Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 12/03/15

Thursday, 3 December 2015

JPL CubeSat clean room: A factory for small spacecraft

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There was a time when you could find spacecraft clean rooms in two sizes -- -- big and bigger. After all, these harsh-white, sterile environments have to handle very large spacecraft, support equipment, and a small legion of highly trained technicians and engineers. But today, more than ever, spacecraft come in all shapes and sizes. The bigger ones already have their clean room needs covered, but what about the little guys? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has them covered too, with the new Integrated CubeSat Development Laboratory.
via Science Daily
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Faintest galaxy from the early universe, 400 million years after the big bang

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Astronomers have detected a very compact and faint early galaxy that was forming 400 million years after the big bang.
via Science Daily
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Half of Kepler’s giant exoplanet candidates are false positives, study finds

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An international team made a 5-year radial velocity campaign of Kepler's giant exoplanet candidates, using the SOPHIE spectrograph (Observatory of Haute-Provence, France), and found that 52.3% were actually eclipsing binaries, while 2.3% were brown dwarfs.
via Science Daily
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LISA Pathfinder en route to gravitational wave demonstration

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ESA's LISA Pathfinder lifted off earlier Dec. 3, 2015 on a Vega rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on its way to demonstrate technology for observing gravitational waves from space. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
via Science Daily
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New research exploits extraordinary properties of graphene

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Innovative new research has demonstrated how the extraordinary properties of graphene can be exploited to create artificial structures that can be used to control and manipulate electromagnetic radiation over a wide range of wavelengths.
via Science Daily

NASA Space Telescopes See Magnified Image of the Faintest Galaxy from the Early Universe

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Hunting for faraway galaxies that existed long, long ago is like a fishing trip for astronomers. So far only the "big fish" have been found, bright galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the big bang. Now, using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers have caught a "smaller fish," a very compact and faint early galaxy that was forming 400 million years after the big bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.

via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/45/

Graphene oxide could make stronger dental fillings

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Graphene oxide could be used to make super strong dental fillings that don't corrode, according to a new study. Research suggests we chew around 800 times in an average meal; that's almost a million times a year. We put our teeth under huge strain, and often require fillings to repair them. Fillings are typically made of a mixture of metals, such as copper, mercury, silver and tin, or composites of powdered glass and ceramic. Typical metal fillings can corrode and composite fillings are not very strong; Graphene on the other hand is 200 times stronger than steel and doesn't corrode, making it a prime new candidate for dental fillings.
via Science Daily

Superflare: Sun could release flares 1000x greater than previously recorded

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The Sun demonstrates the potential to superflare, new research into stellar flaring suggests. New research has found a stellar superflare on a star observed by NASA's Kepler space telescope with wave patterns similar to those that have been observed in solar flares. Superflares are thousands of times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun, and are frequently observed on some stars.
via Science Daily
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Enceladus: Ringside Water World

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus poses above the gas giant's icy rings in this Cassini spacecraft image. The dramatic scene was captured on July 29, while Cassini cruised just below the ring plane, its cameras looking back in a nearly sunward direction about 1 million kilometers from the moon's bright crescent. At 500 kilometers in diameter, Enceladus is a surprisingly active moon though, its remarkable south polar geysers are visible venting beyond a dark southern limb. In fact, data collected during Cassini's flybys and years of images have recently revealed the presence of a global ocean of liquid water beneath this moon's icy crust. Demonstrating the tantalizing liquid layer's global extent, the careful analysis indicates surface and core are not rigidly connected, with Enceladus rocking slightly back and forth in its orbit.

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