Outbursts of energetic particles that hurtle out from the sun and can disrupt space communications may be even more varied and numerous than previously thought, according to results from the closest-ever flyby of the sun.

One of the greatest threats from the sun to astronauts and the satellites that provide GPS maps, cell phone service and internet access are high-energy particles that erupt from the sun in bursts. Top: On Nov. 17, 2018, the 321st day of that year, ISIS observed a burst of high-energy protons, each with more than 1 million electron-volts of energy. The warmer colors (yellow, orange, red) represent an increase in the number of these high-energy particles hitting the ISIS sensors.Bottom: An artists representation of one of these energetic particle events.

Image by Jamey Szalay and David McComas; Adapted with permission from D.J. McComas et al., Nature 575:7785 (2019)

The new findings, which help us understand the sun's activity and ultimately could provide an early warning for solar storms, come from one of the four instrument suites aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft that has completed its first passes near the fiery orb. Results from all four suites appear today in a set of articles published in the journal Nature.

The finding that these energetic particle events are more varied and numerous than previously known was one of several discoveries made by the instrument suite known as the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (ISIS), a project led by Princeton University that involves multiple institutions as well as NASA.

"This study marks a major milestone with humanitys reconnaissance of the near-sun environment," said David McComas, the principal investigator for the ISIS instrument suite, a Princeton professor of astrophysical sciences and the vice president for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. "It provides the first direct observations of the energetic particle environment in the region just above the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona.

"Seeing these observations has been a continuous 'eureka moment,'" McComas said. "Whenever we receive new data from the spacecraft, we are witnessing something that no one has ever seen before. That is about as good as it gets!"

ISIS seeks to find out how the particles become so fast moving, and what is pushing them to accelerate. The scientists searching for these answers includes ISIS team members at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of New Hampshire, Southwest Research Institute, the University of Delaware and the University of Arizona, as well as collaborators at the University of California-Berkeley, Imperial College London, the University of Michigan, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatoryand the National Center for Scientific Research in France.

Highly energetic particles can disrupt communications and global positioning systems (GPS) satellites. These streams of particles, made up primarily of protons, have two sources. The first is from outside our solar system, generated when exploding stars release streams of particles known as cosmic rays. The other is our sun. Both can damage the electrical systems of spacecraft and are forms of radiation that can harm astronauts health.

These energetic particles fly much faster than the solar wind, which is the roughly million mile-per-hour flow of hot electrically charged gas that whips off the sun. If the solar wind were a stream, the energetic particles would be fish that leap out and jump ahead of the flow. The particles travel along pathways called magnetic flux tubes that extend from the corona out into the solar wind.

During Parker Solar Probes first two orbits, ISIS detected many small energetic particle events, solar bursts during which the rates of particles streaming out of the sun increased rapidly. On ISIS, the Epi-Lo instrument measures particles in the tens of thousands of electron-volts, while Epi-Hi measures particles with millions to hundreds of millions of electron-volts. (For reference, the electricity in your house is 120 volts.) Here, data from orbits 1 (left) and 2 (right) show the ISIS particle count rates overlaid as color strips along the black line that represents the trajectory of Parker Solar Probe. The lower energy (Lo) rates are on the inside of the track, while the higher energy (Hi) rates run outside. Both the size and color correspond to the measured rates, such that large red bars indicate the biggest bursts, when the sun released the most particles in a short amount of time.

Image by Jamey Szalay and David McComas; Adapted with permission from D.J. McComas et al., Nature 575:7785 (2019)

Understanding these particles could improve space weather forecasts and give early warning of the massive storms that can disrupt Earthly communications and space travel.

"The answer to questions about how energetic particles form and accelerate is incredibly important," said Ralph McNutt, who oversaw the building of the lower energy of the suites two instruments and is chief scientist in the Space Exploration Sector at APL. "These particles affect our activities on Earth and our ability to get our astronauts out into space. We are making history with this mission."

Due to their speed, the particles act as an early warning signal for space weather, said Jamey Szalay, an associate research scholar in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton who leads the data visualization efforts for ISIS. "These particles are moving fast, so if there is a big solar storm on its way, these particles are the first indicators."

Most previous studies of solar energetic particles relied on detectors located in space about the same distance from the sun as is the Earth 93 million miles from the sun. By the time the particles get to those detectors, it is hard to track where they came from, because the particles from various sources have interacted and intermixed.

"Its a bit like cars coming from crowded tunnels and bridges and spreading out onto interstate highways," McComas said. "They get faster as they move away, but they also get mixed and interact in ways that it is impossible to tell who came from where as you move farther and farther away from the sources."

The top panel shows a schematic of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), during which a burst of mass as big as Lake Michigan is ejected from the sun. These can pose a hazardto astronauts and space satellites, but ISIS scientists discovered that tiny energetic particles rush ahead of the ejected mass, providing advance warning of the incoming threat. The bottom panel showsproton fluxes detected byISIS's EPI-Lo (top) and the magnetic field measurements (bottom) around the time of an observed CME. The energetic particles reachedParker Solar Probe nearly a day before the ejected mass.

Image by Jamey Szalay and David McComas; Adapted with permission from N.J. Fox et al, Space Science Reviews 204: 7 (2016) and D.J. McComas et al., Nature 575:7785 (2019)

In its first trips around the sun, the Parker Solar Probe travelled twice as close to the sun as any previous spacecraft has ever been. At its closest, the spacecraft was 14 million miles or 35 solar radii, which is 17.5 widths of the sun from the fiery surface.

Getting close to the sun is essential for unraveling how these particles form and gain high energies, said Eric Christian, the deputy principal investigator on ISIS and a senior research scientist at NASA Goddard. "It is like trying to measure what is happening in a mountain by studying the base of the mountain. To know what is happening, you have to go where the action is: You have to go up on the mountain."

A potential concern of the researchers was that the sun's 11-year cycle of activity is presently at a low. But the low activity level turned out to be an advantage.

"The fact that the sun was quiet allowed us to analyze events that are extremely isolated," said Nathan Schwadron, a professor of physics and astronomy and the head of the ISIS science operation center at the University of New Hampshire. "These are events that haven't been seen from farther away because they are just clobbered by the solar wind activity."

During its first two orbits, ISIS observed several fascinating phenomena. One was a burst of energetic particle activity that coincided with a coronal mass ejection, a violent eruption of energized and magnetized particles from the corona. Prior to the ejection, ISIS detected a buildup of relatively low energetic particles, whereas after the ejection there was a buildup of high energetic particles. These events were small and not detectable from the Earths orbit.

Another observation from ISIS was particle activity indicating a sort of solar wind traffic jam, which happens when the solar wind suddenly slows down, causing fast-moving solar wind to pile up behind it and forming a compressed region of particles. This buildup, which astrophysicists call a co-rotating interaction region, occurred out beyond Earths orbit and sent high energy particles back toward the sun where they were observed by ISIS.

Researchers are eager to understand the mechanisms by which the sun accelerates particles to high speeds. ISISs detection of each particles identity whether it is hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, iron or another element will help researchers further explore this question.

On Epi-Lo, 80 tiny telescopes are looking in 80 different directions, and one of those was punctured by a dust grain when Parker Solar Probe was at its closest approach to the sun. The purple arrow shows the approximate arrival direction of the dust grain, and the bottom panel shows where during the second orbit collision occurred.

Image by Jamey Szalay and David McComas; Adapted with permission from D.J. McComas et al., Nature 575:7785 (2019)

There are two kinds of acceleration mechanisms, one that occurs in solar flares when magnetic fields reconnect, and another that occurs when you get shocks and compressions of the solar wind, but the details of how they cause particle acceleration are not that well understood, said Mark Wiedenbeck, a principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who oversaw the development of the higher energy instrument in the ISIS suite. The composition of the particles is a key diagnostic to tell us the acceleration mechanism.

ISIS made its third brush by the sun on Sept. 1, and will make its next on Jan. 29, 2020. As the mission continues, the satellite will make a total of 24 orbits, each time getting closer to the solar surface, until it is roughly five sun-widths from the star. The researchers hope that future flybys will reveal insights into the source of the energetic particles. Do they start as "seed particles" that go on to attain higher energies?

Jamie Sue Rankin, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton working in the McComas group, began working on the higher energy ISIS instrument as a graduate student at Caltech.

"It has been neat to see this whole process develop over the past decade, Rankin said. It is like surfing a wave: We built these instruments, made sure they were working, made adjustments to make sure the calibrations were right and now comes the exciting part, answering the questions that we set out to address.

"With any spacecraft, when you go out into space, you think you know what to expect, but there are always wonderful surprises that complicate our lives in the best way," she said. "That is what keeps us doing what we do."

The study, "Probing the Energetic Particle Environment near the Sun," by D.J. McComas, E.R. Christian, C.M.S. Cohen, A.C. Cummings, A.J. Davis, M.I. Desai, J. Giacalone, M.E. Hill, C.J. Joyce, S.M. Krimigis, A.W. Labrador, R.A. Leske, O. Malandraki, W.H. Matthaeus, R.L. McNutt Jr., R.A. Mewaldt, D.G. Mitchell, A. Posner, J.S. Rankin, E.C. Roelof, N.A. Schwadron, E.C. Stone, J.R. Szalay, M.E. Wiedenbeck, S.D. Bale, J.C. Kasper, A.W. Case, K.E. Korreck, R.J. MacDowall, M. Pulupa, M.L. Stevens and A.P. Rouillard, was published in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Nature, released online on Dec. 4 (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1811-1). This work was supported as a part of the Parker Solar Probe mission under NASA contract NNN06AA01C.

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Sun's close-up reveals atmosphere hopping with highly energetic particles - Princeton University

The Prospect is proud to exclusivelyrelease the bookTake Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacyby JamesKwak. We will release one chapter every other day over the next two weeks,starting with todays introduction.

