Select Page ::

Amanda Nunes: ‘I do Not Intend to Fight Cris Cyborg’ – MMANews.com – MMA News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Amanda Nunes has pumped the brakes on a move to featherweight.

Nunes, who is the reigning Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) womens bantamweight title holder, is likely headed towards a title defense against Valentina Shevchenko. The Lioness entertained a featherweight move when Cris Cyborg was flagged for a potential drug violation.

Now that Cyborg has been cleared to compete and free of any penalty, she may be next in line for a shot at the womens 145-pound gold. Speaking with Flo Combat, Nunes said she doesnt plan on trading leather with Cyborg:

I do not intend to fight with Cris. But my intention was to fight [Holly Holm or Germaine de Randamie], who were in my category, but Cris is coming back now and Im not interested in going up. I want to see her as the champion. To fight with her, I would have to gain weight and gain muscle. I am at 135 pounds. To do such a job (at 145), I would need at least a year. Thats what I said: This category is for Cris. but then she tested positive. But then, two girls from the 135-pound class moved up, one was coming off two defeats and the other was not in the rankings. The champion [Germaine de Randamie] is a girl that I have already defeated. I asked to go up because I can be champion in two categories. My point of view was that they were two athletes from my category and that Cris was not in the game at the time.

California beaches start to reopen weeks after sewage spill in Mexico – Fox News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

CORONADO, Calif. Sunday was the first day in several weeks that surfers, swimmers and kids wanting to play in the the wet sand had a green light to touch the Pacific Ocean in Coronado, but miles of beach south of there remained closed due to the huge sewage spill in Tijuana.

Beaches from Avenida Lunar, one block south of the Hotel del Coronado, north to the Navy Base were declared safe Saturday evening by the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health. Testing confirmed that the water quality met state health standards.

But the beaches of Silver Strand, Imperial Beach and the border area remained off limits to water contact due to sewage flows from the Tijuana River.

TSUNAMI OF SEWAGE SPILLS AT MEXICAN BORDER DELIBERATE, SAYS CALIFORNIA MAYOR

The ocean shoreline from the International Border to the north end of Silver Strand at Avenida Lunar will remain closed until sampling confirms these areas are safe for water contact, the department said in a statement.

International water quality experts were blindsided last month, when a major sewage transmission line in Tijuana was closed for repairs and millions of gallons of raw sewage diverted to the Tijuana River, which flows into the United States at San Ysidro.

South Bay Clean Water Movement hosted an event Sunday called Letters at the Pier involving kids and adults writing dozens of letters afterU.S. officials estimate 143 million gallons of sewage spilled from Tijuanalast month.

Climate, friendly businesses make Delaware beaches a year-round … – USA TODAY

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

USA Today Network Ryan Marshall, The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal 7:18 p.m. ET March 6, 2017

The Rehoboth Beach boardwalk Monday, Feb. 20, 2017.(Photo: Staff photo by Megan Raymond)

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. It's 62degrees and the sun is shining bright. Parking spots are impossible to find onRehoboth Avenue or side streets.

Restaurants are slammed. Beachgoers crowdthe boardwalk benches, many lickingice cream cones.

And it's Feb. 20, Presidents Day.

Innovative business owners, a warming climate and an aggressive marketing plan arequickly making Delaware beaches a year-round destination.

I cant believe how much more popular its become in the (past) five years, said Peter Devlin, a school teacher like his spouse Janet. They owna homenear the Rehoboth Beach shopping outlets. Janet noted thatthe couple from Staten Islandmade their first trip to Delaware 12 years ago driving past their usual haunt at Wildwood, along the Jersey Shore.

They haven't been back to Jersey, Janet said, partly because food there "stinks."

Cyclists on a collision course with Rehoboth Beach

By the numbers, Delaware beach towns are bustling

Delaware's quest for this year-round acclimation beganin1989, when the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey BeachChamber of Commerce hiredCarol Everhartto create an event to extend the beach season into late fall. Everhart came up withthe Sea Witch Festival, which brought 5,000 people to the shore that first Halloween.

Everhart deemed the inaugural eventa failure. But Sea Witchnow brings200,000 visitors to Delaware's beaches each fall, and it's augmented with festivals focused onchocolate,sandcastles and gumbo. Then there are six events annually featuring dogs.

Restaurants are now jammed on weekday nights in January, with diners being a mix of locals andout-of-towners. Hotels are teeming with families angling forweekend-themed events. And shops are increasingly keeping theirdoors open, rather than boarding up for winter.

Matt's Fish Camp in Bethany Beach had40 employees on payrollthis February.

"Five years ago that would have been ludicrous," said Scott Kammerer, president ofSoDel Concepts, which operates 10 coastal restaurants, a food truck and a catering company. Thecompany's sales rose40 percent in February, following the busiest January ever, Kammerer said. Last June, SoDel opened a new Matt's Fish Camp in Lewes.

Its not 25 years of renaissance," said Chip Hearn,owner of The Ice Cream Store on Rehoboth Avenue since 1970. "It's25 years straightof renaissance.

You'vegot every kind of food imaginable done extraordinarilywell right here in Rehoboth, Dewey, Lewes and the Bethany area, Hearn said. Ill put it against anybody, and I go all over the country doing shows.

Inside of the Dogfish Head Brewings and Eats located in Rehoboth Beach, De.(Photo: Staff Photo by Megan Raymond)

When Dogfish Head opened on Rehoboth Beach in 1996, 80 percent of the businesses closed after the season. Now, 80 percent are open year-round in some type of variation likeThursday to Sunday a few weeks out of the year, Everhart said.

Twenty-one years ago, Dogfish Head founder SamCalagione notes, his business "wasthe smallest commercial brewery in America, and people thought we were insane when we announced that we were going to be open year-round."

Today, Dogfish Head is one of the nations 25 largest craft brewers out of more than 6,000. The company operates a production brewery in Milton, a seafood restaurant-brewpubin Rehoboth Beach, which it is renovating and expanding, and a beer-themed inn in Lewes. Dogfish employs more than 250 workers and producesmore than 260,000 barrels of beer per year.

Calagione agrees that the dining scene at the Delaware beaches is a big draw. But he points to one thing that has not changedsince Sea Witch was conceived the naturalbeauty of the coastline and Rehoboth's iconic boardwalk.

"It's made coastal Delaware not just a tourist destination," he said, "but a relocation destination."

Warming weather

Like the planet as a whole, Delaware is getting warmer. Over the last half century in Lewes, the average winter temperaturehas gone up 3degrees, the growing season is longerand the number of days below freezing hasdeclined by almost half, according to a study by the Office of the Delaware State Climatologist completed in 2010.

"Lewes has quite a few more mild winter nights now than it used to back in the mid-20th century," said Kevin Brinson, associate state climatologist and director of the Delaware Environmental Observing System.

And experts predictDelaware'sweather will only get warmer.

Delaware officials hired Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, to project future climate trends.Hayhoe, working with state Climatologist Daniel Leathers, projected temperatures will increase another 1.5 to 2 degrees. By mid-century, temperatures will rise 2.5 to 4.5 degrees. And by century's endtemperatures are expected to rise somewhere between 3.5 and 9.5 degrees.

Rehoboth Beach, De. boardwalk Monday, Feb. 20, 2017.(Photo: Staff Photo by Megan Raymond)

That would puta typical winter day atRehoboth Beach in the mid-50s during January and February, rather than the mid-40s of today.

Warmer temperatures have a downside, though.For low-lying states like Delaware, the implications are significant. Delaware has already spent millions of dollars to pump sand from the shoals offshore back onto beaches sand that's lost with each passing storm. The federal government has contributed millions more with major, ongoing sand restoration and repair projects from Broadkill Beach along Delaware Bay south to Wallops Island in Virginia.

Rehoboth loses a foot or two of sand each year and Rehoboth is slightly higher than the rest of Delawares coast, positioned as it is on a headland. But along the billion-dollar boardwalk, with the giant, neon orange sign advertising Dolles popcorn and saltwater taffy, the risk is real.

The other problem is that as the ocean off the Mid-Atlantic coast warms, storms could get stronger. The biggest hurricanes Delawareans typically experience are category 1,with winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour and a storm surge of 4 to 5 feet. That means storm surge as we know it would be even higher as sea level rises and if stormsbecome more powerful.

With every big storm, Delaware's governor and congressional delegation push for new federal funding forso-called beach renourishment projects. But the administration of President Donald Trump has yet to weigh in on whether it will support ongoing efforts to dredge sand offshore of America's beaches, then pump it onshore and smooth it to perfection.

When the sun's shining and the beaches are manicured, visitors come.

"Unless we have a bad weather situation, they (tourists) are here," Everhart said.

In 2010, the chamberestimated 6,998,700visitors came to theCoastal Highway, Rehobothdowntown and Dewey Beach area.By 2015, the number jumped to nearly 8 million. As 2016 calculations roll in,Everhart expects even more growth ahead.

Taylor and Colin Zreet of, Dallas, Texas, talk about planning their vacation to the area on Friday, Feb. 17, 2017.(Photo: Staff photo by Megan Raymond)

When they arrived at Lewes in mid-February from Dallas, where their hometown has been heating up year-round,Colin and Taylor Zreetwere hoping for cooler weather.The millennials planned their one-year anniversary trip around their shared loved of craft beer, and Dogfish Head was a big draw, they said, as they sat next to acrackling fire at the Dogfish Inn on another 60-degreeday in late February.

