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Back on earth, let's hope all that reclamation in the SCS is high enough above sea level... or not?

NEWS | May 14, 2015
It's the final act for Larsen B Ice Shelf
By Carol Rasmussen,
NASA's Earth Science News Team

Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf is likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs before the end of the decade, according to a new NASA study. Credits: NSIDC/Ted Scambos. View larger image.
A new NASA study finds the last remaining section of Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf, which partially collapsed in 2002, is quickly weakening and is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.

A team led by Ala Khazendar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found the remnant of the Larsen B Ice Shelf is flowing faster, becoming increasingly fragmented and developing large cracks. Two of its tributary glaciers also are flowing faster and thinning rapidly.

"This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone."
- Ala Khazendar, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
"These are warning signs that the remnant is disintegrating," Khazendar said. "Although it’s fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it’s bad news for our planet. This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone."
Ice shelves are the gatekeepers for glaciers flowing from Antarctica toward the ocean. Without them, glacial ice enters the ocean faster and accelerates the pace of global sea level rise. This study, the first to look comprehensively at the health of the Larsen B remnant and the glaciers that flow into it, has been published online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Khazendar's team used data on ice surface elevations and bedrock depths from instrumented aircraft participating in NASA's Operation IceBridge, a multiyear airborne survey campaign that provides unprecedented documentation annually of Antarctica's glaciers, ice shelves and ice sheets. Data on flow speeds came from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars operating since 1997.

Khazendar noted his estimate of the remnant's remaining life span was based on the likely scenario that a huge, widening rift that has formed near the ice shelf's grounding line will eventually crack all the way across. The free-floating remnant will shatter into hundreds of icebergs that will drift away, and the glaciers will rev up for their unhindered move to the sea.

Ice shelves are the gatekeepers for glaciers flowing from Antarctica toward the ocean. Without them, glacial ice enters the ocean faster and accelerates the pace of global sea level rise.
Located on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen B remnant is about 625 square miles (1,600 square kilometers) in area and about 1,640 feet (500 meters) thick at its thickest point. Its three major tributary glaciers are fed by their own tributaries farther inland.
"What is really surprising about Larsen B is how quickly the changes are taking place," Khazendar said. "Change has been relentless."

The remnant's main tributary glaciers are named Leppard, Flask and Starbuck — the latter two after characters in the novel Moby Dick. The glaciers' thicknesses and flow speeds changed only slightly in the first couple of years following the 2002 collapse, leading researchers to assume they remained stable. The new study revealed, however, that Leppard and Flask glaciers have thinned by 65-72 feet (20-22 meters) and accelerated considerably in the intervening years. The fastest-moving part of Flask Glacier had accelerated 36 percent by 2012 to a flow speed of 2,300 feet (700 meters) a year — comparable to a car accelerating from 55 to 75 mph.

Flask's acceleration, while the remnant has been weakening, may be just a preview of what will happen when the remnant breaks up completely. After the 2002 Larsen B collapse, the glaciers behind the collapsed part of the shelf accelerated as much as eightfold — comparable to a car accelerating from 55 to 440 mph.

The third and smallest glacier, Starbuck, has changed little. Starbuck's channel is narrow compared with those of the other glaciers, and the small glacier is strongly anchored to the bedrock, which, according to authors of the study, explains its comparative stability.

"This study of the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers provides insights about how ice shelves farther south, which hold much more land ice, will react to a warming climate," said JPL glaciologist Eric Rignot, a coauthor of the paper.

The research team included scientists from JPL; the University of California, Irvine; and the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway. The paper is online at

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PanAsian said:

Forgot if I was reading the What The Heck or the SciFi threads for a second!

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Well I throw in some Alien article every once in a while to keep people awake. At least they are written by scientist and not UFO conspiracy reporters

A leap forward in the hunt for Earth-like planets


(COSMOS) By analysing the atmosphere, spin and mass of a distant planet using nothing but the light it reflects from its star – which was thought impossible with current technology – scientists should be able to figure out whether the planet is capable of supporting life.

“This pushes a very difficult technique to a new limit,” says Chris Tinney, an exoplanetary scientist at the University of New South Wales. “It’s a ridiculously hard experiment to do.”

The technique was refined by astronomy PhD student Jorge Martins from the University of Porto in Portugal and reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

It comes 20 years after astronomers identified the first extra-solar planet (or exoplanet), 51 Peg b, which orbits a star in the Pegasus constellation. Since then scientists have discovered nearly 2,000 other distant worlds.

