from the nucleus. This was likely created by the outburst of gas, which increased the neutral gas flux in the comet’s coma, forcing the solar wind to ‘stop’ further away from the comet and thus pushing the cavity boundary outwards beyond where Rosetta was flying at the time.
“Finding a magnetic field-free region anyway in the Solar System is really hard, but here we’ve had it served to us on a silver platter – this is a really exciting result for us,” adds Charlotte.
“We’ve been moving Rosetta out to distances of up to 300 km in recent weeks to avoid problems with navigation caused by dust, and we had considered that the diamagnetic cavity was out of our grasp for the time being. But it seems that the comet has helped us by bringing the cavity to Rosetta,” says Matt Taylor, Rosetta Project Scientist.
“This is a fantastic multi-instrument event which will take time to analyse, but highlights the exciting times we’re experiencing at the comet in this ‘hot’ perihelion phase.”