Battle Garbage Galactica: Russia set to hunt space debris

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Published: 29 April, 2011, 16:08

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TAGS: Space, Russia, SciTech, Politics, USA, Robert Bridge

As the last frontier becomes increasingly cluttered with space junk, Russia says it has the radar capabilities to detect and track these objects, which are beginning to pose a collision risk for space missions.
Ilgar Tagiyev, chief of combat logarithms and programs unit in the missile defense division, has told Interfax-AVN that Russia’s Don-2N multifunctional radar station is capable of detecting and tracking the millions of various space objects in near-Earth orbits, including potentially dangerous space “garbage.”
Space experts identify “space junk” as everything from spent rocket stages and dead satellites to tiny metal fragments (At the height of the Cold War, for example, the US military, worried that the Soviet Union would cut its undersea communication cable, launched Project West Ford, which called for placing a ring of 480 million copper dipole antennae – almost 2 centimeters long each – in medium Earth orbit to facilitate a international radio communication; the project was scrapped, yet the needles remain. According to a 2007 study by Virginia Tech, it was reported that “many clumps of the needles are indeed still in orbit”).
The Don-2N is part of the National Missile Defense system.
"The radar is capable of tracing at least 12,000 space objects," Tagiyev confirmed.
Discussing the sizable fragments of space parts floating in orbit, which number “in the tens of thousands,” Tagiyev said the debris poses an increasing threat to space missions, including that of the International Space Station (ISS).
While most space junk is very small in size, and may be countered by reinforcing the external shell of space crafts, other pieces, like spent rocket boosters, are large and require space crews to manually steer clear of them.
In January 2007, for example, a fragment of the Chinese Feng Yun 1C weather satellite, which the Chinese destroyed earlier as part of an anti-satellite experiment, passed within a short distance from the International Space Station, he said.
Asked whether the Russian surveillance system detected an increase of space garbage after China destroyed the weather satellite, Tagiyev said that about 2,500 new objects appeared in orbit following the satellite’s planned destruction.
Russia: soon the only taxi to space
On Wednesday, Russia launched an unmanned spacecraft to supply the crew on board the ISS with a new shipment of equipment and supplies.
The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said in a statement that the M-10M Progress took off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Friday.
The international crew aboard the ISS currently consists of an Italian, two NASA astronauts and three Russians.
Meanwhile, NASA is preparing for a historic last on Friday, as the space shuttle Endeavor makes it final trip into outer space.
Endeavour will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and spare parts to the ISS. The US space shuttle mission will come to a final close in June after Atlantis completes its final mission.
This will leave Russia the only country capable of conducting live space flights. It also places extra pressure on Russia to tidy up the extraterrestrial zone.
Tagiyev said the Don-2N radar helps ensure the safety of ISS flights by warning Mission Control about approaching space debris or other space objects.
Robert Bridge, RT

NASA Spacecraft Snaps 1st Photo of Mercury from Orbit

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AP – This image provided by NASA is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's …

SPACE.com Staff,
Space.com Space.com Staff,
space.com – Tue Mar 29, 5:45 pm ET

This story was updated at 5:32 p.m. ET.
The first spacecraft ever to circle Mercury has beamed home the first-ever photo taken of the small rocky planet from orbit, showing a stark landscape peppered with craters.
NASA's Messenger spacecraft snapped the new Mercury photo today (March 29) at 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT). The photo shows the stark gray landscape of southern Mercury, a view that is dominated by a huge impact crater. [See the first photo of Mercury from orbit]
"This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system's innermost planet," Messenger mission scientists explained in a statement.
The new Mercury photo shows a region around the south pole of Mercury. A 53-mile (85-kilometer) wide crater called Debussy clearly stands out in the upper right of the image, with bright rays emanating from its center. [More photos of Mercury from Messenger]
A smaller crater called Matabei, which is 15 miles (24 km) wide and is known for its "unusual dark rays," is also visible in the image to the west of the Debussy crater, mission managers explained.
The new Mercury photo was posted to the Messenger mission website managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is overseeing the flight for NASA.
The photo is the first of 363 snapshots Messenger took during six hours of observations around Mercury. The images are expected to cover previously unseen areas of Mercury, terrain that was missed by Messenger during three previous flybys before it entered orbit.
Messenger arrived at Mercury on March 17, more than 6 1/2 years after its launch from Earth.
The spacecraft paused in its Mercury photo reconnaissance work just long enough to beam the new images back to Earth, mission managers said.
"The Messenger team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down," Messenger mission scientists said.
NASA plans to hold a teleconference with reporters on Wednesday to review the latest Mercury discoveries by the Messenger probe. The spacecraft's name is short for the bulky moniker MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging.
The $446 million Messenger probe is expected to spend at least one Earth year studying Mercury from orbit. The spacecraft is in an extremely elliptical orbit that brings it within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of Mercury at the closest point and retreats to more than 9,300 miles (15,000 km) away at the farthest point.
The primary science mission phase will begin on April 4, when Messenger will start mapping the entire surface of Mercury, a process that is expected to require around 75,000 images. Scientists hope the spacecraft will help answer longstanding mysteries over the planet's geology, formation and history.
While Messenger is the first mission ever to orbit around Mercury, it is not the first spacecraft to visit the planet. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet three times in the mid-1970s.
Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

