Reporters Witness NASA's Latest High Tech Exploration Tool Before Testing

NASA workers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wearing clean room "bunny suits," prepare the LDSD test article for shipment later this month to Hawaii. 

LDSD will help land bigger space payloads on Mars or return them back to Earth.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

On April 9 reporters got a chance to don "bunny suits" (protective apparel that sometimes makes people look like large rabbits) and enter a NASA clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

In the room is NASA's latest technology for landing large payloads on planets like Mars or Earth, being processed for shipping prior to testing next June.

NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space this June from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.

The LDSD crosscutting demonstration mission will test breakthrough technologies that will enable large payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars, or other planetary bodies with atmospheres, including Earth.

These new technologies will not only enable landing of larger payloads on Mars, but also allow access to much more of the planet's surface by enabling landings at higher altitude sites.

The LDSD is one of several crosscutting technologies NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is developing to create the new knowledge and capabilities necessary to enable our future missions to an asteroid, Mars and beyond.

The directorate is committed to developing the critical technologies required to enable future exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.

NASA continues to solicit the help of the best and brightest minds in academia, industry, and government to drive innovation and enable solutions in a myriad of important technology thrust areas.

These planned investments are addressing high priority challenges for achieving safe and affordable deep-space exploration.

In fact, NASA's space tech team will launch seven major technology demonstrations in next 24 months.

Astronomers witness mysterious and unique disintegration of asteroid

This series of Hubble Space Telescope images reveals the breakup of an asteroid over a period of several months in late 2013. 

The largest fragments are up to 200 yards in radius, each with "tails" caused by dust lifted from their surfaces and pushed back by the pressure of sunlight. 

The 10 pieces of the asteroid drift apart slowly and show a range of breakup times, suggesting that the disintegration cannot be explained by a collision with another asteroid. 

One idea for the breakup is that the asteroid was accelerated by sunlight to spin at a fast enough rate to fly apart by centrifugal force. 

The images were taken in visible light with Hubble's Wide-Field Camera 3. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt/UCLA

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time the breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.

The discovery is published online March 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Though fragile comet nuclei have been seen falling apart as they near the sun, nothing resembling this type of breakup has been observed before in the asteroid belt. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope photographed the demolition.

"Seeing this rock fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing," said David Jewitt, a professor in the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.

The crumbling asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, was first noticed as an anomalous, fuzzy-looking object on Sept. 15, 2013, by the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescopes.

Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescope

A follow-up observation on Oct. 1 with the W.M. Keck telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea revealed three co-moving bodies embedded in a dusty envelope that is nearly the diameter of Earth.

"The Keck telescope showed us that this asteroid was worth looking at with Hubble," Jewitt said.

With its superior resolution, the Hubble telescope revealed that there were really 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails.

The four largest rocky fragments are up to 200 yards in radius, about twice the length of a football field.

The Hubble data showed that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely pace of one mile per hour—slower than a strolling human.

The asteroid began coming apart early last year, but new pieces continue to emerge in the most recent images.

This makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent.

Some of the debris from such a high-velocity smash-up would also be expected to travel much faster than observed.

Astronomers witness birth of Milky Way's most massive star

a) Mid-infrared Spitzer composite image. 

b) Herschel column density image of SDC335. 

c) ALMA 3.2 mm dust continuum emission of the central region of SDC335 where two cores are identified, MM1 and MM2. 

Credit: A&A 555, A112 (2013)

Scientists have observed in unprecedented detail the birth of a massive star within a dark cloud core about 10,000 light years from Earth.

The team used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) telescope in Chile – the most powerful radio telescope in the world – to view the stellar womb which, at 500 times the mass of the Sun and many times more luminous, is the largest ever seen in our galaxy.

The researchers say their observations – to be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics – reveal how matter is being dragged into the centre of the huge gaseous cloud by the gravitational pull of the forming star – or stars – along a number of dense threads or filaments.

"The remarkable observations from ALMA allowed us to get the first really in-depth look at what was going on within this cloud," said lead author Dr Nicolas Peretto, from Cardiff University.

"We wanted to see how monster stars form and grow, and we certainly achieved our aim. One of the sources we have found is an absolute giant—the largest protostellar core ever spotted in the Milky Way!

"Even though we already believed that the region was a good candidate for being a massive star-forming cloud, we were not expecting to find such a massive embryonic star at its centre. This cloud is expected to form at least one star 100 times more massive than the Sun and up to a million times brighter. Only about one in 10,000 of all the stars in the Milky Way reach that kind of mass."

Different theories exist as to how these massive stars form but the team's findings lend weight to the idea that the entire cloud core begins to collapse inwards, with material raining in towards the centre to form one or more massive stars.

Co-author Professor Gary Fuller, from The University of Manchester, said: "Not only are these stars rare, but their births are extremely rapid and childhood short, so finding such a massive object so early in its evolution in our Galaxy is a spectacular result.

More information: 'Global collapse of molecular clouds as a formation mechanism for the most massive stars,' Astronomy & Astrophysics, www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2013/07/aa21318-13.pdf

LHC Colliderscope: Witness to creation

The building you see in the video above is the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and the light show blinking across its facade depicts tracks of subatomic particles born in energies approaching those at the creation of the universe occurring in close to real time 175 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

There, in CERN's Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment, protons traveling close to the speed of light are being smashed together, releasing enormous concentrations of energy that in turn give birth to new particles. The new particles travel through ATLAS's Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT), a detector composed of 500,000 detector straws that signal when a charged particle passes through.

Full article here ....