Space Scan

Charles Simonyi, the developer of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel is all set to blast off in a Russian ship Saturday. The cost of the journey is a whooping $20 million including the cost of nearly a half-year’s training in Russia. The Russian ship will carry him on the two day trip to the ISS for an 11-day stay. He will then return April 20 on a Russian space capsule. He cites the reasons for his expensive trip as a way to promote space travel and to learn in the greatest detail how the systems work. Simonyi plans to take samples of the Microbes living there and to repair two broken ham radios. Via: usatoday

Make these vacations memorable for your kids by planning for space tourism! The best place for such tourism is the Kennedy Space Center. Approximately 1.5 million people visit this space center every year! With the opening of Shuttle launch Experience, the number of visitors will increase more. It will offer virtual space ride to the visitors. It is also being expected that in the working spaceports, interesting space themed attractions could be installed. Visitors will be entertained with the real life space fliers. According to the managing Director of Spaceport and President of Lyon Capital Inc, Michael Lyon, they are also planning to open space centers in Singapore and United Arab Emirates. Virginia based Space Adventures along with others is the partner of Spaceport. They are in the process of developing actual launch facilities in one of the emirates, Ras-al-Khaimah, along with Singapore. Major highlights of these space centers are spaceship simulators, interactive exhibits and displays of rocket replicas. Zero gravity airplane flight is one of the best their features. To make things more adventurous, visitors could also experience realistic space camp, with underwater training and high-G centrifuge. Lyon quoted, “no real place to see a centrifuge as a tourist.” When the space center will become a real spaceport then it would be a major attraction for the private sector astronauts. He also added, “We’re not a theme park. Everything we do is based on authenticity.” Now, Lyon along with his partners is working hard on financial proposition along with various technological perspectives. Via:cosmiclog

Scientists and Astronomers have accounted for some dark caverns reportedly seen on the Mars’s terrain. These dark images of the so-called caverns give a first impression of some trick done through Photoshop software but NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter imagery confirmed that these dark images are definitely of some strange cavern entrances. Look carefully at the picture, the dark spot in the middle confirms to be a hole in amidst of lava. Scientists and researchers confirmed that it cannot be an impact crater as it does not have a heaved rim called the “Ejecta”. It is surely a deep hole / cavern as light from the sun never seems to return from it. This kind of phenomenon is only seen when there is a deep cave type opening on the surface of a planet. The scientists assume it to be some deep, dark chamber with collapsed or caved-in roof. They also opine that it may be having sharp vertically rising walls. They are fascinated by this imagery for sure. Via: Universetoday

Researchers at NASA seem to be all set for their upcoming and well-talked mission to the Moon. In the wake of this upcoming mission NASA is trying to strengthen it’s commercial associations and considerably taking measures for the same. We got to have some idea from sir Neil Woodward who is the acting director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate – “That would make our life a lot easier.” NASA seems to be leaving not a single stone unturned for getting what they want. Their projected mission will be starting somewhere around 2019 or 2020. Another assignment NASA will be eyeing on would be a manned mission to the Red planet – Mars. Woodward opined that -”If somebody says ‘I have this really great way to be able to extract water ice from lunar regolith (lunar rocks) that I’ve developed on my own dime’ we would be interested.” In regards to the “Space development conference”,Dallas, Mr. Woodward addressed the Reuters by saying that -”If we could be in a commercial relationship with somebody who has the capability that’s fine because in many cases they can do it for less money than we can.” While addressing them, he very well kept the “Venture capital in space exploration” as the main theme in consideration. It is amazing to know that NASA foretells a manned outpost on the Lunar surface just like the International Space Station (ISS). Woodward tried to make clear that – “Maybe at that point there will be commercial exploitation and we won’t be sending missions there but some of the commercial companies here will start sending people there. One thing that keeps being batted around is a fuel dump in orbit, in low Earth orbit. If someone was to build one of those and said do you want NASA to be a customer we would say yes because if you do the math it turns out that it would be an advantage to us.” “We’re trying to help some commercial entities demonstrate that they can do low Earth orbit resupply to say the space station and once they can do that we can contract with them and then we don’t have to do it ourselves anymore. It would be much better if there was an American company who had that capability and presumably being a private entity they may be able to do it for less expense,” he added. For the space shuttle fleet that would retire by 2010 he opined – “The space station needs a tremendous amount of food and water and scientific experiments to go up and down — we have to pay the Russians to do that after the shuttle retires.” Via: Reuters