Kwak, the co-author of13 BankersandWhite House Burningand the author ofEconomism, is a keen observer of policy and politics, and his book offers powerful evidence of how the Democratic Party drifted from its traditional position as a party of the people. He adds his prescription for how the party can get back on track. As the battles for the soul of the Democratic Party continue,Take Back Our Partyis a field guide to that debate. We're excited to bring it to you.

We live in troubled times.

Ordinary Americans are struggling. Despite decades of technological innovation and economic growth, the typical familys net worth is no higher than in the 1980s. Health care costs, including rising insurance premiums, deductibles, co-payments, prescription drug prices, and often unexpected out-of-network charges, bankrupt a growing number of once-secure families. Young adults are burdened by student loan payments extending as far as they can see. Steeply rising rents make finding an affordable home virtually impossible in more and more cities. State and local governments are failing to deliver even essential services like clean water to their residents. A handful of companies controlled by billionaires have levels of control over our lives once imaginable only in science fiction. Increasingly precarious federal government finances threaten future reductions in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that many elderly Americans rely on. And decades of unsustainable growth have already profoundly changed the climate of our planet in ways we are only now beginning to realize.

Yet despite these disturbing developments, many peopleparticularly those who are well-off and well-educatedinsist that nothing could be better. As of 2019, the United States is in the 11th year of an economic expansion that has seen the stock market rise and the unemployment rate fall to record levels. We remain enthralled by every years new marvels produced by the dream factories of the technology superpowersself-driving cars, drone deliveries to your doorstep, virtual reality, space travel, and on and on. (The full realization of these wonders always seems just out of reach, but no matter.)

The explanation for this divergence is simple. Over the past 40 years, the economic fortunes of the very rich and more or less everyone else have become completely uncoupled. From 1980 to 2014, the total incomes of the top 1 percent more than tripled, while those of the bottom 50 percent remained essentially unchanged. The previous 34 years, from 1946 to 1980, saw the opposite pattern: Income growth was substantially higher for the bottom 50 percent than for the top 1 percent. If you have the money, you live in one economy, with the best health care in the world, easy access to green space, the finest restaurants that have ever existed, elite educational institutions from preschool through the most opulent research universities anywhere, and luxury goods and services that once were reserved for royalty. If you dont have the money, you live in another economy, where your familys welfare is vulnerable to sudden changes in the demand for your skills generated by distant markets, you breathe the dirty air produced by uncontrolled development or drink the toxic water delivered by a crumbling infrastructure, your children go to underfunded public schools, and you are rapidly being priced out of the health care your family needs.

Obviously there is no border wall that cleanly divides the very rich from everyone else. There is an intermediate zone, roughly from the 75th to the 95th income percentile, where people are more or less comfortable in a material sense. But they can see the speed with which the truly wealthy have separated themselves from the rest of society, and many of them are desperate not to be left behindif not for themselves, then for their children. Anxiety about getting into a good college, landing choice summer internships, and securing a job at one of the handful of highly selective companies that promise entry into the economic eliteGoldman Sachs, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and their few peersis at pathological levels. The recent college admissions cheating scandal is not only more proof that the very rich live in a different world from everyone else, but also shows that they, too, are desperate to place their children on the educational escalator to success and fortune. The forward march of inequality is there for anyone to see, and no one wants his or her family to be caught on the wrong side of history.

This divide between the vast majority of Americans, who face the prospect of negligible improvements in their living standards at the cost of constant insecurity, and a small minority who both literally and figuratively jet away into another world, is the central economic challenge of our time. It is a problem in clear view today. Only one in five Americans think that todays youth will have a better life than their parents generationstark skepticism about what for centuries we have been calling the American dream.

Inequality is a problem that, on its own, will only get worse. Technological advances will vastly increase the advantages of being rich and well-educated and the costs of not being so fortunate. Increasingly capable machines will displace low-skilled workersconsider how apps and kiosks are doing the job of cashiers at casual restaurants and big-box storeswhile enriching the people who design them and the shareholders of the companies that manufacture them. Artificial intelligence will replace many knowledge workers while rewarding a small elite of computer scientists and their employers. It is true that people made the same doomsday predictions about earlier inventions, and in past ages of capitalism the market found higher-value occupations for many workers (though not necessarily for those who lost their jobs to new technology). It is possible that a society could adapt to these transformations in ways that help everyone, not just an intellectual and economic elite. But there is little reason to think that ours is such a society. In trusting to markets to allocate all good things, we have allowed the benefits of automation to be monopolized by people with the capital to invest in new technology and those with the skills to master it.

This is not merely an economic problem. It is hard to see how a society can long endure when the precarious fortunes, interests, and life experiences of its people become foreign to a small ruling class. (Let them eat cake, a noblewoman in 18th-century France is reputed to have said upon hearing that the peasants had no bread.) The rise and fall of nations depend on the extent to which their economic and political institutions remain open to a wide range of interest groups within society, as documented by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in decades of research. Fourteenth-century Venice was both a democracy of sorts and a thriving commercial center of the Mediterranean. Once political power was seized by a closed hereditary aristocracy, however, the city-state fell into irreversible economic decline, eventually becoming the sinking museum that it is today.

In a modern democracy, this should not happenat least in theory. When everyone has an equal vote, a tiny minority of the super-rich should not be able to run away with the lions share of societys economic gains. In the classical model, there should be a party of business and a party of labor, generally representing the rich and working class, respectively. The United States has never had a true labor party, but through the middle of the 20th century these roles were more or less approximated by Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans were the party of business, generally favoring lower taxes, smaller government, and fiscal responsibility. The Democrats were the party of labor unions and immigrant minorities, favoring higher taxes, bigger government, and more generous social programs. In the 1930s, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt who established the federal safety net with public jobs programs and Social Security. In the 1960s, it was another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who created Medicare and Medicaid, the last major expansions of the welfare state, and launched an optimistic war on poverty.

During the past half-century, however, the tectonic plates of the political landscape have completely shifted. It is common knowledge that the Republican Party has been taken over by radical conservatives who want to dismantle government altogether (or, as Grover Norquist famously said, reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub) and hold a host of unsavory views on immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, and womens rights. The parallel transformation of the Democratic Party has received relatively less attention. Todays Democratic eliterepresented by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clintonhas, in deed if not in word, repudiated the heritage of Roosevelt and Johnson, fleeing what it sees as an embarrassing legacy peopled by unionized workers and welfare recipients. Instead, todays establishment Democrats style themselves as expert managers of a sophisticated market economy, friends of big finance and big technology, and architects of growth and opportunity. Instead of a party of capital and party of labor, the United States today has two parties of capitalone insular and white nationalist, the other generally tolerant and multiculturalor, as the pathbreaking economist Thomas Piketty has argued, two parties that represent different segments of the elite. When it comes to economic policy, one is absolutist and ideological, the other technocratic and evidence-based, but both see growth as the overriding objective and markets as the optimal way to produce and distribute goods and services.

This is the political context that made it possible for the 1 percent to reach economic escape velocity and launch themselves away from the mundane, stagnant, anxiety-ridden lives of everybody else. The Democratic Party is dominated by people who fear nothing more than being called liberals (let alone socialists) or being seen as soft-hearted, soft-headed believers in big government and the welfare state. Since the 1990s, the partys economic platform has been that markets deliver prosperity, and the role of government should be limited to correcting market failures such as externalities, adverse selection, or moral hazard, in the academic jargon employed by the policy elite. This is why Bill Clintons lasting economic policy achievement was the introduction of work requirements for poverty assistance; this is why the greatest financial crisis in 70 years did not lead to structural change in the banking sector; this is why the health care program that bears Barack Obamas name is a warmed-over version of the plan introduced by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, which was originally the brainchild of the reflexively conservative Heritage Foundation. As Republicans have succumbed to tribalism and irrationality, Democrats have claimed the mantle of fiscal prudence and responsible stewardship of the capitalist market economy.

The consequence is that the Democratic Party of the past 25 years has done next to nothing about inequality and has little to say about it. The party establishment has only taken up progressive policy ideas, such as the $15 minimum wage, when forced to by activists, usually working at the state or local level. The onetime defenders of the working class have stood idly by as the 1 percent has swept up an increasing share of the gains from economic growth, including the benefits of the post-recession recovery. Its response has been to lecture that a rising tide lifts all boatsa maxim that differs little from the trickle-down economics so dear to conservatives. (Nominating Barack Obama for president at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton acknowledged that too many people did not yet feel the effects of economic growthbut, he promised, if you will renew the presidents contract, you will feel it.) Alternatively, Democrats will claim that some bundle of clever, market-friendly policiesfunding for infrastructure spending and incentives for clean-technology investment are the current darlingswill magically shift the distribution of income and wealth down toward the working and middle classes.

Of course, the rise of inequality and the stagnation of the middle class are more the fault of the conservatives who took over the Republican Party than of the moderates who responded by shifting the Democratic Party to the political center. It is crucial to understand the conservative movement in order to appreciate how we got ourselves into our current mess. I have written books that were largely about Republicansabout their campaign to deregulate the financial sector, their willingness to sacrifice two centuries of fiscal responsibility on the altar of tax cuts, and their use of simplistic economic theories to mask policies that favor the rich.

But I am not a Republican and, if you are reading this, you probably arent, either. More to the point, we can be certain that todays Republican Partydominated as it is by ultra-wealthy donors and a fundamentalist ideology of cutting taxes for the rich and eliminating programs for everyone elsewill do nothing to stem the rising tide of inequality or improve the economic fortunes of ordinary families. If we are going to more fairly share the vast wealth that our society produces, we first need a political party dedicated to improving the economic well-being of all Americans. That means we have to restore the historical identity of the Democratic Party as the champion of the poor, workers, and the middle class.

And so, because this is a book about how to make things better, its a book about Democrats. Its about how, in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, we latched onto the idea that a more modern, more sophisticated, more business-friendly Democratic Party could successfully compete for the White House. Its about how this transformation, while paying off in victories in four of the past seven presidential elections (six if you go by the popular vote), has left us impotent in the face of growing inequality, even when in power, and incapable of making the case that we can help families struggling against economic insecurity and misfortune. And its about how a new Democratic Party, dedicated to a progressive economic agenda, can take up the challenge of ensuring a decent life for every American.

