Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Air-Breathing Rocket Engine Gets Funding Infusion

An artist's conception of Reaction Engines' Skylon spacecraft. Credit: Reaction Engines

Air-breathing rocket engine. Need we say more?

The technology, which sounds straight out of a science-fiction movie, has enough reality to it for the United Kingdom government to offer $90.62 million (£60 million), in stages, to a company looking to develop the engine.

The money will go to Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines, which we’ve seen on Universe Today before. They’re also developing an unpiloted and reusable spacecraft called Skylon, which is intended for low Earth orbit after leaving the planet from a conventional runway.

Skylon isn’t flight-ready yet, but so far the project did pass a United Kingdom Space Agency technical assessment. If completed, the UK Space Agency says Skylon is just one of many vehicles that could use this engine, which is called Sabre.

“The unique engine is designed to extract the oxygen it needs for low atmosphere flight from the air itself, paving the way for a new generation of spaceplanes which would be lighter, reusable and able to take off and launch from conventional airport runways,” the agency stated.

The money, stated Reaction Engines founder Alan Bond, will fund  “the next phase in the development of its engine and heat management technology.” More specifically, this is what the company plans to use the funds for:

– Engine technical design work;

– Improving lightweight heat exchanger technology and manufacturing;

– Performing wind tunnel and flight testing of engine components;

– Doing a “ground demonstration” of the engine.

If all stays to schedule, Reaction Engines expects a Sabre prototype will be ready in 2017, with flight tests commencing in 2020.

A cutaway view of the proposed Sabre engine, which is being developed by Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines. Credit: Reaction Engines
A cutaway view of the proposed Sabre engine, which is being developed by Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines. Credit: Reaction Engines

The major goal of Sabre is to use hot air entering the engine to obtain the required oxygen for operations, rather than carrying the gas separately on board. The engine is supposed to switch to a “rocket mode” at 26,000 feet in altitude.

“This advantage enables a spaceplane to fly lighter from the outset and to make a single leap to orbit, rather than using and dumping propellant stages on the ascent – as is the case with current expendable rockets,” the UK Space Agency stated.

Reaction Engines promises Skylon would give “reliable access to space” through carrying payloads of up to 15 tonnes, but at only 2% of the cost of more conventional launch vehicles — namely, rockets. It remains to be seen if they will achieve that cost goal, but the funding is welcome news nonetheless for the company.

Source: UK Space Agency

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spacesuit Water Leak Aborts Space Station EVA

ISS Astronauts had to scramble to get Luca Parmitano out of his spacesuit after water leaked inside the suit, covering his face. Via NASA TV.

Today’s spacewalk at the International Space Station was cut short due to a water leak inside astronaut Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit. At one point, there was so much water inside Parmitano’s ears and around his face that he couldn’t hear or speak to communicate with the other astronauts. “Squeeze my hand if you’re fine,” fellow EVA member Chris Cassidy said to Parmitano.

What was supposed to be a 6-7 hour spacewalk lasted only 1 hour and 32 minutes after the leak occurred.

If you don’t think a little water could be a problem inside a spacesuit, recall how Chris Hadfield showed how water clung to his eyes in a simulated “cry,” or continued to cling to a washcloth even though it was being wrung out (see video below). The water inside Parmitano’s helmet literally surrounded and clung to his face and head.

“He looks miserable, but is OK,” the crew told Mission Control after they quickly removed Parmitano’s helmet and toweled off his face and head.

NASA TV said the cause of the leak in the helmet was “not readily identifiable,” but Parmitano appeared to be examining the drink bag that was inside his helmet shortly after the two astronauts got inside and were removed from their suits. However, just a short time later, Cassidy told Mission Control that Parmitano said the “water tasted really funny,” so it was likely not from the drink bag, and was perhaps the iodinated water from the crew’s liquid-cooled undergarments. But Cassidy also said Parmitano’s torso was essentially dry, and that the source of water seemed to be around the back of his head.

Close-up look inside the 'EMU' spacesuit worn on spacewalks showing the area where Luca Parmitano first felt the water leak. Via astronaut Doug Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels) on Twitter
Close-up look inside the ‘EMU’ spacesuit worn on spacewalks showing the area where Luca Parmitano first felt the water leak. Via astronaut Doug Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels) on Twitter

NASA is still investigating the source of the leak, and will have followup discussions and medical conferences with the astronauts to find out more and to make sure Parmitano is OK.

