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***The Official Space Thread***

WookieD

WookieD

Didier Zokora
***The Official Space Thread**

Mining moon rocks, living on Mars, space elevators and pretty pictures of nebulae... Stick it in here.

I'll start off with this pretty cool article, the Japs reckon they really can make a space elevator...

news_2.jpg

A major Japanese construction company has unveiled a thrustingly ambitious project to build a space elevator by 2050.

Tokyo's Obayashi Corp wants to build a space station some 36,000 kilometres above Earth, and then run tourists up in an elevator car via a carbon nanotube pulley.

That's high. Very high. To put that number into perspective you need to know that the average passenger jet flies at 10 km, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic will take tourists just 110km up and even the International Space Station is a mere 330 km from Earth. The Moon, however, is a whopping 350,000 km away.

The science-fiction-style project would also see solar power cells attached to the space station, which could send electricity to the ground to power the elevator. Also, a counterweight on a cable would float 96,000 kilometers above Earth.

The space station would apparently house laboratories and living spaces. The elevator car could carry up to 30 people to the station, and it would run at 200 kilometres per hour. To again put that crazy number into perspective, that's about the clip of a high-speed train, but nowhere near as fast as a Space Shuttle, which blasted off at 28,000 km/h.

That speed would also mean a seven and a half day trip to reach the station. That's 90 in-flight movies. Obayashi says it could use magnetic linear motors for propulsion of the car. That's when an alternating magnetic field causes a coil to move.

Obayashi is one of the largest construction outfits in Japan. They are the main contractor on the world's tallest self-supporting tower: the Tokyo Sky Tree. But that's only 634 metres high: 150 times shorter than the space elevator's highest point.

"At this moment, we cannot estimate the cost for the project," an Obayashi official said. "However, we'll try to make steady progress so that it won't end just up as simply a dream."
 
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Awesome, I love space stuff.

I took up astronomy a couple of years ago and it's my number one hobby now (supporting Spurs is more than a mere hobby, before anyone says anything :) ). I got into the photography side of things recently and while it's bloody frustrating, it's really rewarding when you manage to get something right. You mentioned pretty pictures of nebula, this is one I managed to take of the Orion Nebula:

orion-nebula-2012-03-03-wide.jpg


Light years away from the quality a really dedicated enthusiast would get, but I'm pretty pleased with it for a back garden effort.
 
Two questions, how do you keep the base station in constant orbit with the space station?

If the "elevator shaft" disconnects from the base to allow the space station to orbit how do you then reconnect the "shaft"?
 
That looks cool mate. One of the missus' mates is into astronomy. I was horrified at the amount of money you can burn on a back garden set-up! It's definately for the dedicated. That said, the results are fantastic.
 
Boonie said:
Two questions, how do you keep the base station in constant orbit with the space station?

If the "elevator shaft" disconnects from the base to allow the space station to orbit how do you then reconnect the "shaft"?
Click to expand...


Geostationary orbit

A geostationary orbit, or Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), is a circular orbit 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above the Earth's equator and following the direction of the Earth's rotation. An object in such an orbit has an orbital period equal to the Earth's rotational period (one sidereal day), and thus appears motionless, at a fixed position in the sky, to ground observers. Communications satellites and weather satellites are often given geostationary orbits, so that the satellite antennas that communicate with them do not have to move to track them, but can be pointed permanently at the position in the sky where they stay. A geostationary orbit is a particular type of geosynchronous orbit.

The notion of a geosynchronous satellite for communication purposes was first published in 1928 (but not widely so) by Herman Potočnik.[1] The idea of a geostationary orbit was first disseminated on a wide scale in a 1945 paper entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in Wireless World magazine. The orbit, which Clarke first described as useful for broadcast and relay communications satellites,[2] is sometimes called the Clarke Orbit.[3] Similarly, the Clarke Belt is the part of space about 35,786 km (22,000 mi) above sea level, in the plane of the Equator, where near-geostationary orbits may be implemented. The Clarke Orbit is about 265,000 km (165,000 mi) long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
 
WookieD said:
That looks cool mate. One of the missus' mates is into astronomy. I was horrified at the amount of money you can burn on a back garden set-up! It's definately for the dedicated. That said, the results are fantastic.
Click to expand...
I know, I try to do it "on the cheap" as much as possible but you keep seeing little bits and pieces to buy and it soon adds up!
 
