Space Telescopes Take an Unparalleled Look into Superstar Eta Carinae – Video

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Space Telescopes Take an Unparalleled Look into Superstar Eta Carinae
Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10000 light-years. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA #39;s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,...

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Space Telescopes Take an Unparalleled Look into Superstar Eta Carinae - Video

No to space balloon flight in Singapore: CAAS

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SINGAPORE: The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore on Friday (Jan 9) disallowed the planned launch of a manned space balloon flight from Singapore because of "significant safety and operational concerns".

CAAS said in a statement that the position was conveyed to IN.Genius, the local company spearheading the launch, in late 2013.

"Given the high density of air traffic in our skies and of the populace, space balloon flights cannot be launched from Singapore due to safety risks to aircraft in the Singapore Flight Information Region, as well as to lives and property on the ground," it said.

IN.Genius had planned to send the first Singaporean into space for the country's 50th birthday as a gift to the nation. The space capsule would be launched 20km - into a region called the "Armstrong Line" or the beginning of space - using a stratospheric balloon, cruise for 30 minutes, then return to Earth by parachute and parafoil.

A dozen Singaporeans vying for the one spot to go up have been put through vigorous physical training to prepare for the trip, which was planned to coincide with Singapore's National Day in August.

The companys founder Lim Seng had called the plan a viable, proven, safe way of flying to space. The stratospheric balloons have been used by the Russians, Europeans and Americans to launch equipment into space, he said.

TOO MANY RISKS: CAAS

A space balloon has limited steering capability, moves at a relatively slow speed and is highly affected by environmental conditions such as winds. As such, it may drift from its desired flight path and pose safety risks to other aircraft, CAAS said.

To maintain a safety buffer, aircraft will have to be diverted away from a large zone around the balloon's flight path. This will require closure of the affected airspace for prolonged periods, causing severe disruption to civilian air traffic.

"Hundreds of flights and hundreds and thousands of passengers could be adversely affected," CAAS stated.

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No to space balloon flight in Singapore: CAAS

No to manned space balloon flight in Singapore: CAAS

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SINGAPORE: The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore on Friday (Jan 9) disallowed the planned launch of a manned space balloon flight from Singapore because of "significant safety and operational concerns".

CAAS said in a statement that the position was conveyed to IN.Genius, the local company spearheading the launch, in late 2013.

"Given the high density of air traffic in our skies and of the populace, space balloon flights cannot be launched from Singapore due to safety risks to aircraft in the Singapore Flight Information Region, as well as to lives and property on the ground," it said.

IN.Genius had planned to send the first Singaporean into space for the country's 50th birthday as a gift to the nation. The space capsule would be launched 20km - into a region called the "Armstrong Line" or the beginning of space - using a stratospheric balloon, cruise for 30 minutes, then return to Earth by parachute and parafoil.

A dozen Singaporeans vying for the one spot to go up have been put through vigorous physical training to prepare for the trip, which was planned to coincide with Singapore's National Day in August.

The companys founder Lim Seng had called the plan a viable, proven, safe way of flying to space. The stratospheric balloons have been used by the Russians, Europeans and Americans to launch equipment into space, he said.

TOO MANY RISKS: CAAS

A space balloon has limited steering capability, moves at a relatively slow speed and is highly affected by environmental conditions such as winds. As such, it may drift from its desired flight path and pose safety risks to other aircraft, CAAS said.

To maintain a safety buffer, aircraft will have to be diverted away from a large zone around the balloon's flight path. This will require closure of the affected airspace for prolonged periods, causing severe disruption to civilian air traffic.

"Hundreds of flights and hundreds and thousands of passengers could be adversely affected," CAAS stated.

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No to manned space balloon flight in Singapore: CAAS

Local firm not allowed to launch space balloon flight from S'pore for safety reasons

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SINGAPORE - A local company's plan to launch a space balloon with a Singaporean on board into near space from Singapore will have to be shelved, after the CAAS decided not to allow the launch from here for safety reasons.

According to The Straits Times, IN.Genius had wanted to launch the space balloon into near space on National Day.

In a statement today, CAAS said that although the idea was commendable, there were significant safety and operational concerns.

"Given the high density of air traffic in our skies and of the populace, space balloon flights cannot be launched from Singapore due to safety risks to aircraft in the Singapore Flight Information Region, as well as to lives and property on the ground," CAAS said.

CAAS also stressed that as space balloons have limited steering capability, move at a relatively slow speed, and are highly affected by environmental conditions, they may drift from their desired flight path and pose a safety risk to other aircraft.