It was the couple's first time visiting the Delaware coast, and in just a few daysthe quiet beaches, outdooractivities and dining made an impression.

We dontreally get good seafood in north Texas, Taylor Zreet said. We're determined to eat seafood for every dinner while were here.

A community united

If a first-rate dining scene, a warm climate with clean beaches and events like Sea Witch brought tourists from all backgrounds to the Delaware beaches, it was CAMP Rehoboth that unified them in the late 1990s.

Creating A More Positive Rehoboth started in 1991 as an organization that lobbiedfor the commonality of people whether theyare gay, lesbian or straight, according to Executive Director and co-founder Steve Elkins.

CAMP Rehoboth became the resource for outreach in Rehoboth to unite the community and fight for equal rights.After sexual orientation incidentsin the early 1990s clouded the city's future toward welcoming the gay and lesbian community, city police and officials told Elkins they were not going to let discrimination standanymore.

"It became a little more acceptable for two men or two women to walk down the boardwalk holding hands, knowing the police were going to protect them as opposed to harassthem," Elkins said.

Rehoboth Beach and the boardwalk was filled during President's Day Weekend thanks to sunshine and warm temperatures.(Photo: Staff Photo by Megan Raymond)

The communities continued to bond together and in 1997, then-Gov. Tom Carper signed hate crimes legislation adding sexual orientation into Delaware law at a ceremony in front of Rehoboth Beach's City Hall.

Businesses in Rehoboththat didn't feel comfortable expressing themselves before the legislation was signed into law were suddenly empowered, Elkins said. Now, Rehoboth Beach is consistently touted as a top LGBT destination whether it is for nightlife, beaches or dining.

"That was really a turning point when the city said, 'We value the LGBTof course then it was just gay and lesbiancommunity contributions to our city. It was amazing how many gay and lesbian business owners finally stood up and said, 'You've been coming to my shop forever, and I'm gay or I'm a lesbian. We're friends."

Sam Cooper, who is enteringhis 27th year as Rehoboth Beach mayor, basks in the warmaffection his community enjoys. But Cooper has been steadfast in working to keep the city's most importanttraits the same as they were when he started.

As somebody who lives here, its been my home my whole life;Im keen on keeping it a nice place to live, Cooper said. I think it can be a good tourist destination, but sometimes those are at odds. You have to be aware of the quality of life for the people that live here, too.

The bustling crowd over Presidents Day Weekend caused Cooperto raise an eyebrow, but he, too, enjoyed the 70-degree day on Feb. 23. He joked with the police chief heading into a meeting, remembering 6 to 8 inches of snow on the ground in previous years.

As Rehoboth grows in popularity and sophistication,Cooper doesn't want Delaware's most famous beach town to become like a quip Yogi Berra once used to describe a favorite restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded.

Adds Cooper: "Preserve the small-town charm of the city thats the key to me."

Calagione believes coastal Delaware towns have found a happy balance between commerce and quality of life.

"I think were a far way away from saturation in terms of what our community can accommodate," Calagione said. "I live in downtown Lewes with my wife and kids,and we love every season of coastal Delaware. We appreciate that its a little more chill and less frenetic in the winter.

"I think it will always stay proportional."

Contributing: Molly Murray.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2n8oyXo

View post:

Climate, friendly businesses make Delaware beaches a year-round ... - USA TODAY

Lawmakers propose $50 million to restore beaches – Orlando Sentinel

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

TALLAHASSEE Beach restoration is the latest area targeted for a slice of the money voters set aside two years ago for environmental preservation.

Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, and Rep. Kathleen Peters, R-Treasure Island, announced Friday they want to match Gov. Rick Scott's request to allocate $50 million a year for beach restoration. The money would come from the state's Land Acquisition Trust Fund, which handles money from a 2014 constitutional amendment aimed at boosting land and water conservation.

The proposal (SB 1590 and HB 1213) would require the Department of Environmental Protection to develop a three-year plan for beach repairs. It also would refocus attention on sand management at inlets and rank the most serious erosion problems as priorities.

Unfortunately, over half of Florida's sandy beaches are eroding, and only half of these miles of eroded beaches are part of a beach project," Latvala, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a prepared statement. "We can point fingers or offer excuses, but the simple answer is not enough funding, and this bill addresses that."

In recent years, the Legislature has provided $30 million a year to fight beach erosion. Scott in January requested $50 million for beach restoration as part of his proposed $83.5 billion budget.

Scott's proposal was in addition to $15.8 million he released last year through an emergency order and another $61 million that is in his proposed budget to help communities struck by hurricanes Hermine and Matthew.

Backers of the 2014 constitutional amendment, known as Amendment 1, said while they support efforts to safeguard water and land resources, they would like to see $150 million a year go to land conservation.

"These bills reflect a piecemeal approach to environmental spending," said Eric Draper, executive director of Audubon Florida. "Amendment 1 was an invitation to legislators to review and prioritize land and water conservation, Everglades restoration and coastal protection. But the big question of environmental infrastructure spending suffers from short-term thinking."

The trust fund dollars are raised through real-estate documentary-stamp taxes, known as "doc stamps." The voter-approved constitutional amendment directs 33 percent of the "doc stamp" tax revenue into the trust fund for 20 years.

Some key lawmakers have objected to using the money for land acquisition, contending the state already has more land in its inventory that it can manage. Meanwhile, they started to slice parts of the trust fund into long-term commitments last year.

A law titled Legacy Florida dedicates up to $200 million a year toward Everglades and Lake Okeechobee projects out of the money put into the trust fund annually. The law also directs $50 million a year for the state's natural springs and $5 million each year for Lake Apopka.

Legislature has full plate ahead of it

The rest is here:

Lawmakers propose $50 million to restore beaches - Orlando Sentinel

Sharp Drop-Off at Cape May Beaches Threatens Surfers, Swimmers … – NJ Spotlight

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Something has spooked some of the surfers out of the water at Cape May, and its not a sharks threatening dorsal fin. Its the fact that the seafloor along the beach drops off sharply, which can create dangerous conditions for board riders and body surfers.

The problem can be traced back to World War II, when the Army Corps of Engineers extended stone jetties 4,500 feet into the ocean as protection against German submarines. But over the intervening years the jetties have starved the beaches of sand, contributing to the steep drop-off. Unfortunately, attempts to ameliorate the problem with a multi-decade beach nourishment project conducted by the Army Corps have only made matters worse, as has sea-level rise.

A crippling accident to a swimmer who broke his neck diving into the ocean at Cape May in 2015 focused attention on the situation once again.

One of the first moves of new mayor Chuck Lear was to establish a Beach Safety Advisory Committee. The group plans on gathering more extensive data concerning in-the-water injuries and establishing closer ties to regional hospitals. It also will reach out to New Jerseys congressional delegation to press for a survey of Cape May's beaches to determine whether the Army Corps can change where and how it dumps sand to increase beach safety.

Read the full story on Newsworks, a content partner of NJ Spotlight.

The rest is here:

Sharp Drop-Off at Cape May Beaches Threatens Surfers, Swimmers ... - NJ Spotlight

Astronomy Picture of the Day – Official Site

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2017 March 7

Explanation: Why does this galaxy spin so fast? To start, even identifying which type of galaxy UGC 12591 is difficult -- it has dark dust lanes like a spiral galaxy but a large diffuse bulge of stars like a lenticular. Surprisingly observations show that UGC 12591 spins at about 480 km/sec, almost twice as fast as our Milky Way, and the fastest rotation rate yet measured. The mass needed to hold together a galaxy spinning this fast is several times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. Progenitor scenarios for UGC 12591 include slow growth by accreting ambient matter, or rapid growth through a recent galaxy collision or collisions -- future observations may tell. The light we see today from UGC 12591 left about 400 million light years ago, when trees were first developing on Earth.

Astronomers Deploy AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe – WIRED

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Brad Goldpaint/Getty Images

Astronomer Kevin Schawinski has spent much of his career studying how massive black holes shape galaxies. But he isnt into dirty workdealing with messy dataso he decided to figure out how neural networks could do it for him. Problem is, he and his cosmic colleagues suck at that sophisticated kind of coding.

That changed when another professor at Schawinskis institution, ETH Zurich, sent him an email and CCed Ce Zhang, who actually is a computer scientist. You guys should talk, the email said. And they did: Together, they plotted how they could take leading-edge machine-learning techniques and superimpose them on the universe. And recently, they released their first result: a neural network that sharpens up blurry, noisy images from space. Kind of like those scenes in CSI-type shows where a character shouts Enhance! Enhance! at gas station security footage, and all of a sudden the perps face resolves before your eyes.

Schawinski and Zhangs work is part of a larger automation trend in astronomy: Autodidactic machines can identify, classify, andapparentlyclean up their data better and faster than any humans. And soon, machine learning will be a standard digital tool astronomers can pull out, without even needing to grasp the backend.

In their initial research, Schawinski and Zhang came across a kind of neural net that, in an example, generated original pictures of cats after learning what cat-ness is from a set of feline images. It immediately became clear, says Schawinski.

