Tag: space.com

An American spy satellite and 13 tiny “cubesats” shared a rocket ride to orbit this morning, lighting up the predawn sky over their California launchpad. 

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasted off today (Oct. 8) from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:49 a.m. EDT (0949 GMT; 8:49 a.m. local California time), lofting the secret NROL-55 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that operates the United States’ spy satellites. You can watch a video replay of the dazzling rocket launch here.

The 13 cubesats tagged along as part of the NRO’s GRACE (Government Rideshare Advanced Concepts Experiment) secondary payload. Nine of the tiny spacecraft were sponsored by the NRO, while NASA sponsored the other four. [‪Photos: Atlas V Launches NROL-55 on Secret Mission]

“That was a great launch and I’m very excited,” Andres Martinez, program manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, said just after liftoff during NASA’s live launch commentary. “Small satellites provide NASA the ability to rapidly develop and launch groundbreaking technology into space.”

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying the classified NROL-55 satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, as well as 13 tiny cubesats for the NRO and NASA, during a pre-dawn launch on Oct. 8, 2015.
Credit: United Launch Alliance

Not much can be said about the secretive NROL-55 mission, which is classified. But NRO and NASA officials have revealed details about the GRACE cubesats, which are mostly demonstrating new tech in Earth orbit.

For example, two of the NRO cubesats, known as AeroCube-5C and AeroCube-7, will test out tracking and laser-communications technologies. These spacecraft weigh just 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kilograms) apiece, NRO officials said.

AeroCube-7 was developed with NASA funding, via the agency’s Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration project. This cubesat will use a 6-watt laser to beam data from low Earth orbit (LEO) to the ground.

“Our goal with this satellite is to achieve communication from LEO to ground at rates that are a factor of 100 higher than what has been achieved so far in cubesats using radio-frequency communication,” Richard Welle, director of the Microsatellite Systems department at The Aerospace Corporation, said during a pre-launch briefing on Wednesday (Oct. 7).

Five other NRO cubesats, which range in weight from 4.4 lbs. to 10 lbs. (2 to 4.5 kg), will demonstrate new “software-defined” radio communications. The other two, which weigh just 2.2 lbs. (1 kg) each, will perform calibration measurements in the ionosphere, a region of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

The four NASA-sponsored cubesats are ARC-1 (Alaska Research CubeSat 1), BisonSat, AMSAT Fox-1 and LMRST-Sat (Low Mass Radio Science Transponder-Satellite).  

The 2.2-lb ARC-1, which was developed by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, will help test out new cubesat control and communications systems.

BisonSat is the first cubesat to be built by students at a Native American tribal college; it was designed at Salish Kootenai College, which is located on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The 2.2-lb. BisonSat will conduct a variety of Earth observations from orbit, but its main mission is educational.

The primary goal is “to interest our students in considering a career in the aerospace industry in the U.S., either as an engineer or as a scientist, and to help address that national need of resupplying our workforce with talented people to keep the U.S. as a leader in this area,” BisonSat principal investigator Tim Olson, of Salish Kootenai College, said during Wednesday’s news briefing.

AMSAT Fox-1, which also weighs 2.2 lbs. was developed by the Maryland-based Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT). The bantam spacecraft “features an amateur radio FM voice repeater that will provide easy portable satellite communications opportunities for amateur radio operators worldwide,” an NRO fact sheet about the GRACE cubesats states.

The 6.6-lb. (3 kg) LMRST-Sat comes courtesy of a team based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. LMRST-Sat aims to help demonstrate a new type of radio-science instrument that could help reveal details about the gravity fields and atmospheres of solar system bodies, said mission principal investigator Courtney Duncan of JPL.

“Once we’ve interacted with it in space and learned some things from that, then we’ll be in a position to propose this credibly to future deep-space missions to interesting destinations such as Europa, the moon of Jupiter, or Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, or Mars,” Duncan said.

NASA sees big potential in tiny, inexpensive cubesats, the basic building block of which is a cube measuring just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side. Indeed, the space agency plans to launch such minuscule craft to the moon, near-Earth asteroids and Mars in the next few years.

Today’s liftoff was the 101st for United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that was founded in December 2006. All of the company’s launches to date have been successful.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Credit: NASA

Eighteen astronauts star in the first of new limited edition poster series from uniphi space agency and Chop Shop. Credit: uniphi space agency

A talent agency that represents former NASA astronauts is launching a unique take on its clients’ spacesuited portraits, collaborating with a popular artist to produce a new illustrated poster series featuring the space travelers they manage.

uniphi space agency, a division of the celebrity marketing and management company uniphi good LLC, has turned to Kickstarter to crowdfund its first art poster in a new series of astronaut-inspired designsby Chop Shop, the Brooklyn-based print house known for its iconic pop-culture artwork.

“I am excited for this unique piece of space memorabilia,” said Michelle Lucas, a former NASA astronaut trainer and vice president at uniphi space agency. “I’ve been a ‘space geek’ and collector since I was young and can’t remember seeing anything like this.” [‪Earth From Space: Amazing Astronaut Photos]

“I literally cannot wait to add this to my office wall,” Lucas said.

The first poster depicts all 18 of uniphi’s current crew of astronauts and features the motto, “The path less traveled is paved with stars.” Each astronaut portrait is accompanied by a star, forming a constellation around an illustration of a space shuttle orbiter and the International Space Station, the vehicles on which the men and women flew.