"To maintain a safety buffer, aircraft will have to be diverted away from a large zone around the balloon's flight path, which would require closure of the affected airspace and adversely affect many flights and passengers," CAAS said.

The authority also explained that operating the balloon would entail jettisoning up to 500kg of ballast, which poses a significant danger to persons and property on the ground.

In other countries, space balloon flights were carried out in specially designated facilities far away from civilian air traffic and populated areas.

CAAS added that its position had been conveyed to IN.Genius in late 2013.

seanyap@sph.com.sg

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Local firm not allowed to launch space balloon flight from S'pore for safety reasons

Heads up, dear leader: Security hole found in North Koreas home-grown OS

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Just a simple change to an unguarded file, and anyone who uses Red Star OS can get root. Of course, that's a pretty small population of potential hackers.

North Korea is a technological island in many ways. Almost all of the country's "Internet" is run as a private network, with all connections to the greater global Internet through a collection of proxies. And the majority of the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea who have access to that network rely on the country's official operating system: a Linux variant called Red Star OS.

Red Star OS, first introduced in 2003, was originally derived from Red Hat Linux. In theory, it gave North Korea an improved level of security against outside attacka Security Enhanced Linux operating system based on Red Hat that could enforce strict government access controls on the few who got to use it.

However, because Red Star has had so few people with access to it, one of the ironic side effects has been that security holes in the operating system may have gone undetected. And as a security researcher who tested the latest release of Red Star's desktop version reported today, one flaw in the system would allow any user to elevate their privileges to those of the system's root account and bypass all those security policies put in place by the North Korean regime.

Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, which recentlyfound its way ontotorrents and various download sites as an .ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like Apple's Mac OS X (earlier versions of Red Star mimicked Windows' user interface).

But as an anonymous researcher referring to himself as "Hacker Fantastic" noted in a post today to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, it also has one significant security hole: a mistake made in permissions settings on a key file that allows anyone with access to the system to run commands as root. "Red Star 3.0 desktop ships with a world-writeable udev rules '/etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules' which can be modified to include 'RUN+=' arguments executing commands as root by udev.d," the researcher wrote.

Udev.d is a generic kernel device manager that can identify hardware "hot-plugged" into a Linux system. The rules file determines how to handle the events associated with the connection of a new device and can include commands to be launched when certain devices are connectedcommands that are run with system-level privileges. The "85-hplj10xx.rules" file is the ruleset associated with drivers for a USB-connected Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1000 series printer and is common to most Linux distributions.

That's probably not a device most North Koreans would typically hot-plug into their PCs. But because the permissions on that file are set as "world writable," any user regardless of permission levels could make changes to the rules to activate it for any device and execute any command they wanted with system-level privileges.

Ironically, there's a similar file permission error that the researcher discovered in Red Star OS 2.0's desktop version, in a different file that's even easier to abusethe system configuration file for Linux's rc utility, which manages the operating system's boot-up. That vulnerability would allow anyone to add commands to be executed during system boot--a great way to ensure that surveillance software or other malware loads up persistently.

Configuration errors like these in the default installation of North Korea's official desktop operating system suggest that there are other security flaws to be found in Red Star. And the NSA may have already found them.

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Heads up, dear leader: Security hole found in North Koreas home-grown OS

1,000 Alien Planets! NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope Hits …

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NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered its 1,000th alien planet, further cementing the prolific exoplanet-hunting mission's status as a space-science legend.

Kepler reached the milestone today (Jan. 6) with the announcement of eight newly confirmed exoplanets, bringing the mission's current alien world tally to 1,004. Kepler has found more than half of all knownexoplanetsto date, and the numbers will keep rolling in: The telescope has also spotted 3,200 additional planet candidates, and about 90 percent of them should end up being confirmed, mission scientists say.

Furthermore, a number of these future finds are likely to be small, rocky worlds with temperate, relatively hospitable surface conditions in other worlds, planets a lot like Earth. (In fact, at least two of the newly confirmed eight Kepler planets which were announced in Seattle today during the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society appear to meet that description, mission team members said.) [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

"Kepler was designed to find these Earth analogues, and we always knew that the most interesting results would come at the end,"Kepler missionscientist Natalie Batalha, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told Space.com last month.

"So we're just kind of ramping up toward those most interesting results," she added. "There's still a lot of good science to come out of Kepler."

Exoplanet science is a young field. The first world beyond our solar system wasn't confirmed until 1992, and astronomers first found alien planets around a sunlike star in 1995. [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]

The Kepler spacecraft has therefore been a revelation, and has helped lead a revolution. The $600 million mission launched in March 2009, with the aim of determining how frequently Earth-like planets occur around the Milky Way galaxy.