Until now, astronomers have had two ways of tracking them down through telescopes. The most widely used is the radial velocity technique, which relies on picking up the ever-so-slight wobble stars have from the gravitational pull of their orbiting planets. It’s how 51 Peg b was discovered and the technique has since uncovered hundreds of exoplanets.

The second is the transit method, where astronomers measure the dip in a star’s light as a planet passes in front of it. One benefit of this technique is that astronomers can sometimes make out the exoplanet’s atmosphere as the star’s light filters through it.

But as both are indirect ways to “see” a planet, there are problems. A lot depends on Earth’s perspective. We can easily detect if a star wobbles left to right or up and down. But if the star wobbles toward us we won’t see it as clearly. Similarly, the transit method relies on an exoplanet passing directly between Earth and its star – and we may have to wait years for it to hit that sweet spot if it ever does at all.

In 1999, University of St Andrews astrophysicist Andrew Cameron and colleagues suggested looking for exoplanets using reflected light. This approach has two benefits. Astronomers can trace a planet’s orbit by observing its motion through space, and from that they can use Kepler’s third law of planetary motion and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to precisely determine the exoplanet’s mass – something they cannot achieve with the radial velocity technique.

The challenge ... is picking up the little bit of light reflected from an exoplanet.

The wavelengths of the light and how much is reflected can also give some idea of an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Reflectivity – also called “albedo” – changes depending on a planet’s surface and atmosphere. Venus, for example, has a very high albedo from its highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid. But Mercury’s albedo is low due to its carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere that barely reflects any light, coupled with its dark porous surface.

The challenge with Cameron’s technique is picking up the little bit of light reflected from an exoplanet. It tends to get swamped by the intense light streaming from its star – especially for planets with a close orbit.

Martins decided to try the technique using the 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile. The telescope is equipped with one of the world’s most sensitive spectrographs – an instrument that can analyse a distant source of light by splitting it into its component wavelengths and filter out unwanted “noise”. What better target than 51 Peg b to try out the new technique?


So Martins pointed the telescope towards it when the bright, daytime side of the planet faced Earth. And when he enhanced the signals using a computer algorithm he had developed, he was left with an albedo signature typical of a type of exoplanet known as a “hot Jupiter”. The planet has around half the mass of Jupiter, but as it orbits much closer to its star than Jupiter orbits the Sun, its gaseous atmosphere is “puffed up” by the intense heat.

Didier Queloz, who as a PhD student was on the team that discovered 51 Peg b in 1995, is “thrilled” by the work.

“It is a real gift to get a direct measurement of the light from this famous planet at the 20th anniversary of its detection,” the Cambridge astrophysicist says.

Even so, the amount of light Martins was able to collect was tiny. Luckily, he has more powerful hardware up his sleeve – the 8.2-metre Very Large Telescope, also in Chile, will be able to suck in more light from 51 Peg b, and its spectrograph will be able to filter out more noise to give a clearer view.

Martins hopes to one day find an exoplanet like Earth orbiting a star like the Sun.

“Who knows?” he says. “We’ll maybe find we’re not alone in the Universe.”


Back to bottling my Grenache

The Most Spectacular Photo (and GIF!) of Saturn Ever Taken


are good — but they aren't as good as this. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured as it approached Saturn in early 2011. The GIF is so beautiful that it bubbled back up to the front page of Reddit recently.

In November 2014, the spacecraft caught another spectacular , Titan, using a visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The glowing orange you see here is called a sunglint, also known as a specular reflection, coming off Titan's massive sea Kraken Mare. It was captured during Cassini's flyby on Aug. 21, 2014. The spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn for the past 10 years.


NASA wrote about the glorious image in a recent blog post:

"The highest resolution data from this flyby — the area seen immediately to the right of the sunglint — cover the labyrinth of channels that connect Kraken Mare to another large sea, Ligeia Mare. Ligeia Mare itself is partially covered in its northern reaches by a bright, arrow-shaped complex of clouds. The clouds are made of liquid methane droplets, and could be actively refilling the lakes with rainfall."

What's life on Titan like? It's like the frozen version of Earth, according to . The moon is "one of the most Earth-like worlds we have found to date," the scientists claim. The reason why this sunglint capture is so incredible is that typically Titan is covered in an orange haze of photochemical smog. Cassini rarely gets a peek of what lies underneath those murky skies, but it does frequently photograph views in violet light, like the one taken below. The two planetary bodies are mimicking each other!