“I believe the first generation to consider space travel to be not so uncommon is here among us now. Being a part of a community that helps to promote this idea of people going beyond the terrestrial bond is exciting for me and as a designer is the most attractive kind of project one can hope to be a part of,” Thomas Romer, the artist behind the poster and owner of Chop Shop, said in a statement.

The uniphi space agency’s astronaut corps includes shuttle mission and station expedition commanders, and men and women who have ventured outside to walk in space. They include Pam Melroy, who was one of only two women to pilot the shuttle; Fred Gregory, the first black astronaut to command a space mission; and David Wolf, whose seven spacewalks totaled more than 40 hours.

Other veteran astronauts depicted on the poster include Clay Anderson, Leroy Chiao, Frank Culbertson and Susan Helms.

“We figured [that] it was time to celebrate these incredible astronauts, and their experiences, through our ‘We Believe In Astronauts’ campaign,” said Annie Balliro, the president and CEO of uniphi good and the uniphi space agency.

A work in progress, the first uniphi space agency and Chop Shop poster: “The path less traveled is paved with stars.”
Credit: uniphi space agency

In addition to the poster, the Kickstarter campaignis also funding a postcard set that features each astronaut on his or her own individual card.

Backers can choose from either the poster, limited to 500 prints, or the postcards, which are limited to 100 sets, for a pledge of $75. Or, for $500, supporters can receive one of the 50 posters or postcard sets to be autographed by all 18 astronauts depicted in the artwork.

Other campaign perks include “We Believe in Astronauts” collectible coins, signed copies of some of the astronauts’ own books, and embroidered mission patches created for uniphi by Tim Gagnon, who has been behind more than 10 of the patches that astronauts and cosmonauts have worn into space.

At the higher levels of support, which begin at $1,500 and climb to $10,000, backers can also choose to have their own portrait illustrated as an astronaut, have an astronaut record their voicemail message, go out for “ice cream or coffee” with an astronaut, or book one of the astronauts to come speak to their group or class.

Balliro said it is not “rocket science” why the people at the center of their poster campaign are so appealing in pop culture.

“Who are the humans who are brave enough to blast off into space? Astronauts. Who are the ones who put on an EVA [space] suit and get out there in the vastness of our universe? Astronauts,” she said.

For more details or to reserve your own poster, see uniphi space agency’s Kickstarter campaign: kck.st/1O9h8g4

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2015 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

This aurora forecast by the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center shows the expected northern lights activity for Oct. 7, 2015 during a geomagnetic storm. The storm could make auroras visible as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon, according to an SWPC alert. Credit: Space Weather Prediction Center/NOAA

Editor’s update for 6:20 pm ET: The Space Weather Prediction Group released a revised alert at 6 p.m. ET today, lowering the geomagnetic storm class to a G1 and a K-index of 5, with auroras now expected to be visible from the northern tier of the U.S., such as northern Michigan and Maine.

A geomagnetic storm kicked up by high-speed solar wind should amplify the northern lights tonight — making them potentially visible as low as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon as the storm intensifies, space weather experts say.

According to an Oct. 7 alert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, the storm will range from strong to extreme, reaching a G3 or greater on NOAA’s scale and a K-index of 7 or greater. That means that auroras may be visible much farther south than their usual arctic locales, weather and viewing location permitting.

If you live in the potential visibility area, the best way to see the northern lights is to be well away from city lights in an area with extremely dark skies. [Best Aurora Photos of 2015]

The geomagnetic storm, which began early last night, was caused by a coronal hole — a gap in the sun’s outermost layer and magnetic field that allows the solar wind to stream out forcefully. The hole appears darker than the surrounding area in photos from some watching spacecraft. The solar wind’s fast-moving charged gas and plasma particles can fly out at speeds of up to 500 miles (800 kilometers) per second from this type of hole, and when they reach Earth’s magnetic field they distort it, causing a geomagnetic storm that can generate auroras in the night sky (as well as potentially interfering with satellite navigation, radio communication and power systems).

This image of the sun released by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center shows the location of a coronal hole on the sun, as viewed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft on Oct. 6, 2015. Solar wind streaming from the coronal hole is amplifying auroras on Earth, according to the SWPC.
Credit: Space Weather Prediction Center/NOAA

Last night, skywatchers in the Arctic Circle saw an unusually bright outburst of auroras: so bright that they could be seen in the sky alongside shining city lights, according to Spaceweather.com, a website that tracks space weather and skywatching events. Any auroras that materialize further south, as the storm increases in power, will be much dimmer — but still an unusual treat for an area that cannot normally see them.

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing photo of tonight’s northern lights or another night sky photo you’d like to share with Space.com and its news partners for a possible story or gallery, send images and comments in to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com. Good luck!

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-55 payload heads toward the launch pad at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base ahead of a planned Oct. 8, 2015 launch. Credit: ULA

An American spy satellite will blast off early Thursday morning (Oct. 8), taking 13 tiny “cubesats” along for the ride, and you can watch all the action live.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled to launch the NROL-55 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that operates the United States’ spy satellites, at 8:49 a.m. EDT (1249 GMT) Thursday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You can watch the launch live on Space.com beginning at 8:29 a.m. EDT (1229 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV.

NROL-55’s primary payload is classified, but the 13 cubesats — which will hitch a ride as part of the NRO’s GRACE (Government Rideshare Advanced Concepts Experiment) secondary payload — are less mysterious. Nine of the bantam spacecraft are sponsored by the NRO, while the other four are sponsored by NASA. [‪Cubesats: Tiny, Versatile Spacecraft Explained (Infographic)]

Three of the NRO cubesats are part of a project called SNaP-3, “whose mission is to develop user software-defined radios to provide beyond-line-of-sight communication for disadvantaged users in remote locations,” according to an NRO fact sheet. Each of the SNaP-3 spacecraft weighs 10 lbs. (4.5 kilograms).

