Iran to Launch 3 New Satellites with More Powerful Launchers

In this undated photo provided by the Iranian Defense Ministry on Friday, June 17, 2011, technicians work on a locally manufactured satellite called Rasad. 

Image courtesy Iranian Defense Ministry.

Iran is preparing to launch three new locally made satellites to the orbit, Fars News Agency reported citing the Deputy Head of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) Hamid Fazeli.

Tehran is preparing to orbit three new home-made satellites, called Zafar (Triumph), Tolou (Sunrise) and Pars, from more powerful launchers and on the back of bigger carriers in the near future, an official announced on Saturday. 

Credit: Fars News Agency

Deputy Head of Iran Space Agency (ISA) Hamid Fazeli made the announcement on the sidelines of a ceremony at the start of the World Space Week in Tehran today.

"Launching the under-construction satellites, including Sharifsat and Nahid, are also among the short-term plans of the ISA," he added.

Also, Iranian Vice-President for Executive Affairs Mohammad Shariatmadari told reporters in the same ceremony that Iran hopes that its Sharifsat satellite would be sent into orbit this year.

Fazeli had announced in May that Iran plans to launch three home-made monitoring satellites into orbit in the next Iranian calendar year (March 2015-March 2016).

"Zafar, Tolou and AUT Sat will be sent into space onboard the Simorq satellite carrier," he said.

Fazeli noted that the satellites would transmit images of the Earth's surface to ground stations.

Zafar will be sent into a geostationary orbit, which is a circular orbit around 36,000 kilometers (22,320 miles) above the Earth's equator.

The satellite will reportedly have a lifespan of one year and six months, and will capture images and transmit them to stations on earth.

Tolou satellite will also carry out remote sensing and topography missions, and will travel in an orbit of 500 kilometers above from the Earth’s equator.

Moreover, AUT Sat, developed by Iranian scientists at Amir Kabir University of Technology, is a monitoring and telecommunications satellite, which weighs 100 kilograms. It is expected to have a lifespan of two years.

NASA's WFIRST-AFTA: Dark Energy Hunt Combines Powerful New Tools and 2 Missions

An artist's rendition of the proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission, which will study dark energy, extrasolar planets and objects in the near-infrared.

Credit: NASA

Dark energy makes up nearly three-fourths of the universe, driving its accelerating expansion, but the substance is still mysterious to scientists that study it.

In upcoming years, NASA has plans to investigate this powerful force with the new WFIRST-AFTA mission and a strong role in the European Space Agency's Euclid mission.

"NASA has plans for a robust dark energy portfolio over the next decade," Jason Rhodes of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said during a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physics Society in Savannah, Georgia.


'A tripod of science'
NASA's proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets, or WFIRST-AFTA, will use five probes to perform three complimentary surveys in its search to clarify the nature of dark energy.

"WFIRST-AFTA is a survey mission to make the most precise measurements on the influence of dark energy and dark matter on the universe," Neil Gehrels, WFIRST project scientist of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com by email.

Type Ia supernovas are thought to form from the explosion of a white dwarf star. Because these powerful detonations all share similar brightness that can be viewed in distant galaxies, they are regarded as "standard candles" of cosmology. Recording how dim a supernova appears provides an indication of their distance.

WFIRST-AFTA will survey nearly 3,000 Type Ia supernovas to determine how rapidly they are moving away from the Milky Way due to the expansion of the universe. Scientists think dark energy drives this expansion.

"We can trace out how the universe is expanding more rapidly in the current epoch than earlier in the history of the universe and use that to constrain models of dark energy," Gehrels said.

An artist's view shows three different potential methods of forming Type 1a supernovae, the 'standard candles' used to measure the expansion of the universe. 

The first two panels show a white dwarf in a binary system accumulating matter from its larger companion. The panel on the right shows two white dwarfs colliding, a possible third scenario.

Credit: NASA/Swift/ Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State Univ.

The telescope will also perform a High Latitude Imaging Survey to determine the effects of dark matter structures on the light from distant galaxies.

Einstein predicted, and scientists have subsequently confirmed, that massive structures bend the light coming from objects behind them, serving as a gravitational lens.

Astronomers have used such natural telescopes formed by features such as massive galaxies to study objects throughout the universe.

Dark matter works the same way, bending the light from galaxies that sit behind it. By searching for small distortions of galactic shapes, WFIRST-AFTA will allow scientists to determine the dark matter distribution along the lines of sight.

The third dark energy survey planned for WFIRST-AFTA will study baryonic acoustic oscillations, or BAOs. Ripples of sound waves left over from the early universe grew into the larger structures of the universe over time.