Back to bottling my Grenache

NASA’s Orion spacecraft borrows basic design from Apollo program


The Orion spacecraft may look like its 40-plus-year-old Apollo predecessor, but — like a modified car — its innards have been stripped and replaced with modern technology that will enable NASA’s newest space mobile to send humans further than ever before, experts said Wednesday.

Mike Hawes, Orion’s program manager for Lockheed Martin, said a capsule that could carry up to six astronauts has the same shape as Apollo because the original designers got it right.

“The physics are the same of going out and coming back at higher speeds,” he said. “The technology is all totally different. The computers are dozens of times faster than the (International Space Station). They’re thousands of times faster than Apollo. Apollo actually flew on 8K memory machines and, I think, it was 1 megahertz.”

NASA partnered with Lockheed Martin to launch an Orion spacecraft Dec. 5, Exploration Test Flight-1 (EFT-1). The last time NASA sent a spacecraft meant to hold humans out of lower Earth orbit was 43 years ago in Apollo 17.

Once the agency perfects Orion, it will be able to carry four astronauts in deep space for up to 21 days. The objective is to enable people to explore destinations such as asteroids and eventually Mars.

Hawes and Mark Geyer, Orion project manager at the Johnson Space Center, visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Wednesday to thank a team of 15 JPL’ers who contributed to the December test flight. They also shared lessons learned from the test flight with the larger JPL community as well as talked about to expect next.

The next Orion mission will be Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), which is scheduled for September 2018, Geyer said. Then in 2021, NASA will send a crewed flight into high lunar orbit for a flyby meant to last at least a few days, he said.

EFT-1 cost $370 million. Some of the materials such as the Orion spacecraft itself will be reused in future missions. The federal government has budgeted $1.1 billion a year for a series of Orion missions that could one day help put footprints on Mars, Geyer said.

Like Apollo, Orion uses a crew model plated with Avcoat, a material that could withstand extreme temperature changes. Although the substance carries the same name, Hawes said new discoveries and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency restrictions have changed Avcoat’s composition.

“If you think about Apollo, I didn’t know as a kid, but we only visited the equator of the moon — a very small part,” Geyer said. “Orion enables missions to go to the rest of the moon. It enables missions to go to these asteroids. It enables missions to go to Mars, and it’s the first piece to get the crew up safe and back.”

Link:


Back to bottling my Grenache

The Air Force plans to launch its fourth X-37B mission, designated OTV-4 and codenamed AFSPC-5, aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station tomorrow, May 20, 2015. The mission will test a Hall Effect Thruster in support of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellite program, and will also carry a NASA materials mission.

I feel more confident in the X37B program then Orion and SLS

The House Appropriations Committee has released updated numbers for the NASA FY 2016 budget. The highlights include: $3.4 billion for Space Launch System, Orion and related ground systems, an increase of $546 million over the President’s request; $1 billion for Commercial Crew, a reduction of $243 million from the request; $625 million for space technology, a reduction of $100 million. $1.56 billion for planetary exploration, an increase of $196 million; $1.68 billion for Earth science, a reduction of $264 million; $140 million to begin work on the Jupiter Europa clipper; $19 million to maintain operations of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and $13.7 million for the Mars Opportunity Rover. - See more at:

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Parabolicarc has a table showing the budget in more detail.

SNC Building Rotating Mount for JPSS-2 Instrument
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— May 18, 2015

A rotating mount made by Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) will launch to space in 2021 aboard NOAA's Joint Polar System Satellite (JPSS)-2: a spacecraft tentatively to be built by Orbital ATK. JPSS-2 will be the second in a series of six satellites designed to continue global weather measurements through 2038. The SNC mount will (literally) support the Radiation Budget Instrument being built for JPSS-2 by Exelis Geospatial Systems. Credit: Orbital ATK artist's concept

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The Exelis-built Radiation Budget Instrument will perform essentially the same function on JPSS-2 as the Northrop Grumman-built Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System instrument (above) will for JPSS-1. Both radiometers will help scientists better understand Earth’s weather and climate by measuring sunlight and radiation reflected into space by clouds, and radiation emitted from the planet. Credit: NASA
Exelis Geospatial Systems of Rochester, New York, tapped Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) Space Systems of Louisville, Colorado, to build a rotating mount for an instrument Exelis is providing for a U.S. civilian weather satellite launching in 2021.

SNC, which did not disclose the value of the work in a May 14 press release announcing the award, will build the so-called Azimuth Rotation Module for the Radiation Budget Instrument Exelis is building for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 spacecraft. Exelis is building the instrument under a roughly $200 million contract awarded in 2014 by NASA, which procures and builds all NOAA satellites.