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Take Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy - The American Prospect

SMITHSONIAN CHANNEL(TM) REVISITS THE LEGENDARY EVENT THAT TRIGGERED THE BIRTH OF TABLOID HEADLINES IN

"BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN"

NEW SPECIAL PREMIERES ON JANUARY 13 AT 8 PM ET/PT

NEW YORK - December 9, 2019 - The Battle of the Little Big Horn. Custer's Last Stand. The Battle of the Greasy Grass. An infamous conflict known by many names is one that has been edited, embellished and sensationalized for over a century. On June 25, 1876, Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull and thousands of American Indians were attacked by General George Custer's 7th Cavalry as they camped on the banks of Montana's Little Bighorn River. Vastly outnumbered, Custer's entire regiment was wiped out. What was to follow was a nationwide media storm - but what led to this deadly encounter, and how did history books get it so wrong? BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN premieres Monday, January 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Smithsonian Channel.

BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN explores how the proliferation of the telegraph and burgeoning newspaper industry led to a simultaneous news break across the country. The inaccurate and dramatized reporting resulted in an American public both outraged and captivated; with no white survivors left to tell the tale, a decisive 19th-century conspiracy theory was born. BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN draws inspiration from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian's exhibition Americans, which highlights the ways in which American Indians have been part of the nation's identity since before the country began, and features interviews with three of the museum's curators - David Penney, Emil Her Man Horses and Ccile Ganteaume. The special also visits the National Museum of Natural History's National Anthropological Archives to examine rare original drawings created by Lakota Chief Red Horse - a pictorial version of his testimony of the events at Bighorn - and notes the obvious absence of the fabled "Custer's Last Stand" image depicted on the battle field.

BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN traces the events leading up to Bighorn - broken treaties, stolen lands and the threat of lost identity at the hands of government initiatives targeting assimilation of the Lakota Sioux and other American Indian tribes. The special uncovers how tabloid news coverage of the battle turned the U.S. Cavalry's bombshell loss at Bighorn into an unstoppable mythos, while fueling stereotyped depictions of the Native American - a Plains warrior wearing a feathered headdress - that persist to this day. Whether celebrating the victors at the Greasy Grass or dissecting the myth of Custer's Last Stand, Bighorn has been stirring emotions in the American public for almost 150 years. It was a pivotal moment in our nation's history and one that serves as an important reminder of all that we are, and all that we have lost.

BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN is a Biscuit Factory Production for Smithsonian Networks. Producers for The Biscuit Factory are Molly Hermann and Rob Lyall. Linda Goldman and David Royle serve as executive producers for Smithsonian Channel.

Smithsonian Channel(TM), a ViacomCBS network, is where curiosity lives, inspiration strikes and wonders never cease. This is the place for awe-inspiring stories, powerful documentaries and amazing factual entertainment, available in HD and 4K Ultra HD across multiple platforms. Smithsonian Channel, winner of Emmy(R) and Peabody awards for its programming, is the home of popular genres such as air and space, travel, history, science, nature and pop culture. Among the network's offerings are hit series including Aerial America, America in Color, America's Hidden Stories, Apollo's Moon Shot, The Pacific War in Color and Air Disasters, as well as critically-acclaimed specials that include The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, Black Hole Hunters and Princess Diana's Wicked Stepmother. Smithsonian Networks also operates Smithsonian Channel Plus(TM), a subscription video streaming service delivering over a thousand hours of the Channel's stunning and diverse library of documentaries and series in HD and 4K Ultra HD. Smithsonian Channel is also available internationally in Canada, Singapore, Latin America, the UK and Ireland. To learn more, go to smithsonianchannel.com, or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Breaking News - Smithsonian Channel(TM) Revisits the Legendary Event That Triggered the Birth of Tabloid Headlines in "Battle of Little Big...

A common question is what does the G in 5G stand for?. Weve all heard of 3G, 4G and even 5G; from third generation to the fourth and then the fifth, but what does a generation really entail? Given 5G technology is now available, what does it all mean?

Well, for starters 5G will offer speeds of up to 1000x faster than 4G and that means better mobile performance, gaming experiences, video capabilities and stronger connectivity which opens up the playing field especially when it comes to apps such as Facetime and Snapchat.

To understand the advancements in mobile technology, lets take a look at the journey from 1G to 5G or rather from the days of carrying heavy brick-like mobiles to the super light weight smartphones of today.

To answer the question, you need to go back to the basics of the telephone. Analogue cellular, big like a brick and capable of making calls across a very limited space. Revolutionary in every way. Back then, they mustve thought Weve hit the jackpot here.

This was great, at the time, but the first mobile phones had a very limited range and as increasingly more people demanded quicker and more accessible communication, it needed to be upgraded. The first step to doing this was to standardise the cellular network to make it work across multiple systems. Queue the 3GPP (third generation partnership program); the people who started the standardisation process that eventually lead to 2G.

A shift from analogue systems to digital with the addition of SIM cards that ensured more security, and more importantly allowed other networks to communicate with each other.

Its not just across the Brisbane or Sydney networks that these cellular devices work, but around the globe. 2G also took a step up in its communication capabilities with the addition of SMS or texting; a means of communicating that is far more used than calling in todays society.

This came about during the era of the Pager. You remember that little box you had holstered to your waist like a gun? The thing that would allow users to receive and respond to messages? Well at the time, the thought was that SMS would be useless in the face of Pagersboy were they wrong.

2G was essentially the dawn of the communications disruption.

People could even use Blackberrys to receive emails. The world was clearly changing at a rapid pace, and Telco companies needed to keep up or risk falling behind.

Now we can receive files on a mobile phone, and so logically the next step is to provide an internet connection to these devices so that these files can be accessible anywhere and at anytime. In comes 3G.

A lot of people associate 3G cellular with the iPhone 3Gbut think before that. Were talking 2003 with Hutchinson as the sole providers at the time; before smartphones were even released. We had the blueprint, but not the right device to build the project to completion. Essentially, what we needed was a PC. And so the challenge was How do we get a mobile device to act like one?

Smartphones is how.

This opened up a new world of communication. It was already impressive that we could receive attachments, but now we wanted to be able to send them, and not just any attachment, but photos and videos.

4G, introduced in 2011, focused on the relationship between the user and the internet. We were now able to send each other photos and videos via SMS, we had data to roam the internet, but we still werent really adapted to what we now know as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. With 3G, we reached speeds of 42Mbps which at the time was deemed impressive. But advancements to the next generation allowed for up to 2Gbps, meaning that things like Facebook live, video conferencing and FaceTime were all possible; and in real time.

We were also introduced to the concept of latency. To put it simply, if I were to send you a package, latency is how long it would take for you to receive the package. With 4G, the latency speed was at 30 ms; bringing about the term Instant Messaging.

An important point that needs to be understood is that 5G is not simply about your Google results page loading a few mili-seconds faster; it is instead a gateway to a new dimension of possibilities.

Its the next step to dealing with a software society full of a multitude of connections.

5G will be crucial for gaming, training and entertainment purposes. Getting 2.3 Gbps at now 20 mili-seconds of latency means that users will be receiving data even faster. For VR, training simulations for firefighting, space travel and airplane piloting can be used even more efficiently; self-driving cars like those form Tesla will respond to its environment at high speeds, gaming will be high-quality and lag-less and much more.

When it comes to you and me, we can expect a plethora of new and exciting technologies on apps such as Snapchat, as well as ultra-fast connectivity for FaceTime calls, Facebook lives, Instagram lives and video in general. And, of course, your phone will load pages faster, messages will be sent and received at ping rates, and you will genuinely notice a huge difference in performance. In fact, it is said that 5G will offer speeds of up to 1000x faster than its predecessor.

5G will bring us a new meaning to a connected society. More people will be able to connect to the same network without hindering its performance level; a feature that is especially important in developments to autonomous cars, connected machinery, and general Internet of Things devices.

To sum it up, 5G will bring greater speeds in terms of the moving of data, lower latency (at more responsive rates), and the ability to connect far more devices at once on one network. It will not banish 4G, instead it will continuously work in tandem with, bouncing back and forth to gauge the best connection possible for your device.

There are currently smartphones that do support 5G. You can check out the list here.

We can expect two Apple products that support 5G in 2020, along with Sony, Nokia and plenty more. Right now, these 5G-supported phones are quite expensive, but when more of them start to roll out, the prices will start to drop.

The simple answer is no. There is a common misconception that 5Gs higher frequency will be harmful to humans. The truth is that 5G, although higher than 4G, remains in the safe zone of 30GHz and 300GHz known as the Millimetre wave; in the same zone as microwaves. Things only start getting dangerous at the range of 790THz to 30PHz (1 PHz = 1,000,000 GHz). So in conclusion, no, 5G is not harmful.

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What Is 5G? What Does It Do? And How Will It Benefit You? - Women Love Tech

Fictional image of hibernating astronauts, via ESA.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on November 18, 2019, that its scientists have recently been investigating the process of placing astronauts into hibernation to cross the vastness of space. These scientists met at ESAs Concurrent Design Facility to assess the advantages of human hibernation for a trip to a neighboring planet, such as Mars. They took as their reference an existing study that described sending six humans to Mars and back on a five-year timescale. They studied how crew hibernation would impact space mission design, and put some numbers to known advantages to human hibernation for space travel, for example, that a smaller space capsule could be used if the crew were hibernating, rather than awake, for the months-long journey to Mars.

Jennifer Ngo-Anh, a team leader in ESAs Science in Space Environment (SciSpacE) program, commented:

For a while now hibernation has been proposed as a game-changing tool for human space travel.

If we were able to reduce an astronauts basic metabolic rate by 75% similar to what we can observe in nature with large hibernating animals such as certain bears we could end up with substantial mass and cost savings, making long-duration exploration missions more feasible.

EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

Here is ESAs Concurrent Design Facility, which hosts representatives of all space mission disciplines in order to design future space missions. Image via ESA.