• Video: Messenger's Mercury Orbit Arrival
• New Views of Mercury From NASA's Messenger Probe
• Most Enduring Mysteries of Mercury

NASA Ringmakers of Saturn UFOs 2010

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Posted by UFO-Blogger
I just found this interesting so i thought i would share :)

6 Everyday Things That Happen Strangely in Space

Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer

Date: 07 March 2011 Time: 11:53 AM ET

 

 

 Boils in a Big Bubble

 

 

 

Water

On Earth, boiling water creates thousands of tiny vapor bubbles. In space, though, it produces one giant undulating bubble.

Fluid dynamics are so complex that physicists didn't know for sure what would happen to boiling water in microgravity until the experiment was finally performed in 1992 aboard a space shuttle. Afterward, the physicists decided that the simpler face of boiling in space probably results from the absence of convection and buoyancy — two phenomena caused by gravity. On Earth, these effects produce the turmoil we observe in our teapots.

Much can be learned from these boiling experiments. According to NASA Science News, "Learning how liquids boil in space will lead to more efficient cooling systems for spacecraft ... [It] might also be used someday to design power plants for space stations that use sunlight to boil a liquid to create vapor, which would then turn a turbine to produce electricity."

Flames Are Spheres

On Earth, flames rise. In space, they move outward from their source in all directions. Here's why:

The closer you are to the Earth's surface, the more air molecules there are, thanks to the planet's gravity pulling them there. Conversely, the atmosphere gets thinner and thinner as you move vertically, causing a gradual decline in pressure. The atmospheric pressure difference over a height of one inch, though slight, is enough to shape a candle flame.

That pressure difference causes an effect called natural convection. As the air around a flame heats up, it expands, becoming less dense than the cold air surrounding it. As the hot air molecules expand outward, cold air molecules push back against them. Because there are more cold air molecules pushing against the hot molecules at the bottom of the flame then there are at its top, the flame experiences less resistance at the top. And so it buoys upward.

When there's no gravity, though, the expanding hot air experiences equal resistance in all directions, and so it moves spherically outward from its source.

Bacteria Grow More ... and Are More Deadly

Thirty years of experiments have shown that bacterial colonies grow much faster in space. Astro-E. coli colonies, for example, grow almost twice as fast as their Earth-bound counterparts. Furthermore, some bacteria grow deadlier. A controlled experiment in 2007 testing salmonella growth on the space shuttle Atlantis showed that the space environment changed the expression of 167 of the bacteria's genes. Studies performed after the flight found that these genetic tweaks made the salmonella almost three times more likely to cause disease in mice than control bacteria grown on Earth.

There are several hypotheses as to why bacteria thrive in weightlessness. They may simply have more room to grow than they do on Earth, where they tend to clump together at the bottom of petri dishes. As for the changes in gene expression in salmonella, scientists think they may result from a stress response in a protein called Hfq, which plays a role in controlling gene expression. Microgravity imposes mechanical stresses on bacterial cells by changing the way liquids move over their surfaces. Hfq responds by entering a type of "survival mode" in which it makes the cells more virulent.

By learning how salmonella responds to stress in space, scientists hope to learn how it might handle stressful situations on Earth. Hfq may undergo a similar stress response, for example, when salmonella is under attack by a person's immune system.

You Can't Burp Beer

Because no gravity means no buoyant force, there's nothing pushing gas bubbles up and out of carbonated drinks in space. This means carbon dioxide bubbles simply stagnate inside sodas and beers, even when they're inside astronauts' bellies. Indeed, without gravity, astronauts can't burp out the gas — and that makes drinking carbonated beverages extremely uncomfortable.

Luckily, a company in Australia has concocted a brew that'll be just the thing for kicking back on spaceflights. Vostok 4 Pines Stout Space Beer is rich in flavor, but weak in carbonation. A nonprofit space research organization called Astronauts4Hire is looking into whether the beer will be safe for consumption on future commercial spaceflights.