The telescope spots alien planets using the "transit method," watching for the telltale brightness dips caused when an orbiting planet crosses the face of its host star from Kepler's perspective.

The instrument generally needs to observe multiple transits to flag a planet candidate, which is part of the reason why the most intriguing finds are expected to come relatively late in the mission. (Several transits of a huge, close-orbiting "hot Jupiter," which has no potential to host life, can be observed relatively quickly, while it may take years to gather the required data for a more distantly orbiting, possibly Earth-like world.)

"Before, we were just kind of plucking the low-hanging fruit, and now we're getting down into the weeds, and things are getting a little harder," Batalha said. "But that's a challenge we knew we would have."

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1,000 Alien Planets! NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Hits ...

NASA, Nissan to make autonomous car by end of year

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The all-electric Nissan Leaf fitted with autonomous drive equipment allowed to park at NASAs Ames Research Center. Nissan

Japanese automaker Nissan and NASA are teaming up to advance the technology behind cars that drive autonomously.

Yokohama-based Nissan Motor Co. and NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, announced Thursday a five-year research-and-development partnership for autonomous vehicle systems so they can eventually be applied to commercially sold cars.

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Auto manufacturers displayed their newest smart car concepts at CES in Las Vegas. Features include smartwatch integration and gesture control. CN...

Nissan is excited about the potential of self-driving cars, which executives say could lead to improved safety, a pillar for future autos along with low emission technology.

NASA researchers will be working with Nissan's research unit in Silicon Valley, they said in a joint statement. Researchers from the two organizations will test a fleet of zero-emission autonomous vehicles that can be used to transport materials, goods, payloads -- and people. NASA says the tests will mirror the way the engineers operate rovers in space from a mission control center on Earth.

They said that the first vehicle of the fleet is expected begin testing at the facility by the end of 2015.

The maker of the Leaf electric car and Infiniti luxury models aims to introduce autonomous driving technology to consumers between 2016 and 2020. Ames developed the Mars rover software and robots onboard the International Space Station.

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NASA, Nissan to make autonomous car by end of year

NASA posters sell vacations on alien worlds

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Story highlights NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has produced vintage-style posters advertising trips to new planets Posters evoke golden age of travel from last century with classic art deco graphics and fonts Actual travel to newly discovered planets is unlikely for now as they're trillions of miles away

It does, after all, have two suns.

OK, so a long weekend visiting a planet 1,200 trillion miles away, may not be a realistic prospect just yet, but that hasn't stopped scientists at NASA from dreaming.

To mark the exciting discovery of a slew of potentially distant habitable worlds by its Kepler space observatory, the U.S. space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology has created a series of posters advertising imaginary vacations to some of them.

Rendered in the retro style of classic travel billboards of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, the posters depict these distant worlds as pleasurable destinations.

The image for Kepler 16-b -- previously compared to the fictional "Star Wars" planet of Tatooine because of its dual suns -- shows a space-suited figure basking in the light from the twin orbs overhead.

"Relax on Kepler 16-b," the poster says. "The land of two suns ... Where your shadow always has company."

Although the planet is depicted as a rocky, terrestrial world, NASA says it could also be a gas giant like Saturn with freezing temperatures that would make it hostile to known lifeforms.

A second poster shows an astronaut free-falling to experience the powerful gravity over HD 40307g, a "Super Earth" 44 light years -- or 264 trillion miles -- away.

Another sunny day on Kepler-16b.

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NASA posters sell vacations on alien worlds

Nissan and NASA to work on autonomous car technology

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TOKYO Japanese automaker Nissan and NASA are teaming up to advance the technology behind cars that drive autonomously.

Nissan and NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., announced this week a five-year research-and-development partnership for autonomous-vehicle systems so they eventually can be applied to commercially sold cars.

Nissan is excited about the potential of self-driving cars, which executives say could lead to improved safety, a pillar for future autos.

NASA researchers will be working with Nissan's research unit in Silicon Valley, they said in a joint statement.

The maker of the Leaf electric car and Infiniti luxury models aims to introduce autonomous-driving technology to consumers between 2016 and 2020. Ames developed the Mars rover software and robots onboard the International Space Station.

"The partnership brings together the best and brightest of NASA and Nissan, " said Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.

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Nissan and NASA to work on autonomous car technology

Nissan, NASA Team Up for Self-Driving Car Tech

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The first vehicle in the zero-emission fleet is expected to hit the test track by the end of 2015.

