KySat

Voyager: heliosphere is lopsided

Voyager 2, on its way out of our solar system toward interstellar space, has relayed new information about the boundary region where the sun's solar wind, which dominates that heliosphere, ebbs, and the heliosheath begins.

The heliosphere appears to be lopsided.

If all goes well, the two Voyager craft should still have enough energy to transmit their findings as they make their way across the heliosheath and toward the heliopause, which marks the beginning of intersteller space, and area where our sun loses all influence.

NASA engineers believe that they have enough power onboard to return data until 2025, perhaps long enough to provide information after the two craft have left the solar system for good.

Wayne

Video: cubesat solar sail

As promised yesterday, here is a video of the deployment mechanism for the innovative CubeSat NanoSail-D. It's amazing how 10 square meters of sail can be packed into the space the size of three cubes.

[Update:] Dean Alhorn, the engineer in the video, wrote to say that "the actual sail and deployment mechanism is packed in the volume that is less that 2 cubes. The first cube is all electronics and batteries. The next two cubes [house] the sail, boom mechanism and some deployment electronics. There is room for 40 sq. meter of sail, but not enough volume for more boom length."

Thanks for the clarification!

Wayne

New new Worlds: "But wait, there's more!"

[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival] I enjoyed this quote from the recent article, "For Alien-Life Seekers, New Reason to Hope," regarding the results from a new sky survey:

Whether habitable or abominable, planets are inescapable. 'You make a star, you’re probably going to get planets,' said Seth Shostak, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. 'They’re like those knives that get thrown in for free when you order a Veg-o-matic.'

The idea that there might be other planets like ours orbiting distant stars is hardly new - exo-planet hunters have cataloged over 300 in the past dozen years - but the notion that Earth-sized planets might be fairly common is a more recent development. As one planetary theorist says in the article above, it's very suggestive that just as soon as astronomers were able to find low-mass planets, they found them. And as observational techniques are further refined, the detection of an exo-planet very similar in mass to ours now seems almost a matter of time.

Wayne

Wikipedia: planetary formation

Mars soil contains nutrients for life

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has performed its first wet chemistry experiment on the collected Martian soil, returning data showing that it contains many nutrients. It might just be suitable for... asparagus?

Wayne

Taking a hammer to KySat

Members of the KySat team conducted hammer tests of the cube yesterday on the campus of UK. As Tyler explains at the bottom of this post, collecting this data and comparing it with the known vibration profile of the rocket will tell the team whether any dampening needs to be added to protect the satellite during launch.

The "test pod," which simulates the P-POD system that will physically deploy the satellite, is pictured below right. The cube is inside.

The hammer tests are part of a complete testing regime that will ensure that the cube survives launch and carries out its educational mission once it is in the cold vacuum of space.

Wayne

"Stellar Horizon"

The nearest stars, other than our sun of course, can be seen in this image from CiCLOPS. Entitled "steller horizon," it depicts Alpha Centauri A and B - but not the red dwarf companion Proxima Centauri - above Saturn's ring plane. Click the image for a larger version.

CICLOPS also added this note about relative distance of the stars compared to the distance of Saturn from Earth:

From the orbit of Saturn, light (as well as Cassini's radio signal) takes little more than an hour travel to Earth. The distance to Alpha Centauri is so great that light from these stars takes more than four years to reach our solar system. Thus, although Saturn seems a distant frontier, the nearest star is almost 29,000 times farther away.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

A trio of Earths

Here is an artist's impression of the latest in a haul of planets from recent observations at the European Souther Observatory.

The image depicts a system of three "super-Earths" around the star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.

As detection techniques improve, the ability to potentially resolve exoplanets as small as Earth is becoming more likely, and, indeed, according to European astronomers about 45 new "Earth-like" planets have been uncovered by Harps, or the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher at the observatory in Chile. The new discoveries have the mass of three or four Earths.

Astronomers now believe that roughly thirty percent of the stars in the Milky Way may harbor such super-Earths, according to a New York Times article yesterday.

Scientific American has more.

Given the wealth of data being created by terrestrial observatories like Harps, space craft such as Kepler almost undoubtedly will find planets very similar in mass to our own within habitable orbits - orbits permitting the presence of liquid water - of their parent stars.

You and I are living in the Golden Age of planetary discovery.