The two astronauts were going to continue tasks from last week’s EVA: routing power and data cables for a new Russian laboratory module scheduled to be launched to the ISS late this year or early 2014. They also were going to reposition a wireless camera antenna on the station’s power truss and replace a camera on the external deck of the Japanese Kibo lab module.

But the spacewalkers only completed one task before the leak became a problem. This was the second shortest spacewalk on record; on June 24, 2004, pressure problem in Mike Fincke’s spacesuit prompted an abbreviated 14-minute EVA.

ISS Astronauts gather in the Quest airlock after water leaked inside Luca Parmitano's spacesuit. Via NASA TV.
ISS Astronauts gather in the Quest airlock after water leaked inside Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit. Via NASA TV.

The @SpaceShuttleAlmanac Twitter feed may have provided the best analogy of what Parmitano was experiencing during the leak: “Imagine having a fishbowl on your head with a half a litre of water sticking to your face, ears and nose. Then imagine you can’t take the fishbowl off your head for a minimum of 20 minutes, feel the panic?”

This was the 171st EVA for station construction and maintenance. NASA said nothing critical to station will be affected as a result of cutting the space walk short. Likely another EVA will be scheduled for the tasks.

NASA will be holding a news conference later today to provide more information.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Carnival of Space #310

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Kimberly Kowal Arcand and Megan Watzke at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory blog.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #310.

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Podcast: The Pacific Ring of Fire

The Pacific Ring of Fire, a strong of volcanic . Credit:

The Pacific Ring of Fire wraps around the Pacific Ocean, including countries like Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Chile. And the inhabitants within those countries are prone to… oh… killer earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. Let’s chat about the history of this region and the kinds of risks they face.

Click here to download the episode.

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

“The Pacific Ring of Fire” on the Astronomy Cast website, with shownotes and transcript.

And the podcast is also available as a video, as Fraser and Pamela now record Astronomy Cast as part of a Google+ Hangout (usually recorded every Monday at 3 pm Eastern Time):

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Researcher Finds a New Moon Around Neptune in Hubble Data

This composite Hubble Space Telescope picture shows the location of a newly discovered moon, designated S/2004 N 1, orbiting the giant planet Neptune, nearly 4.8 billion km (3 billion miles) from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute).

It took sharp and patient eyes, but researcher Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute has found a tiny moon orbiting Neptune that’s never been seen before. Showalter used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope to find the moon, designated S/2004 N 1, which is estimated to be no more than 19 km (12 miles) across, making it the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system. This is the 14th known moon of Neptune.

S/2004 N 1 is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye, NASA said. Even Voyager 2 –which flew past Neptune in 1989 to survey planet’s system of moons and rings – didn’t catch a view of this moon, even though data from Voyager 2 revealed several other moons.

Neptune photographed by Voyage. Image credit: NASA/JPL
Neptune photographed by Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL

Showalter was studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune earlier this month.

“The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” he said. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.”

The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009.

Showalter noticed the white dot about 100,000 km (65,400 miles) from Neptune, located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus. Showalter plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours.

Showalter should get the “Eagle Eyes” award for 2013!

Source: HubbleSite

Posted on by Brett Szmajda

Book Review – ‘The Lost Art of Finding Our Way’ by John Edward Huth

It’s a moment that you’ve always dreaded – you stepped away from your hiking buddies to take a photo, but on the way back you slipped down an embankment. Now you’re isolated, you can’t find the trail or your friends, and you’re in unfamiliar woods. You try your phone – no signal. How did people navigate before GPS, anyway? In The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, author John Edward Huth aims to show us just that. In a richly-illustrated 544 pages, Huth tries to illuminate the techniques that let man circumnavigate the globe, long before the first GPS satellite was launched.

The book is divided into roughly two halves, with the first being historical tales and discussions of techniques used by ancient navigators to find their way. The Norse are here, as are Pacific Islanders and European sailors: all have lessons to teach us about our environment, from the way that waves form around a cluster of islands, to how to use a cross-staff to estimate the position of a star on a heaving ship deck. Following this, the second half of the book is more abstract, dealing with factors useful to navigators: like weather prediction, or the factors that create the swell and tides in the ocean.

I found the first half of the book to be the most interesting, as the practical techniques for, say, triangulating your position with only a map and a compass are very interesting to a city-bound boy. The second half was much tougher reading as it is quite dry, often reading like a physics textbook. Descriptions are clear, although I will note that if you were looking for a practical manual to teach you navigation, this book isn’t it. It will, for instance, explain how dip angle and refraction in the atmosphere complicate accurate estimates of the horizon and the elevation of stars—but stop short of pointing you a resource to help correct for these inaccuracies.

