KREUZADER (Posts tagged space)

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
“April 10, 2016: International Space Station Configuration. (Clockwise from top) The Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft is docked to the Poisk mini-research module. The ISS Progress 63 spacecraft is docked to the Zvezda service module. The ISS Progress 62...

April 10, 2016: International Space Station Configuration. (Clockwise from top) The Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft is docked to the Poisk mini-research module. The ISS Progress 63 spacecraft is docked to the Zvezda service module. The ISS Progress 62 spacecraft is docked to the Pirs docking compartment. The Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft is docked to the Rassvet mini-research module. The Cygnus cargo craft is attached to the Unity module. The SpaceX Dragon is attached to the Harmony module.

pretty sure that’s the most ships that’s ever been docked to ISS

space nasa roscosmos esa international space station spacex orbital atk
“In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed. This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature...

In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed. This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature space probes attached to lightsails – to speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour. Such a system would allow a flyby mission to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years from launch, and beam home images of possible planets, as well as other scientific data such as analysis of magnetic fields.

Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and detection of Earth-crossing asteroids.

A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can become a reality. They are listed here, for consideration by experts and public alike, as part of the initiative’s commitment to full transparency and open access. The initiative will also establish a research grant program, and will make available other funding to support relevant scientific and engineering research and development.

Source: breakthroughinitiatives.org
stephen hawking space breakthrough starshot
hubblesite.org

Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place

Astronomers have uncovered a near-record-breaking supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in an unlikely place: in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe. The observations, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini telescope in Hawaii, could indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought.

Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes — those roughly 10 billion times the mass of our sun — have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions of the universe packed with other large galaxies. In fact, the current record holder tips the scale at 21 billion suns and resides in the crowded Coma galaxy cluster, which consists of over 1,000 galaxies.

“The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies,” said lead discoverer Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe. While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the universe is to be expected — like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan — it seemed less likely they could be found in the universe’s small towns.

black hole astronomy space
“This new image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows the finest detail ever seen in the planet-forming disc around the nearby Sun-like star TW Hydrae. It reveals a tantalising gap at the same distance from the star as...

This new image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows the finest detail ever seen in the planet-forming disc around the nearby Sun-like star TW Hydrae. It reveals a tantalising gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun, which may mean that an infant version of our home planet, or possibly a more massive super-Earth, is beginning to form there.

Source: eso.org
astronomy space
arstechnica.com

Why Blue Origin’s latest launch is a huge deal for cheap space access

Blue already proved it could land. Now it's showing it can rinse and repeat.
image

Saturday’s flight is significant not only because it continues to demonstrate the potential of reusable rockets to lower the cost of access to space. Regular flights have an added, critical benefit for any launch system. The more New Shepard flies, the more confidence Blue Origin will have in its reliability and safety, which is vital for a company that hopes to begin human test flights in 2017, and perhaps take paying passengers to space as early as 2018.

“One of the things I feel very, very strongly about is if you want to get good at spaceflight you have to practice,” Bezos explained in March to Ars. “If you’ve ever had surgery, there are very good statistics that suggest you should find a surgeon who does it five times a week, preferably 10 or 20 times a week, because that’s the kind of rate we humans get really good at things. We need to get to the point where we are flying more than 100 times a year. We want a vehicle we can fly over and over again with only the lightest of refurbishment.”

blue origin jeff bezos space rocket

soviet cosmonaut laser pistol:

Yes, these are real handheld laser weapons developed in the 1980s for cosmonauts. These futuristic pistols used pyrotechnic flashbulb ammunition, and their primary function was to disable optical sensors on enemy spacecraft or satellites. Allegedly the laser beams of these recoilless guns were energetic enough to burn through a helmet visor, or to blind anybody from 65 feet.

Source: Gizmodo
soviet union space laser
nasaspaceflight.com

NASA looks to test planetary defense options on ARM mission

Perhaps the most important aspect of the ARM mission is not its ability to pick up a boulder from the surface of an asteroid and place that boulder in lunar orbit but instead its ability to test planetary defense mechanisms against potentially hazardous NEAs.

To this end, part of the ARM mission will provide a target to allow NASA to conduct a demonstration of planetary defense capabilities.

According to the ARM Update presentation to the NAC Human Exploration and Operations Committee, “large, hazardous-size asteroid provides representative target for planetary defense demonstration.”

Under this aspect of ARM, the planetary defense demonstration would take place in 2024, assuming a No Later Than December 2021 launch date for ARM, and would occur after the characterization and boulder capture objectives of the mission.

nasa space planetary defense