Wayne

Top ten near-term space technologies

Next Big Future lists the top ten near-term technologies that will significantly boost existing space capabilities. The technological list includes dramatically lowered access to space, faster travel to Mars, inflatable structures and electric solar sails. It's an interesting collection of technologies that are close to reality. Check it out.

Wayne

Tiny satellites powered by Earth's magnetic field?

Saying that "as long as nobody gets hurt, a decent explosion livens up any experiment," the Physics arXiv blog reports on the failed test of a potential new propulsion idea, Lorentz Actuated Orbit. Could tiny satellites be powered by the Earth's magnetic field?

This is a project of Mason Peck, who has also been working on modular reconfigurable space craft held together by magnetic flux pinning. CubeSats might be used to test these principles.

Wayne

Phoenix a Twitter hit

In case you weren't already following along, the Phoenix's Twitter page is climbing the Twitterholic rankings and currently is the 42 most popular according to Nature.

Wayne

Phoenix Mars Lander mission offers webcast for schools

According to the Oregon Space Grant Consortium, NASA will be conducting a webcast a portion of the Phoenix Lander mission for schools on Thursday, May 22 as the robot explorer, which will touch down on Mars on May 25, nears the planet. The events of the entry, descent and landing, and the path to Mars so far will be reviewed.

Phoenix's mission is to land at the Mars' north pole, dig into the icy soil looking for the chemical building blocks of life and study the history of water.

But first it much touch down safely on the Red Planet. Here is a very well done video combining animation with expert narration of the challenge getting Phoenix to the ground:

Wayne

Future Kentucky Space

[KySat Space readers: the next couple of posts will consist of my live notes from the Kentucky Space Conference '08 session held on Wednesday in Lexington.]

Dr. Jim Lumpp, KySat faculty advisor from the University of Kentucky, will talk briefly about future missions.

Beginning with high altitude balloons, he explains that near-space can be used for a wide variety of things because at 100,000 feet, only one percent of the atmosphere is left.

"You can also look up," he says.

Suborbital missions will continue to play a part in the Kentucky Space program. As a test bed for systems, the experience is invaluable.

Displaying a picture of KySat-1, orbital missions are, of course, critical and picking up a theme of Dr. Malphrus', he says that the infrastructure being built around orbital missions is impressive.

Given enough experience, perhaps a lunar mission is possible. Could a P-Pod ride to the moon and eject a cube for lunar orbit?

The satellites being built at MIT, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley and Stanford are big - cubesats are different and KySat has discussed with each of these schools the possibility of working together to contribute cube technology being developed in-house.

Because CubeSats are such a disruptive technology, he adds, the National Science Foundation is looking to launch 3-6 missions a year to do space weather and atmospheric research.

Transitioning to the current project, KySat-1, Dr. Lumpp says that KySat-1 will be passively magnetically stabilized. Since there is nothing "to lever off of" in space, being able to point cubes will be the subject of future efforts. And he offers this thought: perhaps by inducing an electronic current, a magnetic field can be created. This field could be turned on and off. When it's off, the Earth's magnetic field can take over to passively orient the cube.

It's a brief session and in response to a question, Dr. Lumpp describes how cubes can be used for life sciences research. Pharmasat is doing an E. Coli study, for example.

In fact, he adds, it's the launch opportunities that are holding up science.

Wayne

Send your name along with exoplanet hunter

How would you like to have your name on board the craft that discovers the first Earth-sized exoplanet? Now you can. NASA has announced an opportunity for anyone to submit their name to be burned on a DVD that will accompany Kepler, scheduled for a February, 2009 launch.

The Name in Space DVD will be mounted on the exterior of the spacecraft in November 2008.  A video of the DVD being mounted on the spacecraft will be taken and posted on the Kepler mission Web site prior to the spacecraft being shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in December of this year. A copy of the DVD with all of the names and messages will be given to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Washington.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA

Meet Eris

This is an artist's conception of a new member of our solar system, the dwarf planet Eris, which is approximately three times farther from the sun than its dwarf companion, Pluto. At that distance the small body is very, very cold and the sun appears much like other stars in the Milky Way as Eris moves among the "icy wrecks" of the Kuiper Belt.

Wayne

Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Would we know life if we encountered it?