Two other NRO cubesats from a project known as SINOD-D, which weigh just 4.4 lbs. (2 kg) apiece, will also demonstrate software-defined radio communications, while the 3.3-lb. (1.5 kg) AeroCube-5c and AeroCube-7 craft will prove out tracking and optical-communications technologies, according to the fact sheet.

The other two NRO cubesats, from the PropCube project, weigh a mere 2.2 lbs. (1 kg) apiece. This duo will perform calibration measurements high up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The four NASA-sponsored cubesats are called ARC-1 (Alaska Research CubeSat 1), BisonSat, AMSAT Fox-1 and LMRST-Sat (Low Mass Radio Science Transponder-Satellite).

ARC-1, which weighs 2.2 lbs., was developed by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This miniature spacecraft will characterize the thermal and vibration conditions experienced during launch and help test out new cubesat control and communications systems.

Students at Salish Kootenai College, a tribal institution on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, developed the 2.2-lb. BisonSat, which will perform a variety of Earth observations. A main goal of the project is to help students learn how to design, build and operate spacecraft, according to NRO officials.

The 2.2-lb. AMSAT Fox-1 was developed by the Maryland-based Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT). This cubesat “features an amateur radio FM voice repeater that will provide easy, portable satellite communications opportunities for amateur radio operators worldwide,” the NRO fact sheet states.

A team based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, devised LMRST-Sat, a 6.6-lb. (3 kg) spacecraft designed to demonstrate a new type of transponder that could help cubesats navigate through deep space, far from Earth.

You can also watch the NROL-55 launch live at ULA’s website, http://www.ulalaunch.com, starting at 8:29 a.m. EDT (1229 GMT).

Thursday’s liftoff will be the 101st launch for ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that was founded in December 2006. All 100 of ULA’s launches to date have been successful.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

The planet Uranus will be at opposition on Oct. 11, 2015. This Starry Night Software sky map shows the location of Uranus, as well as Neptune, at midnight on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015 as seen in the southern sky from mid-northern latitudes. Credit: Starry Night Software

It’s officially autumn, and time once again to seek out the two most distant planets of our solar system, Uranus and Neptune.

Both are gas giants and each can be readily identified using good binoculars. Uranus, in fact, can be seen with just your unaided eyes under a dark, clear sky — if you know where to look. Fortunately, both are currently well-placed for viewing in our evening sky and with the waning moon moving into the morning sky, it will be a good time to look for these two faint planets.

Here’s an overview of where to spot the distant planets, as well the intriguing histories of their discovery. [October 2015 Skywatching Guide]

Uranus at opposition

Interestingly, although the planet Uranus can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under favorable conditions, its presence was unknown until March 13, 1781, when William Herschel discovered it by accident using a 6-inch reflecting telescope. Herschel initially believed he had discovered a new comet, noting that it was moving slowly through the constellation Gemini. He did not announce the discovery until just over a month after his first observation of the new object.

But after several notable European astronomers calculated its orbit it became clear that Herschel’s object was not a comet, but actually a brand-new planet; the very first planet that was discovered scientifically.

Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal of England, asked Herschel to name the new planet and Herschel responded with Georgium Sidus (George’s Star), or the “Georgian Planet,” in honor of King George III of England.

Unfortunately for Herschel, his proposed name for the new world was not very popular beyond the realm of Great Britain and other possible names were soon put forth: Neptune and Uranus were the two that were most bandied about with Uranus — the primal Greek god personifying the sky — being the most popular. The confusion over what moniker to definitively assign to the seventh planet continued right up through the first half of the 19th century until 1850, when the British Nautical Almanac Office finally switched from Georgium Sidus to Uranus. That’s when the name finally stuck. [Photos of Uranus, the Tilted Giant Planet] 

Uranus is currently visible in our early evening sky, within the dim constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. On Oct. 11 it will arrive at opposition, its furthest point from the sun, and will be visible the entire night. It shines at magnitude +5.7, which places it near the threshold of naked-eye visibility under dark, clear skies.

It is best to study the chart attached to this column first, then scan that region with binoculars. Using a magnification of 150-power with a telescope of at least 3-inch aperture, you should be able to resolve it into a tiny, pale-green featureless disk. Uranus, which on average lies 1.783 billion miles (2.870 billion km) from the sun, has a diameter of 31,763 miles (51,118 km) and, according to flyby magnetic data from Voyager 2 in 1986, has a rotation period of 17.2 hours and takes 84 years to make one trip around the sun. At last count, Uranus has 27 moons, all in orbits lying in the planet’s equator. There is also a complex of nine narrow, nearly opaque rings, which were discovered in 1978.

Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn are all rather similar in the sense that their interiors consist mainly of methane, water and ammonia, encased in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.

But the most bizarre thing about Uranus is the tilt of its axis with respect to the plane of its orbit. The other seven planets are tilted somewhere between 3 and 29 degrees.

Uranus is tilted at 97.8 degrees.

So from our Earthly perspective, seasons on Uranus are extreme: when the sun rises at its north pole, it stays up for 42 Earth years; then it sets and the north pole is in darkness for 42 Earth years.