WookieD said:
Geostationary orbit

A geostationary orbit, or Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), is a circular orbit 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above the Earth's equator and following the direction of the Earth's rotation. An object in such an orbit has an orbital period equal to the Earth's rotational period (one sidereal day), and thus appears motionless, at a fixed position in the sky, to ground observers. Communications satellites and weather satellites are often given geostationary orbits, so that the satellite antennas that communicate with them do not have to move to track them, but can be pointed permanently at the position in the sky where they stay. A geostationary orbit is a particular type of geosynchronous orbit.

The notion of a geosynchronous satellite for communication purposes was first published in 1928 (but not widely so) by Herman Potočnik.[1] The idea of a geostationary orbit was first disseminated on a wide scale in a 1945 paper entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in Wireless World magazine. The orbit, which Clarke first described as useful for broadcast and relay communications satellites,[2] is sometimes called the Clarke Orbit.[3] Similarly, the Clarke Belt is the part of space about 35,786 km (22,000 mi) above sea level, in the plane of the Equator, where near-geostationary orbits may be implemented. The Clarke Orbit is about 265,000 km (165,000 mi) long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
Click to expand...

Fair enough, my geek is in other areas :)
 
I love space stuff.

I still cannot comprehend that the universe has no edge. EVERYTHING HAS A fudgeIN EDGE
 
Well, not really space but...

[video=youtube_share;xqse4VoNsYY]http://youtu.be/xqse4VoNsYY[/video]
 
Revving Up the Antimatter Engine
Hope springs eternal for die-hard Star Trek fans that scientists will one day build an actual, working antimatter propulsion engine similar to the one that powers the fictional starship Enterprise.

A new paper by a pair of enterprising (get it?) physicists should fan the flames of that fantasy even further.

Ronan Keane (Western Reserve Academy) and Wei-Ming Zhang (Kent State University) report that the latest results from their computer simulations indicate that at least one key component of realizing a working antimatter propulsion engine -- highly efficient magnetic nozzles -- should be far more efficient than previously thought. And such nozzles are feasible using today's technologies.

Before everyone chimes in with a resounding "Squee!", let's back up a moment.

First, its true: matter/antimatter propulsion is not just the stuff of science fiction. As he did with many technical aspects of the series, for the Enterprise propulsion system, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry drew on science fact.

Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter. So antiparticles are identical in mass to their regular counterparts, but the electrical charges of antiparticles are reversed. An anti-electron would have a positive instead of a negative charge, while an antiproton would have a negative instead of a positive charge.

When antimatter meets matter, the result is an explosion. Both particles are annihilated in the process, and their combined masses are converted into pure energy -- electromagnetic radiation that spreads outward at the speed of light.

Remember in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: when Kirk sabotages the Enterprise after surrendering his ship to the Klingons? He programs the computer to mix matter and antimatter indiscriminately. Ka-boom! The ship is destroyed.

Despite that whole annihilation thing, as recently as October 2000, NASA scientists were developing early designs for an antimatter engine for future missions to Mars.

Antimatter is an ideal rocket fuel because all of the mass in matter/antimatter collisions is converted into energy. Matter/antimatter reactions produce 10 million times the energy produced by conventional chemical reactions such as the hydrogen and oxygen combustion used to fuel the space shuttle.

We're talking reactions that are 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear fission produced at a nuclear power plant, or by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they are 300 times more powerful than the energy released by nuclear fusion

Alas, the only way to produce antimatter is in large accelerators at places like CERN. Even the most powerful atom smashers only produce minute amounts of antiprotons each year -- as little as a trillionth of a gram, which would barely light a 100-watt bulb for three seconds.

It would take tons of antimatter to fuel a trip to distant stars. It would take CERN roughly 1,000 years to produce one microgram of antimatter.

Should an ample supply of antimatter be found, a secure means of storage must then be devised; the antimatter must be kept separate from matter until the spacecraft needs more power. Mixing can’t occur all willy-nilly, because then the two would annihilate each other uncontrollably, with no means of harnessing the energy.