This feline-friendly system was called a GAN, or generative adversarial network. It pits two machine-brainseach its own neural networkagainst each other. To train the system, they gave one of the brains a purposefully noisy, blurry image of a cat galaxy and then an unmarred version of that same galaxy. That network did its best to fix the degraded galaxy, making it match the pristine one. The second half of the network evaluated the differences between that fixed image and the originally OK one. In test mode, the GAN got a new set of scarred pictures and performed computational plastic surgery.

Once trained up, the GAN revealed details that telescopes werent sensitive enough to resolve, like star-forming spots. I dont want to use a clich phrase like holy grail, says Schawinski, but in astronomy, you really want to take an image and make it better than it actually is.

When I asked the two scientists, who Skyped me together on Friday, whats next for their silicon brains, Schawinski asked Zhang, How much can we reveal? which suggests to me they plan to take over the world.

They went on to say, though, that they dont exactly know, short-term (or at least theyre not telling). Long-term, these machine learning techniques just become part of the arsenal scientists use, says Schawinski, in a kind of ready-to-eat form. Scientists shouldnt have to be experts on deep learning and have all the arcane knowledge that only five people in the world can grapple with.

Other astronomers have already used machine learning to do some of their work. A set of scientists at ETH Zurich, for example, used artificial intelligence to combat contamination in radio data. They trained a neural network to recognize and then mask the human-made radio interference that comes from satellites, airports, WiFi routers, microwaves, and malfunctioning electric blankets. Which is good, because the number of electronic devices will only increase, while black holes arent getting any brighter.

Neural networks need not limit themselves to new astronomical observations, though. Scientists have been dragging digital data from the sky for decades, and they can improve those old observations by plugging them into new pipelines. With the same data people had before, we can learn more about the universe, says Schawinski.

Machine learning also makes data less tedious to process. Much of astronomers work once involved the slog of searching for the same kinds of signals over and overthe blips of pulsars, the arms of galaxies, the spectra of star-forming regionsand figuring out how to automate that slogging. But when a machine learns, it figures out how to automate the slogging. The code itself decides that galaxy type 16 exists and has spiral arms and then says, Found another one! As Alex Hocking, who developed one such system, put it, the important thing about our algorithm is that we have not told the machine what to look for in the images, but instead taught it how to see.

A prototype neural network that pulsar astronomers developed in 2012 found 85 percent of the pulsars in a test dataset; a 2016 system flags fast radio burst candidates as human- or space-made, and from a known source or from a mystery object. On the optical side, a computer brainweb called RobERtRobotic Exoplanet Recognitionprocesses the chemical fingerprints in planetary systems, doing in seconds what once took scientists days or weeks. Even creepier, when the astronomers asked RobERt to dream up what water would look like, he, uh, did it.

The point, here, is that computers are better and faster at some parts of astronomy than astronomers are. And they will continue to change science, freeing up scientists time and wetware for more interesting problems than whether a signal is spurious or a galaxy is elliptical. Artificial intelligence has broken into scientific research in a big way, says Schawinski. This is a beginning of an explosion. This is what excites me the most about this moment. We are witnessing anda little bitshaping the way were going to do scientific work in the future.

Continued here:

Astronomers Deploy AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe - WIRED

Kepler’s K2 Mission Helps Discover Five New Exoplanets – Sci-News.com

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Using NASAs Kepler spacecraft on its K2 mission, astronomers have discovered five new planets around other stars, including two extraordinary companions to a subgiant star.

A Neptune-mass exoplanet. Image credit: NASA / Goddard / Francis Reddy.

In the January 2017 issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (arXiv.org preprint), Dr. Alexis Smith from the German Aerospace Center Institutes of Planetary Research and co-authors report the discovery of a giant planet and a brown dwarf orbiting K2-99, a very iron-rich star with a mass of 1.6 solar masses.

K2-99 is on its way to becoming a red giant. Our Sun will reach this phase in five billion years, once it has fused all of its hydrogen into helium, the researchers said.

Also known as EPIC 212803289, K2-99 is an 11th magnitude subgiant star in the constellation of Virgo, approximately 1,970 light-years away.

This star is being orbited by a Jupiter-like planet, K2-99b. But in contrast to Jupiter, which needs 12 years to complete one orbit around the Sun, K2-99b orbits its star in just 18 days, Dr. Smith said.

Until now, only a few transit planets have been found orbiting such subgiants.

The interesting thing about K2-99 is that we also see signals from a second object in a long-period orbit of several hundred days (K2-99c) perhaps a brown dwarf, he added.

Brown dwarfs are of great interest because they fill the evolutionary gap between planets and stars and are considered to be failed stars, which we still do not know much about.

In a paper available on arXiv.org, Dr. Philipp Eigmller, also from the German Aerospace Center Institutes of Planetary Research, and co-authors report the discovery of a hot gaseous planet around the star K2-60, also known as EPIC 206038483.

Dubbed K2-60b, the planet has a radius of 0.68 Jupiter radii and a mass of only 0.43 that of Jupiter.

This planet orbits its star in a mere three days, Dr. Eigmller said.

For comparison, it takes the innermost and fastest planet in the Solar System, Mercury, 88 days to complete one orbit around the Sun.

In the same paper, Dr. Eigmller and colleagues report the discovery of a giant planet orbiting the F9-type star K2-107, also known as EPIC 216468514.

The planet, named K2-107b, has a mass of 0.84 that of Jupiter. Its radius is 1.44 times that of Jupiter.

In a paper published in the Astronomical Journal (arXiv.org version), the same team reports the discovery of a warm Neptune-like planet in a 10-day orbit around the F-type star K2-98 (EPIC 211391664).

In contrast to the ice giant Neptune, however, this planet named K2-98b must be very warm due to the proximity to its star, Dr. Eigmller and co-authors said.

Because of this proximity, K2-98b will be engulfed by its own star in approximately three billion years, when K2-98 has become a red giant.

_____

A.M.S. Smith et al. 2017. K2-99: a subgiant hosting a transiting warm Jupiter in an eccentric orbit and a long-period companion. Mon Not R Astron Soc 464 (3): 2708-2716; doi: 10.1093/mnras/stw2487

Philipp Eigmller et al. 2016. K2-60b and EPIC 216468514b. A sub-Jovian and a Jovian planet from the K2 mission. arXiv: 1611.03704

Oscar Barragn et al. 2016. K2-98 b: A 32-M(Earth) Neptune-sized planet in a 10-day orbit transiting an F8 star. AJ 152, 193; doi: 10.3847/0004-6256/152/6/193

Original post:

Kepler's K2 Mission Helps Discover Five New Exoplanets - Sci-News.com

Star clusters discovery could upset the astronomical applecart – Phys.Org

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

March 6, 2017 This vibrant image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Meixner (STScI) & the SAGE Legacy Team.

The discovery of young stars in old star clusters could send scientists back to the drawing board for one of the Universe's most common objects.

Dr Bi-Qing For, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, said our understanding of how stars evolve is a cornerstone of astronomical science.

"There are a billion trillion stars in the Universe and we've been observing and classifying those we can see for more than a century," she said.

"Our models of stellar evolution are based on the assumption that stars within star clusters formed from the same material at roughly the same time."

A star cluster is a group of stars that share a common origin and are held together by gravity for some length of time.

Because star clusters are assumed to contain stars of similar age and composition researchers have used them as an "astronomical laboratory" to understand how mass affects the evolution of stars.

"If this assumption turns out to be incorrect, as our findings suggest, then these important models will need to be revisited and revised," Dr For said.

The discovery, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, involves a study of star clusters located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way.

By cross-matching the locations of several thousand young stars with the locations of stellar clusters, the researchers found 15 stellar candidates that were much younger than other stars within the same cluster.

"The formation of these younger stars could have been fuelled by gas entering the clusters from interstellar space," said co-author Dr Kenji Bekki, also from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

"But we eliminated this possibility using observations made by radio telescopes to show that there was no correlation between interstellar hydrogen gas and the location of the clusters we were studying.

"We believe the younger stars have actually been created out of the matter ejected from older stars as they die, which would mean we have discovered multiple generations of stars belonging to the same cluster."

Dr Bekki said the stars were currently too faint to see using optical telescopes because of the dust that surrounds them.

"They have been observed using infrared wavelengths by orbiting space telescopes Spitzer and Herschel, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency," he said.

"An envelope of gas and dust surrounds these young stars but as they become more massive and this shroud blows away, they will become visible at optical wavelengths for powerful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope."

"If we point Hubble at the clusters we've been studying, we should be able to see both young and old stars and confirm once and for all that star clusters can contain several generations of stars."

Explore further: Image: Hubble admires a youthful globular star cluster

More information: , OUP accepted manuscript, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx015

Globular clusters offer some of the most spectacular sights in the night sky. These ornate spheres contain hundreds of thousands of stars, and reside in the outskirts of galaxies. The Milky Way contains over 150 such clustersand ...

Located approximately 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Musca (The Fly), this tightly packed collection of starsknown as a globular clustergoes by the name of NGC 4833. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope ...

An astronomer from LJMU's Astrophysics Research Institute has discovered a new family of stars in the core of the Milky Way Galaxy which provides new insights into the early stages of the Galaxy's formation.

Messier 18 was discovered and catalogued in 1764 by Charles Messierfor whom the Messier Objects are namedduring his search for comet-like objects. It lies within the Milky Way, approximately 4600 light-years away in ...

