International Space Station

Live Views of Earth The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component was launched into orbit in 1998, with the first long-term residents arriving in November 2000.[7] It has been inhabited continuously since that date.[8] The last pressurised module was fitted in 2011, and an experimental inflatable space habitat was added in 2016. The station is expected to operate until 2030.[9] Development and assembly of the station continues, with several new elements scheduled for launch in 2019. The ISS is the largest human-made body in low Earth orbit and can often be seen with the naked eye from Earth.[10][11] The ISS consists of pressurised habitation modules, structural trusses, solar arrays, radiators, docking ports, experiment bays and robotic arms. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuzrockets and American Space Shuttles.[12] The ISS serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which crew members conduct experiments in biologyhuman biologyphysicsastronomymeteorology, and other fields.[13][14][15] The station is suited for the testing of spacecraft systems and equipment required for missions to the Moon and Mars.[16] The ISS maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda module or visiting spacecraft. It circles the Earth in roughly 92 minutes and completes 15.5 orbits per day.[17] The ISS programme is a joint project between five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).[18][19] The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements.[20] The station is divided into two sections, the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) and the United States Orbital Segment (USOS), which is shared by many nations. As of January 2018, operations of the American segment were funded until 2025.[21][22][23] Roscosmos has endorsed the continued operation of ISS through 2024,[24] but has proposed using elements of the Russian segment to construct a new Russian space station called OPSEK.[25] In December 2018, the U.S. Senate extended ISS funding until 2030.[9] The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian SalyutAlmaz, and Mirstations as well as Skylab from the US. The station has been continuously occupied for 18 years and 111 days since the arrival of Expedition 1 on 2 November 2000. This is the longest continuous human presence in low Earth orbit, having surpassed the previous record of 9 years and 357 days held by Mir. It has been visited by astronauts, cosmonauts and space tourists from 18 different nations. After the American Space Shuttle programme ended in 2011, Soyuz rockets became the only provider of transport for astronauts at the ISS. The station is serviced by a variety of visiting spacecraft: the Russian Soyuz and Progress, the American Dragon and Cygnus, the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle,[18] and formerly the American Space Shuttle and the European Automated Transfer Vehicle. The Dragon spacecraft allows the return of pressurised cargo to Earth (downmass), which is used for example to repatriate scientific experiments for further analysis. The Soyuz return capsule has minimal downmass capability next to the astronauts.]]>

Black Hole Size Comparison

James Williams   Video brought here courtesy of Harry Evett Published on Sep 15, 2017 Stars in our Universe can get unimaginably giant, but one thing that beats them is Black Holes. In this video, we compare these magnificent objects’ size with the Earth, Sun, and even the entire Solar System to give a perspective on how truly large Black Holes are. Music: Fall of the Solar King by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (…) Artist:]]>

Fermi Paradox: Where Are the Aliens?

By Elizabeth Howell, Contributor   The Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are. Given that our star and Earth are part of a young planetary system compared to the rest of the universe — and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve — the theory says that Earth should have been visited by aliens already. As the story goes, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, most famous for creating the first nuclear reactor, came up with the theory with a casual lunchtime remark in 1950. The implications, however, have had extraterrestrial researchers scratching their heads in the decades since. “Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire galaxy,” the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, said on its website. “Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it’s quite short compared with the age of the galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.” Fermi Fermi reportedly made the initial remark, but he died in 1954. Publication fell to other people, such as Michael Hart, who wrote an article titled “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth” in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Quarterly Journal in 1975. (Some say this is the first such paper to explore the Fermi paradox, although this claim is a bit hard to prove.) “We observe that no intelligent beings from outer space are now present on Earth,” Hart wrote in the abstract. “It is suggested that this fact can best be explained by the hypothesis that there are no other advanced civilizations in our galaxy.” He noted, however, that more research in biochemistry, planetary formation and atmospheres was needed to better narrow down the answer. While Hart was more of the opinion that we were the only advanced civilization in the galaxy (he argued that in Earth’s history, somebody could have visited us already unless they started their journey less than two million years ago), he outlined four arguments exploring the paradox: 1) Aliens never came because of a physical difficulty “that makes space travel infeasible,” which could be related to astronomy, biology or engineering. 2) Aliens chose never to come to Earth. 3) Advanced civilizations arose too recently for aliens to reach us. 4) Aliens have visited Earth in the past, but we have not observed them. The argument has been challenged on many grounds. “Maybe star travel is not feasible, or maybe nobody chooses to colonize the galaxy, or maybe we were visited long ago and the evidence is buried with the dinosaurs — but the idea has become entrenched in thinking about alien civilizations,” wrote Fermi paradox researcher Robert H. Gray in a 2016 Scientific American blog post. Frank Tipler, a professor of physics at Tulane University, followed up on the argument in 1980 with a paper titled “Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist,” also published in the RAS Quarterly Journal. The bulk of his paper dealt with how to get resources for interstellar travel, which he suggested could be achieved by having some kind of self-replicating artificial intelligence moving from star system to star system and create copies using materials there. Since these beings aren’t on Earth, Tipler argued we are likely the only intelligence out there. He also said that those who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence are similar those who think about UFOs, because both camps believe “we are going to be saved from ourselves by some miraculous interstellar intervention.” Today, the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence is a popular one, with several papers appearing every year from different researchers. It’s also been fueled by the discovery of exoplanets. Fermi2

