Space, Science and Exploration (News and Events)

[Knerys]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04...ast_mars_trip/

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days


By Iain Thomson
Posted in Science, 10th April 2013 00:40 GMT


NASA, and plenty of private individuals, want to put mankind on Mars. Now a team at the University of Washington, funded by the space agency, is about to start building a fusion engine that could get humans there in just 30 days and make other forms of space travel obsolete.


"Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics in a statement. "We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace."

The proposed Fusion Driven Rocket (FDR) is a 150-ton system that uses magnetism to compress lithium or aluminum metal bands around a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet to initiate fusion. The resultant microsecond reaction forces the propellant mass out at 30 kilometers per second, and would be able to pulse every minute or so and not cause g-force damage to the spacecraft's occupants.

The spent fuel pellet is ejected behind the motor to provide propulsion, and because the whole process is magnetically controlled there's relatively little wear and tear on the engines. A pellet the size of a grain of sand would provide the same propellant as a gallon of conventional rocket fuel.


All this requires electrical power to control and contain the reaction, but Anthony Pancokti, an advanced propulsion engineer with the team, told The Register that the advantages of magnetic inertial confinement fusion (over that requiring massive lasers, for example) mean that the spacecraft could power itself on solar energy alone.

"It's very scalable; we can achieve fusion at a much smaller scale," he said. "We could run the designed engine off 200KW of solar panels, which is about the same power as generated by the panels around the International Space Station"

Using the FDR system, flight times to the Red Planet could take between 30 and 90 days, compared to over eight months that it took to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. The 30-day trip would require three days of engine operation to get the spacecraft up to speed and another three to slow it down into orbit around Mars.

Such a motor would also be considerably cheaper to launch than a chemical rocket system, since there is much less fuel to hoist out of the gravity well before it starts a trip. The proposed design for a 150-ton spacecraft would allow around a third of that mass to be used for cargo – human or otherwise – and the reduced flight time would reduce the exposure of astronauts to the effects of solar radiation.

Many space missions use aerobraking – using the friction of a planet's atmosphere to slow down – as a way of saving the propellant. This drive, however, is so efficient that aerobraking makes little sense, since the weight of the shielding needed for the maneuver is greater than the propellant FDR needs to slow down.


The team has tested all the parts of the FDR in the lab, and is now going to start building a fully working engine that brings these elements together, thanks to funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which aims to fund long-term space technology.

The FDR is one of only ten projects to get Stage Two funding from the program. This $600,000 award will provide the proof-of-concept FDR system over the next 18 months, and a working spacecraft would be ready as soon as 2020, Pancokti predicted – but if NASA wanted to throw money at the project, this timescale could be cut.

Given the tight financial strictures of the US government this is unlikely, but the FDR engine has the potential to make chemical or ion drives for spacecraft as obsolete as the steam engine for earth-bound transportation.

Uhhhhhh yes please!!!

[Ramplate]

wow

[JBond]

I'll take two!

[sshuttari]

From 8 months to 30 days? Wow... That's impressive

[Deexan]

Official NASA transcripts.

[JBond]

I think that should have been in "Apollo 13."

[sshuttari]

Women better off without bras concludes Study

Especially Young women

Women should forget everything they've been told about bras. According to a new French study, published on Wednesday, wearing a bra does nothing to reduce back pain, and the chest supports actually cause increased breast sagging.

The results of a mammoth 15-year study led by professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, from the University of Besançon in eastern France, are finally in and it looks like conventional wisdom about bras and back pain has been way off the mark.

According to Rouillon, a sports science expert, the lesson to be learned from the preliminary results of his marathon experiment is that "bras are a false necessity".

"Medically, physiologically, anatomically - breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity. On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra," Professor Rouillon told France Info radio on Wednesday.

Using a slide rule and caliper, Rouillon spent years carefully measuring changes in the orientation of breasts belonging to hundreds of women, at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon.

All the women involved in the study were aged between 18 and 35, although the professor was keen to stress that the group were not a representative of the global population of females.

After regularly measuring women who were not wearing bras the scientists concluded that "on average their nipples lifted on average seven millimetres in one year in relation to the shoulders."

Capucine, a 28-year-old woman who participated in the professor's in-depth study, hasn't worn a bra for two years, and swears by the results.

"There are multiple benefits: I breathe more easily, I carry myself better, and I have less back pain," Capucine told France Info.

Despite the groundbreaking results of his study Rouillon advised certain women not to immediately throw away all their bras in the bin.

"It would be of no benefit to a 45-year-old mother to stop wearing a bra," he warned.

