Who's Visiting Who?

Every spacecraft currently exploring (or about to explore) a major solar system object (other than the Earth and Sun).

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=10990

MORE PUPS! "Pluto May Have 10 More Undiscovered Moons, Study Suggests"

 

 

"A flotilla of 10 or more tiny undiscovered moons might lurk in Pluto's orbit, complicating a spacecraft's planned flyby of the distant dwarf planet in 2015, new simulat...ions suggest.
This preliminary finding could make life even more difficult for the team planning NASA's New Horizons mission, which is slated to take the first-ever up-close look at the Pluto system in July 2015. After Pluto's fifth known moon, a small satellite known as P5, was discovered last year, officials said they may need to redraw the spacecraft's path to avoid such obstacles.
"It has our attention," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told SPACE.com via email, referring to the new research. He added he hasn't thoroughly analyzed the work yet."

Via: space.com

 

(nasa image)



 

SpaceX Grasshopper 24-Story Hover Slam 3/7/13 | Multi-Angle

"SpaceX's Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet), hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control.
Grasshopper consists of a Falcon 9 first stage and is 33.5 meters tall (110 feet). For perspective a 6 ft mannequin cowboy is on the rocket."

(SpaceX on YouTube)

The SpaceX videos are fun to watch!

Colorado Student Receives $100,000 Intel First Prize

"A high school senior who cultivated populations of algae under her loft bed won first place and $100,000 in the Intel Science Talent Search on Tuesday night. The contestant, Sara Volz,... 17, of Colorado Springs, Colo., researched ways to create populations of algae cells with high oil content; this algae oil can be converted into an economically feasible biofuel. “It’s something she’s worked on for years, and that shows a certain passion and drive that you don’t always see in heavily mentored projects,” said David Marker, a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the chairman of the judging panel. “And what really set her off was that she’s so well-rounded in all areas of science — I was able to ask her very advanced math questions that she answers easily.”

 

Second prize in the contest, $75,000, was awarded to Jonah Kallenbach, 17, of Ambler, Pa., for his project, “Characterizing and Identifying Interactions of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins.” Mr. Kallenbach’s research, in the burgeoning field of bioinformatics and genomics, focused on “disordered” regions in protein chains — areas with abnormal molecular structures. These areas eventually may serve as targets for newly developed drugs to treat diseases like breast cancer, ovarian cancer and tuberculosis.

       

Adam Bowman, 17, of Brentwood, Tenn., won third prize and $50,000 for research into less expensive ways to create ionized gases called plasmas, which have applications ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to nuclear physics. Current plasma sources are prohibitively expensive, and Mr. Bowman’s findings, which grew out of a tabletop plasma “gun” he built in his garage, could make the gases widely accessible to lower-budget institutions.

       

Rounding out the top winners were: Hannah Larson, of Eugene, Ore.; Peter Kraft, of Munster, Ind.; Kensen Shi, of College Station, Tex.; Samuel Zbarsky, of Rockville, Md.; Brittany Wenger, of Sarasota, Fla.; Akshay Padmanabha, of Collierville, Tenn.; and Sahana Vasudevan, of Palo Alto, Calif.

       

The winners were chosen from more than 1,700 entries in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search, the most prestigious high school science contest in the country. Seven of its alumni have won Nobel Prizes, 11 have received MacArthur “genius” awards, and two have received Fields Medals. Four contestants this year were profiled on Tuesday in Science Times."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/science/colorado-student-receives-100000-intel-first-prize.html?ref=science)

A revised estimate of the occurrence rate of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones around kepler m-dwarfs

(NASA PHOTO)

                                                                                

By Ravi kumar Kopparapu
(Department of Geosciences -- The Penn State University) 
(Submitted on 11 Mar 2013)

"Because of their large numbers, low mass stars may be the most abundant planet hosts in our Galaxy. Furthermore, terrestrial planets in the habitable zones (HZs) around M-dwarfs can potentially be characterized in the near future and hence may be the first such planets to be studied. Recently Dressing & Charbonneau(2013) used Kepler data and calculated the frequency of terrestrial planets in the HZ of cool stars to be 0.15^{+0.13}_{-0.06} per star for Earth-size planets (0.5-1.4 R_{Earth}). However, this estimate was derived using the Kasting et al.(1993) HZ limits, which were not valid for stars with effective temperatures lower than 3700 K. Here we update their result using new HZ limits from Kopparapu et al.(2013) for stars with effective temperatures between 2600 K and 7200 K, which includes the cool M stars in the Kepler target list. The new habitable zone boundaries increase the number of planet candidates in the habitable zone. Assuming Earth-size planets as 0.5 - 1.4 R_{Earth}, when we reanalyze their results, we obtain a terrestrial planet frequency of 0.48^{+0.12}_{-0.24} and 0.53^{+0.08}_{-0.17} planets per M-dwarf star for conservative and optimistic limits of the HZ boundaries, respectively. Assuming Earth-size planets as 0.5 - 2 R_{Earth}, the frequency increases to 0.51^{+0.10}_{-0.20} per star for the conservative estimate and to 0.61^{+0.07}_{-0.15} per star for the optimistic estimate. Within uncertainties, our optimistic estimates are in agreement with a similar optimistic estimate from the radial velocity survey of M-dwarfs (0.41^{+0.54}_{-0.13}, Bonfils et al.(2011)). So, the potential for finding Earth-like planets around M stars may be higher than previously reported." 

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1303.2649