Sunday, October 11, midnight EDT. Find Uranus at opposition by following the chain of stars in Pisces to a spot half way between Zeta and Epsilon Piscium, and a little to the south.
Credit: Starry Night Software

Neptune in the night sky

In contrast to Uranus, distant Neptune is much too faint to be perceived with the unaided eye. Its average distance from the sun is 2.795 billion miles (4.497 billion km); the eighth and (since the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet status in 2006) farthest planet in the solar system.

It is slightly smaller than Uranus, with a diameter of 30,250 miles (48,682 km). Currently at magnitude +7.9, it’s more than six times dimmer than Uranus. Nonetheless, if you have access to a dark, clear sky and carefully examine our map, you should have no trouble in finding it with good binoculars. The planet currently resides in the constellation of Aquarius, the Water Carrier. It arrived at its opposition to the sun on Aug. 31 and is now highest in the south in the middle of the evening. [Photos of Neptune, The Mysterious Blue Planet]

With a telescope, trying to resolve Neptune into a disk will be more difficult than it is with Uranus. You’re going to need at least a 4-inch telescope with a magnification of no less than 200-power, just to turn Neptune into a tiny blue dot of light.

Neptune’s atmosphere has an active and visible weather pattern, driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the solar system, with recorded wind speeds as high as 1,300 miles (2,100 km) per hour.Its period of revolution around the sun equals 164 years.

In 1989, Voyager 2 revealed the existence of at least three rings around Neptune, composed of very fine particles. Neptune has 14 moons, one of which — Triton — has a tenuous atmosphere of nitrogen and at nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 km) in diameter, is larger than Pluto. Because it is moving in a retrograde (backward) orbit, there are suggestions that Neptune may actually have captured it in the distant past. Those who have access to a telescope of 12 inches or more might even be able to get a glimpse of Triton, very close to Neptune itself.

Neptune’s discovery came about from long-term observations of Uranus. It seemed to astronomers that some unknown body was somehow perturbing Uranus’ orbit. Then, as so often happens in science, two men attacked the problem at the same time without knowing of each other’s intentions.

In England, young John Couch Adams, just out of college, proved by mathematics that there must be an unseen planet beyond Uranus and indicated where in the sky it might be found. Meanwhile, in France, Urbain J.J. Leverrier came up with a similar solution. Both believed that the unseen body was then in the constellation of Aquarius, the Water Carrier, where Neptune resides today.

Adams and Leverrier appealed to other astronomers for help in tracking down the planet. In England, James Challis, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, searched for the planet during the summer of 1846 following Adams’ directions. Amazingly, Challis actually saw Neptune twice — but failed to recognize it because he was using an out-of-date star map!

Meanwhile, on Sept. 23 of that year, a letter arrived at the Berlin Observatory from Leverrier requesting that they search in the place he suggested. Johann Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest did exactly as instructed and found the new planet in less than an hour.

Sometimes I wonder why Adams and Leverrier did not actually look for Neptune on their own. It appears that they both preferred spending much of their free time working out complicated mathematical problems as opposed to actually looking through the eyepiece of a telescope.

Desk men to the end!

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing image of the night sky that you would like to share with Space.com and its news partners for a story or photo gallery, send photos and comments in to: spacephotos@space.com.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer’s Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

If you’re delighted by the ever-changing sky, here are some of its brightest inhabitants to watch for this week just before dawn.

Just before dawn, you’ll be able to view four bright planets. And now that October is here, and the days are getting shorter for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the sun rises around 7 a.m., so you don’t have to get up particularly early to check out the predawn view.

Venus, as usual, is the brightest of the bunch, with Jupiter close behind. Mars and Mercury are more challenging, and you may need binoculars to spot them. Watch them over the next few weeks, and you’ll see a changing pattern of bright objects. [10 Must-See Stargazing Events to Look Up for in 2015]

Venus and Mercury are tethered close to the sun, but the other planets and stars will be marching westward night by night.

This week, the waning crescent moon will be moving through the four planets toward the horizon, heading to new moon on Oct. 12.

The Moon

Thursday morning, Oct. 8, the moon will be close to Venus. In fact, the moon will even pass in front of Venus for observers in Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia.

Friday morning, Oct. 9, the moon will be in a close grouping with Mars and Jupiter.

Saturday morning, Oct. 10, the moon will be about halfway between Jupiter and Mercury, and will be a useful guide for spotting Mercury.

Finally, on Sunday morning, Oct. 11, for those of you with low eastern horizons, a thumbnail of a moon will be very close to Mercury, even passing in front of it in southern South America. Look for Mercury just above and to the left of the moon.

Parallax effect

A good way to see the effects of parallax, an object’s movement against a more distant background, is during a close passage of the moon in front of four planets. Depending on where you live on Earth, north or south, you will see the moon as nearer or farther away from individual planets. At present, Venus is the only planet south of the ecliptic — the sun’s path through the stars — so it is the most likely planet to get covered by the moon, which is also south of the ecliptic.

Another thing to look for this week is the earthshine or earthlight, from sunlight reflected onto the moon’s “dark” side by the Earth. A close look will show a faintly glowing “full moon” just above the sunlit crescent.

Early gems

If you get up a little earlier this week, you will get a fine preview of the winter sky. Look for the constellation of Orion close to the meridian, and the bright star Capella directly overhead. No fewer than eight first-magnitude stars are visible in the nighttime sky. This is a wonderful chance to observe the gems of the winter sky when the temperature is a lot warmer than it will be in January, when these same objects will appear in the evening sky.

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing image of the night sky that you would like to share with Space.com and its news partners for a story or photo gallery, send photos and comments in to: spacephotos@space.com.