[Deexan]

Called it.

[JBond]

Duh?

[Ramplate]

Science at its finest!

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:

[Ramplate]

Lab-made rat kidneys raise hopes for dialysis patients

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered yet another way to make a kidney - at least for a rat - that does everything a natural one does, researchers reported on Sunday, a step toward savings thousands of lives and making organ donations obsolete.

The latest lab-made kidney sets up a horse race in the booming field of regenerative medicine, which aims to produce replacement organs and other body parts.

Several labs are competing to develop the most efficient method to produce the most functional organs through such futuristic techniques as 3D printing, which has already yielded a lab-made kidney that works in lab rodents, or through a "bioreactor" that slowly infuses cells onto the rudimentary scaffold of a kidney, as in the latest study.

The goal of both approaches is to help people with kidney failure. In the United States, 100,000 people with end-stage renal disease are on waiting lists for a donor kidney, but 5,000 to 10,000 die each year before they reach the top of the transplant list.

Even the 18,000 U.S. patients each year who do get a kidney transplant are not out of the woods. In about 40 percent the organ fails within 10 years, often fatally.

If what succeeded in rats "can be scaled to human-sized grafts," then patients waiting for donor kidneys "could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells," said Dr. Harald Ott, of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He led the research reported on Sunday in the online edition of Nature Medicine.

That would minimize the risk of rejection and make more organs available.

Ott's group used an actual kidney as its raw material, but competing labs are using 3D bioprinters to create the starting material, the scaffold or framework of the organ.

"With a 3D bioprinter, you wouldn't require donor organs," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina and a pioneer in that technology.

"The printer also lets you be very precise in where the cells go" on and in the scaffold. But he hailed the Massachusetts General Hospital work as "one more study that confirms these technologies are possible."

'BIOENGINEERED'

Ott and his team started with kidneys from 68 rats and used detergent to remove the actual cells. That left behind a "renal scaffold," a three-dimensional framework made of the fibrous protein collagen, complete with all of a kidney's functional plumbing, from filter to ureter.

The scientists then seeded that scaffold with renal cells from newborn rats and blood-vessel-lining cells from human donors. To make sure each kind of cell went to the right spot, they infused the vascular cells through the kidney's artery - part of the scaffold - and the renal cells through the ureter.

Three to five days later, the scientists had their "bioengineered" kidneys.

When the organs were placed in a dialysis-like device that passed blood through them, they filtered waste and produced urine.

But the true test came when the scientists transplanted the kidneys into rats from which one kidney had been removed. Although not as effective as real kidneys, the lab-made ones did pretty well, Ott and his colleagues reported.

Ott said he thinks using different kinds of cells to build up a kidney on the scaffold could work even better, since the immaturity of the renal cells they used might have kept the lab-made transplant from performing as well as nature's.

If the technology is ever ready to make kidneys for people, the cells would come from the intended recipient, which would minimize the risk of organ rejection and reduce the need for lifelong immune suppression to prevent that.

Although the technique requires human kidneys to provide the scaffold, the organs do not have to be in as good working order as those for transplant.

"That gives you the potential to make use of kidneys offered for transplant that would otherwise be discarded," said Atala, perhaps because they have a viral infection or other disease.

Atala himself is nevertheless forging ahead with 3D printing. He and his colleagues have used that technique to make not only kidneys but also mini-livers which, implanted in lab rodents, made urea and metabolized drugs like a natural one.

They are now trying the more difficult feat of making larger, pig-sized kidneys, as a stepping-stone to human kidneys.

[Knerys]

http://www.space.com/20694-spaceship...st-flight.html

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Makes Stunning Leap Toward Private Spaceflight

By Miriam Kramer | SPACE.com – 6 hrs ago

A new private spaceship is one step closer to flying its first passengers after acing a spectacular test flight over the California desert last week.
Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo successfully conducted its first "cold flow" flight test above the Mojave Desert last Friday (April 12). During the test, oxidizer was run through the rocket's propulsion system and out the back nozzle of the ship, though the vehicle's rocket engine was not turned on.

"As well as providing further qualifying evidence that the rocket system is flight-ready, the test also provided a stunning spectacle due to the oxidizer contrail and for the first time gave a taste of what SpaceShipTwo will look like as it powers to space," Virgin Galactic officials wrote in a statement.

During the most recent test — which comes on the heels of the ship's 24th successful drop test on April 3 — the space plane was flown high into the sky by WhiteKnightTwo, its carrier aircraft. After being released from the plane, SpaceShipTwo glided smoothly back to the ground, leaving a contrail of oxidizer in its wake.