(Phys.org)A team of Brazilian astronomers, led by Denilso Camargo of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, has discovered seven new embedded clusters located unusually far away from the Milky Way's ...

This image, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the globular cluster Terzan 1. Lying around 20,000 light-years from us in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), ...

The discovery of young stars in old star clusters could send scientists back to the drawing board for one of the Universe's most common objects.

The nature of the dark matter which apparently makes up 80% of the mass of the particles in the universe is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of present day sciences. The lack of experimental evidence, which could ...

The scaffolding that holds the large-scale structure of the universe constitutes galaxies, dark matter and gas (from which stars are forming), organized in complex networks known as the cosmic web. This network comprises ...

Among the most striking features on the surface of Ceres are the bright spots in the center of Occator crater which stood out already as NASA's space probe Dawn approached the dwarf planet. Scientists under the leadership ...

European astronomers have recently studied the chemical composition of the low-mass globular cluster designated NGC 6362. Their detailed analysis of chemical abundances for 17 elements in the cluster provides important insights ...

Mars may have been a wetter place than previously thought, according to research on simulated Martian meteorites conducted, in part, at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Adjust slider to filter visible comments by rank

Display comments: newest first

^^^^And what has that pile of irrelevant fail got to do with anything in the article?

That the cluster stars actually form from ejections from the core star. The metallicity will vary among the individual stars, largely depending on their size and location within the cluster. That the metallicity is largely dependent on the internal growth rates of the star itself, as new matter generated both therein each star and from the core is largely non-metallic. And now intermediate core black holes found in a cluster, as I had predicted.

Gosh. Maniacs, Say it Ain't so!

https://phys.org/...ter.html

https://phys.org/...ars.html

https://phys.org/...ter.html

So if my analysis is so lame, what does that make yours?? Lamer??

"Recent studies have shown that an extended main-sequence turn-off is a common feature among intermediate-age clusters (13 Gyr) in the Magellanic Clouds. Multiple-generation star formation and stellar rotation or interacting binaries have been proposed to explain the feature.............

The paper goes on: "These findings support for the multiple-generations scenario as a plausible explanation for the extended main-sequence turn-off."

There is therefore no upset applecart, just another revision of the list of possible explanations.

Interestingly, the same phenomenon has been observed in globular clusters in the Milky Way. ( see https://arxiv.org...6526.pdf , and references therein).

@Tuxford, Nope. Just read the paper, and it says nothing about stars being formed from material ejected from other stars in the cluster.

You call this rational?: http://etheric.com/

Lol.

Apology owed to Tuxford? 🙂

Err, no. read LaViolette's model, as outlined by Tuxford's comments in the articles he highlighted in his OP. It bears no resemblance to what is being discussed in this article. This is just regular star formation from gas clouds expelled in supernovae a long time ago.

"Our finding also suggests that the gas supply for second-generation star formation cannot originate from young massive stars but must be from old AGB stars."

Admittedly, my phraseology was a bit crap, but there is nothing in this as regards LaViolette's nonsense: http://etheric.co...onomy/2/

To paraphrase a poster elsewhere, "LaViolette started off quite promisingly, but then became insane."

I would define this as fusion. Older stars within a vast amount of material, not quite an elliptical galaxy, where there exist multiple pockets of charge and charge clusters, i.e. elements, in free frall. Thus the force causing fusion is the "gravitational" force, which can be defined from the charge distribution, an attractive force since charge will always comply, like charge more distant and unlike charges move closer together, So one can see the rotations and revolving elements that will create matter, or be consumed by a star. Not the other scenario. Ejections are varied.

Science is too limited for solving this puzzle, being locked inside a hall of intellectual mirrors, when the solution actually lies outside the hall. Dumb and dumber congratulating each other inside the hall. Lost. Not even blatant contrary observations can shake them from their mania. They must defend their world-view. Their sense of sanity is challenged. And so they lash out, like davy here.

The issue was your bald assertion to Tuxford and insulting his reading comprehension. Your assertion was demonstrated false by the facts as written in Dr For's Letter itself. Why not be a big man and just apologize for THAT alone? The rest of your disagreements are irrelevant to THAT particular issue. Yes? So go on, mate, prove you are not letting personal feuds and ill will etc get in the way of your objective regard for the facts once they are objectively presented (as in my post quoting the Letter itself). Give him that apology limited to THAT at least; it's only fair; and your credibility will only be improved if you admit your error when faced with same. Yes? And who knows, maybe the ill will and personal distractions may in future be reduced due to that honest gesture. Yes? 🙂

"The temperature of stars is directly related to the speed of its rotation. Those with slower rotation are red, while with the increase of the rotation speed, also increases the glow and the temperature of a star. As a consequence, it turns white and blue . If we consult the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, it is obvious that both very small and super giant stars can have the same glow; they can be white, red or blue. " from https://www.acade...rotation

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Read the rest here:

Star clusters discovery could upset the astronomical applecart - Phys.Org

Using Astronomy To Fight Urban Blight – CityLab

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

In a partnership with Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore is borrowing a trick from stargazers to predict housing abandonment.

A pair of surviving rowhomes surrounded by vacant lots at dusk in Baltimore. The city has some 17,000 vacant buildings.

Almost 17,000 houses sit boarded-up and vacant throughout Baltimore. These are the ones deemed officially unlivable by the city, some with rooftops or walls missing. But those structures represent just a fraction of a larger problem. Estimates from the Census and other community surveys suggest anywhere between 30,000 and 54,000 other homes are currently unoccupied. The question is: Which ones?

Its a similar story in other cities that have experienced severe population drops, such as Detroit and Cleveland. Keeping track of the exact locations of vacancies can prove difficult as the only occupancy data available is often out of date or incomplete. This information gap represents a challenge for housing authorities trying to stabilize shaky neighborhoods.

So whats a city to do? Baltimore is taking an unorthodox approach to the problem by enlisting some heavenly assistance. Roughly two years ago, through Johns Hopkins Universitys 21st Century Cities initiative, the Baltimore Housing and then-deputy commissioner Michael Braverman reached out to Tamas Budavari, a Hopkins astrophysicist who researches the statistical challenges of mapping the universe. His task, among many others, is to use big data to help the city find unoccupied buildings before they reach a state of terminal disrepair. To accomplish that, he does what astronomers do when they study distant stars: Look into the past to predict the present.

Budavari and Phil Garboden, a doctoral student in sociology and applied math, are working on a statistical tool to predict abandonment. Theyre combining publicly available data with GIS technology to create a database of the citys housing stock. This will serve as a base to do high-level statistical analyses that can help officials make better, data-driven evaluations of current and future interventions. It could help Baltimore study, among other things, when and why homes are abandoned, and at what point a vacant home starts affecting nearby properties.

Once abandoned, a home is more likely to attract crime and lower the property value of surrounding houses, in turn driving more neighbors away. If cities can predict where clusters of vacant homes are likely to form, they can intervene before the entire neighborhood empties. They can, for example, consider lower-cost alternatives to demolition. Getting rid of all 17,000 homes in Baltimore would take $500 million and half a centurymoney and time the city doesnt have on hand.

On the surface, Budavari and Braverman seem like an unlikely pair. But astronomy and urban analysis actually have a lot in common, Budavari says. Just like how galaxies cluster in the universe, houses also cluster in the city, he says. So if you have a vacant house in a given place, there's a higher probability of finding other ones next to it.

Astronomers rely on a wealth of studies and massive databases compiled over decades to find those galaxy clusters. Cities, on the other hand, often lack detailed and real-time data. Whether a property is occupied is fairly invisible, says Garboden. The U.S. Census comes around every 10 years and tracks housing occupancy as a five-year average, but only on the tract level. What the city needs to know is, are there neighborhoods that are suddenly incredibly unoccupied?

Thats hard to detect; cities cant tell which homes are only temporarily unoccupied as renters move in and out, and which ones are on the path of long-term abandonment as residents flee their neighborhoods for good. The statistical tool he and Budavari are developing will hopefully be able to find these empty homes and figure out if theyre about to be abandoned, which will help officials monitor when neighborhood begins showing signs of distress. Such a model would be based on a variety of data, including water, gas, and electricity usage, postal deliveries, and possibly even cellphone use. Essentially, the team is going back in timeas astronomers often domining years worth of data to detect abnormal patterns that predict the future.

Consider, for example, hourly water use. In an occupied home, it may be normal to see low usage during the day when people are at work, and high usage in the mornings and evenings. Deviations from that pattern could signal leaky pipes somewhere in a home thats not being maintained, or that the water is turned on only when someone has broken in to use it. In places like Detroit and elsewhere, where a lot of properties are vacant, theyre nonetheless being used by local residents for a number of things, Garboden says. Sometimes that's using water to wash their car; sometimes that's stealing electricity from that house, or sleeping in it.

The data might also help researchers determine whether a house might soon become occupied, though Garboden says its still too early to say which patterns are predictive. Still, that is one of the many questions the team is trying to answer. As more data come in, from third parties and on-ground investigations, the team hopes to integrate them into sophisticated algorithms that will eventually refine the tools predictive capabilities.

Last March, a 69-year-old West Baltimore resident named Thomas Lemmon was sitting in his Cadillac parked next to an abandoned rowhouse when the building collapsed in high winds. The home was one of five to come down, igniting anger among residents who say they should have been torn down long ago.