This article was provided to Space.com by Simulation Curriculum, the leader in space science curriculum solutions and the makers of Starry Night and SkySafari. Follow Starry Night on Twitter @StarryNightEdu. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Scientists were looking for planets forming in the large disk of dust surrounding a young star when they encountered a surprise: fast-moving, wavelike arches racing across the disk like ripples in water.

The team first spotted the five structures in data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile while searching for lumps and bumps that might indicate planets forming around the young star. When the researchers looked back at images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 and 2011, they managed to spot the same features — but in new locations. A new video of the mysterious ripples, describes the strange features as seen by ESO scientists.

“Our observations have shown something unexpected,” Anthony Boccaletti, a researcher from LESIA (Observatoire de Paris/CNRS/UPMC/Paris-Diderot) in France and lead author on the paper, said in a statement. “The images from [the Very Large Telescope instrument] SPHERE show a set of unexplained features in the disk, which have an archlike or wavelike structure unlike anything that has ever been observed before.” [The Top 10 Strangest Things in Space]

By cross-referencing with the earlier Hubble records of the star, the team saw that the strange ripples were moving incredibly fast.

Researchers have spotted strange, fast-traveling ripples speeding around the disk of dust surrounding the young star AU Microscopii. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope and ESA’s Very Large Telescope show the ripples’ movement over the course of four years. The scale bar at the top of the image stretches the length of Neptune’s orbit around the sun.
Credit: ESO, NASA & ESA

“We reprocessed images from the Hubble data and ended up with enough information to track the movement of these strange features over a four-year period,” Christian Thalmann, a team member from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, said in the statement. “By doing this, we found that the arches are racing away from the star at speeds of up to 40,000 km/h [24,855 mph]!”

The red dwarf star AU Microscopii, called AU Mic for short, is 32 light-years from Earth and half the mass of the sun. Because of its heavy, uneven disk of debris, which Earth observers see edge-on, researchers have kept a careful eye on the star to watch for planets coalescing from the dust (noticing fluffy, “dryer-lint” evidence of planetary precursors in 2007, for instance).

The young star AU Microscopii, nicknamed AU Mic, can be found in the constellation of Microscopium.
Credit: ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

The newly spotted features are racing away at terrific speeds. The outermost ones are moving faster, and at least three appear to be moving quickly enough to escape the star’s gravitational pull, officials said in the statement. The waves are likely not caused by the collision of large asteroidlike objects or changes in the star’s gravity, the researchers said.

“One explanation for the strange structure links them to the star’s flares,” co-author Glenn Schneider, of Steward Observatory in Arizona, said in the statement. “AU Mic is a star with high flaring activity — it often lets off huge and sudden bursts of energy from on or near its surface.”

“One of these flares could perhaps have triggered something on one of the planets — if there are planets — like a violent stripping of material which could now be propagating through the disk, propelled by the flare’s force,” Schneider said.

The scenario is still speculative; it will take a lot of continued observation with the Very Large Telescope and other instruments to work out exactly what’s causing the racing waves. The research paper suggests the huge Acatama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array in Chile, for instance, to monitor the gas movement in the system. An accompanying “News and Views” column points out that the Gemini South telescope in Chile has also observed the system, but with a different field of view. Researchers may have to pool measurements from a number of perspectives to get to the bottom of the ripples.

“Cases such as that of AU Mic, in which disks can be imaged in great detail but any planets present are unseen, are likely to remain more common than directly imaged planets,” Marshall Perrin, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, who was not involved with the study, wrote in the “News and Views” column. “Lucky for astronomers, then, that circumstellar disks still turn out to have surprises such as the fast-moving dust features of AU Mic.”

The new research was described Oct. 7 in the journal Nature.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Credit: ESO, Luis Calçada, Martin Kornmesser, Christoph Malin (christophmalin.com) and NASA

The billionaire CEO of Amazon.com is also the founder of the private spaceflight company Blue Origin, which is slowly stepping into the public spotlight. Credit: Blue Origin

In September, billionaire Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company he founded, would build a facility at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, kicking off a new phase for the company as it pursues the construction of an orbital space vehicle.

Blue Origin has been known for being extremely secretive about its operations and future goals — a luxury partly afforded by having a private launch facility in a remote area of west Texas. The move to Florida’s Space Coast, however, may force the company to step into the spotlight.

Following the announcement ceremony at Cape Canaveral last month, Bezos talked with the media about his childhood obsession with the space program and science fiction books, and how that passion has motivated his business pursuits and shaped his ultimate goal to eventually put “millions of people” into space. [Photos: Private Spaceships of the Secretive Blue Origin]

A history of secrecy

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos leads Blue Origin, a commercial aerospace firm that hopes to send people on suborbital and orbital space trips.
Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist

Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) is surrounded on all sides by miles of empty grassland and marshes. The pad has gone unused for the past decade, but on Sept. 14, this otherwise rural spot hosted a bustling event space. A few hundred visitors gathered inside a massive tent with a soaring ceiling, temporary flooring, a reception area, a seating area and a large stage.

Among the guests were a few dozen members of the media, some of whom operated television cameras, ready to watch Bezos announce that the company would make a home at LC-36.

“During its 43 years of service, 145 launches thundered into space from this site,” Bezos said from the stage. “The site saw its last launch in 2005, and the pad has stood silent for more than 10 years — too long. We can’t wait to fix that.”

Blue Origin will build a facility at LC-36, where it will manufacture, test and launch the orbital launch vehicle that the company is building from scratch — unofficially nicknamed “Very Big Brother.”