But these are trivial engineering concerns, surely. The point is, Keane and Zhang think they've solved one part of the conundrum. Any rocket's maximum speed depends on the configuration of the rocket stages, how much of the total mass is devoted to fuel, and a little something called exhaust velocity that provides the all-important thrust.

Keane and Zhang focus on the latter in their paper, i.e., how fast all those particles resulting from (hypothetical) matter-antimatter annihilation are traveling as they whip out of the rocket engine. Their premise relies on charged pions resulting from proton-antiproton collisions. A nozzle that emits a strong magnetic field could channel the emitted charged particles into a focused stream of charged pions, accelerating them to produce stronger thrust.

All this is old hat. And here's the sticking point to that plan. The exhaust velocity of those pions depends partly on how fast they're moving as they emerge from the annihilation event, and partly on the efficiency of the magnetic nozzle design.

Past calculations have shown that while the pions' initial speed would be over 90 percent the speed of light, the magnetic nozzle would only be 36 percent efficient, so the largest escape velocity that could be achieved would be a disappointing one-third of light speed.

There isn't much human beings can do to jack up the pions' initial speed, so clearly the way to tackle this problem is to focus on the design of the magnetic nozzle. That's exactly what Keane and Zhang did, relying on CERN software designed to simulate the complex interactions between particles, matters and fields so physicists can better understand the behavior of all those particles produced in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

The simulations showed that prior assessments of the magnetic nozzle's efficiency were much too low; it should be possible to build a nozzle with 85 percent efficiency using technology available to us today.

True, they also found that the initial speed of the pions was lower than previously estimated -- only about 80 percent of light speed. That still averages out to a far more promising final exhaust velocity of about 70 percent light speed.

There's still the little problem of acquiring sufficient antimatter to fuel an entire rocket, even if we could work out all the engineering kinks. Keane and Zhang hypothesize that rather than creating antimatter on board, as the Enterprise does, it might be more feasible to mine deposits of antimatter in space.

Last year the PAMELA mission found that Earth is ringed by antiprotons. Unfortunately, it only detected 28 protons over the course of its two-year mission. That's less than CERN produces each day.

Okay, so maybe we're not ready for antimatter powered spaceships just yet. But it's fun to play around with these kinds of ideas. Perhaps one day, one of these crazy schemes will pay off, and a future generation of astronauts will boldly go where only the fictional Enterprise has dared to venture before.


http://news.discovery.com/space/revving-up-the-antimatter-engine-120516.html
 
NASA Adopts Two Spare Spy Telescopes, Each Maybe More Powerful Than Hubble

It almost sounds too good to be true. Twin Hubble-quality space telescopes currently collecting dust in upstate New York are getting a second chance at flight, and they could be the best thing to happen to NASA since the real Hubble’s mirrors were fixed. The unused scopes are even the same size as the beloved space telescope, and nary a civilian knew they existed until yesterday.

The former spy telescopes were donated by the National Reconnaissance Office, and according to NASA’s plans, when they launch into space, they’ll be looking out at the cosmos — as telescopes rightly should — rather than down on Earth.

NASA unveiled its plan on Monday to use one of them to study dark energy, potentially shaving years and a quarter of a billion dollars off its plan to build the most important observatory in decades.

Apparently the NRO called up some NASA officials a year ago to discuss bequeathing some spare “unused hardware,” as the New York Times puts it. NASA started checking them out, and found they are wonderful, highly complex instruments. Jaws dropped throughout the astrophysics community as scientists realized the impressive scopes’ optics are “astounding,” and that they’re equipped with technology that will make them easy and affordable to use in Earth orbit.

Loretta Desio, a spokesperson for the NRO, told Spaceflight Now the telescopes were built in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their optics make them more powerful than Hubble.

NASA took ownership of them in August, and since then agency officials and a small team of astronomers have been trying to figure out what to do with them. John Grunsfeld, who famously repaired the Hubble in space on three separate occasions and now serves as NASA’s space science chief, initially thought they’d be a headache and a storage problem, he told the Times. Then he started asking astronomers how they might be used, and put together a plan to use them to study dark energy. The plan: One of the telescopes (maybe both someday?) could serve as the science community’s long-hoped-for Wfirst.