Nissan and NASA have partnered to build an autonomous vehicle.

The car maker and space agency on Thursday announced a five-year R&D alliance between scientists at Nissan's U.S. Silicon Valley Research Center and NASA's Ames Research Center.

The team will focus on autonomous drive systems, human-machine interface solutions, network-enabled applications, and software analysis and verification, all of which will be aided by technology typically found in road and space travel.

"The work of NASA and Nissanwith one directed to space and the other directed to Earth, is connected by similar challenges," Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said in a statement. "The partnership will accelerate Nissan's development of safe, secure, and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020."

The first vehicle in the zero-emission fleet is expected to hit the test track by the end of 2015. Trials will run similarly to how NASA operates planetary rovers from a mission control center.

By 2020, Nissan hopes to introduce self-driving cars that can navigate "in nearly all situations," including city driving, the company said.

NASA said it will benefit from Nissan's expertise in innovative component technologies and research on the development of vehicular transport applications. The space agency will also gain access to prototype systems and a provision of test beds for robotic software.

"All of our potential topics of research collaboration with Nissan are areas in which Ames has strongly contributed to major NASA programs," Ames Research Center director S. Pete Worden said.

For example, the group developed Mars rover planning software, put robots onboard the International Space Station, and built Next Generation air traffic management systems, "to name a few," Worden boasted.

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Nissan, NASA Team Up for Self-Driving Car Tech

NASA, Nissan team up to make self-driving, emission-free vehicles

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January 9, 2015

John Hopton for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

NASA has announced that it will work on a five-year project with automakers Nissan, to develop and test zero-emission, autonomous cars that they hope will change the face of Earthly driving as well as improving vehicles in space.

The project will be based in Silicon Valley, where Nissans research center in Sunnyvale is a stones throw from NASAs Ames Research Center. NASAs unparalleled level of expertise when it comes to engineering, robotics, and making reliable, durable machines will combine with work Nissan has already begun on creating autonomous vehicles.

While NASAs vehicles have done a remarkable job of negotiating galactic terrains, Nissan can bring their knowledge of taking on the urban environment with quickly-reacting vehicles. NASA may have made it to Mars, but its rovers never had to contend with cyclists, stop signs and pedestrians wandering across the street while playing on their phones.

This is a perfect blend of the capability of what the robotics folks at NASA Ames have and the autonomy that we bring, Nissans Maarten Sierhuis told Wired. Sierhuis is the director of Nissans Silicon Valley research center and also spent ten years as a NASA senior scientist. While NASAs space vehicles demonstrate an astonishing level of technological advancement, they are not entirely autonomous. However, they may need to be more to be more autonomous in future as space exploration expands and the machines become more complex.

The timing is right because we are ready to start testing, Sierhuis added.

NASA can teach automakers a lot about the interaction between man and machine, says Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. In a statement that encapsulates the magnitude of the project and its ambitions, he says that: When we talk about autonomous drive, were transforming the relationship between the driver and the car from a master to slave, to a kind of partner.

The first stage for the project is to extend the maps Nissan uses in its autonomous driving simulator, which currently cover the immediate area around its research center, to include the Ames campus. The aim then is to have a car on the road by the end of 2015, which can be improved upon over five years.

We gain time, we gain knowledge, we gain expertise, Ghosn says. Thats what the whole thing is aboutmoving as fast as we can.

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NASA, Nissan team up to make self-driving, emission-free vehicles

NASA and Nissan team up to develop self-driving cars and space rovers

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NASA and Nissan believe they've got a lot to learn from each other when it comes to autonomous vehicle technology. So, the two have decided to team up for the next five years and develop a self-driving system that they can use not just on Earth, but also in space. A team of scientists from both organizations will design an autonomous vehicle technology at the NASA Ames Research Center, home to Moffett Field, where Google is also testing its self-driving auto prototypes. The duo will start by conjuring up a fleet of zero-emission robotic cars, presumably modified Nissan Leafs, as that's exactly what's pictured above. They expect to start test driving the first one by the end of 2015.

Nissan has long been working onself-driving cars, even testing an autonomous Leafon Japanese roads in 2013. But company CEO Carlos Ghosn thinks NASA, which has a great track record building durable space rovers controlled from Earth, can teach the automaker how to create a more reliable human-machine interface. NASA, on the other hand, aims to pick up pointers on how to properly incorporate self-driving technology into vehicles. The agency plans to build autonomous rovers for use in locations farther or more dangerous than Mars.

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NASA and Nissan team up to develop self-driving cars and space rovers