Why do we need to put astronauts into hibernation at all? The reason is that space is vast. Even our own neighborhood of space our solar system is subject to a space-is-vast issue that factors heavily into our missions to explore the other planets near us in space. Consider that the New Horizons mission to Pluto, for example launched in 2006 needed nine years to get to its flyby.

To get an idea of the distance scale of our solar system, visit If the moon were only 1 pixel showing the relative distances of the planets to scale on a single extra-wide page. Then try if you can to extend what youve learned to the billions of other likely solar systems in our galaxy alone.

As Joe Hansen host of the PBS series Its Okay to be Smart says in the video below:

The human brain just cant fathom how big things like the solar system are.

Robin Biesbroek of ESA who has worked in the past on the removal of space debris from low-Earth orbit was part of the recent ESA study on human hibernation. He commented:

We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design.

We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team.

Finally we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years.

The scientists found that the mass of a spacecraft for human hibernation could be reduced by a third.

The ESA scientists quantified what might seem fairly obvious that a spacecraft for hibernating astronauts could be on the small side. This comparison shows the size of a module for a crewed Mars mission with its hibernation-based equivalent. Image via ESA.

If the crew were hibernating, you wouldnt need extensive crew quarters, or as much storage room for consumables (like food and water). Hibernation module design via ESA.

ESA said hibernation would take place in small individual pods that would double as cabins while the crew are awake. Hibernation pod design via ESA.

What would it be like for the astronauts? ESA explained:

The assumption was that a drug would be administered to induce torpor the term for the hibernating state. Like hibernating animals, the astronauts would be expected to acquire extra body fat in advance of torpor. Their soft-shell pods would be darkened and their temperature greatly reduced to cool their occupants during their projected 180-day Earth-Mars cruise.

ESA said the hibernating cruise phase would end with a 21-day recuperation period. It said that based on the experience of animal hibernation the crew would likely not experience bone or muscle wastage. ESA also explained:

Radiation exposure from high-energy particles is a key hazard of deep space travel, but because the hibernating crew will be spending so much time in their hibernation pods, then shielding such as water containers could be concentrated around them.

And ESA also spoke of the largely autonomous operations, with optimum use of artificial intelligence and fault detection, isolation and recovery needed on a spaceship where most humans are hibernating.

Sound a bit creepy or lonely? Maybe. But Ngo-Anh commented:

the basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy: a broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades. Most major medical centres have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in a better shape than they otherwise would be.

We aim to build on this in future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people.

NASA has contracted studies on human hibernation in space, too. This image is a settlement-class Mars Transfer Habitat designed by NASA contractor SpaceWorks in 2017. Read more: Sleeping their way to Mars.

By the way, if youre interested in reading a wonderful recent science fiction series depicting deep-space travel via human hibernation two of the best sci-fi books Ive ever read (and Ive read a bunch) try Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovksy. Both have all the things I love in science fiction: travel over millenia among the stars, how the hibernating travelers perceive time passing, strange planets, weird aliens, a human love story. Human hibernation plays a big role in these awesome books!

The cover of Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovksy.

Bottom line: The European Space Agency has been studying how real-life human hibernation would impact space mission design.

Via ESA

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ESA studies human hibernation for space travel - EarthSky

Once the preserve of science fiction, through films such as Alien (pictured) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, hibernation or suspended animation may one day become an important enabler of deep space travel. 20th Century Fox

The European Space Agency (ESA) is daring to dream big, with the organizations latest project to implement human hibernation for space travel. The concept of sleeping while traveling to distant planets is a mainstay of sci-fi movies like Alien, Interstellar, and Passengers.

The ESA has assembled a team to study hibernation with the aim of using it in manned space missions as part of the Future Technology Advisory Panel. The team began by looking at current attempts to create hibernation technologies and considering what the impact would be on mission design. As a reference point, they considered a theoretical mission that would send six people to Mars and back within five years.

We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design, Robin Biesbroek of the ESAs Concurrent Design Facility said in a statement. We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team. Finally, we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years.

According to the teams research, the use of hibernation could reduce the total mass of a spacecraft by one third, as well as a one-third reduction in the requirements for consumables like food and water. Instead of crew quarters, each astronaut would have a soft pod that would double as a cabin while they were awake. The astronauts would be administered a drug to induce hibernation, then their pods would be darkened and their temperature reduced for several months.

The big advantage of hibernation is that it would enable astronauts to travel on much longer space missions. If a hibernation state could be achieved in which an astronauts metabolic rate was reduced by around three-quarters, which is what happens in hibernating animals such as bears, then manned space missions could reach much further from our planet as the requirements for food, water, and oxygen would be reduced.

Despite the fact that humans clearly dont hibernate, scientists say that the idea of putting people into a hibernation-like state is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy, Jennifer Ngo-Anh, leader of the ESAs SciSpacE team, said in the same statement. A broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades. Most major medical centers have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in better shape than they otherwise would be.

We aim to build on this in the future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people.

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European Space Agency wants to put astronauts into hibernation for space travel - Digital Trends

Credit Suisse began coverage of Virgin Galactic with an outperform rating Thursday, saying in an a note titled "The Ultimate Joyride" that the firm sees multiple factors driving the space tourism stock higher.

"Our bullish view reflects the near-term monopoly SPCE offers in an industry (commercial space tourism) where public investment opportunities are scarce. We view this as a classic tech-driven high demand, low supply story with high barriers to entry," Credit Suisse analyst Robert Spingarn wrote in a note to investors. "Not everyone will see the value, but we believe the math works nonetheless."

Virgin Galactic shares rose in premarket but later dropped, closing down 7.4% at$9.10. Credit Suisse has a $12.43 price target on the stock, essentially seeing 36% upside over the next year. The firm is the second to begin covering Virgin Galactic with a buy recommendation: Vertical Research Partners is also bullish on the opportunity.

The stock has slid since its public debut last month, down about 20%, but that doesn't worry Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya. He expects Virgin Galactic to begin flying its first customers as early as May, saying on Wednesday that flights "will begin in about six to nine months."

"I think the story of Virgin is just so new that it hasn't been written yet. We'll start commercial operations in the middle of next year, so the full-fledged business value will become apparent very quickly to a lot more people at that point," Palihapitiya said in an interview with CNBC's Seema Mody on "Closing Bell."

Credit Suisse agrees, saying the stock's upside largely depends on how closely Virgin Galactic sticks to its schedule and begins flying people.

"We believe the greatest single catalyst would be successful completion of the first commercial flight," Spingarn said. "From here, losses should dissipate rapidly as flight activity rises."

Virgin Galactic spacecraft Unity fires its engine and heads to space with its first test passenger on board in February 2019.

Virgin Galactic | gif by @thesheetztweetz | CNBC

At $250,000 per person, Virgin Galactic's ticket revenue is about three times the cost of each flight, Credit Suisse noted, "which would drive very attractive incremental margins." The company's spacecraft holds up to six passengers along with the two pilots.

Spingarn says Virgin Galactic "has a distinct first-to-market advantage" in space tourism, estimating nearest competitor Blue Origin is at least two years behind. And even when Blue Origin does start flying people, the company is inaccessible to public investors as it is wholly owned and funded by Jeff Bezos.

Credit Suisse also mentions SpaceX, with its fully reusable Starship rocket, as a long-term threat to Virgin Galactic's business.

"While SpaceX does not appear to be as focused on space tourism, a point-to-point solution serviced by Starship could convert space travel from a novelty experience to a commodity service," Spingarn said.

Virgin Galactic is thinking about the potential of high-speed, long distance travel, also known as point-to-point space travel. Boeing's venture arm HorizonX last month invested $20 million into Virgin Galactic to explore developing a vehicle capable of flying around the world at hypersonic speeds. But SpaceX is a notable risk to Virgin Galactic's future business, Credit Suisse said.

"Unless Virgin is able to offer a similarly compelling point-to-point solution, the arrival of point-to-point by competitors could damage the overall [total addressable market] for space tourism and, therefore, the long-term demand profile," Spingarn said.

Finally, Credit Suisse warns that any major accident or malfunction would likely substantially slow Virgin Galactic's business. In 2014, an accident during a Virgin Galactic test flight killed a co-pilot.

"We assign a $0 value in the case of a catastrophic event (e.g., a fatal crash)," Spingarn said.

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Credit Suisse says to buy Virgin Galactic stock for its 'near-term monopoly' on space tourism - CNBC

Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reachers of our galaxyin the vast nothingness of spacethe distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. Temperatures in these vacuous regions can plummet to about -455 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 kelvin). Are you shivering yet?

But why is the vacuum of space this cold? Well, it's complicated.

For physicists, temperature is all about velocity and motion. When we talk about the temperature in a room, thats not the way a scientist would talk about it," astronomer Jim Sowell of the Georgia Institute of Technology tells Popular Mechanics. We would use the expression heat to define the speeds of all the particles in a given volume.

Most scientists use the kelvin instead of Fahrenheit to describe extremely cold temperatures, so we'll be doing that here, too.

Most, if not all of the heat in the universe comes from stars like our sun. The inside of the sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, temperatures can swell to 15 million kelvin. (On the surface, they only reach up to about 5,800 kelvin.)

The heat that leaves the sun and other stars travels across space as infrared waves of energy called solar radiation. These solar rays only heat the particles in their path, so anything not directly in view of the sun stays cool. Like, really cool.

At night, the surface of even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, drops to about 95 kelvin. Plutos surface temperature reaches about 40 kelvin. Coincidentally, the lowest temperature ever recorded in our solar system was clocked much closer to home. Last year, scientists measured the depths of a dark crater on the surface of our moon and found that temperatures dropped to about 33 Kelvin, according to New Scientist.

Thats SUPER cold, like -400 Fahrenheit cold.

Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

But our universe is vastunimaginably vast. (And possibly a loop?) What about the vacuum of space?

Well, thats where things get tricky. Within near and distant galaxies, the mesh of dust and clouds that weaves between the stars has been observed at temperatures between between 10 and 20 kelvin. The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin.