Plentiful planets

The universe is incredibly vast and old. One estimate says the universe spans 92 billion light-years in diameter (while growing faster and faster). Separate measurements indicate it is about 13.82 billion years old. At first blush, this would give alien civilizations plenty of time to propagate, but then they would have a cosmic distance barrier to cross before getting too far into space. Fermi first formed his theory long before scientists found planets outside of our solar system. There are now more than 3,000 confirmed planets, with more being found frequently. The sheer number of planets that we have found outside of our solar system indicates that life could be plentiful. FOR MORE OF THIS CLICK HERE]]>



A Star Grazed Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago, and Early Humans Likely Saw It

grazed the solar system 70,000 years ago, coming closer than 1 light-year to the sun. For perspective, the sun’s nearest stellar neighbor these days, Proxima Centauri, lies about 4.2 light-years away. The astronomers came to this conclusion by measuring the motion and velocity of Scholz’s star — which zooms through space with a smaller companion, a brown dwarf or “failed star” — and extrapolating backward in time. Scholz’s star passed by the solar system at a time when early humans and Neanderthals shared the Earth. The star likely appeared as a faint reddish light to anyone looking up at the time, researchers with the new study said. [Top 10 Star Mysteries] star Grazer The new study bolsters the 2015 analysis with a different type of evidence. A research team led by Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, of the Complutense University of Madrid, analyzed 339 known solar system bodies with hyperbolic orbits — paths through space that are V-shaped, rather than circular or elliptical. Objects on hyperbolic orbits could theoretically have come from interstellar space, just like ‘Oumuamua, the first known solar system visitor born around another star. But they could also be natives nudged onto weird tracks by gravitational interactions with the sun or some of its planets. And denizens of the Oort Cloud — a frigid ring far from the sun that’s home to trillions of comets — could even be “perturbed” by the Milky Way’s disk, or wandering stars that get too close. “Using numerical simulations, we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come,” de la Fuente Marcos said in a statement. “In principle, one would expect those positions to be evenly distributed in the sky, particularly if these objects come from the Oort Cloud,” he added. “However, what we find is very different: a statistically significant accumulation of radiants. The pronounced over-density appears projected in the direction of the constellation of Gemini, which fits the close encounter with Scholz’s star.” star Grazer2 ‘Oumuamua is not among the Gemini group, so that bizarre, needle-shaped object really does seem to have come from another star system, the researchers added. They also flagged eight other bodies that may be interstellar interlopers, including Comet ISON, which broke apart during a highly anticipated close pass by the sun in November 2013. The new study was published online last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. You can read it for free at the online preprint site Source Article Please support this site.   [simple-payment id=”741″]   [contact-form][contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”1″ /][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”1″ /][contact-field label=”Comment” type=”textarea” required=”1″ /][/contact-form]]]>

Scientists Create Superionic 'Space' Water

ice seven (ice VII). First discovered in 2016, it remains solid at room temperature. Laser pulses were passed through this material, which heated it and created shock waves throughout the material. These extreme conditions, which only occur naturally in otherworldly environments , were enough to produce the superionic ice. Lead author Marius Source:…

This Ice Is Nearly As Hot As the Sun.