"Life" is hard to define according to NewScientist's space blog, which points out that there are more than 280 definitions on record. The subject was at the center of a lively discussion at a just-concluded SETI Institute astrobiology conference, which seems apt.

Wayne

Carnival of Space No. 50

My name is Wayne Hall and I work with the Kentucky space program. Huh? Kentucky what?!

Suffice it to say that a group of talented people are out to change the perception of what's possible in the commonwealth of Kentucky by doing hands-on space science. The very first project of this ambitious enterprise is a cooperative, student-led effort to design, build and fly a CubeSat that kids from the eastern mountains to the western Mississippi river shore can figuratively reach out and touch from classrooms all over the state. The first of many planned efforts, it will rocket to orbit sometime late this year or early next. And with that,

Welcome to the 50th edition of the Carnival of Space! From rocket racing to astronomy to particle physics to the search for intelligent life, this week features a wide variety of space-related topics. So let's dive right in.

New Frontiers has news about the Rocket Racing League and its announcement about upcoming exhibition race dates. Meanwhile, Space Transport News discusses Red Bull air races and the differences and similarities to rocket racing as well as taking some notes from the news conference.

At Altair VI, David S. F. Portree writes about the old NASA Office of Exploration Mars' and Moon vision for space exploration and has something to say about space tourism.

The Planetary Society's Emily Stewart Lakdawalla notes the stunning images of Phobos available from the Mars Express image catalog. A Babe in the Universe follows suit, pointing out that the crater Stickney is 9 km across on a moon only 22 km long. Speaking as a blogger who makes liberal use of CICLOPS and HiRISE images, the pictures coming from current robotic missions are spectacular. I'm looking forward to what MESSENGER and New Horizons might reveal.

Speaking of the planets, Stuart Atkinson at Cumbrian Sky reports on one suggestion to send monkeys to Mars. You read that right. He also provides some images of Pheonix's landing spot on the planet.

Fraser explains why Pluto is no longer a planet. Let's just say that the region beyond Neptune is awfully interesting.

Of the many satellites that dance around Sun, Neptune's Triton is probably not a world that tickles one's imagination when envisioning space colonization. But while it may be ignored as scientists chase after Mars and Titan, Neptune's Triton may in the distant future become a prime location at the edge of our solar system. Colony Worlds asks: Neptune's Triton: Is It Worth Billions, Or Trillions?

This week's Space Video at Space Feeds is the eighth episode of Firefly, Out of Gas.

At Next Big Future, Brian Wang asks whether a $153 million Thin Film Dome inflated over cities might protect against nuclear weapons or perhaps substitute for communication satellites. Russian inventor and researcher Alexander Bolonkin has developed an interesting technology that suggests all kinds of commercial possibilities.

Can Dark Matter be directly detected? Anticipating such an announcement, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel expresses his doubts at Starts with a Bang! It's a question I've also put to Star Stryder, Pamela Gay.

Astronomer Robert Simpson at Orbiting Frog contributes a post to the 50th carnival on Nebulae in 3D. He nominated another post about the late John Wheeler from Daniel Holz at the wonderful group blog Cosmic Variance. Holz movingly recalls his time with the physicist, who was conversant in biology, history and poetry. Please give it a read.

At Out of the Cradle, Ken Murphy continues his look at growing plants on the Moon with a review of the book "Lunar Base Agriculture" in part II of his article "Of a Garden on the Moon".

At Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster, who is surely link-weary from the attention this blog has paid to him, posts a story about "Life as Rarity in the Cosmos," which looks at new research suggesting that we are living rather late in the history of Earth's biosphere. If so, it might have implications for the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere. Bottom line: we might find that life itself is rather common, but intelligent life? Not so much.

Do we have anything to worry about from the Large Hadron Collider? Ian O'Neill explains that "an Earth-eating black hole is pretty much impossible."

Ever-prepared, Scouts Canada describes a variety of methods for finding direction without a compass or GPS by using the sun, stars and moon. In practical fashion, Scouts blogger Mang also lends some context to astronomical distances - the discussion includes a scale overlay of the solar system on the City of Toronto using a standard marble for Earth - and writes about modeling a micro-satellite, the Microvariability & Oscillations of STars (MOST) satellite. The MOST team has opened target proposals to the public.

Space Cynics, meanwhile, wonders how prepared Gen-Y is to contribute to the national space program.