Until now, Blue Origin has been able to execute its test rocket launches in total secrecy. Last April, from its private facility in west Texas, the company performed a successful test launch of its suborbital vehicle, which is called New Shepard. Blue Origin plans to use New Shepard mainly for space tourism, taking private citizens on a ride up above Earth’s atmosphere, where they can enjoy a brief period of weightlessness and an unhindered view of the cosmos. [How Blue Origin’s Suborbital Rocket Ride Works (Infographic)]

But Blue Origin didn’t inform the public or the media about the test launch until it was already complete. (A few weeks before the launch, the company’s president, Rob Meyerson, had told reporters that a test launch would take place “later this year.”) The company’s entire run of test launches has been conducted in a similar style, going back to at least 2006 with an earlier-generation vehicle.

In 2011, Blue Origin reported that it had performed two successful test launches of New Shepard but lost the vehicle during a third launch. The vehicle reached an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), traveling at more than 700 mph (1,100 km/h), but it experienced a “flight instability” that changed its angle of attack and prompted the safety team to stop the rocket’s thrusting.

Vehicle losses like this are expected in the early stages of testing a rocket or space-bound vehicle, but they can also happen during normal operations, as has been vividly demonstrated over the last 12 months.

On June 28, an uncrewed Falcon 9 rocket built by the private spaceflight company SpaceX exploded minutes after liftoff, disappearing in a cloud of white smoke. The rocket was carrying SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon capsule, which was packed with supplies intended for the International Space Station (ISS). The failure was later attributed to a faulty strut, and the company has not announced when it will fly again.

And on Oct. 28, 2014, the private spaceflight company Orbital Sciences (now known as Orbital ATK) had to abort the launch of its robotic ISS resupply vehicle only seconds after liftoff. The company’s Antares rocket crashed back down onto the launchpad, creating an explosion that looked like it came straight out of a big-budget action movie. Video of the event stayed at the top of the global news cycle for a week.

Even if Blue Origin doesn’t invite the public or the media to watch its test launches in Florida, the liftoffs will be clearly visible to residents of the Space Coast. It is highly likely that, at some point, Blue Origin will have to deal with the same media blitz that surrounded SpaceX and Orbital when their rockets failed.

The press event at LC-36 might be a sign that Blue Origin is preparing for this inevitable step into the spotlight. The grand showcase concluded with Bezos dramatically unveiling an image of Very Big Brother. (Details about the partially reusable rocket won’t be released until next year.) He finished the event with an even more dramatic statement: “One day — and I don’t know how long this will take — but one day, I look forward to having a press conference with you guys in space. I look forward to it very much.”

On the other hand, the announcement event in Florida may very well have been fueled not by Blue Origin but by the politicians and local community leaders who also spoke at the event. Bezos was one of eight speakers, including the state’s governor, Rick Scott, and Sen. Bill Nelson. The talks were a volley of thanks and congratulations to the people who had made Florida an appealing location for businesses like Blue Origin. (The new facility will bring $200 million and 330 jobs to the area, according to Scott.)

Bezos’ speech did not include basic information such as what, exactly, would be included in the new facility, or when construction would begin. That speech was posted to the company’s website and served as its only official statement. However, Bezos did answer questions from reporters following the event. During that Q&A session, he said the new facility will include manufacturing for portions of Very Big Brother, a launchpad and an acceptance test facility for Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine. Construction will begin “very soon,” and the company aims to launch from there “by the end of the decade.” The New Shepard vehicle will continue to launch from west Texas.

Millions of people in space

Blue Origin has not only been secretive about its rocket launches but also has resisted discussing the details of its future plans. The company’s promotional video features an inspiring speech by Bezos about the history of human exploration, set against shots of mountain climbers and cave explorers, but offers nothing concrete about what the company hopes to accomplish.

In Florida, Bezos repeatedly came back to the idea of patience, saying that there are “no shortcuts to doing this right.” He cited the company motto, Gradatim ferociter, a Latin phrase meaning “Step by step, ferociously.”

This “long-term orientation” is what Bezos references when he’s asked why an Internet commerce mogul should lead a spaceflight company.

“The willingness to be patient and to know we’re going to have to iterate, that we’re going to have to keep going,” he said. “That kind of steadiness, I think, is unbelievably valuable, and that’s something that I can bring that’s actually difficult for even NASA to sometimes bring or any kind of government-funded program [that] is sometimes subject to starts and stops.”

(Bezos later added that he is a “big fan of NASA” and sees the organization being able to jump into “more and more dramatic” pursuits as the private spaceflight industry increasingly takes over operations in Earth orbit.)

In a 2012 interview with Space Insider, Brett Alexander, director of strategy and business development for Blue Origin, said the company’s relative silence is motivated by a desire to stay focused on action rather than talk.

“We like to talk about things we’ve done, not things we’re planning to do,” Alexander said. “So, it’s more about accomplishments. After all, the space business is hard. Things always take longer than you’d expect.”

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, which is developing the SpaceShipTwo commercial space plane, is now somewhat notorious for making early predictions about when the company will be ready to fly customers. (In 2004, Branson predicted SpaceShipTwo would be up and running by 2007.) So far, Virgin Galactic has not flown a single customer, and a fatal test crash in 2014 has delayed the company’s progress.

Even Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, has put forth so many futuristic technology ideas that he’s earned a reputation as the “real-life Tony Stark,” in reference to the fictional comic book billionaire/inventor also known as Iron Man.

