Saturday, April 10, 2010

Earth Gets Geomagnetic Wallop

Feeling a bit scattered today? Well perhaps you can blame the weather. I'm not talking about spring fever. A blast of solar wind is pummeling Earth's magnetosphere, sparking the strongest geomagnetic storm so far this year.

Though it registered a "7" on the 0-to-9 K-index scale of magnetic disturbances, the storm is expected to pass quickly. The silver lining, for those at high-latitudes anyway, is a beautiful show of auroras -- the result of high-energy particles from the sun smashing into oxygen and nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere. As the molecules return to normal, they give off energy in the form of photons. The colors in the aurora depend on which atmospheric gas is being revved up by the invading electrons and how much energy is being exchanged. Oxygen emits greenish yellow or red light; Nitrogen generally produces blue.

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U.S. Signs New Deal for Soyuz Flights

Russia is charging the United States $55.8 million a seat for six round-trip rides aboard its Soyuz capsules, currently the sole means for getting astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Under a new contract announced yesterday, NASA will pay Russia $335 million for Soyuz flights in 2013 and 2014. An existing contract in effect through 2012 costs NASA $51 million per passenger, a fee that includes training and support services.

The fee increase is relatively small, considering Russia's monopoly on crew transportation services to the space station. China, the only other country that has put people into orbit, isn't part of the station partnership.

The United States is retiring its three space shuttles, which had been used for crew transport, at the end of the year, due to cost and safety concerns. A replacement ship is TBD.

The Obama administration wants to turn over space taxi services to private industry. Space Exploration Technologies of California, which looks to be the front-runner, has yet to fly its Falcon 9 rocket, which NASA is helping to develop as a cargo hauler. Falcon 9's debut flight is expected in May.

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Shuttle Discovery Arrives at Space Station

Space shuttle Discovery successfully docked at the International Space Station early Wednesday, its astronauts overcoming a rare antenna breakdown that knocked out radar tracking.

Shuttle commander Alan Poindexter and his crew relied on other navigation devices to approach the orbiting outpost.

"You guys are looking beautiful," Japanese space station resident Soichi Noguchi radioed as the shuttle drew within 660 feet, loaded down with supplies.

The two spacecraft came together 215 miles above the Caribbean, precisely on time.

It was only the second time that a shuttle had to dock with the space station without any radar; the first was 10 years ago.

Poindexter trained for just such an event two weeks ago. As he closed in on the final 150 feet, he radioed, "It's a lot of fun."

Flight director Richard Jones said the flying was flawless. "The crew made it look easy," he told reporters.

One of the first matters of business for the 13 space fliers -- once the hatches swung open -- was transmitting detailed laser images of Discovery to Mission Control in Houston.

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Nearby Star Has Shady Companion

For nearly 190 years, scientists have argued over what's causing a bright, relatively nearby star known as Epsilon Aurigae to lose its luster every 27 years.

The dimming, which lasts about 18 months, is due to some sort of eclipsing companion. The most likely scenario, however, seemed ridiculously far-fetched: a sibling star of some sort cloaked in a shroud of dark dust and orbiting head-on relative to Earth.

Yet that's exactly what astronomers found using a network of four linked, infrared telescopes to create an instrument that can resolve targets with 100 times the power of the Hubble Space Telescope. The technique, called interferometry, allowed scientists to watch the companion object's silhouette pass across the face of Epsilon Aurigae, confirming the pair's unusual geometry.

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Pluto's Dwarf Planet Family Could Get Bigger

Although Pluto was kicked out of the planetary club by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) four years ago, the passionate "Pluto debate" rumbles on.

But the fact remains that even before discovery of Eris in 2005 by a Palomar Observatory team headed by Caltech's Mike Brown, Pluto's ranking as a planet in the solar system was tenuous at best. Eris was measured to be nearly 30 percent larger than Pluto; did that make Eris a planet too? No, but its discovery began a series of events that changed our understanding of the solar system forever.