These temperatures dip perilously close to an elusive measurement: absolute zero. At absolute zero, which to -459.67 degrees Fahrenheitno motion or heat is transferred between particles, even on the quantum level.

In the vacuum of space, gas particles are few and far betweenabout one atom per spoonful, or 10 cubic centimeters, according to Quartzso they arent able to readily transfer heat to each other through conduction and convection. Heat in space can only be transferred through radiation, which regulates how particles of light, or photons, are absorbed or emitted, according to UniverseToday.

The further you travel into interstellar space, the colder it gets. I dont know that youll ever get down to absolute zero, Sowell says. Youre always going to see some light and therell be some motion. There may be pockets of the universe where temperatures drop to 1 Kelvin above absolute zero, he notes, but so far, the closest measurement to absolute zero has only been observed in laboratories here on Earth.

"Humans are actually pretty good at creating extreme temperatures," Alasdair Gent, a graduate student in astroparticle physics also of the Georgia Institute of Technology tells Popular Mechanics. Scientists are able to recreate the same temperatures seen in the vacuum of space as well as inside the core of stars like our sun.

Back here on Earth, we have it easy. You can have high-speed particles zipping by us outside the Earth's atmosphere, but if you took off your space suit, you would feel cold because there aren't that many particles hitting you, says Sowell. Here on the surface of the earth, particles aren't moving really fast, but there are zillions of them.

Earths atmosphere does an excellent job of circulating the suns heat through conduction, convection and radiation. Thats why we feel temperature changes so acutely on Earth. The particles are moving just a bit faster due to the sunlight or weather patterns, says Sowell.

When we venture out past the safety and confines of our planet, we wear spacesuits and travel in spacecraft that help protect us from these extreme temperatures. Here, a large dose of creativity and a whole lot of insulation is critical.

The Apollo-era spacesuits, for example, had heating systems that included flexible coils and lithium batteries. Modern suits come equipped with tiny, microscopic balls of heat-reactant chemicals that helped protect astronauts from the frigid temps. The Artemis spacesuits, which will take the next man and first woman to the moon in 2024, come equipped with a portable life support system that will help future moonwalkers regulate their temperature on the moon and beyond.

Were you to weave between galaxies in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, the heat from your bodyabout 100 watts, according to Space.comwould start to radiate away from you. (Remember, conduction and convection don't work here.) This would be a slow, frigid way to go, and, eventually, you'd freeze to death. But... it's likely you'd asphyxiate first.

After all, space is all about extremes.

Update: A previous version of this article referred to the kelvin as being measured in degrees. The kelvin is not measured in degrees. We regret the error.

Read more here:

The Weirdly Nihilistic Reason Why Outer Space Is So Cold - Popular Mechanics

Robert Segovia, the writer and director of the new comedic two-act playLosers in Spacesuggests that the play might not exist if he hadnt lost his job a while back. I started writing it three or four years ago, and didnt think I was a good enough writer, he says And I got laid off, which is sad, but it did give me time of like,oh, its kind of now or never to write this thing.

One of the core concepts of the show is rooted in Segovias childhood love for a particular style of science fiction TV show. When I was kid, I used to think I didnt like sci-fi, but then I realized I didnt like sci-fi where theytravel. I just wanted tostay, he says. I didnt really like the Star Trekkylets go to these planets [and] fight a monster.I really like the idea of lazy spacefaring. Like youve gotten out here and youre just gonna hang out a little bit.

Hes interested in the idea of space travel becoming so common that its no longer romanticized and its just a job. Its kind of fun to think of space like that there will be a point where well be in space so long thatll itll seem notbad, butboring. Itll just be like, oh, were on this planet. Great. I gotta take out the trash still.

Thats the core comedic conceit ofLosers in Space its characters arent heroic or brilliant pioneers, theyre regular folks who are kind of bored with their jobs and arent that bright. There are very few intelligent characters in my universe, Segovia says. And they arefrustrated, because everyone around them is kind of bumbling.

The characters work at a topaz mining base on the planet Parkor (topaz is worth in the 29thcentury exactly what its worth now, which is to say not that much, Segovia says). Parkor is a planet where the natural landscape looks very much like a present-day American parking lot, largely because Segovia and his crew had to film some video scenes of the planet in Austin. Austins nothing but parking lots, so I just made the planet parking lots, Segovia says with a laugh.

True to its old-school TV sci-fi heritage,Losers in Spaceis a two-act stage show that plays kind of like a TV show. I call it a two-act play, but its really two episodes, Segovia says. If it goes well, we could do more and more and more.

The idea of creating more adventures and settings and characters for theLosers in Spaceuniverse clearly excites Segovia, and is rooted in his childhood imagination. I [was] a Mexican-American kid who grew up in a predominantly white community, and so I never saw myself on TV, he says. So I think fantasy and sci-fi and things like that writing in those forms, you can kind of project yourself into those, where you may not be able to project yourself into your regular romantic comedy because you just never see yourself in those roles. If the world that youre living in as a kid is not something that you can be a part of, then you just build a different world.

"Losers In Space' runs through December 1 at Fallout Theater

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Writer And Director Robert Segovia Creates A Universe Where Space Travel Is Boring And Hilarious - KUT

If you're looking to plan a space-themed trip but you've already been to NASA's Kennedy and Johnson space centers, Atlas Obscura's new book can offer off-the-beaten-path cosmic destinations.

"Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders" (Workman Publishing, 2019) offers around-the-world destination recommendations for travelers looking for something unusual. Based on the website of the same name, the book was written by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton and covers oddities of every nature. Plenty of those recommendations touch on spaceflight and related topics.

Perhaps you'd like to see icons of spaceflight itself: the book recommends stops like Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where Russian Soyuz vehicles still launch to the International Space Station. Or visit Australia's museum dedicated to the Skylab station that fell out of the sky.

Related: 5 Great Summer Vacation Ideas for Space Lovers

Or, if you're more interested in science destinations, consider visiting facilities like Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia or the Large Zenith Telescope with its mercury mirror in Canada.

Museum options abound, including historic planetariums, Germany's space travel museum, a museum dedicated to Galileo Galilei (and his preserved middle finger) and the Shanghai Astronomical Museum.

"Atlas Obscura" also offers places to see where space and Earth intersect, from finding Libyan desert glass to visiting Namibia's massive Hoba meteorite, left where it fell since it's too massive to move.

Or, of course, you could take the alien route. Consider the Betty and Barney Hill Archive in New Hampshire, dedicated to alien abduction accounts; stop by memorials of encounters with UFOs in Poland and Sweden, or even visit a would-be alien welcome center in South Carolina.

The book explores plenty of other space-related destinations as well. It's not quite the same as visiting space but we can't all be astronauts.

You can buy Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders at Amazon.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

See the rest here:

New 'Atlas Obscura' Book Offers Host of Space Oddities to Visit on Earth - Space.com

A prototype of a SpaceX rocket designed to carry people to Mars has suffered a major failure during tests in Texas.

A video of the incident recorded by a local space enthusiast captured the moment the top of the Starship MK-1 rocket exploded.

SpaceXsaid there were no injuries and that the incident in such an early-stage test of the rocket was not a serious setback.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The purpose of todays test was to pressurise systems to the max, so the outcome was not completely unexpected, a spokesperson for the space firm said.

SpaceX CEO revealed on Twitter that tests would now proceed with the Starship MK-3 prototype design, which is more refined and features a much-improved flight design.

"The striking colour and texture of Africa Illizi, Algeria"

"Every day spent living in space is a great day, but today was particularly special. I got to speak with one of my inspirational heroes Prof Stephen Hawking and his amazing daughter Lucy, who developed the Principia Space Diary to engage children with STEM subjects. As well as talking about dark matter, quantum entanglement, alien life and light beam powered nanocraft we also got to see an amazing pass over the Bahamas and this - my favourite reef smile emoticon"

"Sunrise approaching Russia's frozen north-east coast"

"Hello London! Fancy a run? 🙂 #LondonMarathon"

"50 shades of blue: Bahamas"

"Snow on the mountains next to Yinchuan in China"

"Is it just me or do I see some rocket flames down there? These strange land features are in the Erg Iguidi desert, with its yellow stripes of sand stretching from Algeria to northern Mauritania in the Sahara"

"Sunlight reflecting the stunning colours of this Himalayan lake"

"The real thing: found Everest! Last picture turned out to be third-tallest mountain Kanchengjunga"

"Go #Exomars have a great mission. Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think #AfricaArt"

"Amazingly clear view of Tenerife"

"Some midday winter sun glinting off Greenlands snow-capped peaks"

"Great texture in these huge sand dunes, Saudi Arabia"

"The dam makes this river look like a dragons tail. Oahe Dam north of Pierre, South Dakota in the United States. (North is to the right)"

"Spotted volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning heat has melted snow around top"

"New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine. Mt Cook centre left with the Grand Plateau to the front and Mt Tasman (3,497m) to the right of the Grand Plateau. Fox Glacier in the middle then Franz Josef curving right. Tasman Lake (largest at front) is at the foot of the Tasman glacier which runs along the front of them. The Hooker Glacier flows out behind Mt Cook coming down to meet the Mueller Glacier on the left of the photo. The Murchison Glacier is at the front of the photo running parallel with the Tasman Glacier"

"Another great pass over Patagonia and a swirling plankton bloom off the coast"

"We dont often get such clear views of Alaska"

"Lights along the Nile stretching into the distance from Cairo"

"The Pacific Ring of Fire clear to see amongst the volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia"

"Im guessing there was an impressive storm going on under that cumulonimbus cloud"

"Night-time Sahara you can really see how thin the Earths atmosphere is in this picture"

"Tokyo and Japanese coast. This image shows most of Japan with the largest mass of light corresponding to Tokyo. The white lights on the left are fishing boats"

"Morning sun striking active volcanoes in Guatemala"

"The vast waters of the Tapajos river, Amazonia"

"Beautiful glacial river water flowing from this Patagonian ice field Lake Viedma, West is up"

"Minus the #Dragon photobomb this time..."