In addition to his SpaceX duties, Musk serves as CEO of Tesla Motors, which manufactures electric cars,and chairman of the solar-energy company SolarCity. Furthermore, in 2013, he proposed the idea of a transportation system called the Hyperloop that would carry passengers from place to place on Earth at speeds of about 760 mph (1,220 km/h).

Musk has spoken at length about his ideas for building a Mars colony — indeed, he has said he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species.

In talking with reporters in Florida, Bezos pushed aside comparisons between himself and the likes of Musk and Branson, stating that he is “a fan of anybody who’s investing in space,” and that “space is pretty big, there are a lot of opportunities and there’s room for multiple winners.” He later added, “Our biggest opponent in this endeavor is gravity.”

But it is difficult not to compare Bezos with Musk and the other prominent billionaires involved in the spaceflight industry. Both Bezos and Musk made their fortunes with companies that have played major roles in developing Internet commerce (Bezos with the pioneering e-commerce site Amazon.com and Musk with the online payment system PayPal). Both men are also known for having extremely high expectations of their employees, and it is interesting to consider whether that is a necessary trait for people trying to overcome the challenge of making spaceflight significantly more affordable and reliable.

In addition, SpaceX and Blue Origin are currently the only private spaceflight companies building vertically launched orbital rockets entirely in-house.

Both companies are also pursuing reusable rocket designs. Most current large rocket designs include a first-stage booster that gives the payload the initial push off the launchpad and then separates and falls back to Earth (typically falling into the ocean). This first stage is typically lost, and both Bezos and Musk have emphasized that making this section reusable would dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight.

Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have first-stage rocket boosters that, instead of falling, are designed to land themselves safely on the ground after launch. SpaceX has tried twice in the past year to bring a Falcon 9 first stage down softly on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. In both cases, the rocket did hit its target but came in too fast and couldn’t stick a soft landing. With the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket last June, the company has had to push back any more test flights of the reusable rocket stage. [SpaceX Rocket’s First Stage Crashes During Landing Attempt (Video)]

Blue Origin also tested its reusable rocket stage during April’s test launch of New Shepard, without success.

SpaceX is currently a front-runner in many aspects of the commercial spaceflight industry and is on its way to offering extremely low-cost rocket launches (largely possible because the company builds everything in-house). The company is already using its Falcon 9 rocket to fly cargo deliveries to ISS for NASA, and is scheduled to fly astronauts there in 2017, using a crewed version of the Dragon capsule. (Boeing also aims to start flying NASA astronauts in 2017, using a capsule called the Starliner.)

Blue Origin recently entered into its first potentially profitable contract agreement with United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin formed in late 2006. ULA builds the Atlas and Delta series rockets, used frequently by NASA to send heavy payloads into space. Under the new collaboration, ULA will use Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine in its next-generation Vulcan rocket. Even though ULA has much more launch experience than either SpaceX or Blue Origin, with 100 successful launches as of Oct. 7, the company currently buys its engines from Russia.

SpaceX does not yet have any public agreements to sell its rocket engines, and has not stated any plans to get into space tourism.

Inspiring the public

Based on the way he engages with the public, Musk seems to think that part of changing the future is getting the general public excited about it. He’s a late-night talk-show regular, and while he doesn’t quite have the flair of the fictional Tony Stark, he doesn’t deny the comparison. 

Bezos and Blue Origin have flown under the radar to date, but at the LC-36 announcement in Florida, he did seem to want to put forth a public identity — not that of a brilliant inventor, but of a kid inspired by the space program and science fiction stories.

“I read all of [Robert] Heinlein’s novels and [Isaac] Asimov’s novels, and I had all these dreams. I always thought we’d be further along than we are today,” he told reporters. “I figured by now, we’d be out gallivanting around the solar system. […] You know, if you were paying attention in the ’60s and early ’70s, it was a time of very rapid advance, and people thought that we would be going to Saturn by now. I’m still very optimistic about that. I think all that will happen.”

Throughout his conversations with reporters, Bezos came back to the image of himself as a child, and the childlike wonder that people talk about when they reminisce about watching humans walk on the moon. Although he said he does believe spaceflight is a smart (i.e., profitable) business venture, this deep obsession with a science-fiction vision of the future seems to be the central motivator for Bezos in founding Blue Origin. And Bezos’ vision for the company is ambitious: He repeated that his ultimate aim is to have “millions of people living and working in space.”

“We humans need to become a spacefaring civilization,” he said. “[Does Blue Origin] want to go to Mars? Absolutely. But we want to go everywhere. And if you want to go everywhere, then you need to dramatically lower the cost of space. That’s what we’re really focused on.”

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

At Astro Hack Week, hosted the week of September 2015 at New York University, astronomy researchers, programmers and data scientists spent mornings learning about different data topics and afternoons collaborating to put together new analysis tools and solve research questions. Credit: Daniela Huppenkothen

NEW YORK — Last week, astronomers, astrophysicists, data scientists and programmers came together at New York University to try to solve some of astronomy’s toughest problems — in just five days.

The event, called Astro Hack Week, has only one rule: Everybody has to produce something. It might be a build of an astronomy data search algorithm, a series of programming tutorials or a bot that generates fake (and surprisingly plausible) tweets from one of the event creators. It might be planned from the get-go or something dreamed up based on a morning teaching session. But whatever it is, it must be built (or “hacked”) entirely at Astro Hack Week and rely on the cooperation of programmers, scientists and engineers at all levels.