It’s perhaps ironic that The Lost Art of Finding Our Way sometimes feels a little directionless. Maybe it’s because the very scope of the book is so large: in the one book, you can find a discussion of how search parties can be most efficient; descriptions of the magnetic field variations across the Earth’s surface, and their causes; speculation as to why many cultures have ‘great flood’ myths; and an explanation of the physics of wind interacting with sails.

Overall, this book is an impressive attempt to give a broad overview of a number of navigation techniques. Unfortunately it is marred by its own ambition, and the result is a book that can at times feel random, aimless and meandering.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

How to Enjoy a Cuppa Joe in Zero Gravity

Pettit and the Zero G Coffee Cup. Credit: NASA TV

Seriously, for all you coffee addicts, this is science. You may recall how astronaut Don Pettit (known as Mr. Fixit in space) invented a Zero-G coffee cup. But there’s an experiment on board the International Space Station called the Capillary Flow Experiment that is delving even further into how liquids behave in space.

Coffee is not the only liquid that behaves quite differently in space as opposed to on Earth. There are things like cryogenic fuels, thermal coolants, water and urine, too. As NASA says, “The behavior of fluids is one of the most un-intuitive things in all of space flight.”

This poses a challenge for engineers designing spacecraft systems that use fluids. “Our intuition is all wrong,” said physics professor Mark Weislogel of Portland State University, who working with the Capillary Flow Experiment. “When it comes to guessing what fluids will do in new systems, we are often in the dark.”

Weislogel and his colleagues are now looking at interior corners on containers and how that affects liquid flow. Just like on Pettit’s Zero-G coffe cup (see video below), if two solid surfaces meet at a narrow-enough angle, fluids in microgravity naturally flow along the joint —no pumping required.

NASA says this capillary effect could be used to guide all kinds of fluids through spacecraft, from cryogenic fuel to recycled waste water. The phenomenon is difficult to study on Earth, where it is damped by gravity, but on the space station large scale corner flows are easy to create and observe.

Who says coffee isn’t like your morning rocket fuel!

See more at Science@NASA.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Does the Moon Rotate?

Does the Moon Rotate?

Have you ever noticed that the Moon always looks the same? Sure, the phase changes, but the actual features on the Moon always look the same from month to month.

Does the Moon rotate? What’s going on?

From our perspective here on Earth, the Moon always shows us the same face because it’s tidally locked to our planet. At some point in the distant past, the Moon did rotate from our perspective, but the Earth’s gravity kept pulling unevenly at the Moon, slowing its rotation. Eventually the Moon locked into place, always displaying the same side to us.

But if you looked down on the Earth-Moon system from the north celestial pole, from the perspective of Polaris, the North Star, you’d see that the Moon actually does rotate on its axis. In fact, as the Moon travels around the Earth in a counter-clockwise orbit every 27.5 days, it also completes one full rotation on its axis – also moving in a counter-clockwise direction.

If you look at a time lapse animation of the Moon moving entirely through its phases over the course of a month, you’ll notice a strange wobble, as if the Moon is rocking back and forth on its axis a bit.

This is known as libration.

On average, the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth’s surface. But its actual orbit is elliptical, it moves closer and then more distant from the Earth.

When the Moon is at its closest point, it’s rotation is slower than its orbital speed, so we see an additional 8 degrees on its eastern side. And then when the Moon is at the most distant point, the rotation is faster than its orbital speed, so we can see 8 degrees on the Western side.

Libration allowed astronomers to map out more of the Moon’s surface than we could if the Moon followed a circular orbit.

Until the space age, half the Moon was hidden from us, always facing away. This hemisphere of the Moon was finally first observed by the Soviet Luna 3 probe in 1959, followed by the first human eyes with Apollo 8 in 1968.

The two hemispheres of the Moon are very different.

While the near side is covered with large basaltic plains called maria, the far side is almost completely covered in craters. The reasons for this difference is still a mystery to planetary scientists, but it’s possible that a second Moon crashed into it, billions of years ago, creating the strange surface we see today.

So yes, the Moon does rotate.

But its rotation exactly matches its orbit around the Earth, which is why it looks like it never does.

