Russia’s space agency is planning to build a new spaceship with a nuclear engine, its chief said Wednesday.

Anatoly Perminov told a government meeting Wednesday that the preliminary design could be ready by 2012. He said it will then take nine more years and 17 billion rubles ($600 million, 400 million euros) to build the ship.

“The implementation of this project will allow us to reach a new technological level surpassing foreign developments,” Perminov told a meeting which focused on communications and space technologies.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged the Cabinet to consider providing the necessary funding.

“It’s a very serious project,” Medvedev said. “We need to find the money.”

Perminov’s ambitious statement contrasted with the current state of the Russian space program, and sounded more like a plea for extra government funds than a detailed proposal.

Russia is using 40-year old Soyuz booster rockets and capsules to send crews to the International Space Station. Development of a replacement rocket and a prospective spaceship with a conventional propellant has dragged on with no end in sight.

Perminov described the proposed spaceship as a “unique breakthrough project,” but offered few details.

He said that the ship will have a megawatt-class nuclear reactor, as opposed to small nuclear reactors that powered Soviet satellites. The Cold-War era Soviet spy satellites had reactors which produced just a few kilowatts of power and had a lifespan of just about a year.

Perminov didn’t say what the new spaceship will be used for.

He and other officials have said that Russia needs a new spaceship to replace the old Soyuz for missions in Earth orbit, but they only have talked about a ship powered by a conventional rocket fuel so far.

Russian space agency also has mulled over prospective future missions to the moon and Mars, but hasn’t yet set a specific time frame yet.

http://www.askmen.com/

Nigeria’s space agency is no joke. It has launched satellites and aims to put Africans into space.

LONDON, U.K. — Recently I received an email labeled “Strictly Confidential” from Dr. Bakare Tunde, who said he was astronautics project manager at Nigeria’s space agency. He also told me he was the cousin of the first African in space, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde, and that this poor intrepid astronaut had been stranded on a secret Soviet military station ever since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990.

“He is in good humor,” read the email, “but wants to come home.” No wonder he was keen to hurtle back earthwards, Tunde told me his cousin had accumulated almost $15 million in pay. For the price of my bank account details, I could claim 20 percent and fly the brave chap home to collect my portion of the earnings and transfer the rest on to him like the good space-supporter that I was.

This classic 419 scam is indeed far-fetched but one aspect of it is true.

Nigeria really does have a space agency. The west African nation’s National Space Research and Development Agency is already celebrating its 10th anniversary. And as America and Europe’s space agencies set their sights on joint exploration of Mars, Nigeria has big plans of its own: It wants to send a Nigerian up into space in 2015, making Nigeria home to the first black African astronaut.

Sitting across from Gerald Okeke, it’s hard to fathom that the quietly spoken fellow might one day fly beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Okeke, 28, is one of 27 Nigerian engineers being trained how to design and build an earth observation satellite in the U.K., at private British company Surrey Satellites Technology in Guildford, southeast of London. We are sitting in the canteen of the spacecraft-mad company, from whose ceilings dangle silver starburst lights and whose rubbish bins are shaped like shiny rockets.

“There is much to learn but we are coping,” says Okeke, whose father was also a scientist. “It’s a big challenge. Talking about space in Africa is kind of a new field but it’s a very big opportunity for us to explore.”

He says it would be an honor to be picked as Africa’s first black space sailor — who must be aged 27 to 37 at the time of lift-off and whose selection will begin next year ahead of four years of training. Okeke has already spent several years studying in the U.K., which he says is challenging. “The weather can be trouble and we try to cope with the food even though it’s not what we eat in Nigeria,” said Okeke.

His is not the only sacrifice in an expensive and widely questioned mission. Nigeria spends $20 million a year on its space program, in a country in which for every thousand children born, 137 will die before they are five years old. A collapse in the value of Nigeria’s naira currency — in part attributable to the global downturn — has meant the costs of its payments in U.S. dollars have also rocketed by a third.

“Even in the U.S. some people are opposed to the space program so we are not surprised this happens here,” says Seidu Onailo Mohammed, CEO of the Nigerian space agency. “But we want to assess the problems that have devastated this land. We need to monitor our environment, assess problems of flooding, deforestation — all this can only be done if we have a viable space program. Plus after so many years it’s a good idea to think of an astronaut.”

The country jetted up a $13 million earth observation satellite, made in the U.K. and launched from Russia, in 2003. A much more expensive communications satellite, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, was launched from China in 2007. It failed within 18 months but a replacement is due to be propelled into space by 2011, paid for by insurance.