Tyler Nordgren is educating visitors about what they learn about the solar system and universe through what they can see for themselves in the dark starry skies above the parks, as well as on the ground around them in the wonderful geological processes and features the parks protect. The most recent entry from this week at Arches National Park is found here.

Finally, at Music of the Spheres, Bruce Irving asks Why Space?, a theme that the Martian Chronicles also picks up on this week, along with providing some great Cape Verde images as seen from everyone's favorite Martian rover.

Why explore indeed! And since it's THAT time again, perhaps it's appropriate that John Benac contribute a post about Political Action for Space, the first space political action committee.

It's been a blast to host the carnival at Kentucky's space program blog this week. KySat hopes to make its own news in the near future. So please come back and please visit all the great blogs and bloggers you see listed here!

Wayne

Cassini mission gets extension

According to a JPL podcast, the Cassini mission has been extended two years, to July of 2010. Twenty-six more encounters with an "Earth-like" Titan, seven more close encounters of the geyser-moon Enceladus (artist's impression above), and three more encounters, one each, with three of the smaller moons are planned, according to Cassini project manager, Bob Mitchell.

Listen to the podcast for a mission recap and news of the extension.

Wayne

Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed

Parachuting to Mars

Unlike previous craft to land on Mars, the Mars Science Laboratory is big - very big. The Universe Today describes the challenge of lowering it through the planet's thin atmosphere to the surface of the planet.

MSL will be the first planetary mission to use precision landing techniques, using a rocket-guided entry with a heat shield to steer itself toward the Martian surface similar to the way the space shuttle controls its entry through the Earth's upper atmosphere. In this way, the spacecraft will fly to a desired location above the surface of Mars before deploying its parachute for the final landing. MSL will use a scaled-up version of parachutes used for the Viking and Mars Exploration Rovers mission. Called a Disk-Gap-Band parachute, the name describes the construction of the parachute: a disk forms the canopy, then a small gap, followed by a cylindrical band.

Carrying a science lab on board, the job of robotic craft will be to uncover evidence for whether the Martian environment could once have been favorable for microbial life.

USA Today also carries a story about the difficulties of the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Wayne

New NASA Science Site

Conveniently divvied up into "Earth," "Heliophysics," "Planets" and "Astrophysics," NASA has launched a brand new site focused on the space sciences.

Wayne

Titan haze and topology

This recently released photo of Titan clearly shows the high altitude haze layer surrounding the Saturn satellite. The atmosphere of the moon moves in superrotation, that is, faster than Titan itself rotates.

More data about the topology of the moon has also been released.

And somewhere on the surface, the Huygens' probe rests.

Wayne

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Planet formation observed?

Has planet formation been observed? Astronomers studying the young star AB Aurigae believe that maybe it has.

Wayne

Mars' "Grand Canyon"

Here is a "perspective view" of Hebes Chasma obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. According to ESA:

Hebes Chasma is an enclosed trough, almost 8000 m deep, in Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars, where water is believed to have flowed.

The Universe Today has more about these images. Photo: ESA

Wayne

Enceladus' internal heat mapped

More science from Cassini's recent fly by of Saturn's geyser-moon, Enceladus, is being made available to the public. NASA has just posted this heat map of the southern pole of the satellite.

According to the agency, there is a 200 degree swing (Fahrenheit) between the temperature at the vents and the rest of the surface of the moon.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SwRI/SSI

Solar Sail Research

James Cutler, Ph.D., a Consulting Professor at Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, recently referenced some solar sail research on a listserv that I monitor. With his permission, here are his references in case any KySat blog readers are interested:

• Systematically Creased Thin-Film Membrane Structures - pages 10-18 (Article) Alessandro Papa; Sergio Pellegrino Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets (0022-4650) 2008 vol. 45 no. 1
 
• Electric Sail Performance Analysis - pages 122-129 (Article) Giovanni Mengali; Alessandro A. Quarta; Pekka Janhunen Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets (0022-4650) 2008 vol. 45 no. 1
 
• Optimized Low-Thrust Orbit Transfer for Space Tugs - pages 151-153 (Note) Andrew Pukniel; Rodney L. Burton; Adam Jaslikowski Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets (0022-4650) 2008 vol. 45 no. 1

Thank you Dr. Cutler!