Accurately measuring the position and distance of a hundred million galaxies will map these disturbances to determine the evolution of dark energy over time.

The three complimentary surveys combine to provide a broad portrait of dark energy.

"The combined power of all these probes will give the best understanding of dark energy in the current universe and how it evolved with time as the universe expanded," Gehrels said. "WFIRST-AFTA is the only observatory, space or ground based, that combines all of these probes."

Proposed to launch in the mid-2020s, WFIRST-AFTA is not searching solely for information about dark energy.

Instead, it combines what Gehrels calls "a tripod of science." The telescope will also image planets outside the solar system and perform near-infrared surveys.

DKIST: Most powerful solar telescope atop Hawaiian volcano

Construction on the new observatory on the summit of the Haleakala Crater on Maui, Hawaii this February. 

The observatory is expected to be completed in 2019. 

Credit: National Solar Observatory / Ruth Kneale

Rising 10,000 feet above the sunburned faces of 2.2 million tourists a year, the largest solar telescope on the planet is under construction atop Haleakala Crater in Maui, Hawaii.

Never mind all those admonitions about never staring at the sun. Astronomers can't wait for the chance.

DKIST Enclosure Cladding

Named after the late Senator Daniel Inouye, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will be the world's premier ground-based solar observatory in the world.

With its 4-meter (157.5-inch) primary mirror, DKIST is capable of distinguishing features down to 0.03 arc seconds or just 20-70 km (12-44 miles) wide at the sun's surface.

To achieve such fantastic resolutions the telescope will employ the latest adaptive optics technology to cancel the blurring effects of the atmosphere using a computer-controlled deformable mirror.

Consider that the smallest features visible in large amateur telescopes are solar granules, columns of hot gas rising up from the sun's interior.

Each spans about 930 miles (1,500 km) and together give the sun's surface the texture of finely-etched glass.

McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope

DKIST will resolve features more than 60 times smaller. The current largest sun-dedicated telescope is the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope , which has kept a steady eye on the home star with its 63-inch (1.6-meter) mirror since 1962 from Kitt Peak, Arizona.

DKIST will focus on three key areas: What is the nature of solar magnetism; how does that magnetism control our star; and how can we model and predict its changing outputs that affect the Earth?

Astronomers hope to clearly resolve solar flux tubes – magnetic field concentrations near the sun's surface – thought to be the building blocks of magnetic structures in the atmosphere.

Observatory cutaway showing light entering the top of the dome and gathered by the primary mirror, which is reflected to a secondary mirror and from there through a series of smaller mirrors to the science gallery below. 

Inset shows the light path in greater detail including the deformable mirror that will cancel the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence. 

Notice that the secondary mirror is offset with no obstructions between it and the primary mirror that would otherwise lessen the telescope’s ability to resolve fine detail. 

Credit: L. Phelps with enhancements by the author

We still lack a complete understanding of how energy in the sun's turbulent, churning interior is transferred to magnetic fields. Earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss at the surface.

DKIST Mezzanine Floor Structure

Fields within sunspots can range from 1,500 to 3,000 gauss – about the strength of a bar magnet but across a region several times larger than Earth.

A better understanding of small scale magnetic structures, too tiny to be resolved with current telescopes, will help make sense of broader phenomena like sunspot formation, the heating of the solar corona and why the sun's energy output varies.

The solar constant, the amount of radiation we receive from the sun, increases with an increase in solar activity like spots and flares.

DKIST Coudé Rotator with dummy masses

Since the smallest magnetic elements are the biggest contributors to this increase, DKIST will be the first telescope able to image and study these structures directly, helping astronomers understand how variations in the sun's output can lead to climate changes.

DKIST will do its work on rapid times scales, taking images once every 3 seconds. For comparison, NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory takes pictures in 8 different wavelengths every 10 seconds, STEREO one image every 3 minutes and SOHO (Solar Heliospheric Observatory) once every 12 minutes.

The speedy shooting ability will help DKIST resolve rapidly evolving structures on the sun's surface and lower atmosphere in a multitude of wavelengths of light from near-ultraviolet to deep infrared thanks to the the extraordinarily clean and dry air afforded by its high altitude digs.

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) (formerly the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope) is being developed by a consortium led by the National Solar Observatory and comprising the University of Chicago, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Hawaii, the High Altitude Observatory, NASA, the U.S. Air Force and others. For more details on the project, click here.

ESO MUSE: Powerful 3D spectrograph successfully installed on VLT

This view shows how the new MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope gives a innovative three-dimensional depiction of a distant galaxy. 