The Radiation Budget Instrument measures sunlight and radiation reflected into space by Earth’s clouds, and radiation emitted by Earth itself. The data helps scientists better understand how much energy is entering and leaving the planet — a process that affects weather and climate.

The Radiation Budget Instrument is an upgraded version of the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System instrument, which was built by Northrop Grumman. That instrument is now flying on the primary U.S. civilian polar-orbiter, Suomi NPP, and a copy is set to launch with JPSS-1 in 2017.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built Suomi NPP and is building JPSS-1. However, Orbital ATK, Dulles, Virginia, wrested the JPSS work away from the incumbent March 24, winning a NASA contract worth up to $470 million to build JPSS-2, JPSS-3 and JPSS-4. The only firm order on Orbital ATK’s contract is $253 million for JPSS-2.

Ball protested NASA’s decision

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with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which now has until July 16 to issue a ruling. If GAO finds a flaw with NASA’s procurement process, it could force the agency to recompete the JPSS follow-on work. In the meantime, NASA directed Orbital ATK to stop work on JPSS-2, which would be built at the company’s Gilbert, Arizona, satellite factory. Government agencies routinely suspend work on contracts under protest.

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SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule docked with the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station
Picture: EPA/NASA


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Image of Tyrrhenus Mons in Hesperia Planum region taken by Mars Color Camera (MCC) on 25-02-2015 at a spatial resolution of 166m from an altitude of 3192km.

Impression of flow features and NE-SW trending fractures are clearly seen in this image. Impressions of wind streaks can also be seen image.

Tyrrhenus Mons is a volcanic mons. NE-SW oriented fractures indicate stresses due to volcanic process in this region. Approximate direction of wind which created the wind streaks is East-West.

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Pital crater is an impact crater located in Ophir Planum region of Mars, which is located in the eastern part of Valles Marineris region. This image is taken by Mars Color Camera (MCC) on 23-04-2015 at a spatial resolution of ~42 m from an altitude of 808 km.

Wall of the crater and chain of small impact craters are clearly seen in this image. This crater is having the diameter of ~40 km.

Most of craters observed on planetary surfaces are circular in shape. Some of the craters are in elliptical shape. However, this Pital crater is in different shape. This could be due to the eastern extension of regional fracture in the W-E trending fracture zone.

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Images from Mars Color Camera on-board

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I didn't know where to put this, but it's interesting to read.

A large part of the energy it takes to put an object into space is needed to lift it through the thick lower atmosphere.

That is why an innovative Spanish company is developing a satellite launch system called

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. It uses balloons, rather than rockets, for the first launch stage.

"75% of the cost of a rocket launch happens in the first 75 seconds as its going up,” says Jose Mariano Lopez-Urdiales, Founder of Zero2infinity, the company behind the technology.

“If you replace that altitude of the first 75 seconds with something else cheap and simple like a balloon, you suddenly reduce dramatically your cost and also your environmental impact.”

Bloostar uses high-altitude helium balloons.

These can carry a payload of up to 75kg to an altitude of 20 kilometers.

The balloon then drops a cluster of three reusable ring-rockets, which fire in sequence to carry the satellite into orbit.

Zero2infinity says it has designed an engine for the rockets that is much simpler and cheaper than conventional rockets.

The engines use the near-vacuum conditions found at high altitudes to create pressure. This then feeds liquid natural gas to the engines.

“If you compare it with the engine of an airplane it is way simpler,” says Lluc Palerm, and Aerospace Engineer with Zero2infinity.

“You don’t have any moving parts… and [using] new technologies like 3D printing we can do it in two or three pieces. Its very simple to integrate and very simple to operate.”

Zero2infinity says the combination of using the balloons and the simple gas engines will cut the cost of launching a small satellite to just a few million dollars, around ten times cheaper than a traditional rocket launch.

Bloostar is likely to be of greatest interest to companies, universities and even small countries that are increasing putting tiny 'cubesats' into orbit.

These typically weigh around 1 kg, making it possible for Bloostar to launch a number of them at the same time.

Zero2infinity are also looking at using the balloons to take tourists to the edge of space.

It has already tested an experimental pod at high altitudes. It is in the process of developing an insulated and pressurized carbon fiber capsule capable of carrying two passengers up to an altitude of 40km.

Zero2infinity is hoping successful trials of both systems over the next two years will help demonstrate the role balloons can play in opening access to space for all.

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