From Live Science Basic Features of superionic ice:
  • It’s both solid and liquid,
  • It’s 60 times denser than ordinary water ice
  • It forms at temperatures almost as hot as the sun’s surface.
  • This high-pressure form of water ice has long been thought to exist in the interiors of  Uranus and Neptune. But until now, its existence was only theoretical.
Superionic Ice  

“Our work provides experimental evidence for superionic ice and shows that these predictions were not due to artifacts in the simulations, but actually captured the extraordinary behavior of water at those conditions,” Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a statement from the laboratory. Millot was the leader author of a new study describing the work.

Scientists first predicted the existence of a weird water phase that makes the substance both solid and liquid at the same time 30 years ago. It’s also way denser than ordinary water ice because it forms only under extreme heat and pressure, such as those found inside giant planets. During the superionic phase, the hydrogen and oxygen within water molecules behave bizarrely; hydrogen ions move like a liquid, inside of a solid crystal lattice of oxygen. [The Surprisingly Strange Physics of Water]

Making the ice was complicated. First, the team compressed water into an ultrastrong cubic crystalline ice, in a different crystal form than what you see in ordinary ice cubes. To do that, the researchers used diamond anvil cells to apply 360,000 pounds per square inch (2.5 gigapascals (GPa) of pressure; that’s about 25,000 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth). Next, the researchers heated and compressed the cells even further, using laser-driven shocks. Each crystal ice structure received up to six laser beams of more than 100 times that high pressure.

“Because we pre-compressed the water, there is less shock-heating than if we shock-compressed ambient liquid water,” Millot said. The new method lets researchers “access much colder states at high pressure than in previous shock-compression studies.”

Once the superionic ice was ready, the team moved quickly to analyze its optical and thermodynamic properties. They had only 10 to 20 nanoseconds to perform the work, before pressure waves released the compression, and the water dissolved. And the results were bizarre. They found that the ice melts at an extraordinary 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit (4,725 degrees Celsius ) at 29 million pounds per square inch (200 GPa) of pressure. That pressure is about 2 million times the atmospheric pressure on Earth.

“It’s … mind-boggling that frozen water ice is present at thousands of degrees inside these planets, but that’s what the experiments show,” Raymond Jeanloz, a co-author of the study and planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the same statement.

The new findings could provide a peek inside the interiors of planets such as Uranus and Neptune. Planetary scientists suggest these worlds’ innards are composed of up to 65 percent water by mass, plus some ammonia and methane.


Previous work suggested these planets would have “fully fluid” heat-transferring interiors, but the addition of superionic ice changes the picture. The new research instead proposes “a relatively thin layer of fluid and a large ‘mantle’ of superionic ice,” the researchers said in the



That picture of the mini-giant planets’ interiors would confirm a computer simulation performed a decade ago that tried to explain the weird magnetic fields at Uranus and Neptune. Uranus’ magnetic field is tilted 59 degrees away from the planet’s axis. Neptune’s magnetic poles have a roughly 47-degree tilt. This is extreme compared with Earth, which has only an 11-degree tilt. Their magnetic fields also may behave differently; for example, Uranus’ field may turn on and off like a strobe.

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More detailed study of these planets will have to wait until a spacecraft is available. Fortunately, NASA is proposing a Uranus and/or Neptune spacecraft that would zoom out to these planets sometime in the next few decades. Meanwhile, the experimenters plan to push their compression further to simulate conditions inside of even larger giant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn.


A study based on the research was published in February in the journal Nature Physics.


Original article on Live Science.



From a million miles out in space, NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) captured 12 natural color images of the moon’s shadow crossing over North America on Aug. 21, 2017. EPIC is aboard NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), where it photographs the full sunlit side of Earth every day, giving it a unique view of total solar eclipses. More about how NASA studies eclipses: More about DSCOVR:…
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