"Sediment spilling into this mountain lake, Ethiopia"

"We have phases of short nights on the International Space Station sunlight is nearly always visible right now. No prizes for guessing where this is"

"From one mighty ocean to another ships passing through the Panama canal"

"The striking colour and texture of Africa Illizi, Algeria"

"Every day spent living in space is a great day, but today was particularly special. I got to speak with one of my inspirational heroes Prof Stephen Hawking and his amazing daughter Lucy, who developed the Principia Space Diary to engage children with STEM subjects. As well as talking about dark matter, quantum entanglement, alien life and light beam powered nanocraft we also got to see an amazing pass over the Bahamas and this - my favourite reef smile emoticon"

"Sunrise approaching Russia's frozen north-east coast"

"Hello London! Fancy a run? 🙂 #LondonMarathon"

"50 shades of blue: Bahamas"

"Snow on the mountains next to Yinchuan in China"

"Is it just me or do I see some rocket flames down there? These strange land features are in the Erg Iguidi desert, with its yellow stripes of sand stretching from Algeria to northern Mauritania in the Sahara"

"Sunlight reflecting the stunning colours of this Himalayan lake"

"The real thing: found Everest! Last picture turned out to be third-tallest mountain Kanchengjunga"

"Go #Exomars have a great mission. Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think #AfricaArt"

"Amazingly clear view of Tenerife"

"Some midday winter sun glinting off Greenlands snow-capped peaks"

"Great texture in these huge sand dunes, Saudi Arabia"

"The dam makes this river look like a dragons tail. Oahe Dam north of Pierre, South Dakota in the United States. (North is to the right)"

"Spotted volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning heat has melted snow around top"

"New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine. Mt Cook centre left with the Grand Plateau to the front and Mt Tasman (3,497m) to the right of the Grand Plateau. Fox Glacier in the middle then Franz Josef curving right. Tasman Lake (largest at front) is at the foot of the Tasman glacier which runs along the front of them. The Hooker Glacier flows out behind Mt Cook coming down to meet the Mueller Glacier on the left of the photo. The Murchison Glacier is at the front of the photo running parallel with the Tasman Glacier"

"Another great pass over Patagonia and a swirling plankton bloom off the coast"

"We dont often get such clear views of Alaska"

"Lights along the Nile stretching into the distance from Cairo"

"The Pacific Ring of Fire clear to see amongst the volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia"

"Im guessing there was an impressive storm going on under that cumulonimbus cloud"

"Night-time Sahara you can really see how thin the Earths atmosphere is in this picture"

"Tokyo and Japanese coast. This image shows most of Japan with the largest mass of light corresponding to Tokyo. The white lights on the left are fishing boats"

"Morning sun striking active volcanoes in Guatemala"

"The vast waters of the Tapajos river, Amazonia"

"Beautiful glacial river water flowing from this Patagonian ice field Lake Viedma, West is up"

"Minus the #Dragon photobomb this time..."

"Sediment spilling into this mountain lake, Ethiopia"

"We have phases of short nights on the International Space Station sunlight is nearly always visible right now. No prizes for guessing where this is"

"From one mighty ocean to another ships passing through the Panama canal"

Mr Musk unveiled the Starship spacecraft in September, claiming it would be ready to carry humans to Mars within a few years.

This is going to sound totally nuts, but I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months, he said at the event in Texas.

The billionaire polymath also reiterated his belief that humanity needs to colonise the Moon, Mars and other parts of space in order to ensure its survival.

Elon Musk shared a picture of what the Starship rocket will look like(Elon Musk)

In order to achieve this, the company has ushered in a number of groundbreaking innovations to vastly reduce the cost of space travel, including reusable rockets that can land vertically following take off.

We need to make space travel like air travel. Any other mode of transport is reusable so the critical breakthrough is a rapidly reusable orbital rocket this is the holy grail of space, he said.

"I think we should really do our best to become a multi-planet species, and we should do it now."

Social media is an increasingly important battle ground in elections - and home to many questionable claims pumped out by all sides. If social media sites won't investigate the truth of divisive advertising, we will. Please send any political Facebook advertising you receive todigitaldemocracy@independent.co.uk, and we will catalogue and investigate it.Read more here.

See the article here:

SpaceX rocket that Elon Musk wants to take people to Mars in explodes during tests - The Independent

The answer to efficient and cheap space travel might just be simpler than you think; all it requires is a cable and a weight.

Above, we have a video from Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell, and this time around, the scientific YouTube Channel is exploring the idea of cheap and effective space travel. The idea that is proposed begins with what is called a 'Tether,' which is simply a weight with a cable attached to it. Kurzgesagt suggests that humans build extremely long versions of these tethers and place them at a safe distance around our planet and use them as a 'free' means of propulsion to other planets.

Since the tether would be spinning around our planet, spaceships would be able to attach onto the tether and use its rotational force to be pushed towards a designated planet. The video says that there will be a few problems in doing this; humans would have to create smaller spacecrafts that would be able to match the tethers speed throughout our atmosphere (12,000km per hour). While that might sound extremely difficult, it should be noted that traditional spacecrafts need to reach 45,000km per hour to exit our planet's gravity.

The idea is also extended to other planets such as Mars and even smaller asteroids that we could land on, mine, and then return the plundered minerals from. Kurzgesagt estimates that if tethers were used, the time it takes to get to Mars will be reduced from 9 months to just 5 or even 3 months. Tether use would also reduce the size of the rockets by about 84%-96%, due to most of their body not needing to carry monumental amounts of fuel.

* Prices last scanned on 11/22/2019 at 9:50 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, please click for very latest pricing

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The answer to cheap space travel to other planets is a 1,000km Skyhook - TweakTown

A FORMERFife miner who has devised a series of inventions around dissolving materials including bandages and wipes has linked up with scientists at Strathclyde University to develop ways of tackling waste in space.

Brian McCormack has already developed a suite of dissolvable products he believes could transform the way healthcare professionals would treat burns, as well as flushable wipes.

The 62-year-old, who set up McCormack Innovation to develop his products, has now entered a five-year agreement to explore ways of tackling waste in space.

The next stage of the race will be in deep space, and Mr McCormack hopes Scotland will be at the forefront of developing sustainable space travel.

Mr McCormack has created a group of inventions that include a dissolvable bandage that works like conventional crepe dressings, yet can be removed by placing in water.

READ MORE:SpaceX launches supplies to International Space Station after power delays

He is also in advanced discussions with a number of global companies over taking his products to market.

Now he has linked up with experts at the to Strathclyde Aerospace Centre of Excellence to develop new products for space use.

The growing problem of waste in space prompted NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to launch a contest for ideas for tackling rubbish and other waste generated by space crew on long-range human space exploration missions, such as to the Moon or Mars.

Four astronauts can generate 2,500 kilograms of waste in a one-year mission.

Above:NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Expedition 30 flight engineer, is pictured among stowage bags in the Harmony node of the International Space Station. The bags, containing waste, will be transferred to the docked Progress 45 spacecraft for disposal. Credit: NASA

There is already an issue of waste material in space left over by earlier rockets, with between 16,000 and 20,000 pieces being tracked orbiting Earth.

Waste disposal methods on the International Space Station involve astronauts manually processing refuse by placing it into bags then loading it onto a designated vehicle for short term storage, which depending on the craft, returns the refuse to Earth or burns up in the atmosphere.

However, this disposal method will not be available for missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

READ MORE: Former Fife miner invents soluble bandages that could ease pain of millions

Mr McCormack said: Currently general waste on the international space station - packaging, wipes, everything - is put in bags and stored in a capsule.

The capsule is then released from the space station, the capsule enters the Earths atmosphere and burns up on entry like a meteor would.

This is planned so the burn up happens above the Pacific Ocean and at times the rubbish is taken away by a visiting commercial vehicle that returns to Earth.

This system works for low Earth orbit but not for deep space travel. In deep space there will not be the luxury of visiting commercial vehicles to take the rubbish away."

Above: NASA: 'We are going to the Moon by 2024.' Credit: NASA

Mr McCormacksaid:In deep space if you released a waste capsule it would not be pulled back into the Earths atmosphere and burn up, it would travel at dangerously high speeds and pollute space.

NASA has reached out to innovators and industry to develop a system that could solve this problem of disposal of waste in deep space. This is a major challenge.

McCormack Innovation, who have developed the worlds first dissolving wipe, could see opportunity to introduce items of every day use in space travel that would dissolve after use.

The biomedical tested wipe is one. Dissolving toilet paper and other packaging is also included.

READ MORE: Watch: Former Fife miner's soluble bandage 'could revolutionise trauma and burns care'

The company agreed the link-up after a meeting with a team of space academics led by Professor Max Vasile and Dr Monica Oliveira.

Mr McCormack said: It will be an honour for McCormack Innovation to work alongside this team on this project of dissolving waste in space, and making a very important contribution to deep space travel. Again, first-class innovation coming out Scotland.

Dr Oliveira, senior lecturer in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said: Waste management is a great challenge in space, especially in the context of long-duration space missions. Any innovative solutions that help to mitigate issues of waste are key for sustainable long-duration human space travel.

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Former miner turned inventor in link-up with space centre to tackle waste in space - HeraldScotland

Journeys to other star systems will forever be out of reach unless a massive breakthrough in physics makes faster-than-light travel a reality, or a breakthrough in medicine makes suspended animation possible.Now, at least, one of those things has happened.

Samuel Tisherman, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the leader of a team that has successfully put a human being in suspended animation.

Describing the successful operation as a little surreal, Professor Tisherman told New Scientist how he removed the patients blood and replaced with ice-cold saline solution.

The patient, technically dead at this point, was removed from the cooling system and taken to an operating theatre for a two-hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored and being warmed to the normal temperature of 37C.

Prof Tisherman says he will be producing a full account of the procedure in a scientific paper in the new year.

He says that his focus is on pausing life long enough to perform emergency surgery rather than sending astronauts on interstellar journeys.