The question of what to do with Baltimores most-decayed structures has flummoxed city leaders for decades. Some 500 buildings are so dilapidated that, according to The Baltimore Sun, they have to be manually inspected every 10 days.

In response to Lemmons death, acting housing commissioner Braverman asked Budavari to conduct a one-time emergency investigation using his database to narrow down the number of vacant houses the city should inspect for signs of imminent danger. The researchers came back with a list of 5,000 most likely to be unstable; they were either built as end-of-row houses or had become untethered due to previous mid-row demolitions. Comparing that information with aerial photography, the city identified 300 that were missing structural components like rooftops or floor joists. Upon further inspection, he says, some 200 met the criteria for emergency demolition (which allows the city to bypass the process of obtaining permits) and were torn down by the end of 2016, says Braverman. He adds that another 74 have been flagged for immediate removal.

The city has a limited budget for demolitions: an annual $10 million from the mayor and $75 million in state funding over four years as part of Project C.O.R.E., which aims to demolish vacant buildings and replace them with new development. Razing a two- and three-story rowhouse in Baltimore can cost upwards of $14,000 and $25,000, respectively, and that doesnt include the cost of rebuilding walls to stabilize adjacent homes or relocating residents.

Part of the partnership between the housing department and Hopkins is to develop a strategy in choosing which houses truly need to be demolished. One way is to target blocks that are entirely uninhabited. We wanted to know what the dataset look like of all of the demolitions that we could do without a single relocation, says Braverman. The researchers gave us this analysis of all of the vacant buildings in Baltimore where we have no occupied properties in between, which helps inform the process.

Thats the kind of detailed information that housing advocate Shana Roth-Gormley hopes the city will eventually make available to the public. The more that communities have access to that data, the better it's going to be, because while the city does important work collecting the data, they cant do it alone, says Roth-Gormley, pro bono coordinator at the Baltimore housing nonprofit Community Law Center. The data allows neighborhoods to craft their own plans and say, Here are the things we are facingnot just anecdotally but with data to back it up.

Budavari recently submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundations Smart & Connected Communities initiative to expand the partnership to New Orleans and Kansas City, Kansas. Both are part of Bloomberg Philanthropies GovEx initiative, aimed at getting mid-sized American cities to use open data for decision-making.

Well before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, New Orleans had been facing a vacant housing crisis, with over 26,000 uninhabitable properties. That number rose to 43,000 by 2010, as Katrina forced many homeowners to abandon their flood-damaged homes. That same year, Mayor Mitch Landrieu moved to streamline the process of identifying blighted properties and pushed for rigorous data collectioneven setting up a online map to publicly track vacant homes.

Kansas Citys problems are on a smaller scale: Records show that around 900 buildings are deemed vacant. Just last year, the city launched an open data platform to make housing data easier to access. It also has a team called SOAR, for Stabilization, Occupation and Revitalization, dedicated to data research and analysis.

The ability to understand occupancy and predict abandonment is a common goal among all cities facing a vacant housing crisis. People can get this information in these large aggregate levels from the American Community Survey and the Census, but it doesnt happen fast enough Garboden says. Theres a lag, and the city wants that information quickly.

It's like looking at the heavens and only seeing visible light, says Braverman. Just as the latest infrared and ultraviolet observatories can peer beyond the visible spectrum and detect the faint signatures of distant galaxies, he hopes this tool can perform similar feats of detection here on Earth. It will allow us to see the full spectrum of vacant buildings.

Read the rest here:

Using Astronomy To Fight Urban Blight - CityLab

Meet the first African-American crew member of the ISS – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Epps said she has also been learning to speak Russian for about seven years, including a five-week trip to Moscow and another language class there. She said learning the language isnt just for flying on the Soyuz and understanding the controls on it, but also for communicating easily with crewmates. She said has put in a lot of hard work and training over the last seven years and it has all been for getting me into space and being a good crewmate.

Epps said her main duty will be to maintain and update the ISS, along with experiments and studying how to get humans to fly in space longer and away from Earths gravitational field. They will also be doing experiments with rodents, genetics, and whatever NASA wants to do at the time.

As a researcher, I think pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and what we know about space and what we know about the human body and living in space that is a part of human nature and the human exploration spirit to want to go beyond what we already know and try to find out new and innovative things, Epps said.

On top of the variety of research and duties she will be responsible for on the ISS, Epps said shes looking forward to a rare opportunity: the humbling experience of seeing the planet we live on from a new angle.

We see everything from telescopes and other views, but being on the space station gives you the rare opportunity to look at Earth from a different perspective, Epps said. A lot of people who come back talk about how their life perspective changes, too because you see the Earth as a whole and you realize that one of the big things is that theres only the human race, theres not a race on this continent or a race on another continent, but its just the human race.

Out of the 200 people who have been on the International Space Station in its entire 17 years, Epps will only be the 13th woman and the first African American. According to Epps, NASA is improving their diversity and on a good track to increase those numbers, but in a world with a current lack of diverse representation, Epps understands just how far her hard work and success will go toward inspiring people.

I realize the importance of it every day, especially with some of the comments Ive gotten back from young women, Epps said. I think its very important for some women to have a role model that looks like them, so having someone that they can see and touch and say hey if shes doing that, I can do this, too.

I think it will go a long way for young people to see that if Im doing these things, theres no reason, absolutely no reason, they cant get out and contribute and be a part of this as well.

Meet the first African-American crew member of the ISS - Astronomy Magazine

CXBN-2 CubeSat to embark on an important X-ray astronomy mission – Phys.Org

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

March 6, 2017 Credit: MSU

A university-built small satellite known as the Cosmic X-Ray Background NanoSat-2 (CXBN-2) is being prepared for an ambitious upcoming science mission. The spacecraft scheduled for launch into space on March 19 is expected to deliver crucial data that could advance our knowledge about the cosmic X-ray background (CXB).

Led by Morehead State University (MSU), the CXBN-2 project addresses fundamental science questions regarding the structure, origin and evolution of the universe. To answer these questions, the satellite will conduct high precision measurements of the CXB.

"The goal of the CXBN-2 mission is to increase the precision of measurements of the CXB in the 30 to 50 keV range to a precision of almost five percent, thereby constraining models that attempt to explain the relative contribution of proposed sources and lending insight into the underlying physics of the early universe," Benjamin Malphrus, CXBN-2 Principal Investigator at MSU told Astrowatch.net.

CXBN-2 is a small two-unit CubeSat that will rely on its two Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detectors to achieve its scientific goals. Together with the satellite's improved array configuration, these instruments will be able to carry out high precision measurements of the CXB.

"With the novel CZT detector aboard CXBN-2 and an improved array configuration, a new, high precision measurement is possible," Malphrus noted.

The CZT detectors were developed by Redlen Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high-resolution semiconductor radiation detectors. The company has produced extremely uniform crystalline structure CZT material though the manufacturing process known as the Traveling Heater Method (THM). This allows uniformity in the semiconductor material so that charge is evenly distributed, allowing greater energy resolution and detection by bleeding off impurities.

The CZT detectors form the REDLEN M1770 CZT Array, an imaging module onboard the CXBN-2 CubeSat. This module is a 256-pixel radiation detector that is configured in a 16x16 matrix with a 2.46 mm pixel pitch. It consists of a 2x2 array of 64-pixel CZT detectors with thicknesses of five mm and bonded to a common cathode plate.

"Though originally intended for the detection of X-ray and gamma-ray photons while operating at room temperature and for applications in medical physics and security imaging, we found that the CZT detectors possessed the desired energy resolution and photon efficiency over the energy range of interest for the mission." Thomas Pannuti, CXBN-2 Science Principal Investigator at MSU told Astrowatch.net.

With a mass of about 5.7 lbs. (2.6 kilograms), the CXBN-2 CubeSat has dimensions of 3.93 x 3.93 x 7.87 inches (10 x 10 x 20 centimeters) and is fitted with four deployable solar arrays capable of generating up to 15 W of power. The satellite incorporates a power distribution and handling system known as PMD, a command and data handling system (C&DH) based on a Cortex Arm processor, and an innovative attitude determination and control system (ADACS) developed at MSU.

In comparison with the first CXBN mission which was sent into space in September 2012, the CXBN-2 CubeSat has two 256 pixel arrays instead of one. Moreover, it features an innovative 3-D printed Tungsten collimator, a series of improvements to the spacecraft bus, and an innovative conops characterized by a free flying minimally spinning spacecraft.

In this configuration, the CXBN-2 satellite has the potential to advance our understanding about the diffuse X-ray background in particular and the temporal evolution of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies in general. Malphrus and his colleagues are convinced that their CubeSat will provide measurements of the CXB with high precision, thus constraining models that address the relative contribution of the proposed dominant emitting source population (namely heavily absorbed active galactic nuclei).

"Such a high precision measurement of the CXB will provide insight into the underlying physics of the early universe and provide a window on the most energetic objects in the distant universe," Malphrus explained.

CXBN-2 is currently in the final phase of preparations for its March 19 liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The last pre-launch activities include finalizing the ground support software and continuing characterization of the engineering model CZT arrays. The satellite's flight and engineering models were completed in the Fall of 2016 and passed flight qualification testing. The flight unit was delivered to the launch integrator, Nanoracks, in December 2016 and was subsequently shipped to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The CXBN-2 CubeSat will be launched atop an Atlas V rocket, piggybacking on the seventh Cygnus spacecraft mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Besides Cygnus and CXBN-2, a fleet of other satellites, mainly technology demonstrators, will be also sent into orbit on this mission.