A Rose by the Same Name Smells ... Different

Flowers produce different aromatic compounds when grown in space, and as a result, smell notably different. This is because volatile oils produced by plants — the oils that carry fragrance — are strongly affected by environmental factors like temperature, humidity and a flower's age. Considering their delicacy, it isn't surprising that microgravity would affect the oils' production as well.

An "out of this world" fragrance produced by a variety of rose called Overnight Scentsation flown on the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 was later analyzed, replicated and incorporated into "Zen," a perfume sold by the Japanese company Shiseido.

You Sweat More

As explained in the context of candle flames, zero g's means there's no natural convection. This means body heat doesn't rise off skin, so the body constantly perspires in an effort to cool itself down. Even worse, because that steady stream of sweat won't drip or evaporate, it simply builds up. All this makes for a pretty moist journey to the beyond.

Up telescope! Search begins for giant new planet

Tyche may be bigger than Jupiter and orbit at the outer edge of the solar system

By Paul Rodgers

Sunday, 13 February 2011

If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth's, and 375 times farther than Pluto's, which is why it hasn't been seen so far.

But scientists now believe the proof of its existence has already been gathered by a Nasa space telescope, Wise, and is just waiting to be analysed. 

The first tranche of data is to be released in April, and astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette think it will reveal Tyche within two years. "If it does, John and I will be doing cartwheels," Professor Whitmire said. "And that's not easy at our age."

Once Tyche has been located, other telescopes could be pointed at it to confirm the discovery.

Whether it would become the new ninth planet would be decided by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The main argument against is that Tyche probably formed around another star and was later captured by the Sun's gravitational field. The IAU may choose to create a whole new category for Tyche, Professor Matese said.

The IAU would also have the final say about the gas giant's name. To the Greeks, Tyche was the goddess responsible for the destiny of cities. Her name was provisionally chosen in reference to an earlier hypothesis, now largely abandoned, that the Sun might be part of a binary star system with a dim companion, tentatively called Nemesis, that was thought responsible for mass extinctions on Earth. In myth, Tyche was the good sister of Nemesis.

Tyche will almost certainly be made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and will probably have an atmosphere much like Jupiter's, with colourful spots and bands and clouds, Professor Whitmire said. "You'd also expect it to have moons. All the outer planets have them," he added.

What will make it stand out in the Wise data is its temperature, predicted to be around -73C, four or five times warmer than Pluto. "The heat is left over from its formation," Professor Whitmire said. "It takes an object this size a long time to cool off."

Most of the billions of objects in the Oort Cloud – a sphere one light year in radius stretching a quarter of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in the southern constellation – are lumps of dirty ice at temperatures much closer to absolute zero (-273C).

A few of these are dislodged from their orbits by the galactic tide – the combined gravitational pull from the billions of stars towards the centre of the Milky Way – and start the long fall into the inner solar system.

As these long-period comets get closer to the Sun, some of the ice boils off, forming the characteristic tails that make them visible.

Professors Matese and Whitmire first proposed the existence of Tyche to explain why many of these long-period comets were coming from the wrong direction. In their latest paper, published in the February issue of Icarus, the international journal of solar system studies, they report that more than 20 per cent too many of the long-period comets observed since 1898 arrive from a band circling the sky at a higher angle than predicted by the galactic-tide theory.

No other proposal has been put forward to explain this anomaly since it was first suggested 12 years ago. But the Tyche hypothesis does have one flaw. Conventional theory holds that the gas giant should also dislodge comets from the inner Oort Cloud, but these have not been observed.

Professor Matese suggests this may be because these comets have already been tugged out of their orbits and, after several passes through the inner solar system, have faded to the point that they are much harder to detect.

So if it is real, Tyche may not only be disrupting the orbits of comets, it may also overturn an established scientific theory.

You can download a PDF showing the position of Tyche by clicking here

Alien Anomaly Activity And UFO Sighting Videotaped During Space Walk

According to Youtube video posted he just can not believe that this has not been bigger news...
Down below video is incredible! Listen to what they are saying, at first it seems as if they go into a panic and then I believe that they use a code word "Antenna".

You are going to want to listen to the audio closely more than once.Look at all the flashes of different colors, some of that has to do with radiation.

 

Round doughnut shaped UFO is like the ones from the "Tether Incident" where the 11 mile tether broke free and was surrounded by round UFO's similar to this one shown in this  video.

Alien anomaly movement resembled to Guadalajara alien too..