According to a paper presented at the Proceedings of the 9th Australian Space Science Conference, the "dwarf planet club" should start accepting applications from smaller members and according to Brown -- discoverer of over 100 Kuiper Belt objects (or KBOs) -- this is no bad thing for the beleaguered Pluto.

The solar system currently has six bona fide dwarf planets: Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Quaoar and Pluto in the Kuiper Belt and Ceres in the asteroid belt (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter).

However, in this proposal, smaller wannabe dwarf planets could be considered for promotion.

For 50 or so small rocky and icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, Pluto's loss could be their gain; where Pluto was demoted, they could be promoted. Who said there were no winners to come out of Pluto's re-classification?

"Small Solar System objects are irregularly shaped, like potatoes," said Charley Lineweaver of the Australian National University in Canberra, who headed the research. "If an object is large enough that its self-gravity has made it round, then it should be classified as a dwarf planet."

Indeed, one of the criteria for a celestial body to be considered a planet is that it must be round (i.e. it must be massive enough to achieve "hydrostatic equilibrium" -- in other words it must have enough gravity for its surface to be rounded, rather than chunky or potato shaped). But this criterion also extends to dwarf planets, and there are plenty of rounded large asteroids that would make happy dwarf planets.


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Recent Lava Flows Detected on Venus

'Hot spots' have been mapped on the surface of Venus by a European Space Agency (ESA) probe. Venus Express (sister satellite to the Mars Express orbiter) has given us a tantalizing glimpse at features on the planet that rise above the surrounding landscape, exhibiting younger rock, possibly indicating recent volcanic activity. By "recent," we mean "less than 2.5 million years" -- still a very short period of time in geological timescales.

Like the volcanoes and resulting magma that built the Hawaiian archipelago (a series of islands that solidified from a cooling volcanic plume), the image above shows a volcano-like feature, surrounded by young rock that hasn't been degraded by the harsh Venusian atmosphere.

The hot, thick and acidic atmosphere quickly weathers the planet's landscape, making these "newer" regions appear to be emitting more heat than the older, weathered regions. Naturally, these hot spots would be the first places to look to find active volcanoes currently belching material from the planets interior, reveling more about the geology of this mysterious world.

Although we can gain some information about these regions of new rock from the Venus Express satellite, the atmosphere remains too thick to fully realize how old these lava flows are and whether they remain active to this day. To do this, a direct sample would need to be taken by future lander missions. However, it might be advisable for the space agency of any future active volcano-hunting probe not to aim the landing site directly over these hot spots, just in case they're too hot.

--Ian O'Neill, Discovery News

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Pyramid of Mystery Pharaoh Located

The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.

Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment.

"We are talking of meridian and diagonal alignments, with pyramids raised at their intersections. The only missing piece in this sort of grid is the pyramid of Userkare," Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, told Discovery News. His research will appear in the next issue of the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry.

Known only from the king lists, Userkare was the second pharaoh of the 6th Dynasty and ruled briefly between Teti and Teti's son Pepi I. He took power after Teti was murdered, perhaps in a conspiracy he himself had maneuvered.

Little is known about this shadowy pharaoh.

"When Pepi I took control a few years later, Userkare disappeared from history. Finding his tomb might help understand those obscure years. The walls in his burial might also contain intact copies of the Pyramid Texts," Magli said, referring to the oldest known religious texts in the world that were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom.

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'Door To Afterlife' Unearthed At Karnak

An Egyptian excavation team has unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni announced on Monday.

Engraved with religious texts, the six-foot-tall red granite door belonged to the tomb of User, the chief minister of Queen Hatshepsut, the long-ruling 15th century B.C. queen from the New Kingdom.

The door, known as a false door, was meant to be a threshold that allowed the deceased and his wife to interact with the world of the living.

This "interaction" was not eternal for User. More than 1,000 years after his death, during the Roman period, the massive false door was removed from the tomb and used in the wall of a Roman structure.