Although MSU has already sent five smallsats into space, the CXBN-2 CubeSat seems to be the university's most significant science mission so far.

"We are entering a new era of significant science being supported by CubeSats and Morehead State is at the forefront of this enterprise. The opportunity to participate in astrophysics research facilitated by the CubeSat platform as well as to train our students in space systems engineering and observational astrophysics through live space missions like CXBN-2 is invaluable to our research program, our academic programs and to our students," Pannuti concluded.

Explore further: Sun-observing MinXSS CubeSat expected to yield new insights into solar flare energetics

Provided by: Astrowatch.net

A small shoebox-sized satellite has recently proved that studying solar phenomena is not reserved only to large space observatories. The NASA-funded, Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) is providing invaluable information ...

For more than a decade, CubeSats, or small satellites, have paved the way to low-Earth orbit for commercial companies, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations. These small satellites offer opportunities to ...

Arizona State University (ASU) is developing a small satellite that will search hydrogen in lunar craters with the ultimate goal of creating the most detailed map of the moon's water deposits. The spacecraft, named Lunar ...

The GEO-CAPE ROIC In- Flight Performance Experiment (GRIFEX) CubeSat was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Saturday, January 31, 2015, as an auxiliary payload to the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission.

The University of New Mexico's Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations and Applications Center (COSMIAC) is preparing its third CubeSat, a small, cube-shaped satellite, for a space launch.

With help from NASA, a small research satellite to test technology for in-space solar propulsion launched into space Wednesday aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, as part of the agency's ...

The discovery of young stars in old star clusters could send scientists back to the drawing board for one of the Universe's most common objects.

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

See the article here:

CXBN-2 CubeSat to embark on an important X-ray astronomy mission - Phys.Org

Asteroids are splitting in half and growing tails | Astronomy.com – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

A big difference between an asteroid and a comet has usually been that icy comets can develop tails while rocky asteroids generally do not. That is, until this recent discovery of some very unique asteroids came to light.

Astronomers are interested in these particular asteroids not just because they split in two, but some are also sprouting tails.

The asteroid pair the astronomers have become most interested in is P/2016 J1. Fernando Moreno, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), said in a press release, The results derived from the evolution of the orbit show that the asteroid fragmented approximately six years ago, which makes it the youngest known asteroid pair in the solar system to date.

Besides being the youngest asteroid pair, P2016 J1 has another feature that makes it interesting to astronomers.

Moreno said, Both fragments are activated, i.e., they display dust structures similar to comets. This is the first time we observed an asteroid pair with simultaneous activity.

Studies showed that the asteroid pairs were activated at the point on the orbit closest to the Sun and remained that way for somewhere between six to nine months.

Moreno thinks the dust is likely caused by sublimation of ice that was left exposed after the fragmentation.

Asteroid pairs are a common occurrence in the main asteroid belt. The pairs form when an asteroid breaks in two pieces, either from an impact, excess rotational speed, or, in some cases, two asteroids destabilizing each others initial orbits.

Though the pairs are not gravitationally linked, they do have similar orbits around the Sun. The pairs move in quasi-circular orbits between Mars and Jupiter, so they do not experience the temperature change that causes tails on comets. There have been about 20 documented cases of these asteroid pairs with an increased glow and a dust tail, and the asteroids have sometimes been called main belt comets as a result.

For more information on main belt comets, check out the April 2017 issue of Astronomy magazine.

See more here:

Asteroids are splitting in half and growing tails | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

Planetary scientists are turning up volcanoes everywhere they look – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Cold as ice

Then theres a whole other type of volcanism, called cryovolcanism. As NASA explains in this interactive graphic, cryovolcanoes erupt water and gases rather than melted rocks. They dot a number of different bodies in our solar system, include Neptunes moon Triton and Saturns moon Enceladus.

Its a form of volcanism because volcanism is a process that brings material from the interior to the surface, but it is not molten rock, Dr. Rosaly Lopes, Senior Research Scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Astronomy. Instead, cryovolcanoes occur on bodies with an ocean situated beneath an icy crust. When pressure builds up, it is released in the form of geysers of water mixed with ammonia or methane.

Generally, cryovolcanoes are found on bodies in the outer solar system, Lopes said, though scientists also believe that cryovolcanism may even have happened on the asteroid / dwarf planet Ceres. According to recent studies from the Max Plancke Center for Solar System Research, several structures in Occator Crater suggest recent geologic activity consistent with cryovolcanic activity, though to date only one mountain has been found on the world.

Information about these volcanoes provides scientists with clues about important geological processes. Volcanism is one of the major, really fundamental processes that shapes the surface of a planet or moon, Lopes said. That shape, she explained, comes from the interplay of four major processes volcanism, tectonism, erosion, and impact cratering. Understanding volcanisms role in shaping a bodys surface provides a crucial clue in understanding more about the geological processes of that planet.

For example, Lopes told Astronomy, if Earth was the only place we had seen volcanism, we might think that volcanism really depends on plate tectonicsBut when we look at the other planets, we see that they have or have had volcanism in the past, and there is no plate tectonics.

She cited Io as one instance of this: when scientists saw the incredibly active volcanism occurring there, they realized that it was tidal heating that caused this volcanism. It works like this: Io and other Galilean satellites (such as Europa and Ganymede) are in synchronous rotation around Jupiter. Io then becomes caught up in a tug of war between Jupiters gravity and the gravity of these other satellites, Lopes explained. This in turn leads to the bulging of Ios crust up and down, and the resulting friction produces a large amount of heat and a molten interior. When the pressure builds, it occasionally erupts melted rock and plumes of gas.

Recent evidence even suggests that they may appear on comets. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann displays outbursts on carbon monoxide consistent with other forms of cryovolcanism around the solar system. The outbursts seem to happen from one spot on the comet making it one of the smallest bodies believed to have signs of volcanism.

While volcanoes can shed light on certain geological processes, theres another, even more intriguing reason to search for them: they may be indicators of climates suitable for life. Volcanism provides heat and energy, which is essential for life, Lopes said. And cryovolcanism has not only heat, but watertwo of the essential ingredients of life. That doesn't mean that every body with cryovolcanism has the necessary conditions to support life, of course. But those planets may not be a bad place to start.

Read this article:

Planetary scientists are turning up volcanoes everywhere they look - Astronomy Magazine

Iowa Newspaper Calls for Resignation of ‘Sizzler U’ Lawmaker – NBCNews.com

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Iowa State Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa, at the Statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa on Feb. 8, 2017. Charlie Neibergall / AP, file

The Republican lawmaker, who supporters have dubbed "the Donald Trump of Iowa," got into hot water last week after

Ottumwa Courier publisher Wanda Moeller told NBC News this was the last straw for many in the rural town of 25,000 that Chelgren has represented since 2010.

"A lot of the public officials we spoke to over the weekend are just really upset by him," she said. "He's given the town a black eye. The first time he got elected it was just by 10 votes. The second time he won by 400. It's going to be an uphill battle for him if he tries to run again."

Chelgren, who did not immediately return a call for comment Monday, has denied inflating his resume and told NBC News he was not aware of the error on the GOP web site until a reporter asked him about it.

NBC began looking into Chelgren's education background after he proposed controversial

Chelgren claimed his own experiences with "liberal professors" prompted him to put forward a plan to impose a hiring freeze until the number of registered Republicans and Democrats on university faculties were within 10 percent of each other.

Confronted with the discrepancy, the GOP removed the Forbco reference from Chelgren's biography on the

At a rally on Saturday attended by about 60 people where he was introduced as "our own version of Donald Trump," Chelgren

Chelgren makes no mention of any associates degree on the amended GOP web site, which now just states he attended the University of California at Riverside "majoring in astro-physics, geo-physics and mathematics."

But Chelgren, who runs a wheelchair parts manufacturing firm called

A UCR spokesman has confirmed that Chelgren did attend the university, but just for one year and that he majored in physics and did not earned a degree.

"He did not complete his studies here," spokesman John Warren told NBC News last week, adding that he was enrolled for just one year from 1992 to 1993.

On the Frog Legs site, Chelgren also claimed to have worked as manager and auditor for Forbco Management in Anaheim, an apparent reference to the Sizzler operation.

Sanchez, Rebecca (206453029)

Sizzler spokeswoman Janet Ritter told NBC she can confirm Chelgren was employed by Sizzler back in the early 90s.

"Sizzler does do internal training and development," she said. "The certificate the Iowa senator claims to have would have qualified him to manage a Sizzler."

Chelgren also declares on his company website that he worked as a "Geo-Physist for GeoSoils in Temecula," which is a city in Riverside County, California.

The Iowa pol did not state on his company site when he worked for GeoSoils and the word "geophysicist" is misspelled.

Responding to a request from NBC News, Debbie Beach of GEO Soils Inc. said she would try to confirm that Chelgren had indeed employed by them. She also said they don't have an office in Temecula.

"It's in Murrieta, which is the town next door," said Beach.

