NASA Tests Supersonic Flying Saucer for Future Mars Missions

Eat your heart out, Marvin the Martian: NASA is building its own flying saucer as part of a project to get bigger payloads to Mars. The disk-shaped object is called a Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, and it's due to fly for the first time this June.

Journalists got an advance peek at the saucer this week at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where it's being readied for the test flight. The saucer will be taken to Hawaii and then lofted up to an altitude of 120,000 feet (37 kilometers) on a high-altitude balloon. It'll fire a rocket engine to rise even higher, to 180,000 feet (55 kilometers). And then it'll start falling.

During its Mach 3.5 descent, it will inflate like a pufferfish to increase atmospheric drag, slowing its speed to about twice the speed of sound. That will trigger the deployment of a super-strong 100-foot-wide (33.5-meter-wide) parachute, which should slow down the test vehicle enough for a gentle splashdown.

Why go to all that trouble? NASA had to use a complex, rocket-powered sky crane to get its 1-ton Curiosity rover safely down to the surface of Mars in 2012, but the payloads required for human missions to Mars are expected to weigh significantly more — as much as 100 tons. The sky-crane system can't handle payloads that heavy. That's why NASA says it'll need the supersonic decelerator to send astronauts to Mars.

Let's just hope those astronauts don't face the Q-36 explosive space modulatorwhen they get there.

Journalists are dressed in special suits inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they get a look at the saucer-shaped test vehicle for the agency's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator project on Wednesday.

The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator is designed to inflate balloon-like pressure vessels during its descent, to increase atmospheric drag and slow the vehicle down from Mach 3.5 to Mach 2.

Source: NBC 

The One Scientific Field Most Likely to Get Humanity Into Space

If humans are actually going to live on other planets or space stations one day, we're going to need more than rocket fuel and futuristic propulsion systems. We're going to need environmental science. Here are some fundamental reasons why.

I'm cheating a little bit by using the phrase "environmental science" because that can mean a lot of things, from understanding how ecosystems work, to modifying life forms using synthetic biology. It's like understanding how gardens work, but also how to change the soil, plants and insects in your garden to make them grow better. Environmental science can even overlap with sustainable urban design, helping us build cities that exist harmoniously with the natural world. All these fields deal more or less with how humans interact with the broader web of animals, plants and microbes around us.

So how can science that is about life on Earth help us get into space? Remember that living on other worlds will require a lot more than inventing warp drive or solar sails or some kind of rocket fuel that doesn't rely on fossilized plant matter. We're going to be taking ourselves into space, which means we'll have to take ecosystems along with us. Plants will provide food, energy and possibly atmospheric filtering. Animals will be needed for food, fertilizer and insect control.

Portable Ecosystems

Put another way, we can't go to space without bringing Earth with us. Which means it's not likely we'll build a habitat on the Moon, or a giant halo world, without first understanding how the life cycle of the environments on our own planet work. We'll need to build portable, offworld-ready ecosystems.

These portable ecosystems are going to be modified versions of what we have on Earth now, which is also why environmental science is so important. Right now, researchers in this area are pondering how to modify crops to make them less destructive to top soil, more drought resistant, and more nourishing. Plants in space may need other characteristics too, like radiation resistance or zero gee tolerance. We may want them to work as atmosphere scrubbers, so they'll need enhanced respiration systems, capable of sequestering more carbon and releasing more oxygen than they do now.

You Can't Go to Space Without Saving the Earth First

One of the biggest misconceptions about space colonization is that it's an environmental cop out. Conservationists worry that advocating for space travel is tantamount to saying we want to trash the Earth and move elsewhere (presumably to trash that place too). It's a way of abandoning the problem rather than solving it.

But the hard fact is that if we destroy the Earth, we destroy our chances of going to space too. You can't move into space without first saving the Earth, as it were.

We will not make it in space if we don't figure out how to make it here first. Unless we use the tools of environmental science now, we won't have enough resources left in a century to get into space. And even if we discovered a perfect source of energy like the mythical "unobtainium," we're still going to need those portable ecosystems to survive beyond our comfortable, waterlogged rock.

Spaceships are likely to be the most strictly-regulated, sustainable environments humans ever create. The people who live in them won't have grown up on a world without recycling, where we'd rather frak than convert to solar and wind power. Space-farers will grow up with a sense that every single life form is valuable, because they are quite literally what sustains their own lives.

Of course, this is my hope. We may never make it to space, because we may never make it on Earth. But chances are that we will make it. By the time we are colonizing space in hundreds or even thousands of years, we will know that our future doesn't depend on better rockets and bigger smokestacks. It depends on our ecosystems, and whether they survive along with us.

