** Paul Wooster of SpaceX talked at the recent Mars Society conference about the company’s plans for sending people to Mars by 2024:
** SpaceX’s Spacesuit, up close and personal – Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, describes SpaceX spacesuits during a recent visit to the company’s HQ in Hawthorne, California:
** What it’s like to fly the Boeing Starliner CST-100 Spaceship – Dodd also recently tried out a Boeing Starliner crew capsule:
** NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine this week gave a strong endorsement of low cost reusable, commercial space transport systems, which can make a robust lunar program affordable:
Two titanium plaques etched with thousands of miniaturised drawings made by children have been fixed to the CHaracterizing ExOPlanets Satellite, Cheops. Each plaque measures nearly 18 cm across and 24 cm high. The plaques, prepared by a team at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Burgdorf, Switzerland, were unveiled in a dedicated ceremony at RUAG on 27 August 2018. Credits : G. Bucher – Bern University of Applied Sciences
27 August 2018:Two plaques etched with thousands of miniaturised drawings made by children have been unveiled in a dedicated ceremony held today in Switzerland.
Three years ago, thousands of children were inspired by the study of planets beyond our Solar System and translated their imagination into beautiful drawings, which feature a variety of planets and other cosmic settings. Out of the many excellent entries, over 2700 were selected to fly on ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops.
Cheops will make high-precision measurements of stars, monitoring the small changes in brightness due to the transit of a planet across the star’s disc, in order to determine the planet’s size. Combined with known information about the planet’s mass, Cheops will enable the density of the planet to be calculated, and as such determine if it is a rocky, icy, or even a water-world for example – a first step to characterise exoplanets.
“Cheops is ESA’s first small-class science mission and its task is big. The first step characterisation of the Earth-to-Neptune size planets that Cheops will target is an essential step to piecing together what these planets are made of, and towards the long-term search for habitable worlds beyond our own Solar System,”says Jan Wörner, ESA Director General.
“This unique satellite, the product of European collaboration, has already inspired the young generation, seen in the drawings engraved on the plaques unveiled today as Cheops begins its final stages of preparations before moving to the launch site.”
While the satellite was being assembled earlier this year, a team at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Burgdorf, Switzerland miniaturized the drawings and engraved them onto two titanium plates. Each plaque measures nearly 18 cm across and 24 cm high.
The spacecraft has recently completed a series of tests at RUAG Space in Zurich, Switzerland, and today was presented to media and invited guests with the two plaques now attached.
Cheops will soon travel to ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands where the satellite will undergo acoustic and radio-frequency compatibility tests during September, concluding the environmental test campaign. The spacecraft will then return to Airbus Defence and Space, Spain for final tests before shipment to Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The satellite, which is implemented as a partnership between ESA and Switzerland, is on track to complete all planned test activities by the end of the year.
Once in Earth orbit Cheops will begin to characterise some of the many extrasolar worlds already discovered, many of which are similar to those depicted in the inspired artwork that will fly into space with this exciting mission.
This spectacular image of the Carina nebula reveals the dynamic cloud of interstellar matter and thinly spread gas and dust as never before. The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that causes the surrounding gas to glow. By contrast, other regions of the nebula contain dark pillars of dust cloaking newborn stars.
The Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, has been beautifully imaged by ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. By observing in infrared light, VISTA has peered through the hot gas and dark dust enshrouding the nebula to show us myriad stars, both newborn and in their death throes.
About 7500 light-years away, in the constellation of Carina, lies a nebula within which stars form and perish side-by-side. Shaped by these dramatic events, the Carina Nebula is a dynamic, evolving cloud of thinly spread interstellar gas and dust.
The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that causes the surrounding gas to glow. By contrast, other regions of the nebula contain dark pillars of dust cloaking newborn stars. There’s a battle raging between stars and dust in the Carina Nebula, and the newly formed stars are winning — they produce high-energy radiation and stellar winds which evaporate and disperse the dusty stellar nurseries in which they formed.
Spanning over 300 light-years, the Carina Nebula is one of the Milky Way’s largest star-forming regions and is easily visible to the unaided eye under dark skies. Unfortunately for those of us living in the north, it lies 60 degrees below the celestial equator, so is visible only from the Southern Hemisphere.
Within this intriguing nebula, Eta Carinae takes pride of place as the most peculiar star system. This stellar behemoth — a curious form of stellar binary— is the most energetic star system in this region and was one of the brightest objects in the sky in the 1830s. It has since faded dramatically and is reaching the end of its life, but remains one of the most massive and luminous star systems in the Milky Way.
This image is a colour composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximately 4.7 x 4.9 degrees.
Eta Carinae can be seen in this image as part of the bright patch of light just above the point of the “V” shape made by the dust clouds. Directly to the right of Eta Carinae is the relatively small Keyhole Nebula — a small, dense cloud of cold molecules and gas within the Carina Nebula — which hosts several massive stars, and whose appearance has also changed drastically over recent centuries.
The Carina Nebula was discovered from the Cape of Good Hope by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in the 1750s and a huge number of images have been taken of it since then. But VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy — adds an unprecedentedly detailed view over a large area; its infrared vision is perfect for revealing the agglomerations of young stars hidden within the dusty material snaking through the Carina Nebula. In 2014, VISTA was used to pinpoint nearly five million individual sources of infrared light within this nebula, revealing the vast extent of this stellar breeding ground. VISTA is the world’s largest infrared telescope dedicated to surveys and its large mirror, wide field of view andexquisitely sensitive detectors enable astronomers [1] to unveil a completely new view of the southern sky.
Notes
[1] The Principal Investigator of the observing proposal which led to this spectacular image was Jim Emerson (School of Physics & Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, UK). His collaborators were Simon Hodgkin and Mike Irwin (Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK). The data reduction was performed by Mike Irwin and Jim Lewis (Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK).
The latest episode of TMRO:Science, a “Weekly Science and Innovation Show”, is about “Origami Underwater Robots”:
Lisa and Jade chat to Brennan Phillips (University of Rhode Island) and Zhi Ern Teoh (Harvard University) about an underwater self-folding polyhedral robot capable of gently capturing ocean creature and releasing them unharmed.
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A TEDx talk by Melanie Windridge of Tokamak Energy on the possibility of fusion power plants going on line by 2030:
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Elon Musk gives Marques Brownlee a tour of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California and explains what tasks robots do best and where human workers do best:
Infrared images of Saturn’s moon Titan, captured by Cassini’s the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Stéphane Le Mouélic, University of Nantes, Virginia Pasek, University of Arizona. Article at Universe Today