See the rest here:

Iowa Newspaper Calls for Resignation of 'Sizzler U' Lawmaker - NBCNews.com

How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything – WSJ – Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything - WSJ
Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Artificial intelligence is shaping up as the next industrial revolution, poised to rapidly reinvent business, the global economy and how people work and interact ...
Andrew Ng on why Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity ...insideHPC
Think twice before you hire a chief AI officer | CIOCIO

all 3 news articles »

Google’s artificial intelligence can diagnose cancer faster than … – Mirror.co.uk

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Making the decision on whether or not a patient has cancer usually involves trained professionals meticulously scanning tissue samples over weeks and months.

But an artificial intelligence (AI) program owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company, may be able to do it much, much faster.

Google is working hard to tell the difference between healthy and cancerous tissue as well as discover if metastasis has occured.

"Metastasis detection is currently performed by pathologists reviewing large expanses of biological tissues. This process is labour intensive and error-prone," explained DeepMind in a white paper outlining the study.

"We present a framework to automatically detect and localise tumours as small as 100 100 pixels in gigapixel microscopy images sized 100,000100,000 pixels.

"Our method leverages a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and obtains state-of-the-art results on the Camelyon16 dataset in the challenging lesion-level tumour detection task."

Such high-level image recognition was first developed for Google's driverless car program, in order to help the vehicles scan for road obstructions.

Now the company has adapted it for the medical field and says it's more accurate than regular human doctors:

"At 8 false positives per image, we detect 92.4% of the tumours, relative to 82.7% by the previous best automated approach. For comparison, a human pathologist attempting exhaustive search achieved 73.2% sensitivity."

Despite this, it's unlikely to replace human pathologists just yet. The software only looks for one thing - cancerous tissue - and is not able to pick up any irregularities that a human doctor could spot.

poll loading

YES NO

Read this article:

Google's artificial intelligence can diagnose cancer faster than ... - Mirror.co.uk

Artificial intelligence experts unveil Baxter the MIND CONTROL … – Express.co.uk

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

The incredible work undertaken by Artificial Intelligence geniuses has been backed by private funding from Boeing and the US National Science Foundation.

A team from MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University that allows people to correct robot mistakes instantly with nothing more than their brains.

Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, the system can detect if a person notices an error as a robot performs an object-sorting task.

Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

Imagine being able to instantaneously tell a robot to do a certain action, without needing to type a command, push a button or even say a word

CSAIL director Daniela Rus

The teams novel machine-learning algorithms enable the system to classify brain waves in the space of 10 to 30 milliseconds.

While the system currently handles relatively simple binary-choice activities, the studys senior author says that the work suggests that we could one day control robots in much more intuitive ways.

CSAIL director Daniela Rus told Express.co.uk: Imagine being able to instantaneously tell a robot to do a certain action, without needing to type a command, push a button or even say a word.

Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

A streamlined approach like that would improve our abilities to supervise factory robots, driverless cars and other technologies we havent even invented yet.

In the current study the team used a humanoid robot named Baxter from Rethink Robotics, the company led by former CSAIL director and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks.

The paper presenting the work was written by BU PhD candidate Andres F. Salazar-Gomez, CSAIL PhD candidate Joseph DelPreto, and CSAIL research scientist Stephanie Gil under the supervision of Rus and BU professor Frank H. Guenther.

Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

The paper was recently accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) taking place in Singapore this May.

Past work in EEG-controlled robotics has required training humans to think in a prescribed way that computers can recognise.

Rus team wanted to make the experience more natural and to do that, they focused on brain signals called error-related potentials (ErrPs), which are generated whenever our brains notice a mistake.

Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

As the robot indicates which choice it plans to make, the system uses ErrPs to determine if the human agrees with the decision.

Rus added: As you watch the robot, all you have to do is mentally agree or disagree with what it is doing.

You dont have to train yourself to think in a certain way - the machine adapts to you, and not the other way around.

The work in progress identified that ErrP signals are extremely faint, which means that the system has to be fine-tuned enough to both classify the signal and incorporate it into the feedback loop for the human operator.

In addition to monitoring the initial ErrPs, the team also sought to detect secondary errors that occur when the system doesnt notice the humans original correction.

Scientist Stephanie Gil said: If the robots not sure about its decision, it can trigger a human response to get a more accurate answer.

These signals can dramatically improve accuracy, creating a continuous dialogue between human and robot in communicating their choices.

While the system cannot yet recognise secondary errors in real time, Gil expects the model to be able to improve to upwards of 90 per cent accuracy once it can.

In addition, since ErrP signals have been shown to be proportional to how egregious the robots mistake is, the team believes that future systems could extend to more complex multiple-choice tasks.

Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

1 of 9

Salazar-Gomez notes that the system could even be useful for people who cant communicate verbally: a task like spelling could be accomplished via a series of several discrete binary choices, which he likens to an advanced form of the blinking that allowed stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby to write his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Wolfram Burgard a professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg who was not involved in the research added: This work brings us closer to developing effective tools for brain-controlled robots and prostheses.

Given how difficult it can be to translate human language into a meaningful signal for robots, work in this area could have a truly profound impact on the future of human-robot collaboration."

Read the original:

Artificial intelligence experts unveil Baxter the MIND CONTROL ... - Express.co.uk

Armadillo Aerospace – Wikipedia

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Armadillo Aerospace was an aerospace startup company based in Mesquite, Texas. Its initial goal was to build a manned suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism, and it had also stated long-term ambitions of orbital spaceflight. The company was founded by John Carmack.[1]

On October 24, 2008, Armadillo won $350,000 by succeeding in the Level 1 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. On September 12, 2009, Armadillo won $500,000 by succeeding in Level 2 of the same challenge.[2][3][4]

In 2010, they signed an exclusive deal with Space Adventures. Armadillo Aerospace was to provide a sub-orbital rocket to fly tourists into space, while Space Adventures would sell tickets for the experience. [5][6]

In August 2013, Carmack announced that Armadillo Aerospace had been put in "hibernation mode", following setbacks including the crash of the STIG-B rocket in January 2013.[7]

In May 2014, several former employees of Armadillo Aerospace formed a new company, Exos Aerospace, which was created to carry their former company's research into reusable commercial space craft. The new company set up their operations in one of Armadillo's former facilities at the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport, in Texas.[8] Exos completed acquisition of Armadillo assets in early 2015, and intends to begin launches of the Suborbital Active Rocket with Guidance (SARGE) in 2016 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. SARGE will be an enhanced Armadillo STIG-B.[9]

The company placed a strong emphasis on a rapid build and test cycle. Armadillo Aerospace designed and built more than 12 vehicles which used about 50 engine designs for over 100 rocket flights.[10] Each design had several features in common. One was the use of modern computer technologies and electronics to simplify rocket control and reduce development costs. Another was the use of liquid propellants and VTVL to facilitate short launch-to-launch times.[citation needed]

The company was a competitor for the Ansari X-Prize. Armadillo's X-Prize vehicle was unorthodox among modern rockets in that instead of using stabilization fins, which complicate the design and increase drag, Armadillo used an aerodynamically unstable design, where the computer controlled jet vanes based on feedback from fibre optic gyroscopes.[citation needed] Armadillo stated a preference for simplicity and reliability over performance, which was evident in its choice[when?] of hydrogen peroxide (50% concentration in water) and methanol as a mixed monopropellant for the vehicle. A monopropellant-based engine requires only a single tank, as well as greatly simplified plumbing and other hardware.[citation needed]

Armadillo Aerospace competed in the 2006 X PRIZE Cup. Armadillo Aerospace was the only competitor in the Lunar Lander Challenge. The company took two similar vehicles, Pixel and Texel, to the event. The vehicles narrowly failed to win the Level 1 prize, after making three dramatic attempts totalling over 5 minutes in the air,[11] finally crashing out on the final attempt. Persistent landing problems were the main cause of failure, with the undercarriage breaking several times, and landing slightly off the pad on one occasion due to guidance difficulties. These flights were a highlight of the Wirefly X-prize cup.

The quad vehicle design is pressure-fed in blow down mode from an initial pressure of 320 psi for level 1 (400 psi level 2). The roll thrusters are cross-fed by gas drawn from ullage space of the opposite tank. The vehicle is able to transfer propellant through connecting pipes between opposite tanks by controlling ullage pressures with the thrusters; this helps it balance, minimizing gas use. The main engine has two-axis thrust vectoring. The vehicle is fully computer controlled; with guidance from GPS and fiber optic gyroscopes.[citation needed]

Armadillo Aerospace competed in the 2007 Lunar Lander Challenge event in the Wirefly X-Prize Cup 2007.