Wfirst is the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, a $1.5 billion project that in 2010 became the highest priority in space science for the next decade. Formerly known as the Joint Dark Energy Mission, Wfirst would be able to find multitudes of exoplanets in distant galaxies and hopefully answer some questions about dark energy. This mysterious force, which helped three American physicists win the Nobel Prize last fall, permeates the universe and will determine its fate; it’s the most important question in modern physics. But plagued by budget issues and cost overruns related to its next big observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA has said it won’t be able to build Wfirst for another 12 years at least.

The NRO telescopes, which are being called NRO-1 and NRO-2 for now, are capable of serving as Wfirst. Consider this for a minute: Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a brand-new telescope, the nation can use one it already had, but never knew about. This could save the country $250 million, the Times says, quoting NASA’s acting deputy director for astrophysics.

The Times’ Dennis Overbye reports that the two scopes each have a 94-inch primary mirror, just like Hubble. That’s twice the size of the planned mirror for Wfirst, so it would have four times the light-gathering ability. Also, they have a shorter focal length, giving them a wider field of view in which to look for phenomena like supernovae. They’re “Stubby Hubbles,” according to Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble. He also told Overbye, “They were clearly designed to look down.”

This raises a lot of questions, but unsurprisingly, the NRO is keeping mum. One question: What other incredible pieces of technology do our country's spy agencies have just sitting around? If telescopes of this caliber are languishing on shelves, imagine what they're actually using.

Congress, the National Academies and other groups still have to greenlight all of this, and the costs are still quite unclear, but it sounds promising — almost too good to be true, several astronomers agreed. And isn’t it amazing, almost ridiculous, to think about? Yes, the government’s spy agencies do have a pair of awesome, secret, spare super-spacecraft that they might give NASA if they feel like it. Let’s just hope there's no Texas-sized asteroid coming our way and no one is telling us.
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So, still think films like Enemy of the State are over cooked? US spooks had two "Hubble" capability satallites sitting around gathering dust, that's pretty scary. Just shows what can be done when you ditch oversight.
 
I'm quite a big space fan as well. Find a lot of it quite interesting.

"The cosmos is also within us, We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

The space elevator is such a cool idea, would be a real game changer if/when they manage that. As with so much of futuristic tech it's probably down to how carbon nano tubes pan out.

WookieD said:
So, still think films like Enemy of the State are over cooked? US spooks had two "Hubble" capability satallites sitting around gathering dust, that's pretty scary. Just shows what can be done when you ditch oversight.
Click to expand...

Hubble itself isn't actually that big of a telescope. It's power comes from being in orbit, outside the atmosphere and the disturbance that brings. A bit surprised at the proposed savings from getting those two telescopes as from what I understood the real cost of Hubble was getting the damn thing into orbit. This is of course why a space elevator would be a game changer. You could see quite clearly the disturbance from our atmosphere from the shots of the Venus transit, and that was when dealing with our sun. I have heard though that someone are working on a telescope that will be made up of multiple movable mirrors that will be able to compensate for atmospheric disturbances, could see some wonderful pictures from that in the not too distant future.

I would say stuff like what was shown in Enemy of the State is probably theoretically possible, but there are massive engineering problems with stuff like that even if it's possible. Satellites aren't exactly easy to move around, they would need quite a few of them to get good coverage, they show some of that in that film I think. For pretty good reasons that the US military seemingly have gone towards UAVs to spy on their enemies in war situations. Much more flexible and easy to deal with.
 
I want to see some space photos - like out of this world (no pun intended) type photos
 
See they are mind blowing photos. Second one is sensational.

Makes space look very very scary and eerie
 
2nd pic looks very sinister (f*ckers from that area are probably coming to get us, if they are coming at all!).

4th looks like a pair of lips blowing a smoke ring.
 
The pale blue dot:

PIA00452.jpg


That is the earth (small pixel looking thing), as seen from the Voyager space craft more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away. Taken in 1990.

Comparison of the earth compared to other planets, our sun and then some of the biggest known stars around:

[video=youtube;HEheh1BH34Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q[/video]

A picture of a Supernova:

hs-1999-19-i-web.jpg


The bright part at the lower left is a star that went supernova, shines about as bright as the centre of that galaxy for a short period of time (weeks/months). Just to be clear, it is in that same Galaxy, not a star closer to us.
 
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