For each part of the galaxy the light has been split up into its component colours -- revealing not only the motions of different parts of the galaxy but also clues to its chemical composition and other properties. 

Credit: ESO /MUSE consortium /R. Bacon/L. Calçada

Following testing and preliminary acceptance in Europe in September 2013, MUSE was shipped to ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

It was reassembled at the base camp before being carefully transported to its new home at the VLT, where it is now installed on Unit Telescope 4.

MUSE is the latest of the second generation instruments for the VLT (the first two were X-shooter and KMOS and the next, SPHERE, will follow shortly).

The leader of the team and principal investigator for the instrument, Roland Bacon (Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France), expressed his feelings: "It has taken a lot of work by many people over many years, but we have done it!

It seems strange that this seven-tonne collection of optics, mechanics and electronics is now a fantastic time machine for probing the early Universe."

"We are very proud of the achievement—MUSE will remain a unique instrument for years to come."

MUSE instrument on its VLT Nasmyth platform

MUSE's science goals include delving into the early epochs of the Universe to probe the mechanisms of galaxy formation and studying both the motions of material in nearby galaxies and their chemical properties.

It will have many other applications, ranging all the way from studies of the planets and satellites in the Solar System, through the properties of star-forming regions in the Milky Way and out to the distant Universe.

As a unique and powerful tool for discovery MUSE uses 24 spectrographs to separate light into its component colours to create both images and spectra of selected regions of the sky.

It creates 3D views of the Universe with a spectrum for each pixel as the third dimension.

During the subsequent analysis the astronomer can move through the data and study different views of the object at different wavelengths, just like tuning a television to different channels at different frequencies.

MUSE instrument on its VLT Nasmyth platform

MUSE couples the discovery potential of an imaging device with the measuring capabilities of a spectrograph, while taking advantage of the much better image sharpness provided by adaptive optics.

The instrument is mounted on Unit Telescope 4 of the VLT, which is currently being converted into a fully adaptive telescope.

Since the start of 2014, Bacon and the rest of the MUSE integration and commissioning team at Paranal have recorded the MUSE story in a series of blog posts which can be followed here.

The team will present the first results from MUSE at the forthcoming 3D2014 workshop at ESO in Garching bei München, Germany.

"A muse is there to inspire. Indeed, MUSE has inspired us for many years and will continue to do so," says Bacon in a blog post on the first light.

"No doubt many astronomers from all over the world will also be charmed by our MUSE." Bacon reported.

Gemini Planet Imager: Powerful exoplanet camera turns skyward

Gemini Planet Imager's first light image of Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. 

The star, Beta Pictoris, is blocked in this image by a mask so its light doesn't interfere with the light of the planet. 

In addition to the image, GPI obtains a spectrum from every pixel element in the field of view to allow scientists to study the planet in great detail. 

Beta Pictoris b is a giant planet – several times larger than Jupiter -- and is approximately ten million years old. 

These near-infrared images (1.5-1.8 microns) show the planet glowing in infrared light from the heat released in its formation. 

The bright star Beta Pictoris is hidden behind a mask in the center of the image. 

Credit: Processing by Christian Marois, NRC Canada.

After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres.

It will also be a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument to be deployed on one of the world's biggest telescopes – the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile.

Bruce Macintosh

"Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect," says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument.

GPI detects infrared (heat) radiation from young Jupiter-like planets in wide orbits around other stars, those equivalent to the giant planets in our own Solar System not long after their formation. Every planet GPI sees can be studied in detail.

"Most planets that we know about to date are only known because of indirect methods that tell us a planet is there, a bit about its orbit and mass, but not much else," says Macintosh.

"With GPI we directly image planets around stars – it's a bit like being able to dissect the system and really dive into the planet's atmospheric makeup and characteristics."

Stephen Goodsell

GPI carried out its first observations last November – during an extremely trouble-free debut for an extraordinarily complex astronomical instrument the size of a small car.

"This was one of the smoothest first-light runs Gemini has ever seen" says Stephen Goodsell, who manages the project for the observatory.

This is Gemini Planet Imager's first light image of the light scattered by a disk of dust orbiting the young star HR4796A. 

This narrow ring is thought to be dust from asteroids or comets left behind by planet formation; some scientists have theorized that the sharp edge of the ring is defined by an unseen planet.

The left image (1.9-2.1 microns) shows normal light, including both the dust ring and the residual light from the central star scattered by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. 

The right image shows only polarized light. Leftover starlight is unpolarized and hence removed from this image. 

The light from the back edge of the disk is strongly polarized as it scatters towards us.