He tells the story of a young man who was stabbed over a row in a bowling alley: He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly he was dead. We could have saved him if wed had enough time.

His suspended animation technique is intended as a way of securing that extra time.

I want to make clear that were not trying to send people off to Saturn, he says. Were trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.

But inevitably space agencies such as NASA and the ESA as well as more ambitious tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will be taken a keen interest in Prof Tishermans paper when it is published in 2020.

A journey to Saturn can take up to seven years, so keeping the crew on ice might be easier than keeping them healthy and happy for all that time.

While Prof Tisherman has released this news of one successful trial, there is no word on how many previous attempts were made with critical patients before this.

The experiment was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA waived the usual requirement for patient consent in this case as the patient could not be saved by any other means.

At the moment, the biggest obstacle to reliable animation of a patient who has been super-cooled in this way is cell damage as they are re-warmed so-called reperfusion injuries.

Prof Tisherman says that there may be a drug, or cocktail of drugs, that can help minimise these injuries but, he says: but we havent identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet.

Once he has, whether or not he wants to send a refrigerated crew to Saturn, its likely that sooner or later thats exactly what will happen.

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Space travel barrier removed as docs freeze and revive human for first time - Daily Star

Putting astronauts into a state of suspended animation during long distance space travel is a staple of science fiction. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has investigated how such a technologyif it existed in real lifecould work and what its impacts would be on the designs of potential missions to Mars or other worlds.

The key finding of this investigation is that missions which made use of human hibernation would require much less physical space than normal, according to the space agency's Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) and SciSpacE team.

The research assessed human hibernation on a hypothetical mission to send six humans to Mars and back over five years.

"We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design," Robin Biesbroek from the CDF said in a statement.

"We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team. Finally we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years," he said.

The CDF assumed that the astronauts would be induced into hibernation using drugs while inside small individual "soft-shell pods." The pods would be darkened and cooled to keep the bodies of the astronauts at a low temperature for most of the 180-day journey from Earth to Mars.

Before going into hibernation, the crew would have to put on extra body fatjust like hibernating animals do in the wild. Furthermore, the astronauts would go through a 21-day recuperation period after waking up in order to give their bodies time to recover.

An added bonus of human hibernation is that mission designers may be able to better protect astronauts from harmful radiationone of the main hazards of deep space travel. The crew would spend most of the mission in their pods, which could be protected by special shielding.

However, one challenge in any mission involving human hibernation, the CDF said, is that it would have to be largely automated and equipped with an artificial intelligence system that could deal with technical issues until the crew can be revived.

Importantly, the study found that hibernation technology may enable mission designers to reduce spacecraft mass by a third because the crew quarters would no longer be necessary, not to mention several tons of consumable items. The hibernation pods would double as cabins while the astronauts are awake.

"For a while now hibernation has been proposed as a game-changing tool for human space travel," Jennifer Ngo-Anh from the SciSpacE team said in a statement. "If we were able to reduce an astronaut's basic metabolic rate by 75 percentsimilar to what we can observe in nature with large hibernating animals such as certain bearswe could end up with substantial mass and cost savings, making long-duration exploration missions more feasible."

It is important to note that currently there is no proven technology available that can place humans into a hibernation-like state. However, this is not to say that it is beyond the realms of possibility in the future.

"The basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy: a broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades," Ngo-Anh said.

"Most major medical centers have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in a better shape than they otherwise would be. We aim to build on this in future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people," she said.

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This Is How Putting Astronauts Into Hibernation Could Work on a Mission to Mars - Newsweek

In this episode of the podcast Unwrap Your Candies Now, Ernie Manouse interviews Jeff Miller (director) and Tamarie Cooper (cast member and co-artistic director) about Baby Screams Miracle by Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Clare Barron. Described as a funny, moving tale of faith and survival, the show is being produced by The Catastrophic Theatre from November 22 December 15 at MATCH.

Then, Catherine Lu chats with Houston Symphony Composer-in-Residence Jimmy Lpez Bellido about his World Premiere Symphony No. 2, Ad Astra, dedicated to NASA and inspired by space travel. A culmination of his three-year residency, the piece is also a kind of love letter to Houston. Performances are December 5, 7 and 8 at Jones Hall.

Share your comments, questions and ideas at UYCN@houstonpublicmedia.org.

Music used: Invention No. 13 by J.S. Bach performed by Andrs Schiff and Symphony No. 2, Ad Astra by Jimmy Lpez Bellido (rehearsal excerpts) performed by the Houston Symphony, Music Director Andrs Orozco-Estrada

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Catastrophic Theatre Produces A Tale Of Faith And Survival For The Holidays, Plus Composer Jimmy Lpez Bellido Writes A Musical Love Letter To NASA -...

Is our fundamental reality continuous or is it chopped up into tiny, discrete bits?

Asked another way, is space-time smooth or chunky? The question cuts to the heart of the most fundamental theories of physics, linking together the way space and time intersect with the material of our everyday existence.

However, experimentally testing the nature of space and time has been impossible, because of the extreme energies needed to probe such tiny scales in the universe. That is until now. A team of astronomers has proposed an ambitious new plan to use a fleet of tiny spacecraft to detect subtle changes in the speed of light, a hallmark of some of the most mind-bending theories of the cosmos. If space and time are indeed broken up into little bits, the research could pave the way for a completely new understanding of reality.

Related: The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics

The question of "what is space and time?" goes back thousands of years, and our modern understanding rests on two strangely incompatible pillars: quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity.

In general relativity, space and time are woven together into the unified fabric of space-time, the four-dimensional stage that underpins our universe. This space-time is continuous, which means that there are no gaps anywhere; it's all a smooth texture. Space-time isn't just a platform for us to act our parts, however; it's also a player too: The bending and warping of space-time gives us our experience of gravity.

Related: 8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life

In the opposite corner, a set of rules called quantum mechanics governs the interactions of the very tiny things in the universe. Quantum mechanics rests on the idea that not much of our everyday experience is smooth and continuous, but chunky. In other words, it's quantized. Energy, momentum, spin and so many other properties of matter come in only discrete little packets.

What's more, quantum mechanics itself also splits itself into two camps. On one hand, we have the familiar particles of our everyday existence, such as electrons and protons, that interact and do other interesting things. These are obviously very chunky, as they're discrete "things." On the other hand, we have the quantum fields. In the subatomic world, each kind of particle has its own field that spreads throughout space-time; when we think of particles, we think of little vibrations in their fields, which in turn interact with other particles, and do some other interesting things. The fields are understandably very smooth.

So, we have some smooth pictures of our universe and some chunky ones. When it comes to space-time itself, we can easily imagine extending the concepts of quantum mechanics all the way to their logical conclusion, and ruling that space and time are discrete: The very fabric of reality is divided up like pixels on a computer screen, and what we experience as smooth, continuous movement is nothing but a grid of discrete pixels at the tiniest of scales.

Related: The Illusion of Time: What's Real?

Many theories of merging together quantum mechanics and general relativity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, predict some form of discrete space-time (although the precise predictions, interpretations and implications of that chunkiness are still poorly understood). If we could find evidence for discrete space-time, it would not only completely rewrite our understanding of reality, but also open the door to a revolution in physics.

This discreteness can reveal itself only in the most subtle ways; otherwise we would've spotted it by now. Various theories have predicted that if space-time were indeed chunky, then the speed of light may not be entirely constant it may shift ever so slightly depending on the energy of that light. Higher energy light has a shorter wavelength, and when the wavelength becomes small enough, it can "see" the chunkiness of spacetime. Imagine walking down sidewalk: with big feet you don't notice any small cracks or bumps, but if you had microscopic feet you would trip over every little imperfection, slowing you down. But this shift is incredibly tiny; if space-time is discrete, it's on a scale more than a billion times smaller than what we can currently probe in our most powerful experiments.

Enter GrailQuest: the Gamma-ray Astronomy International Laboratory for Quantum Exploration of Space-Time. A team of astronomers submitted a proposal for this mission in response to a call for new space-time-hunting ideas from the European Space Agency (ESA). Their proposal is detailed in the arXiv database, meaning that it hasn't yet been reviewed by peers in the field.

Here's the scoop: In order to see if the speed of light changes with different energies, we need to collect a huge amount of the highest-energy light in the universe, and GrailQuest hopes to do just that.

GrailQuest consists of a fleet of small, simple spacecraft (the exact number varies, from just a few dozen if the satellites are larger to well over a few thousand if they're smaller) to constantly monitor the sky for gamma-ray bursts. These are some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Like their name suggests, these bursts release copious amounts of high-energy photons, a.k.a. gamma rays. These gamma rays travel across billions of years before reaching the fleet of spacecraft, which record the energy of the gamma rays and the differences in timings as the burst washes over the fleet.

With enough accuracy, GrailQuest might be able to reveal if space-time is discrete. At least, it has the right setup: It's examining the highest-energy light (which is affected the most in theories that predict that space-time is chunky); the gamma rays have been traveling for billions of light-years (allowing the effect to build up over time); and the spacecraft are simple enough to produce en masse (so the entire fleet can see as many events as possible, all across the sky).

How would our conceptions of reality change if GrailQuest were to find evidence for the discreteness of space-time? It's impossible to say our current theories are all over the map when it comes to implications. But no matter what, we're going to have to wait. This round of ESA proposals is for launches sometime between 2035 and 2050. While we're waiting, we can debate if the time elapsed between now and then is fundamentally smooth or chunky.

Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

Originally published on Live Science.

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What If Space-Time Were 'Chunky'? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality. - Livescience.com

AS NASA gears up to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, scientists are brewing new ways to help them survive the trip.

One wacky option is to modify the DNA of space explorers to make them super strong and cancer or pain resistant using controversial gene-editing technology.

Much like Sam Worthington in the 2018 Sci-Fi flick The Titan, astronauts would be engineered to deal with the toll of long-distance space travel.

Nasa-backed researchers have already begun to investigate the possibility, reports The Times.

One experiment at Cornell University in New York is looking at taking a gene from a tiny but hardy creature and inserting it into humans.