During testing one of the two Quad vehicles (named Texel) crashed on a tethered flight after a guidance problem caused the vehicle to rapidly gain altitude until 3 separate flight termination procedures were activated at approximately 2030 feet. The vehicle fell, and the impact broke open one of the alcohol tanks and a large fireball engulfed the vehicle.[12] The vehicle was irreparably damaged, and only its sister Pixel could compete in the upcoming event. The plan was to have the first module (of the next generation modular design) compete at level 1, and have Pixel compete at level 2 challenge. [13]

In the level 1 events, Armadillo's craft MOD (actually, module #1) logged several attempts, including several successful first leg flights, but was unable to complete the return trip during any attempt.[citation needed]

On its first attempt, a clogged igniter orifice prevented ignition. On the second attempt, the first leg flight was perfect; increased guidance and control capabilities allowed the module to, in Carmack's words, 'burn the X-mark off the target pad'. The return leg was delayed slightly, because the igniter had clogged again. When the second leg was attempted, a 'hard start' cracked the graphite combustion chamber. As the vehicle was still flying, Carmack flew the crippled vehicle through the course as quickly as possible and hovered 23 meters above the landing pad. With only a few seconds remaining in the required flight time, the damaged combustion chamber cracked again, which caused the vehicle to tilt enough to trigger a computer abort. The vehicle performed an auto-land, but the tilt caused the module to tip over on landing after only 82 seconds in the air.[citation needed]

The second attempt began with another perfect first leg, but the return was marred by another hard start. Seeing that the engine was badly damaged (although flying), the team commanded an abort. The module landed back on the pad after only a few seconds.[citation needed]

On the final attempt, MOD suffered a violent "hard start", resulting in engine explosion. The violence of the explosion embedded a piece of the graphite chamber in the ground 64 meters from the launch pad, and ended their attempts in 2007 for the prize.[14][15]

The 2008 Lunar Lander Challenge took place October 2425 at the Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico. Armadillo Aerospace competed for the third year but for the first time had competition, from the TrueZer0 team. Both received waivers from the FAA to fly experimental rockets.

TrueZero attempted level 1, achieved hover, then lost roll control and was aborted and crashed.

Armadillo had an unsuccessful first attempt at level 1, and landed early due to inadequate thrust. On their second attempt they completed the first leg, but the second leg was cut short by the FAA closing the flight window. The second leg was held in the afternoon, and they were able to take the Level 1 top prize of $350,000.[16]

Armadillo's attempt at the level 2 prize on October 25 was aborted due to their vehicle toppling over after the engine casing burned through due to a fuel-line problem.[citation needed]

Armadillo attempted the Level 2 prize on September 12, 2009. Armadillo successfully flew both legs with their Mod vehicle, each flight lasting over 180 seconds, landing safely. However their landing accuracy was not sufficient to win the first prize, instead they won the US$500,000 second prize[2][3] while Masten Space Systems' Xoie lander won the US$1,000,000 Level 2 first prize.[17]

In 2008, the Rocket Racing League announced that Armadillo Aerospace engines would be used in a second generation of X-Racer aircraft.[18] As of March 2010[update], the Rocket Racing League was utilizing a highly modified Velocity XL FG airframe and an Armadillo Aerospace 2,500 pound thrust liquid oxygen (LOX) and ethanol rocket engine in both the Mark-II X-Racer and Mark-III X-Racer demonstration vehicles.[19] The Rocket Racing league never got out of its early development mode, and no racing season was ever held.

The Super Mod reusable launch vehicle is a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL)[20] unmanned rocket which was developed by Armadillo in 2010-2011. It was submitted to NASA as a potential suborbital vehicle for use as a suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) under NASA's Flight Opportunities Program.[20] It added aerodynamic fairings, partially extendable landing legs with lower aerodynamic drag, and systems improvements to the basic Mod vehicle structure and systems.

Lunar Lander Cup era Mod rocket hovering in free flight

The Mod rocket with an early nose cone, hovering in free flight

The SuperMod rocket during final assembly

In late 2010, Armadillo started development of a new, longer rocket design created for lower-drag, higher-speed high-altitude flights, which they named Stig in homage of the Top Gear driver The Stig.[21] This rocket had similar systems, motors, and component weights as the Super Mod vehicles, but was aerodynamically optimized for high-altitude flights with long 15 inches (38cm) diameter cylindrical tanks instead of larger spherical tanks. The second flight, which took place in 2012, reached 50 miles (82 kilometers), but the recovery chute did not work as planned.[22]

The third flight took place in January 2013 and the vehicle experienced a hard landing following a parachute failure-to-deploy,[7] though the launch was good.[23]

Armadillo was headed, and largely funded, by John Carmack, a developer of video games including the Doom and Quake series. During its early days, all of its employees (including Carmack) had other, full-time jobs and contributed their efforts twice weekly to Armadillo on a voluntary basis. Armadillo had a relatively small budget and was not supported by aerospace companies or agencies like NASA, ESA, or Boeing. Armadillo Aerospace publicly declared itself fully self-funded.[when?][24]

In February 2006, Carmack stated that the program to date had cost slightly over $2 million.[25] Even by the standards of X-Prize candidates, this is a low budget. Scaled Composites is estimated to have spent $25 million on its SpaceShipOne development program.

On August 8, 2006, Armadillo Aerospace announced that it had reached a sponsorship deal with NVIDIA. While details were sparse, John Carmack said, "There is a chance at this point that I may have written the last personal cheque I need to for Armadillo."[26][needs update]

In April 2008, Carmack offered an updated figure of "total cost to date, about $3.5 million". He estimated that another $2 million would be needed to achieve a manned flight to 100km using Armadillo's modular design in a "six-pack" configuration.[27]

By 2010, Armadillo had 7 full-time employees, and was profitable on ongoing operations (though Carmack was continuing to invest in development efforts).[28]

The company mascot was an armadillo named Widget.

In August 2013, Carmack indicated that following the crash of the STIG-B rocket earlier that year, he had wound down the company operations and had put the company in "hibernation mode." Armadillo had stopped accepting (profitable) contract R&D work two years prior, in order to focus on development of a suborbital reusable rocket. During those two years, Armadillo operated at an approximately US$1 million per year burn rate funded personally by Carmack. Several reasons were offered for this outcome, including a failure to adopt a multi-test-vehicle build strategy, making the loss of a single rocket more significant than it would have otherwise been.[7]

As of August 2013[update], Carmack was "actively looking for outside investors to restart work on the companys rockets".[7]

In 2015 the assets of Armadillo Aerospace were sold to EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, Inc.

Carmack stated in his monthly reports and in forum posts that he expected his path to an orbital vehicle to include modular rockets similar to OTRAG technology. Lutz Kayser, the founding engineer of OTRAG, visited Armadillo in May 2006 and loaned Carmack some of their original research hardware.

"I have been corresponding with Lutz for a few months now, and I have learned quite a few things. I seriously considered an OTRAG style massive-cluster-of-cheap-modules orbital design back when we had 98% peroxide (assumed to be a biprop with kerosene), and I have always considered it one of the viable routes to significant reduction in orbital launch costs. After really going over the trades and details with Lutz, I am quite convinced that this is the lowest development cost route to significant orbital capability. Eventually, reusable stages will take over, but I actually think that we can make it all the way to orbit on our current budget by following this path. The individual modules are less complicated than our current vehicles, and I am becoming more and more fond of high production methods over hand crafter prototypes." -- June 2006 Armadillo Aerospace Update[29]

U.S. suborbital spaceship signs up Russian space tourist. 11/10/2010

The U.S. Armadillo Aerospace company, which is developing the suborbital spaceship for space tourist flights, announced on Monday that a Russian has become its first confirmed passenger. St Petersburg resident Evgeny Kovalev won his ticket to the cosmos in a contest organized by Efes brewery.

Read this article:

Armadillo Aerospace - Wikipedia

BrahMos Aerospace to Be Indian DRDO’s Commercial Wing Abroad – Sputnik International

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Asia & Pacific

12:38 07.03.2017(updated 13:00 07.03.2017) Get short URL

Sputnik/ Ilya Bogachev

"Work started along time ago. This will be similar toANTRIX, the commercial arm ofIndian Space Research Organization (ISRO)," the source said.

BrahMos Aerospace is an Indo-Russian joint venture company inwhich DRDO has 50.5% stake and Russia's NPO Mashinostroyenia has 49.5%. The company is currently responsible fordesigning, developing, producing and marketing BrahMos supersonic missiles.

DRDO is not satisfied withefforts ofthe government-owned defense companies inpromoting DRDO's developed systems asmost ofthese companies have sufficient domestic orders and are not committed towardsexports.

DRDO wants tostay focused onits primary objective i.e. research and development, especially inareas where imports entail prohibitive costs or where India does not yet possess technologies critical formeeting the requirement ofarmed forces, butit wants a dedicated wing that can handle commercial deals togive a fillip todefense exports fromIndia.

DRDO-developed systems won the world's attention duringAero India, Bahrain International Air Show and Africa Aerospace and Defense Exhibition inSouth Africa. Following this, DRDO found the need tohave a commercial wing due toincremental demand ofits developed systems globally.

"Twenty countries have shown interest inprocuring the DRDO systems like Akash surface toair missile, BrahMos, Sonar, Underwater Acoustic Communication System, Torpedoes, Fuel Air Explosive Bomb, Thermobaric & Main Battle Tank Ammunition, Titanium Sponge, AEW&C System, and BFS Radar," said Dr S Christopher, DRDO chairman.

India has set a target of $2 billion defense exports, a six-fold increase fromcurrent exports, by2019. In order togive impetus toexports, the Narendra Modi government has allowed government-owned defense companies toearmark 10 per cent oftheir production forexports. "The biggest challenge inboosting defense exports fromIndia is the limited range ofexportable products, limited overseas markets and predominance ofdefense manufacturers who have been inthe business far longer thanIndia," Cowshish added.

BrahMos Aerospace to Be Indian DRDO's Commercial Wing Abroad - Sputnik International

Select Page ::