But still the Nigerian agency wants more money. The government believes it will all pay off in the end.

Already the earth observation satellite has taken some pretty impressive snaps including pictures of poppy growing in Afghanistan, the state of cyclone damage after Myanmar’s authorities restricted access to international rescue teams in 2008 and, closer to home, identifying the whereabouts of illegal tankers parking far out at sea to steal Nigeria’s oil supplies.

Nigeria has managed to sell about 1,000 of its satellite images and hopes over the course of each satellite’s lifetime such data sales will cover the costs of manufacture and operation.

“We are bringing down space to apply it on the ground,” says Francis Chizea, Director of the Nigerian space agency. “It’s going to be very very important for the economy. We can map the wetlands and advise on areas very good for rice production; monitor desertification in the north; find the best place to locate dams; assess the environmental impact of oil drilling; locate oil spills and track movements on the border.”

It’s all been made possible by a new approach to space science that has let developing nations in on the extra-terrestrial act.

“We’ve been able to shrink a satellite from a double-decker bus down to the size of a TV set,” says Martin Sweeting, the British founder of Surrey Satellites Technology, a radio fanatic as a child who decided space shouldn’t be the privilege of the rich nations. “It’s now possible for an African country to have its own satellite for $10 to $15 million. It can yield real benefits at the right price.”

South Africa, Algeria and Egypt are all marshaling their own satellite facilities, so there’s no question Africa’s scientists are reaching for the stars.

http://www.globalpost.com/

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock.

Their existence on the moon is hinted at based on observations of sinuous rilles – long, winding depressions carved into the lunar surface by the flow of lava. Some sections of the rilles have collapsed, suggesting that hollow lava tubes hide beneath at least some of the rilles.

But until now, no one has found an opening into what appears to be an intact tube. “There’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem,” says Carolyn van der Bogert of the University of Münster in Germany. “If it’s intact, you can’t see it.”

Finding a hole in a rille could suggest that an intact tube lies beneath. So a group led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency searched for these “skylights” in images taken by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the moon for almost two years before ending its mission in June.

Deep cave

The team found the first candidate skylight in a volcanic area on the moon’s near side called Marius Hills. “This is the first time that anybody’s actually identified a skylight in a possible lava tube” on the moon, van der Bogert, who helped analyse the feature, told New Scientist.

The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across.

It is not clear exactly how the hole formed. A meteorite impact, moonquakes, or pressure created by gravitational tugs from the Earth could be to blame. Alternatively, part of the lava tube’s ceiling could have been pulled off as lava in the tube drained away billions of years ago.

Radiation shield

Finding such an opening could be a boon for possible human exploration of the moon (see What NASA’s return to the moon may look like).

Since the tubes may be hundreds of metres wide, they could provide plenty of space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation, meteoroid impacts and wild temperature fluctuations (see Can high-tech cavemen live on the moon?).

“I think it’s really exciting,” says Penny Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. “Basalt is an extremely good material for radiation protection. It’s free real estate ready to be exploited and modified for human use.”

Blocked passage?

But even if astronauts were to rappel into the hole, they might not be able to travel far into the tube it appears to lead into. “I would bet a lot of money that there’s a tube there, but I would not bet nearly so much that we could gain access to the tube,” says Ray Hawke of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who has also hunted for lunar lava tubes.

Rubble or solidified lava might block up the tube. “It could be closed up and inaccessible,” Hawke told New Scientist.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which should be able to snap images of the area that are at least 10 times as sharp, could help reveal more about the hole. And more lava tube openings may be found.

The Kaguya team is still combing over images of other areas in search of additional skylights. And Hawke says a proposal is in the works to use LRO’s main camera to snap oblique shots of the lunar surface. This could help reveal cave entrances that are not visible in a bird’s-eye view.

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)

http://www.newscientist.com/

2009-10-24

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock. Read the full story

If a person extends his or her arm and index finger completely, the beginning of Earth is represented by the end of the nose and the present is the fingertip. Passing a file over the fingernail once would erase all of human history.

Source: http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/09/17_earth.html

Astronomers have announced a haul of planets found beyond our Solar System.

The 32 “exoplanets” ranged in size from five times the mass of Earth to 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers said.

They were found using a very sensitive instrument on a 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla facility in Chile. Read the full story

Link to NASA TV can be found here

By Joe Rao

Get ready for a unique cosmic collision! Early Friday morning, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will end its mission with a bang — literally.

The probe — also known by its acronym, LCROSS — is currently carrying along the upper stage of the rocket that launched it on its way to the moon on June 18. NASA’s game plan is to send that spent rocket motor on a course to smash into the lunar surface. Not just anywhere on the lunar surface, but to a thoroughly scrutinized crater called Cabeus that lies near the moon’s south pole and is enveloped in perpetual darkness. The hoped-for result will be to find hidden water frozen inside the crater.

For seasoned skywatchers here on Earth, the event should also produce a visible cloud of ejected material. However, only knowledgeable amateur astronomers with the right equipment will be able to detect the event. Others can watch the event live on NASA TV.

Smackdown!
The general belief among astronomers is that over the last few billion years, the moon has been bombarded by countless numbers of comets. The water from most of these comets completely sublimated away, but if any settled at the bottom of a crater near the moon’s poles, those permanently shadowed regions can keep the water from disappearing and lock it up as ice for a very long time.

Cabeus is a relatively flat crater about 60 miles (100 kilometers) in diameter on the moon’s south pole. Scientists believe the crater may be one of those special cases that holds water ice in its perpetually shadowed top soil. NASA initially selected a different target for LCROSS, the nearby crater of Cabeus A, but switched to the larger Cabeus because data suggested it had a higher likelihood of containing hidden water ice.

The impact is scheduled to occur this Friday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 a.m. ET. That’s 4:30 a.m. PT, or 11:30 UT. To convert Universal Time to your local time, go here.

Impact will occur less than 10 hours after the spent Centaur rocket motor is released and the LCROSS “shepherding spacecraft” maneuvers into position to trail the Centaur en route to the lunar surface. The 5,000-pound (2,270-kilogram) Centaur is expected to slam into Cabeus at a sharp angle at a speed of 5,600 mph (9,000 kilometers per hour).

If all goes according to schedule, the shepherding vehicle, carrying nine science payloads, will follow the Centaur’s plunge into the moon, beaming back data live to Earth. Like a bullet hitting sand, the Centaur stage’s explosive collision is expected to create a crater roughly 60 or 70 feet wide (20 meters wide) and perhaps as much as 16 feet (5 meters) deep, in the process dredging up approximately 385 tons of lunar dust and soil — enough to fill nearly 18 school buses. In addition to recording the collision, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the regolith plume thrown up by the collision, just before it too slams into the lunar surface some four minutes later, kicking up its own smaller plume of debris.

In the minutes leading up to its sacrifice to the cause of science, the 1,500-pound (700-kilogram) shepherding spacecraft will use its specialized sensors to look for water’s telltale chemical signature within the larger debris plume created by the Centaur, possibly in the form of ice, hydrocarbons or hydrated materials.

How to watch
NASA wants amateur astronomers to join in a “citizen scientist” program. Jennifer Heldmann heads the LCROSS observing campaign. “We would like to have as many eyes and instruments watching the impact as possible, because this is the way we’ll get the most data and the most information as possible,” she said.

Those who live to the west of Mississippi River will have the best opportunity, because the sky will still be dark. Those living east of the Mississippi will still be able to see the moon, but they’ll also have to contend with morning twilight or, in the case of those living along the Atlantic Seaboard, daylight after sunrise. That makes for a much brighter sky background.

To see LCROSS’ effect, a dark backdrop will be an important prerequisite, since it’s estimated that the debris plume will be no brighter than a sixth-magnitude star (the threshold of naked-eye visibility), and quite likely even fainter.

If you want to try seeing the impact yourself, you need to be aware of some important points.

The bigger, the better
First, you’re going to need a moderately large telescope, somewhere on the order of at least 10 to 12 inches (250mm to 300mm) of aperture. Smaller telescopes will probably not be able to do the job, and you will definitely not see anything using binoculars. You’ll likely need to use magnifications in the 250- to 500-power range to have a legitimate chance of getting a glimpse of the dim impact plume.

Keep in mind that high power dilutes the brightness of an image, and aggravates any unsteadiness of detail. As a general rule of thumb, the maximum amount of magnification for any telescope should be 50-power per inch of aperture.

“But wait a minute,” you may protest, “my telescope comes with a special Barlow lens that the manufacturer promises will double or even triple the magnification of my eyepiece.”

True enough. In fact, that aforementioned 500-power is likely achieved by pushing the scope’s highest power eyepiece with that very same Barlow lens, which ultimately will result in a dim, impossibly fuzzy image.

If you’re a beginner, you need to understand that that using a Barlow lens is similar to enlarging a photograph. The negative, like a telescope’s image, contains only so much detail, which can be blown up only so far before all you can see is fuzz! So if you have a 3-inch (75mm) department store telescope — even if it is blessed with perfect optics — the claim of 500-power is more than three times the limit of the most practical magnification that it can provide.

The impact will take place at the lunar south pole, or on the lower limb of the moon along the dark portion immediately adjacent to the terminator (the line that separates the illuminated day side and the dark night side of the Moon). Try to keep the very bright sunlit portion of the moon out of the field of view as much as possible.

The plume is expected to be in the shape of a “Vm” but it will be exceedingly small in size relative to the moon itself. According to NASA’s Brian H. Day, the dusty material is only expected to rise about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the lunar surface. From Earth, that would be equal to about one-quarter of 1 percent of the moon’s apparent size or about 5.2 arc seconds.

To get an idea of just how large this is, point your telescope toward Jupiter, which conveniently shines in the southern part of our current evening sky. Jupiter’s disk currently measures 45 arc seconds in diameter; so the dust plume from LCROSS would appear only about one-ninth as large as that!

And the plume — if and when it’s visible — will not last very long. The best guesstimates are that it will last no more than two minutes.

You can get more detailed viewing tips from NASA here.

Observatories expected to participate in the study include the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, Hawaii’s Keck and Gemini telescopes, the Magdelena Ridge and Apache Ridge observatories in New Mexico, the MMT Observatory in Arizona and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) now circling the moon.

Lastly, you can watch the event live on NASA TV, beginning at 6:30 a.m. ET (3:30 a.m. PT).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

Moon Water: A Game-Changing Discovery

The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.

Read the full story

Asteroid Juno set to brighten your night September 21st 2009

Toward the end of September, the sun will turn a spotlight on the asteroid Juno, giving that bulky lump of rock a rare featured cameo in the night sky. Those who get out to a dark, unpolluted sky will be able to spot the asteroid’s silvery glint near the planet Uranus with a pair of binoculars. Read the full story

(CNN) — Scientists have discovered the first confirmed Earth-like planet outside our solar system, they announced Wednesday.

“This is the first confirmed rocky planet in another system,” astronomer Artie Hatzes told CNN, contrasting the solid planet with gaseous ones like Jupiter and Saturn. Read the full story

Crop circles, Google Earth, and the logo mystery

On Google’s homepage today, the search giant swapped out its normal logo for a UFO-themed Google doodle. The illustrated flying saucer carved out “Goog e” in the corn field, and a little green tractor finishes off the “l.” Read the full story

The ancient Egyptians used two bright stars in the Big Dipper and Little Dipper constellations to align their pyramids in a north-south direction, a British Egyptologist says. If she’s right, we can now pin down the ages of the pyramids far more accurately than before.

It’s an “ingenious solution to a long-standing mystery”, says astronomer and science historian Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It seems quite convincing to me. This could pin down the dates of the Old Kingdom of Egypt – the oldest fixed dates in history.” Read the full story

Scientists in the US are trying to map the twisting “tubes” so they can be used to cut the cost of space travel.

Each one acts like a gravitational version of the Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of forces between planets and moons.

Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways can look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrangian points where gravitational forces balance out. Read the full story

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.

The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet’s zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.

The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.

It’s a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at the Keele University in England. Hellier’s report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

“It’s causing its own destruction by creating these tides,” Hellier said.

The star is called WASP-18 and the planet is WASP-18b because of the Wide Angle Search for Planets team that found them.

The planet circles a star that is in the constellation Phoenix and is about 325 light-years away from Earth, which means it is in our galactic neighborhood. A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles.

The planet is 1.9 million miles from its star, 1/50th of the distance between Earth and the sun, our star. And because of that the temperature is about 3,800 degrees.

Its size — 10 times bigger than Jupiter — and its proximity to its star make it likely to die, Hellier said.

Think of how the distant moon pulls Earth’s oceans to form twice-daily tides. The effect the odd planet has on its star is thousands of times stronger, Hellier said. The star’s tidal bulge of plasma may extend hundreds of miles, he said.

Like most planets outside our solar system, this planet was not seen directly by a telescope. Astronomers found it by seeing dips in light from the star every time the planet came between the star and Earth.