Credit: Processing by Marshall Perrin, Space Telescope Science Institute.

For GPI's first observations, the team targeted previously known planetary systems, including the well-known Beta Pictoris system; in it GPI obtained the first-ever spectrum of the very young planet Beta Pictoris b.

The first-light team also used the instrument's polarization mode – which can detect starlight scattered by tiny particles – to study a faint ring of dust orbiting the very young star HR4796A.

With previous instruments, only the edges of this dust ring, (which may be the debris remaining from planet formation), could be seen, but with GPI astronomers can follow the entire circumference of the ring.

Supernova Legacy Survey: Powerful ancient explosions explain new class of supernovae

A small portion of one of the fields from the Supernova Legacy Survey showing SNLS-06D4eu and its host galaxy (arrow). 

The supernova and its host galaxy are so far away that both are a tiny point of light that cannot be clearly differentiated in this image. 

The large, bright objects with spikes are stars in our own galaxy. 

Every other point of light is a distant galaxy. 

Credit: UCSB

Astronomers affiliated with the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) have discovered two of the brightest and most distant supernovae ever recorded, 10 billion light-years away and a hundred times more luminous than a normal supernova. Their findings appear in the Dec. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

These newly discovered supernovae are especially puzzling because the mechanism that powers most of them—the collapse of a giant star to a black hole or normal neutron star—cannot explain their extreme luminosity.

Discovered in 2006 and 2007, the supernovae were so unusual that astronomers initially could not figure out what they were or even determine their distances from Earth.

"At first, we had no idea what these things were, even whether they were supernovae or whether they were in our galaxy or a distant one," said lead author D. Andrew Howell, a staff scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) and adjunct faculty at UC Santa Barbara.

"I showed the observations at a conference, and everyone was baffled. Nobody guessed they were distant supernovae because it would have made the energies mind-bogglingly large. We thought it was impossible."

One of the newly discovered supernovae, named SNLS-06D4eu, is the most distant and possibly the most luminous member of an emerging class of explosions called superluminous supernovae.

These new discoveries belong to a special subclass of superluminous supernovae that have no hydrogen.

The new study finds that the supernovae are likely powered by the creation of a magnetar, an extraordinarily magnetized neutron star spinning hundreds of times per second.

Magnetars have the mass of the sun packed into a star the size of a city and have magnetic fields a hundred trillion times that of the Earth.

While a handful of these superluminous supernovae have been seen since they were first announced in 2009, and the creation of a magnetar had been postulated as a possible energy source, the work of Howell and his colleagues is the first to match detailed observations to models of what such an explosion might look like.

Co-author Daniel Kasen from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab created models of the supernova that explained the data as the explosion of a star only a few times the size of the sun and rich in carbon and oxygen.

The star likely was initially much bigger but apparently shed its outer layers long before exploding, leaving only a smallish, naked core.

More information: dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/779/2/98

NASA SDO: Powerful Solar Flare recorded

An M9-class eruption lofted a faint coronal mass ejection towards Earth on Oct. 24th, 2013. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the fireworks.

Credit: NASA / SDO

HYADES: UCSC new China Huawei astrophysics supercomputer system

The Hyades astrophysics computer system, seen from the front (left) and back (right), is the primary on-campus supercomputer used by astrophysics researchers in the departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Physics, as well as by computer scientists in the Baskin School of Engineering. 

Photo by P. Madau

State-of-the-art computer systems have been instrumental in making UC Santa Cruz one of the world's leading centers for computational astrophysics and planetary science.

A new supercomputer recently installed on campus provides an order of magnitude improvement in the ability of researchers to address fundamental questions in cosmology and astrophysics.

Its value is further enhanced by a high-capacity data storage system for archiving and sharing the results of astrophysical simulations.

The powerful new "Hyades" supercomputer will be used by UCSC researchers to simulate phenomena such as exploding stars, black holes, magnetic fields, planet formation, the evolution of galaxies, and how structure emerged in the cosmos after the big bang.

The $1.5 million machine was funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation grant of $910,000, augmented by campus contributions and favorable deals from vendors such as Dell and Intel.

Paired with the supercomputer is a Huawei Universal Distributed Storage (UDS) system that provides one petabyte of high-performance storage capacity.

The Huawei UDS cloud storage system, on loan to the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) at the Baskin School of Engineering, is expected to become one of the largest repositories of astrophysical data outside of national facilities.



Shawfeng Dong, scientist and computing cluster administrator for the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, oversaw the installation and integration of the Hyades supercomputer and Huawei storage system.