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New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

"We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English," lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.

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Oldest Man-Made Structure Found in Greek Cave

The oldest known example of a man-made structure was found within a prehistoric cave in central Greece, according to the Greek culture ministry.

The structure is a stone wall that blocked two-thirds of the entrance to the Theopetra cave near Kalambaka on the north edge of the Thessalian plain. It was constructed 23,000 years ago, probably as a barrier to cold winds.

“An optical dating test, known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence, was applied on quartz grains nested within the stones. We dated four different samples from the sediment and soil materials, and all provided identical dates,” Nikolaos Zacharias, director of the laboratory of archaeometry at the University of Peloponnese, told Discovery News.

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Turin Shroud Enters 3D Age

The Shroud of Turin, the controversial piece of 14- by 4-foot linen that some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, will enter the 3D age when it goes on display for six weeks after Easter.

Special two-filter glasses, just like the 3D glasses that hit movie theaters with the recent releases of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, are set to make their way to the Turin Cathedral.

Sold by the Salesian religion from its Turin bookshop, the glasses are called "HI-Rex-1" and "HI-Rex-1L" -- which are specially designed for nearsighted people -- and cost 2 euros and 3 euros respectively.

According to Bruno Fabbiani, an expert at Turin Polytechnic in holograph technology and printed images, the glasses will enable pilgrims to scrutinize details invisible to the naked eye.

"They allow a three-level perception, although only two filters are employed. Viewers can first detect the blood traces, then the body outline. Finally, a third image, which integrates the previous two, emerges," Fabbiani told reporters.

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Prototype submersible produces more power than it consumes

Engineers have come up with a unique solution to the problem of powering underwater robotic vehicles -- tapping the unlimited energy difference between the ocean's cold spots and its more temperate regions.

A prototype submersible southwest of Hawaii has been chugging away for more than three months collecting data about ocean temperature, pressure and salinity, producing more power than it consumes.

"Having a long-duration underwater vehicle has been a dream for a long long," oceanographer Li Chao, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

SourceEngineers have come up with a unique solution to the problem of powering underwater robotic vehicles -- tapping the unlimited energy difference between the ocean's cold spots and its more temperate regions.

A prototype submersible southwest of Hawaii has been chugging away for more than three months collecting data about ocean temperature, pressure and salinity, producing more power than it consumes.

"Having a long-duration underwater vehicle has been a dream for a long long," oceanographer Li Chao, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

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Turning CO2 Back into Fuel

What to do with all that CO2?" It's a question that's always vexed me, especially when I'm stuck in traffic behind five semis, two SUVs, and we're all doing 85MPH while passing a plant like the one pictured here. Ugh. Seriously...what to do with the CO2? Well, some scientists in Britain have a cunning plan. They're working on research into using some serious chemistry and nanoscience to capture CO2 from the air, and transform it into something useful, like maybe plastics, or even ethanol.

Yep, from your gas tank, to your car exhaust, through the electro-chemical ringer, and then back to your tank.

Now, there are already other efforts to do this, but those methods rely on separate technologies to capture and then convert the CO2. The British team (researchers from the University of Bristol, the University of Bath, and the University of West England) want to combine it all into one, more efficient process.

Imagine if those chimneys above were lined with a special polymer that would not only scrub out the CO2, but actually turn it into something else.

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Nanotube Propels Atoms Into Black-Hole Spiral

Physicists have created something akin to a black hole in their labs.

It's on the atomic scale, that is, very, very small. But it's the first time anything like this has ever been done and the experiment could prompt innovations in nano-sized devices.

Lene Vestergaard Hau, a physicist at Harvard University, and her colleagues cooled atoms to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Next, they shot the cooled atoms toward a suspended single-walled carbon nanotube they named "Lucy." The nanotube had 300 volts of charge surging through it.

Atoms that came within a micron of the charged nanotube became attracted to it, spiraling around it at faster and faster speeds, maxing out at more than 2,700 miles per hour.

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