To deal with the huge complexity of data and simulation in astronomy today, many researchers are turning to data scientists and programmers for inspiration — or becoming programmers themselves. Space.com took a field trip last Thursday (Oct. 1) to see how Astro Hack Week is crafting that transition. [To Find Alien Earths, Scientists Comb Kepler Data (Video)]

“Many of the projects [that] people are working on didn’t exist before, let’s say, a week ago,” said Phil Marshall, a staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in California and one of Astro Hack Week’s organizers. “And some of them are emerging as we sit here,” he told Space.com.

Astro Hack Week’s mornings were filled with tutorials on different data techniques. During Thursday’s afternoon hacking time, participants from around the world gathered in a large room in the NYU student center at several round tables, and the steady stream of discussion among pairs and trios adjusted volume as presenters came and went for pop-up lectures at the front.

The problems most groups were solving stemmed from dealing with massive amounts of data, often pulling in techniques tailored to the higher computing power available now that couldn’t previously be applied to astronomy. For instance, one of the projects focused on speeding up a dark-matter simulation that required modeling hundreds of universes in a row, and another adapted a technique used in speech recognition to an analysis of star data from the Kepler space telescope (to figure out stars’ internal rotation patterns). Many of the methods had only rarely been used in astronomical circles.

“Every field has its own jargon, but as soon as you overcome that, you realize that as long as you work on data problems, you kind of speak the same language, just with slightly different words sometimes,” said Daniela Huppenkothen, a data scientist at NYU and a Hack Week organizer.

Huppenkothen’s own hack, which she worked on throughout the event, concerned putting together a program for choosing attendants at big hack events with the right combinations of experience and expertise to spark new developments.

This is Astro Hack Week’s second year, and its first in New York City. (The first was at the University of Washington last year.) Whereas astronomer and physicist David Hogg, also of NYU, spent the first year in an organizational role, he had a chance to work on a hack of his own this time around. He and a new collaborator worked on ways to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of galaxies from two-dimensional images. 

“For me, it’s like time out of time,” Hogg said. “There’s nothing about the project that I’m doing that I couldn’t have done on a longer timescale. On the other hand, hack week is like time out of time, where we can just focus 100 percent on what we’re doing.” For others, the projects they end up working on are completely unexpected or dreamed up right at the event: even previously-proposed projects “go through a mix-master” during the collaboration process.

Hogg noted that his results could go toward a new academic paper — the potential outcome for many of the new projects. [Researchers Create Massive Simulation Of The Universe (Video)]

At last year’s event, Hogg said, there was a session on a machine learning method for classifying objects, called Random Forest, that had rarely been used in astronomy. With a machine learning program, a computer takes in many samples that have already been classified by humans to learn how to make the distinctions on its own. Many participants went on to implement that method to solve their own data classification problems during the event, and as those researchers publish their results, machine learning is becoming a solution to more and more astronomy problems. Hogg anticipates similar breakout techniques to come out of this event.

Hack Week is run and primarily sponsored by the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU, whose mission is to change the way science is done by making data science methods a key, available part of the process. (Hogg is executive director of the program.) It’s also sponsored by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile, a massive project that will be able to map the whole sky in just a few nights after its construction in 2018 or 2020, and that will search for changes and new phenomena over the course of 10 years. The telescope’s operators will need extraordinary data tools, developed in partnership with astronomers, to find the gems among the changing vistas.

Although the Hack Week concept isn’t a new one to coders, it’s one of the first to lend a “pop-up” approach to cracking tough problems astronomy researchers encounter.

“Hackers and coders have had hacking events for decades,” Hogg said, “but scientists didn’t think of themselves as hackers until recently.”

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU

SHOWS

The clouds produced by five suborbital NASA rockets that launched on March 27, 2012, from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia were reported to be seen from as far south as Wilmington, N.C., west to Charlestown, W. Va., and north to Buffalo, N.Y. Credit: NASA

A NASA suborbital rocket launch Wednesday evening (Oct. 7) is expected to produce glowing clouds high above Earth, and you can watch all the eye-catching action live online.

Weather permitting, a Black Brant IX sounding rocket is scheduled to blast off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) Wednesday and deploy colorful clouds of barium and strontium that will be visible to observers throughout the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. But people all over the world can watch the launch and see the clouds live on Space.com, thanks to a webcast provided by NASA TV and the Wallops center.

The main goal of Wednesday’s launch is to test the performance of the two-stage Black Brant IX, which will be flying with a reformulated motor, NASA officials said. But the mission also serves to try out a number of technologies, including newly developed lightweight materials and novel payload-ejection systems.

One such ejection system is designed to deploy vapor clouds, which researchers use to study winds and other phenomena in Earth’s atmosphere. And that’s what will provide the sky show during Wednesday’s liftoff.

This map shows areas of North America where a sounding rocket launch should be visible on Oct. 7, 2015.
Credit: NASA

The barium and strontium will be released at an altitude of 130 miles (209 kilometers). The clouds should begin appearing about 6 minutes after launch, according to Space.com skywatching columnist Joe Rao.

“The barium-strontium mixture produces a cloud with a mixture of blue-green and red color. The blue-green part is neutral, i.e., not charged. Strontium is used to enhance the visibility of the neutral flow,” NASA officials wrote in a statement Friday (Oct. 2).

“The amount of barium and strontium used in the test is much smaller than that used in a typical July 4 fireworks display and poses no hazard to the community,” they added.

Wednesday’s launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday (Oct. 6), but bad weather forced a delay. The launch window extends through next Monday (Oct. 12).

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing image NASA’s rocket launch that you would like to share with Space.com and its news partners for a story or photo gallery, send photos and comments in to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.