Piero Madau

Piero Madau, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and principal investigator on the NSF grant, said, "Hyades is more than ten times better than our previous machine, and with the Huawei system providing storage for our simulation results, we can maximize the value of those results by making them available to the astrophysics community."

Joel Primack, professor of physics at UCSC and director of the UC High-Performance Astro Computing Center (UC-HiPACC), explained that supercomputer simulations can generate such huge amounts of complex data that it becomes difficult to analyze them on the fly.

An enormous amount of storage capacity is needed for the output of these simulations so that the results can be studied and shared with other researchers.

Joel Primack

"The Huawei system will be used to store our astrophysics results, not only from Hyades but also from simulations that we run at the big national supercomputing facilities, such as at NASA Ames or Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Primack said.

"Those facilities can only store the results for a limited time, and they also restrict access to them. Now, with the Huawei storage system, we can put our results on a local server."

The Theoretical Astrophysics at Santa Cruz (TASC) computational astrophysics group includes about 20 faculty and at least 50 postdoctoral researchers and graduate students in four departments: Applied Math and Statistics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Physics.

In addition, computer scientists at the CRSS will be studying the performance of the new Huawei UDS system. Huawei is among the industry sponsors of CRSS, an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center supported by NSF.

Andy Hospodor

"We're interested in how scientists store and use big data in a system like Hyades," said CRSS executive director Andy Hospodor. "We have studied other operating environments and are very interested in learning about astrophysical data.

Our faculty and students will find ways to improve the performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of such large-scale data systems."

NASA Launching Powerful Landsat Earth-Observation Satellite

The payload faring containing the Landsat Data Continuity Mission LDCM spacecraft is lifted to the top of Space Launch Complex-3E at Vandenberg Air Force Base where it will be hoisted atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V for launch. 

CREDIT: NASA/VAFB

NASA's latest Earth-observation satellite blasted off Feb. 11, continuing a venerable program that has been monitoring environmental change and resource use for more than four decades.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The LDCM spacecraft will track changes in forest cover, agricultural output and urban sprawl, among other things, adding to a Earth-observation record that has been growing continuously since Landsat 1 lifted off in July 1972.

"LDCM will be the best Landsat spacecraft yet, in terms of improved capabilities and the amount of data returned," mission program executive David Jarrett, of NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., told reporters Friday (Feb. 8) in a prelaunch press briefing. "LDCM will continue the Landsat legacy well into the future."

The new satellite separated from the rocket an hour and twenty minutes after liftoff, and the peep of its first signal was received three minutes later at a ground station in Norway.

The satellite will reach its operational orbit 438 miles (735 kilometers) over the Earth within two months.

It is designed to have a minimum five year life span, although it is fueled for a 10-year run in space, orbiting the Earth about 14 times a day.

The satellite is the eighth in a series that has been instrumental in tracking the changing face of the planet.

"This data is a key tool for monitoring climate change and has led to the improvement of human and biodiversity health, energy and water management, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture monitoring -- all resulting in incalculable benefits to the U.S. and world economy," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

The new spacecraft's powerful sensors will gather 400 "screens" of the planet a day and relay them for storage in ground base archives where they can be accessed by anyone.

Frankfurt Motor Show: Volkswagen packs a Powerful Punch

Andrew English, the Telegraph Motoring Correspondent, tries out VW's L1, an 180 mile-per-gallon, two-seater hybrid car, at the Frankfurt Motor Show.

In many ways this 840lb, tandem-seat machine is the most important car at the show and just as much a supercar as the Lamborghini Reventón or Bugatti Sang Bleu.

It teaches people that 'super’ powers don’t have to equate with a gargantuan size, weight and fuel consumption. Super is as super does and the L1 has super in spades.

Very much Dr Ferdinand Piëch’s baby (he ordered former R&D boss Ulrich Eichhorn to build a one litre per 100km or 283mpg car in 1998), the L1’s the result of VW’s heavyweight research into using lightweight exotic body materials such as carbon fibre in less expensive ways.

"It's a real Head Turner", said one hardnosed critic

It uses one half of a 1.6-litre TDI engine in a hybrid installation to give amazing fuel economy. It also looks the business. The 800cc, twin-cylinder, common-rail, turbodiesel is joined by a 14bhp electric motor.

The engine operates in two modes with the eco mode giving 7bhp and sport mode 29bhp, the electric motor provides extra acceleration and can power the L1 on its own for short distances.

"See More of the Frankfurt Motor Show Highlights Here"

....and finally here's another 3 things that could thrill and excite you beyond belief. One of them is Volkswagen's new Lamborghini's Reventon Roadster, and wherever it goes, I think the others will follow. Vroom! Vroom!