Wayne

Latest Carnival of Space online

Just a quick post to say that the latest Carnival of Space has been posted to Riding with Robots, a site the pulls in images from the various robotic missions currently underway.

Wayne

Boomerang does circle in space

In an update to an earlier post, I can report that a boomerang thrown in space does indeed circle back. I haven't seen news yet on the release of the paper airplane.

Wayne

NASA and the next generation

A newly discovered blog, Open NASA, has posted its take on a Gen-Y panel at the recent Space Exploration Conference. At issue: how to engage this generation in the space sciences and space exploration.

Wired Science and HobbeySpace have more on the session. And NASA Watch has made some very interesting slides available.

Wayne

Seeing the universe anew

Introduced in this TED video, Microsoft will soon unveil the WorldWide Telescope, which will weave feeds from satellites and telescopes into a seemless guided tour of the universe.

Wayne

Google Lunar X Prize news on YouTube

News about the major expansion of teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize has been posted to YouTube. Judging by the sheer number of hits it has received in so short a time, this business of private missions to the Moon excites a lot of people.

Wayne

How does space exploration affect you?

NASA has introduced a nice interactive graphic describing how space exploration affects each of us. Click on "NASA Home and City" for an interactive tour through the everyday items found in a typical home that have roots in the space program. The graphics and execution of the newly redesigned NASA web home is simply outstanding.

Wayne

Ultraviolet universe

Captured by the Swift satellite and made available by NASA, this is a portrait of M33, a galaxy 2.9 million light years from our own. The image is bathed in ultraviolet because that's the spectrum the instrument on Swift can see. Ultraviolet is the part of the light spectrum that will burn skin on a bright summer day.

Wayne

Planet hunter set for '09 launch

NASA's first ever spacecraft designed to look for Earth-sized planets is on track for a launch a year from this week. According to the PlanetQuest:

Kepler will detect planets indirectly, using the 'transit' method. A transit occurs each time a planet crosses the line-of-sight between the planet's parent star that it is orbiting and the observer. When this happens, the planet blocks some of the light from its star, resulting in a periodic dimming. This periodic signature is used to detect the planet and to determine its size and its orbit.

If you're interested in keeping up to date with the latest discoveries, PlanetQuest has made available a desktop widget, pictured above.

Wayne

Small sat science, big results

Universe Today carries news of successful small sat experiments that could result revolutionary technologies.

One experiment used nanotechnology to test a sensor that can detect poisonous gasses. The other experiment tested a film that changes characteristics depending on the electrical current passed through it. Both were ferried to space as part of the United States Navy Small Satellite Program, which is intended to send inexpensive craft into space to do, in part, science. In this particular instances properties of electrochromism were tested.

See the article for more on how the results might be used.

Wayne

NASA on Earth sciences

NASA has announced a media teleconference scheduled for 11a EST Friday that will discuss a couple of Earth sciences projects the agency will undertake. One mission will map soil moisture and the second will measure ice sheets and forest and vegetation biomass. An audio feed of the discussion will be made available on this page.

Wayne

Michio Kaku on Time Travel

In this "IF Conversation," Michio Kaku, leading theoretical physicist and author, discusses “Parallel Worlds and Time Travel.” This series of very brief exchanges filmed at the September 2007 IdeaFestival may also be found at IFTV on YouTube and on the IdeaFestival web site.

Wayne

Mars webinars for educators

The Oregon Space Grant consortium lists four free Mars Web seminars designed for science educators, one of which focuses on the Mars Student Imaging Project. The National Science Teachers Association has more on this opportunity.

Wayne

Mars

Open source engineering Mac apps

For any KySat readers using OS X, here are three open source applications you might want to check out: FreeMat for "rapid engineering, data processing and scientific prototyping." Yacas, a computer algebra system, and R-Project for statistical computing.

Wayne

Software

Latest Carnival of Space out

This must be the largest Carnival of Space yet. From the use of the Wii remote to teach physics, to plant extremophiles, to an explanation of redshift, there's a lot of space news and science in this edition. Check it out.

Wayne

Name that satellite

NASA is asking the public to name its Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST. The telescope is designed to peer at "extreme environments," looking for "signs of new laws of physics," including what dark matter might be.

To name that satellite, go here. According to NASA:

Anyone who drops a name into the "Name That Satellite!" suggestion box on the Web page can choose to receive a "Certificate of Participation" via return e-mail. Participants also may choose to receive the NASA press release announcing the new mission name. The announcement is expected approximately 60 days after launch of the telescope.

