Here is the latest of NASA’s weekly Space to Ground reports on recent activities related to the Int. Space Station:
Here is the latest of NASA’s weekly Space to Ground reports on recent activities related to the Int. Space Station:
Aurora Flight Sciences has beaten several much bigger companies for a DARPA contract to build a vertical take off and landing demonstration vehicle that has much higher performance that helicopters or tiltrotor designs like the Osprey now in operation: DARPA Selects Aurora to Build VTOL X-Plane Technology Demonstrator
Aurora’s LightningStrike has an unusual design with 24 electric ducted-fans distributed along the wing and canard and driven by an on-board generator.
The technology demonstrator was designed in close collaboration with Aurora’s team members, Rolls-Royce PLC and Honeywell International Inc. The Aurora-led team intends to deliver a number of aviation milestones with the demonstration aircraft, including being the first aircraft designed to demonstrate:
The aircraft design features a Rolls-Royce AE 1107C turboshaft engine that would power three Honeywell generators, and 24 ducted fans distributed on both the wings and canards. The aircraft’s electric distributed propulsion (EDP) system would consist of highly integrated, distributed ducted fans that, combined with the synchronous electric drive system, would enable the design’s potentially revolutionary hover efficiency and high-speed forward flight.
This video animation illustrates how the Lightning Strike will operate:
A documentary series of short films about the Google Lunar XPRIZE will be released later this month:
Academy Award®-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of $30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers.
This character-driven, emotional, awe-inspiring series of 9 short films will follow a selection of the teams currently racing to complete their missions. It will explore the lives of their charismatic, quirky members, the sacrifices they have made to get to where they are today, and crucially, what drives them on this incredible journey.
Here is the trailer:
More at
From Variety:
The nine-episode series will premiere on Google Play on March 15 for free, and on the Google Lunar Xprize YouTube channel on March 17. Each episode is about 7 minutes and all episodes will be released in one batch.
Here is a new report from the European Southern Observatory (ESO):
In this huge new image clouds of crimson gas are illuminated by rare, massive stars that have only recently ignited and are still buried deep in thick dust clouds. These scorching-hot, very young stars are only fleeting characters on the cosmic stage and their origins remain mysterious. The vast nebula where these giants were born, along with its rich and fascinating surroundings, are captured here in fine detail by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
RCW 106 is a sprawling cloud of gas and dust located about 12 000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Norma (The Carpenter’s Square). The region gets its name from being the 106th entry in a catalogue of H II regions in the southern Milky Way [1]. H II regions like RCW 106 are clouds of hydrogen gas that are being ionised by the intense starlight of scorching-hot, young stars, causing them to glow and display weird and wonderful shapes.
RCW 106 itself is the red cloud above centre in this new image, although much of this huge H II region is hidden by dust and it is much more extensive than the visible part. Many other unrelated objects are also visible in this wide-field VST image. For example, the filaments to the right of the image are the remnants of an ancient supernova, and the glowing red filaments at the lower left surround an unusual and very hot star [2]. Patches of dark obscuring dust are also visible across the entire cosmic landscape.
Astronomers have been studying RCW 106 for some time, although it is not the crimson clouds that draw their attention, but rather the mysterious origin of the massive and powerful stars buried within. Although they are very bright, these stars cannot be seen in visible-light images such as this one as the surrounding dust is too thick, but they make their presence clear in images of the region at longer wavelengths.
This video takes a close-up look at a huge image of part of the southern constellation of Norma (The Carpenter’s Square) where wisps of crimson gas are illuminated by rare, massive stars that have only recently ignited and are still buried deep in thick dust clouds. These scorching-hot, very young stars are only fleeting characters on the cosmic stage and their origins remain mysterious. The vast nebula where these giants were born, known as RCW 106, is captured here in fine detail by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
The sequence starts with a view of RCW 104, filaments glowing in the intense radiation from a Wolf-Rayet star, passes over the supernova remnant RCW 103, and finally settles on RCW 106 itself.
For less massive stars like the Sun the process that brings them into existence is quite well understood — as clouds of gas are pulled together under gravity, density and temperature increase, and nuclear fusion begins — but for the most massive stars buried in regions like RCW 106 this explanation does not seem to be fully adequate. These stars — known to astronomers as O-type stars — may have masses many dozens of times the mass of the Sun and it is not clear how they manage to gather, and keep together, enough gas to form.
O-type stars likely form from the densest parts of the nebular clouds like RCW 106 and they are notoriously difficult to study. Apart from obscuration by dust, another challenge is the brevity of an O-type star’s life. They burn through their nuclear fuel in mere tens of millions of years, while the lightest stars have lifetimes that span many tens of billions of years. The difficulty of forming a star of this mass, and the shortness of their lifetimes, means that they are very rare — only one in every three million stars in our cosmic neighbourhood is an O-type star. None of those that do exist are close enough for detailed investigation and so the formation of these fleeting stellar giants remains mysterious, although their outsized influence is unmistakeable in glowing H II regions like this one.
Notes
[1] The catalogue was compiled in 1960 by three astronomers from the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia whose surnames were Rodgers, Campbell and Whiteoak, hence the prefix RCW.
[2] The supernova remnant is SNR G332.4-00.4, also known as RCW 103. It is about 2000 years old. The lower filaments are RCW 104, surrounding the Wolf–Rayet star WR 75. Although these objects bear RCW numbers, detailed later investigations revealed that neither of them were HII regions.
Here is an update on the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 project: Meet LightSail 2, The Planetary Society’s new solar sailing CubeSat – The Planetary Society.
Last June, LightSail 1 successfully tested the deployment of its sail in orbit. The goal of LightSail 2 is to achieve propulsion from the pressure of sunlight. It is scheduled to go to space in early 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Here is a video of a LightSail 2 deployment test: