Wednesday 26 June 2013

Commercial Space Travel: 4 Things You May Not Know

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In 2001 the American paid a whopping $20 million to visit the international space station, Mir, for seven days. Several startup companies have sprung out since then and have tried to make space tourism more mainstream, but the reality is that, as of ...

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Innovative Partnerships Expand NASA's Summer Education Reach

NASA has selected more than 170 educational organizations nationwide to receive Summer of Innovation mini-awards of as much as $2,500 each.

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/jun/HQ_13-195_SOI_awards.html

July Space Station Spacewalks to be Previewed and Broadcast on NASA TV

Two Expedition 36 astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station twice in July on spacewalks to prepare for a new Russian module and perform additional installations on the station's backbone.

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/jun/HQ_M13-103_Exp_36_Spacewalks.html

Plants Use Quantum Physics to Survive

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The new Science study on purple bacteria, which also photosynthesize, gives more support to the idea that plants use quantum mechanics to achieve this near-perfect efficiency. A trick of quantum physics called coherence, the researchers suggest, helps ...

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NASA Selects Student Teams For Microgravity Research Flights

NASA has selected 14 undergraduate student teams from minority serving institutions across the United States to test science experiments under microgravity conditions.

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/jun/HQ_13-198_MUREP_Flights.html

Launch of NASA's New Solar Mission Rescheduled to June 27

The launch of NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is being delayed one day to 7:27 p.m. PDT (10:27 p.m. EDT) Thursday, June 27, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Live NASA Television launch coverage begins at 6 p.m. PDT.

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/jun/HQ_M13-102_IRIS_Launch_Rescheduled.html

NASA Thruster Achieves World-Record 5+ Years of Operation

A NASA advanced ion propulsion engine has successfully operated for more than 48,000 hours, or 5 and a half years, making it the longest test duration of any type of space propulsion system demonstration project ever.

via NASA Breaking News

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/jun/HQ_13-193_Ion_Thruster_Record.html

Actor Rainn Wilson ofThe Office Talks Asteroid Mining | Spacecom

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Actor Rainn Wilson Talks Asteroid Mining with Planetary Resources ... Skylord at the beginning of the webcastPlanetary Resource's Asteroid Mining PlanPhotos ...

www.space.com/21724-asteroid-mining-actor-rainn-wilson.html

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Sound sculptor to begin arts residency at CERN




Bill Fontana (Image: Jonty Wilde)




Bill Fontana, American sound sculptor and winner of the second Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN, begins his arts residency at CERN 4 July with a lecture at the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation which will be webcast live.


Bill Fontana, whose mantra is “all sound is music” is one of the world’s most renowned sound sculptors. He is internationally known for his pioneering experiments in “sound art” that have featured in some of the world’s leading arts institutions all over the world, including Tate Modern and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He studied with the composer John Cage who transformed his understanding of the world as a universe of sound.


Fontana will work with theorist Subodh Patil, his science inspiration partner during his time at CERN. Fontana will explore the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator [link to LHC page], along with other aspects of the CERN site in his project entitled ‘Acoustic Time Travel’.


“The sounds of the Large Hadron Collider and its technology will best be captured and sculpted by one of the world’s leading sound artists,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “Bill Fontana creates sound pieces out of some of the most iconic buildings and structures in the world, and it is now the turn of the LHC.”


Follow the webcast live from 6.30pm on 4 July. See here if you are in the Geneva area and would like to attend in person.





via CERN updates

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/06/sound-sculptor-begin-arts-residency-cern

Harvard uses distributed computing and quantum mechanics to ...

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The future may be bright with organic solar cells. A new public database from Harvard lists thousands of new molecules ...

ExtremeTech

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Asteroid-mining company raises $1M for world's first crowdfunded ...

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It's official: The world's first crowdfunded, public use space telescope will be spent into space in 2015.

www.geekwire.com/.../asteroidmining-company-raises-1m-wo...

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Creating and Dissipating Magnetic Clouds in Graphene

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Researchers at the University of Manchester however have found a way to switch magnetism on and off within a material, instead of just switching it from up to down. The material is the atom-thin plane of carbon, graphene, which is already an object of ...

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How asteroid mining could add trillions to the world economy

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Yet, space mining is still in its infancy, and exploring it is costly. A NASA mission to an asteroid to bring back 2 kg (about 4.5 pounds) of material in 2021 is expected to cost the space agency $1 billion. But two companies are exploring asteroid ...

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