The tardigrade, also known as the water bear, is smaller than a grain of table salt with a remarkable resistance to cosmic radiation.

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Scientists hope to take the gene that grants them this resistance and implant it into astronauts to help them survive the cancer-causing cosmic rays they'll face during space missions.

"We'll protect the astronauts physically, we'll protect them pharmacologically," Dr Christopher Mason, lead scientists on the project, told The Times.

"But could we protect them genetically, with armour on the inside of their cells?"

The technology faces huge ethical and legal hurdles, and remains decades away from ever being implemented.

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It involves taking the super-gene in question and using a virus to permanently weave it into a person's DNA.

Scientists still have no idea what the long-term effects such a change might have on someone's mental and physical health.

More than 40 other genes that could benefit astronauts have been tracked down by Harvard University geneticist Professor George Church.

One, found in Tibetans, allows them to function at the top of mountains, where there is very little oxygen.

What is gene editing?

Here's what you need to know...

Transferred to astronauts, the trait could help them survive on a limited supply of the gas.

Other genes promise to boost memory and strength, or make someone less sensitive to pain or anxiety.

One, known as the ABC11 gene, is linked with sweat that doesn't smell as bad, potentially benefiting space explorers in cramped spaces.

Gene scientists Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, told The Timesthat the tardigrade DNA idea was "an interesting one, but I suspect rather premature".

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Each change to human DNA would need to go through lengthy assessments for safety and efficacy, he added.

"And there is a question as to who would volunteer to have probably permanent changes made to their [DNA]," Professor Lovell-Badge said.

"It's a type of enhancement which could be considered to be for social rather than personal gain."

Even those behind the experiment admit it's a long way off from a fully-fledged Nasa programme.

How long does it take to get to Mars?

It's not that short of a trip...

"I don't have any plans of having engineered astronauts in the next one to two decades," lead scientist Dr Mason told an audience at a US space conference last month.

Speaking at the 8th Human Genetics in NYC Conference, he said he hoped to have confirmed the modification worked on humans some time in the next two decades.

"If we have another 20 years of pure discovery and mapping and functional validation of what we think we know, maybe by 20 years from now, I'm hoping we could be at the stage where we would be able to say we can make a human that could be better surviving on Mars," Dr Mason said.

In other space news, a bug expert claimed this week that he'd found evidence of insects living on Mars.

A crackpot conspiracy theorist said he'd dug up evidence of asarcophagus on the Red Planet in Nasa photos published in August.

ROCKY HORROR Huge 500-foot asteroid to skim past Earth at 38,000mph on MONDAY, Nasa reveals

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU Hungarian scientists may have found a fifth force of nature

HOT STUFF Giant 50,000C 'Wall of Fire' surrounding our Solar System discovered by Nasa

SPACED OUT Nasa finds astronaut blood moving BACKWARDS on ISS and it could be deadly

NOT SO COOL Botched Elon Musk spaceship test buries launch complex in -196C liquid nitrogen

BIBLICAL FIND Real Noah's Ark 'buried in Turkey' and experts say they can prove it exists

And, Nasa recently managed to record the incredible sound of a "Marsquake" -which you can listen to here.

What do you think of the bonkers GM plan? Let us know in the comments!

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Nasa could create GM astronauts designed to be super-strong and feel no pain and send them to Mars - The Sun

A couple of years ago, I brought you guys news that Star Citizen was collaborating with a company called MyRadar that makes a weather app for phones. Its a terrestrial weather app but has a twist. The CEO of MyRadar, Andy Green also happens to be a Star Citizen backer so he decided to add some of the in game planets into MyRadar and this partnership with Cloud Imperium Games was announced 2 years ago at CitizenCon.

Well, that collaboration has continued, and today we bring you exclusive news of its latest evolution, an evolution which will see MyRadar and Star Citizen going to space properly! MyRadar is launching a satellite into space and in a crazy twist, the Star Citizen backer decided that he would put the Star Citizen logo on the satellite itself so that it will make Star Citizen the first videogame in space! This is no glory project and as you'll see in the video and interview below, has real world implications that will help real people.

Star Citizen Introduces Theatres of War Game Mode Foot, Vehicles and Space Combat

This news obviously comes ahead of this years CitizenCon event tomorrow which well be covering. Lets just say that a weather app with in game weather may just prove useful in future versions if some of the rumours circulating are to be believed...

For now though, I got to ask Andy Green a few questions about the satellite that MyRadar will be launching. They've made a video talking a bit about it and from the (admittedly little) I understand about real world space and satellites this sounds amazing. Check the video out here:

Wccftech: Space! It's amazing, what the Star Citizen community is doing and launching a satellite is unbelievable! Given MyRadar is a weather app, can I assume that the satellite will be for giving you guys more granular data to use within the app?

Andy Green: This first satellite is an introductory satellite that will be a testbed for the aviation side of our business; it will listen to aircraft tracking signals from space and transmit them back down to the ground. This is incredibly helpful as present day infrastructure requires an aircraft to be in range of a ground-based tracking station in order to receive timely information on it. Receiving the signals from space will allow us to track trans-oceanic aircraft, which would have been a tremendous help locating some high-profile missing aircraft tragedies in the last decade.

Our second satellite, already in development, will be our testbed for weather-related sensing. It will look down upon the earth using a patent-pending imaging technique, and the data we get back from the observations will help with everything from hurricane predictions to agricultural analysis.

Star Citizen Introduces microTech Planet and Anvil Carrack, Pisces Ships

W: How did the idea to launch your own satellite first come about? I can't imagine that many other weather companies have their own satellites.

AG: Essentially, we saw a gap in the ability to provide some of the data we're about to start collecting with the new satellites, and with launch costs coming down and our in-house technical capabilities up to the challenge, we decided to move ahead and launch our own. The aircraft tracking data will be able to provide an important safety service that frankly should have been in place long ago, and the weather/environmental observation satellite with its unique image processing will give us some incredible insight that no one else is able to provide. We'll be able to provide all of this data through the MyRadar app to the millions of people who use it every day, including the ability to task satellites to take custom imagery.

W: What type of satellite is it? Who makes it? What company will launch it?

AG: We are engineering and building both satellites in-house. The first satellite is a pocket-cube satellite. It'll be launching into space very shortly on the Rocket Labs "We're Running Out of Fingers" mission, with our launch partner Alba Orbital. The launch window opens this month on November 28th

W: I assume given it's a satellite, it'll have lots of sensing equipment in it, which ship would you most closely associate it with from Star Citizen? The Carrack perhaps as an explorer?

AG: Given its smaller size and specific mission, I think I'd most closely associate it with the Terrapin! It's designed to hide out quietly in space, slipping "under the radar", and its main mission is to track other vehicles and relay that data back to command

W: Star Citizen stuff, what specific artwork will be going up on the satellite? Will it be on the outside? Inside? Both?

AG: The cubesat will have the Star Citizen logo emblazoned on the exterior of one size of the satellite. Check out this promo video we made where you can see it!

W: Do you REALLY need a satellite for myradar or is this just your way of getting in to space while we wait for affordable commercial space travel??

AG: As the initial satellites are just the testbeds, their early-stage purpose is to establish the workflow and proof of concepts, but both of them will still be fully functional. It's the intention to launch a constellation of the satellites to allow us more global coverage for both services each satellite was designed to address.

In the case of the aircraft tracker (the one launching soon), this is part of ACME AtronOmatic, LLC's original core business (ACME is the parent company of the MyRadar app). MyRadar currently provides aircraft tracking services as well as arrival and departure delay information, gate information, and other flight details that can assist both the casual traveler and aircraft pilots/operators.

In the case of the weather/environmental satellite, the new types of imagery we'll be able to collect will, among a plethora of other tasks, be able to look inside the eye wall of a hurricane with a 3D perspective, allowing us to get greater details on the intensity and temperatures at the center of these storms. This data can then in turn be used as inputs to existing forecast models to provide for greater accuracy in tracking these deadly storms. The satellite will also be equipped with a visual-spectrum camera, so we'll be able provide both the custom data imaging and regular visual imaging of the earth below, and we'll be able to offer these on-demand to users right from the app.

Check out the MyRadar app here:

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Exclusive Star Citizen Goes to ACTUAL SPACE with MyRadar! - Wccftech

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In the 21 years since the launch of the International Space Station (ISS), 239 astronauts from 19 countries have visited.

This includes 151 Americans, 47 Russians, three Germans and just one Brit Timothy Peake.

Selected as an ESA astronaut in 2009, 47-year-old Peake graduated from basic astronaut training in 2010 before three years conducting further training and working as a communicator with the ISS prior to being assigned a long-duration mission in 2013.

The Chichester-born astronaut spent six months at the space station from December 15, 2015 to June 18, 2016. During this time Peake conducted a spacewalk to repair the Stations power supply, drove a rover across a simulated Mars terrain and ran the London marathon using the space stations treadmill.

NASA discovers 'mind boggling' oxygen fluctuations on Mars

Upon his arrival back to earth, Peake was awarded a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Queens 2016 Birthday Honours for services to space research and scientific education.

US President Ronald Reagan first directed NASA to build the ISS within the next 10 years in 1984 but it wasnt until 1998 that the first segment of the ISS launched, taking over 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble

Two years later, on November 2, 2000, American Commander Bill Shepherd, and Russian Flight Engineers Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to reside for several months in the station.

Expedition 1's crew, American Commander Bill Shepherd, and Russian Flight Engineers Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev (AFP/Getty Images)

There are currently five members on board the ISS: NASA astronaut Drew Morgan, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, plus the newest arrivals, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.

In June this year, NASA announced it will allow tourists to visit the ISS from 2020 at a price of $35,000 (27,100) per night. The space agency saidthere will be up to two private short astronaut missions per year and the tourists will be permitted to travel to the ISS for up to 30 days - the beginning of a new era of space tourism.

Click through the gallery above to see some of the most incredible images of the International Space Station from the past 21 years.

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The most incredible images of the International Space Station as it turns 21 - Evening Standard