President of the United States, Mr. George Bush, signed supplemental appropriations for NASA’s upcoming expeditions. The supplement said as under – U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007 (Engrossed Amendment as Agreed to by House). NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION – exploration capabilities It said that an additional amount for carrying out NASA’s future “Exploration Capability” programs, which are related to the aftermaths of disaster struck by Hurricane Katrina, would be made available until September 30, 2009. General Provisions for this chapter were – Under the SEC. 4202, somewhere around $ 48,000,000 would be given to NASA for carrying out their expeditions and explorations that help to serve the mankind. This act came under the Public Law 109-148 and Public Law 109-234, but NASA may have got some lesser amount of share there. Via: Nasawatch

Want to experience a divine light? Here it is! A fabulous photograph of grand spiral design galaxy, M81, has been released by the Astronomers. This mind-boggling image is being captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. It would be interesting to know that this is not a single image. It is being created by adding various images with the help of three distinct wavelengths of light. MS 81 is being positioned in the Ursa Major constellation and has about 11.6 million light years. We are lucky enough to enjoy the complete view of spiral structure, as it is at an oblique angle. View of Hubble is so great that image appears to be clear and crisp, whereas other stars can also be resolved, along with both open and global star clusters. Enclosing the central bulge of galaxy, all older and redder stars are positioned. It also has regions for the formation of stars with the spiral arms. According to the Astronomers, due to the recently encounter with another galaxy (M82), this helps in specifying the period of the formation of star. The period of star formation would be approximately 300 million years ago. In Honolulu, this beautiful image was released by the American Astronomical Society Meeting. Via:universetoday

New launch system for NASA: Railway track and scramjet

NASA demonstrates a laser-powered aircraft

Aerospace giant Boeing has stated that the company is internally funding an initiative to develop small satellites. The move is to develop satellites for commercial and military applications that weigh less than 10 kilograms. Two new type of satellites are seen in this new initiative which include Picosatellites weighing up to 1Kg similar to those created by California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University under the CubeSat project and larger nanosatellites weighing up to 10 kilograms. The CubeSat projected was initially intended to provide Universities and other schools the capability to create and launch small satellites at a low price. Such launches cost about $40,000 per cube. We can also say that the main idea behind this move of Boeing is to find viable military and commercial applications that can be taken up by such small satellites. On the commercial side the company can also focus on next-generation Internet routing through satellites. This is a team project having big players such as Boeing, Cisco and Intelsat. Via: Wired

A black hole is an object with a gravitational field so powerful that a region of space becomes cut off from the rest of the universe, no matter and not even light can escape these strong clutches of gravity. Until now scientists from all over the world have tried to know the secrets of this amazing part of the universe, but according to a latest research, black holes might not exist, or at least not exist in a manner in which scientists have imagined it to be. Scientists till now thought that black holes are cloaked by an impenetrable “event horizon” or a point of no return. They think that anything that comes in the vicinity of this “event horizon” has no chances of survival and it falls from the universe for ever. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity light is also trapped inside black holes and no information about what fell into the hole can be recovered. Its now that the contradiction comes into being, scientists claim that information that goes into a black hole seems to have fallen out of the universe, this theory contradicts the equations of quantum mechanics, which always preserve information. To resolve this conflict researchers came to a conclusion that the information is not destroyed but it comes out of the black hole slowly encoded in a hypothetical flow of particles called Hawking radiation, which is thought to result from the black holes’ event horizons messing with the quantum froth that is ever-present in space. Still some other researchers opine that information may not be cut off in the first place so there is no question of it being recovered in any form. To prove this, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, US, Continue reading “Black Holes: Do they really exist?” »