Source: io9

Another Planet Colonization requires at least 10,000 people

A new study has calculated how many people it would take to viably populate another planet.

In the future we may see generational ships heading out across the stars on voyages lasting thousands of years in the hopes of finding new Earth-like worlds to colonize.

Back in 2002, anthropologist John Moore calculated that such a ship would need at least 150 people in order to survive a 2,000-year trip across the cosmos, but is this really enough ? A more recent study conducted by Cameron Smith or Portland State University has cast doubt on this conclusion and suggests that a more realistic number to ensure survival would be between 10,000 and 40,000 people.

These figures were reached by taking in to account the necessary genetic diversity of a population, the possibility of disease or disaster along the way and the likely growth rate from natural births.

"I did this study to materially help in putting together the millions of puzzle pieces that will be required to allow humanity to spread out from our earthly cradle," he said. 

Source: Popular Mechanics

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Explores the Kimberley Waypoint

NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived at the Kimberley Waypoint five days ago. As the name suggests, it’s a stopping point on the rover’s journey to the base of Mount Sharp—but the Kimberley, named after the northern tip of Western Australia (because the Martian terrain bears some resemblance to the region’s orange-red savannas), is unique in its own right. As you can see below, it’s covered in a diverse array of rocks, and surrounded on almost all sides by some pretty distinctive terrain.

The Curiosity rover will soon find an ideal location to drill for samples, then test these samples using onboard equipment. The rover can’t dig very far into the dirt—its two-inch drill is intended primarily for collecting rock samples—but there are certainly things we can learn from studying the chemical composition of the unusual rocks near the Kimberley Waypoint, including clues that may suggest that water was once present in the region.

Source: MU

You're Hurtling Through Space at Over a Million Miles an Hour

Remember that animation making the rounds on the internet some months back, the one that depicted "the true orbit of the planets" as a mesmerizing vortex? 

The animation, while beautiful, was decidedly unscientific. Featured above is a more accurate animation, served up with a hearty helping of exposition from Mika McKinnon.

Unveiling the Center of the Galaxy

We don’t know very much about the center of our galaxy, and small wonder—it’s blocked off by interstellar dust and about 27,000 light years away. (It also probably contains a supermassive black hole.) UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez has spent most of her professional career studying the Milky Way, and explains in very frank terms that we don’t really know very much about the center yet or why it functions the way it does (pay special attention to what she says about the mind-churningly bizarre presence of young stars near the black hole, which reinforces the point that the center of the galaxy is an incredibly weird place):

So when we can actually learn something new about the center of the Milky Way, it’s cause for celebration. And a detailed Fermilab analysis of gamma radiation points us towards the very strong probability that the center of our galaxy contains dark matter. If you’re familiar with the concept of dark matter, you know that this on its own doesn’t tell us much—the defining characteristic of dark matter is that we don’t know what the heck it is. But if the galactic center does indeed include dark matter, this could go a long way towards explaining why we’ve had such a difficult time figuring out what it’s made of.

Source: MU


Could This Be The Signal Of Dark Matter?

Sometimes a strange signal comes from the dark and it takes a while to figure out what that signal means. In this case, scientists analyzing high-energy gamma rays emanating from the galaxy's center found an unexplained source of emission that they say is "consistent with some forms of dark matter."

The data came courtesy of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and was analyzed by a group of independent scientists. They found that by removing all known sources of gamma rays, they were left with gamma-ray emissions that so far, they cannot explain. More observations will be needed to characterize these emissions, they cautioned.

Scientists aren't even sure what dark matter (which can only be detected through gravitational effects) is made of. One theoretical candidate could be something called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which could produce gamma rays in ranges that Fermi could detect.

Also, the location of the radiation at the galaxy's center is an interesting spot, since scientists believe that's where dark matter would lurk since the insofar invisible substance would be the base of normal structures like galaxies.

"The new maps allow us to analyze the excess and test whether more conventional explanations, such as the presence of undiscovered pulsars or cosmic-ray collisions on gas clouds, can account for it," stated Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab and lead author of the study.

"The signal we find cannot be explained by currently proposed alternatives and is in close agreement with the predictions of very simple dark matter models."

The scientists suggest that if WIMPs were destroying each other, this would be "a remarkable fit" for a dark matter signal. They again caution, though, that there could be other explanations for the phenomenon.

"Dark matter in this mass range can be probed by direct detection and by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so if this is dark matter, we're already learning about its interactions from the lack of detection so far," stated co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time."

You can read more about the research in Physical Review D or in preprint form on Arxiv.

Source: NASA