You can listen to a very interesting podcast about the formation of the Moon from Astronomy Cast, Episode 17: Where Did the Moon Come From?

Posted on by Dan Majaess

Citizen Scientists Hunt for Impact Craters in Persia

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Persopolis, Iran (image credit: Oshin D. Zakarian/TWAN).

Citizen scientists have discovered planets beyond our Solar System and established morphological classifications for thousands of galaxies (e.g., the Planet Hunters and Galaxy Zoo projects).  At an upcoming meeting of planetary scientists, Hamed Pourkhorsandi from the University of Tehran will present his efforts to mobilize citizens to identify impact craters throughout Persia.   Pourkhorsandi said he is recruiting volunteers to identify craters using Google Earth, while continuing to seek sightings of fireballs cited in ancient books and among rural folk.  Discovering impact craters is an important endeavour, since it helps astronomers estimate how many asteroids of a particular size strike Earth over a given time (i.e., the impact frequency).  Indeed, that is especially relevant in light of the recent meteor explosion over Russia this past February (see the UT article here), which hints at the potentially destructive nature of such occurrences.

Satellite images have facilitated the detection of impact sites such as the Kamil and Puka craters, which were identified by V. de Michele and D. Hamacher using Google Earth, respectively (see the UT article here).  Pourkhorsandi noted that, “Free access to satellite images has led to the investigation of earth’s surface by specialists and nonspecialists, attempts that have led to the discovery of new impact craters around the globe.   [Yet] few researches on this topic have been done in the Middle East.”  Incidentally, citizens are likewise being recruited to classify craters and features on other bodies in the Solar System (e.g., the Moon Zoo project).

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The Kamil impact crater in Egypt was discovered by V. de Michele using Google Earth, and H. Pourkhorsandi is recruiting volunteers to discover such structures throughout Persia following a similar approach (image credit: L. Folco).

In his paper, Pourkhorsandi describes examples of two targets investigated thus far: “1. a circular structure with a diameter of 200 m (33°21’57”N 58°14’24”E).  [However,] there is no sign of … meteoritic fragments in the region that are primary diagnostic indicators for small size impact craters.”  The second target is tied to an old tale, and note that the Puka crater in Australia was identified by following-up on an old Aboriginal story.  However, Pourkhorsandi states that a field study of the second target (28°24’52” N 60°34’44” E) revealed that the crater is not associated with an impactor from space.

“Beside these structures, field studies on other craters in Persia are in progress, the outcomes of which will be announced in the near future,” said Pourkhorsandi.



View Larger Map
Pourkhorsandi underscores that numerous meteorites have been found in desert regions throughout the world, yet scant attention has been given to Persian deserts (e.g., the Lut desert).  The Lut desert in Persia extends over several thousand square kilometres and is one of the hottest places on Earth (featuring land surface temperatures upwards of 70 degrees Celsius).  Pourkhorsandi noted that in 2005 a ‘curious stone’ was recovered in the Lut desert and subsequent work revealed its extraterrestrial origin.

He went on to remark that, “Three recent short field trips to the central Lut desert led to the collection of several meteoritic fragments, which points to large concentrations of meteoritic materials in the area.”  Some of those fragments are shown in the figure below, and the broader region is likely a pertinent place for citizen scientists to continue the hunt for impact craters in Persia.

Pourkhorsandi concluded by telling the Universe Today, “In the future we aim to expand our efforts with the help of additional people, and will direct individuals to scan other regions of the planet.  Simultaneously, we have commenced a comprehensive analysis of meteorites in the Lut desert with fellow European scientists.”

"Fragments of a H5 chondrite in the field. The scale." from Pour/arXiv.
H chondrite fragments found in the Lut desert (in Persia) are argued to be extraterrestrial in origin (image credit: Fig. 3 in Pourkhorsandi 2013/LPI).

H. Pourkhorsandi’s findings were shown at the 44th Lunar and Planetary conference in Texas, and will be presented at the upcoming Large Meteorite Impact and Evolution V conference.  That latter conference will feature the latest results concerning the cratering process, and a description of the science program is available here.  Copies of H. Pourkhorsandi and H. Mirnejad’s conference submissions are available via the LPI and arXiv.   Those readers interested in joining H. Pourkhorsandi’s effort, or desiring additional information, may also find the following pertinent: the Earth Impact Database, Rampino and Haggerty 1996, “Collision Earth! The Threat from Outer Space” by P. Grego, NASA’s projects for Citizen Scientists.