Wayne

Teaching physics a Wii-bit easier?

How might the Wii remote be used to teach physics? Guest blogging at one of my favorite astroblogs, Star Stryder, Dr. Lenore Horner has a few ideas and suggests DarwiinRemote (Mac), WiiRemote (Windows) and Wiili, a Linux port for the Wii (below) for those of you who like to play with software.

Motion sensors aren’t really new in teaching labs, so why did this one get me so wound up I’d spend a whole vacation teaching myself new stuff just so I could play with it? One thing is that it’s three axes and not just one. Another is that it’s relatively small and light - designed to be held and swung instead of rigidly mounted. A third is that it’s cheap enough to buy as a toy and the software is open source so I can fix it if it doesn’t do what I want - which I’ve already done some of. Lastly is the fact that the Wiimote wasn’t designed for a specific experiment, it was designed to do more or less everything and it’s up to us to find cool things to do with it....

For more on open source software for the Wiimote on all operating systems, go to the Wiili site.

This sounds like it could be just the thing for restless middle schoolers.

Wayne

HiRISE taking Mars public

According to information at HiRISE, students at a New Jersey Charter High School helped it select this image. HiRISE is responsible for the images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

In addition to click workers, who helped it do tasks that required human perception, such as the ability to recognize patterns, but not a lot of scientific background, the HiRISE project has worked to incorporate the public into its efforts. It should be commended.

If you're interested in other human-based computation efforts, see this list. The popular Galaxy Zoo, which asks ordinary individuals to help classify galaxies, is a favorite of mine.

Lastly, the HiRISE blog mentions a way to get MRO data into Google Earth. Google Mars anyone?

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Finding the strings in string theory

[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival weblog] Could the math in string theory, the most esoteric of symbolic languages, have a physical analog after all?

Found via Michio Kaku's site, an article in Physorg.com suggests that primordial strings might be found in the deepest time. Since one of the primary criticisms of string theory is that it cannot be tested and is thus not science, the news that cosmic microwave background radiation might be scanned for evidence of strings would seem to be a relatively straightforward scientific proposition.

Related, Universe Today has posted an article saying that the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to go online this spring, might generate particles "that are sensitive to the dimensions beyond our four dimensional space-time."

These exotic particles, called Kaluza-Klein gravitons, would be highly sensitive to the geometry of extra-dimensions, giving scientists an idea about what lies beyond our universe. If these particles are detected, and if their characteristics can be measured, then perhaps the extra dimensions predicted by string theory may be proven to exist…

That's a lot of ifs, of course. But the universe beyond? Now that's cool. And if you're into participatory science and you have a few extra and available computing clock cycles, you can lend a hand.

Wayne

Wikipedia: string theory

Cubesats to test self-assembly principles?

Talk about formation flying. Could CubeSats be used to demonstrate newly discovered non-contact assembly principles that might be used to build large equipment and satellites in space?

Dr. Mason Peck, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and director of the Space Systems Design Studio, is, according to Centauri Dreams 

investigating an unusual property of type II superconductors called magnetic flux pinning, which may provide an ideal technology for in-orbit self-assembly of modular spacecraft and satellite formations.

Tests have confirmed that objects can be "pinned" across a gap a few centimeters wide, but Peck would like to widen the gap "by a factor of 10 or 100."

This is where it gets interesting:

Cornell graduate student Joe Shoer hopes to launch a CubeSat demonstration of Peck’s non-contacting modular reconfigurable spacecraft design in a few years.

Guest blogging at Centauri Dreams, Larry Klaes of the Tau Zero Foundation also links to this Cornell site about modular reconfigurable spacecraft that may interest you.

Wayne

 

NASA to release new science findings, images of Mercury

Never-before-seen images of Mercury and new scientific findings about the planet will be featured at a news conference planned for Wednesday, according to NASA.

Wayne

"How to win a Nobel Prize"

Astronomy Cast is out with a couple of shows, how to win a Nobel Prize and gravitational waves. Thoroughly understanding the latter could get you the former.

Wayne

2008 launch calendar

Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today runs down the 2008 launch calendar, which includes a number of scientific missions as well as links to their respective web sites.

Wayne