So far astronomers have found more than 370 planets outside the solar system. This one is “yet another weird one in the exoplanet menagerie,” said planet specialist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

It’s so unusual to find a suicidal planet that University of Maryland astronomer Douglas Hamilton questioned whether there was another explanation. While it is likely that this is a suicidal planet, Hamilton said it is also possible that some basic physics calculations that all astronomers rely on could be dead wrong.

The answer will become apparent in less than a decade if the planet seems to be further in a death spiral, he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft.

“Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.” Read the full story

An interesting look at a different theory to how the planet has evolved. Makes you stop and think for a minute: what if?

http://www.nealadams.com/nmu.html

Click the above link to read the full article below. The video demonstrates this theory.

The case against pangea

First… it’s important to understand that this is the most profound disagreement in all of science in a century and a half… and, even so, it is the tip of the iceberg, the ramifications of this disagreement will change everything we know in science, top to bottom.

To begin with basic stuff.
All science knows…
The earth has two crusts. One…the mostly basalt lower crust or the oceanic crust which is 2 – 4 miles deeper down than the higher upper continental crust. This lower crust, essentially covers the Earth. It … this crust is being made daily at rift cracks that snake around the earth’s mid- oceans. But how could all these rifts continually spread apart…without the Earth growing? Ah….that is the question….isn’t it?

Secondly,
Sitting on or “in” and “as part of” the oceanic crust is the second higher upper crust or the Continental Crust rising for the most part out of the water. It is made mostly of granitic rock, which is 2.5 times the weight of water.

Some edge area of the Continental Crust or Plate dips into and under the sea level of the ocean. This area is what we call the Continental Shelf. So as you go out into the ocean and the water gets gradually deeper … that is the Continental Shelf. At a given distance out into the ocean the ocean floor suddenly drops off and goes down like a plummet… 2 ½ to 4 miles to the deep ocean floor, where we find the second lower crust, the Oceanic Crust made mostly of basalts which are 3.0 – 3.3 times the weight of water. So to make it visually clear, if you took the water away what you would see as you go out into the ocean a distance is, the Continental Shelf would suddenly drop away and down like a ridge in Arizona., except it would go straight down for two to three miles, as if it was suddenly broken off. The other side of that broken off ridge is across the ocean thousands of miles in Europe, or Africa and west to Australia and Asia.

How did the two sides of this higher crust spread apart?

Rifts or eruptive cracks in the ocean floor provide new material in the form of molten magmic rock that rises up at a rift area and the oceanic plate spreads apart and the two sides move away from each other smoothly and regularly, and so the continents welded within the oceanic plates also move apart as the ocean bottom spreads…. Now if this happens … and it does, all over the world, logically speaking, this Earth must grow.

We … I … argue that, that this outer crust originally covered the whole of a smaller Earth and the Earth sphere grew. The outer crust, therefore, had to crack and spread to accommodate a growing Earth…which…it apparently did.

We further argue that if you were to shrink the sphere of Earth … by letting the oceanic plate re-enter the rifts they erupted from, over time … the continental crust would easily and completely fit back together, and this solution satisfies all questions of tectonics, science, geology, paleontology, theoretical and practical physics, cosmology, and subatomic physics. Pretty simple actually.

Against this is the current Pangea theory which insists … that the continents float willy, nilly about the Earth, spinning, sliding, bumping, and crashing like bumper cars in a carnival. (That’s a common description … which some geologists are currently backing away from… in small numbers.) The Pangea theory says the Earth was assembled 4.5 billion years ago in a “universal instant” from debris … that was collected in our galaxy, to this size, (by a method that is never … I repeat never explained, why this assembly of material mysteriously ended at exactly this time, and didn’t continue to provide more material is a brutally illogical contradiction. Sometime in the previous 9 billion years, this stuff collected. Yet, for the last 4.5 billion years no new stuff collected, according to our 150 year old theory. How can that be? There is no possible explanation for this contradiction. It’s almost silly. It’s certainly naïve, but still it is one hundred and fifty years old.

We are told this material is ‘star stuff’, from novas or super novas. If this wasn’t presented seriously, it would be funny. Why?

Now this is pretty amazing to watch. Definitely video you won’t see every day.

In north east India, bridges aren’t built – they’re grown! The rainforests of Cherrapunji are credited with being one of the wettest places on Earth, and timber bridges would quickly rot. Locals have an innovative solution – grow bridges out of living trees. Like many in the banyan family, the rubber fig has secondary roots that grow above the soil surface. By guiding these roots across chasms, villagers can slowly grow a strong, permanent bridge. Read the full story