The next big step for the commercial spaceflight company appears to be conducting a full flight test, igniting the rocket in the air.

"The upcoming first powered flight of SpaceshipTwo is in many ways the most significant milestone to date, being the first time that the spaceship has flown with all systems installed and fully operational," Virgin Galactic officials wrote.
The company has not released an expected date for a powered test flight.
Once SpaceShipTwo is operational, WhiteKnightTwo will carry the vehicle up to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) before releasing it.
After separation, SpaceShipTwo will accelerate to 2,500 mph (4,000 km/h) and eventually pass an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), the point at which passengers are considered astronauts. The spaceship will reach a peak altitude of 68 miles (110 km), giving the six passengers and two pilots about five minutes of weightlessness. Upon re-entry, SpaceShipTwo will be able to land on a conventional runway.

A seat on board a SpaceShipTwo flight costs $200,000. More than 550 people have put down deposits to reserve a spot, company officials say.
Virgin Galactic was founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson in 2004 to offer private trips to space for paying passengers. The company's SpaceShipTwo vehicles and their giant WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft were developed by the Mojave, Calif.-based company Scaled Composites.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

[Ramplate]

Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself?

Applying a maxim from computer science to biology raises the intriguing possibility that life existed before Earth did and may have originated outside our solar system, scientists say.

Moore's Law is the observation that computers increase exponentially in complexity, at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every two years. If you apply Moore's Law to just the last few years' rate of computational complexity and work backward, you'll get back to the 1960s, when the first microchip was, indeed, invented.

Now, two geneticists have applied Moore's Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.

Staff Scientist Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, and Theoretical Biologist Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, took Moore's Law, replaced the transistors with nucleotides — the building blocks of DNA and RNA — and the circuits with genetic material, and did the math.

The results suggest life first appeared about 10 billion years ago, far older than the Earth's projected age of 4.5 billion years.

So even if it's mathematically possible for life to have existed before Earth did, is it physically possible? Again, Sharov and Gordon said yes, it is. As our solar system was forming, pre-existing bacterialike organisms, or even simple nucleotides from an older part of the galaxy, could have reached Earth by hitching an interstellar ride on comets, asteroids or other inorganic space debris — a theoretical process called panspermia.

The scientists’ calculations are not scientific proof that life predates Earth — there's no way of knowing for sure that organic complexity increased at a steady rate at any point in the universe's history. Call it a thought exercise or an essay, rather than a theory, Sharov said.

"There are lots of hypothetical elements to [our argument]… but to make a wider view, you need some hypothetical elements," Sharov told TechNewsDaily.

Sharov and Gordon's idea raises other intriguing possibilities. For one, "life before earth" debunks the long-held science-fiction trope of the scientifically advanced alien species. If genetic complexity progresses at a steady rate, then the social and scientific development of any other alien life form in the Milky Way galaxy would be roughly equivalent to those of humans.

Sharov and Gordon's study draws a theoretical and practical parallel between the origin of life and the relationship between life and knowledge. Human evolution doesn’t just occur in the genome; it occurs epigenetically, or within the mind, as technology, language and cultural memory all become more complex. "The functional complexity of organisms [is] encoded partially in the heritable genome and partially in the perishable mind," they explain in the paper.

By applying Moore's Law — a theory originally devised to explain technological development — to life, the geneticists aren’t simplifying evolution; they’re acknowledging its extraordinary complexity, they say.

Although some may be skeptical of Sharov and Gordon's findings, the scientists stand by their conclusions. "Contamination with bacterial spores from space appears the most plausible hypothesis that explains the early appearance of life on Earth," they argue in the paper, which is published online in the preprint journal Arxiv.

Sharov said that if he had to bet on it, he’d say "it's 99 percent true that life started before Earth — but we should leave 1 percent for some wild chance that we haven’t accounted for."

[Knerys]

Uplift!!

[FranklinTard]

heard on the radio that some company is offering 2 tickets to go some 380,000 feet next year to people that guess closest as to how long a balloon can last in the atmosphere (how high up before it pops).

really wish i had remembered the company would post a link...

[JBond]

Originally Posted by Ramplate

Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[Ramplate]

Three years on the sun http://www.space.com/20778-three-yea...pse-video.html

[Knerys]

Ha that cool! There's even a brief moment when a planet zoom by the shot.

[Ramplate]

NASA Captures Monster Hurricane from Space

Cool picture http://gma.yahoo.com/nasa-captures-m...news-tech.html

[Hollywood]

Nice picture, I would hate to be in that in mars.