The Sky Tonight

February 04, 2016

Luxembourg's ultimate offshore investment: Space mining
Luxembourg (AFP) Feb 3, 2016
Luxembourg positioned itself Wednesday to pioneer the potentially lucrative business of mining asteroids in space for precious metals such as gold, platinum and tungsten. The government announced steps to create a legal framework for exploiting resources beyond Earth's atmosphere, and said it welcomed private investors and other nations. With a well-established satellite industry, Luxembourg is the first country in Europe to stake out rights for the mining of so-called "near-Earth objects," acco ... read more

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Philae comet probe: World prepares for final farewell In November 2014, a brave explorer on a daring mission strapped on a pair of studded boots and a hard hat, stuffed a cheese sandwich and a compass into a backpack, and leapt from a spacecraft. ... more		Small Asteroid to Pass Close to Earth March 5 A small asteroid that two years ago flew past Earth at a comfortable distance of about 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers) will safely fly by our planet again in a few weeks, though this time i ... more		Galactic center's gamma rays unlikely to originate from dark matter, evidence shows Bursts of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy are not likely to be signals of dark matter but rather other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, accord ... more
				ASU satellite selected for NASA Space Launch System's first flight The first flight of NASA's new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), will carry 13 low-cost CubeSats, including one from Arizona State University, to test innovative ideas along with an uncrewed Or ... more		Polar vortices observed in ferroelectric The observation in a ferroelectric material of "polar vortices" that appear to be the electrical cousins of magnetic skyrmions holds intriguing possibilities for advanced electronic devices. These p ... more

Heliophysics CubeSat to launch on NASA's SLS Just a bit bigger than a box of cereal, one of the first CubeSats to travel in interplanetary space will be NASA's miniature space science station, dedicated to studying the dynamic particles and ma ... more		Lunar Flashlight selected to fly as secondary payload on Exploration Mission-1 NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems Division recently selected the Lunar Flashlight CubeSat as a secondary payload to fly aboard the Space Launch System's Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) flight. Lunar ... more		Sidekick autonomy software guides YFQ-42A test mission for CCA program Infleqtion lists shares on NYSE as neutral atom quantum firm Top Chinese gaming companies continue to challenge		CuSP will observe solar energetic particles in outer space NASA announced that a miniature solar particle research spacecraft to be built by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) will launch aboard NASA's Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) rocket in 2018. The ... more
				Saturn's rings: less than meets the eye It seems intuitive that an opaque material should contain more stuff than a more translucent substance. For example, muddier water has more suspended particles of dirt in it than clearer water. Like ... more		Blast from black hole in a galaxy far, far away The Star Wars franchise has featured the fictitious "Death Star," which can shoot powerful beams of radiation across space. The universe, however, produces phenomena that often surpass what science ... more

Military Radar Summit 2016 - Washington DC - February 29

Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison & Memory Foam Mattress Review

Scientists debate likelihood of finding life on other planets In a debate hosted by the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, six scientists argued whether remote sensing will reveal evidence of extant life on an exoplanet-any planet outside our solar syst ... more		Will Space Debris be Responsible for World War III? In recent weeks there has been a bit of speculation that collisions between active satellites and space debris could spark WW III. Vitaly Adushkin from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of ... more		Solar-driven ionosphere charges may nudge stressed faults toward rupture Stable black carbon in mangrove soils boosts coastal climate role Low crystallinity iron minerals show promise for chromium cleanup and carbon storage		Novel Calibration Tool Will Help Astronomers Look for Habitable Exoplanets Promising new calibration tools, called laser frequency combs, could allow astronomers to take a major step in discovering and characterizing earthlike planets around other stars. These devices gene ... more
Bright sparks shed new light on the dark matter riddle The origin of matter in the universe has puzzled physicists for generations. Today, we know that matter only accounts for 5% of our universe; another 25% is constituted of dark matter. And the remai ... more		Space-Earth System Produces Highest-Resolution Astronomical Image Using an orbiting radio-astronomy satellite combined with 15 ground-based radio telescopes, astronomers have made the highest-resolution, or most-detailed, astronomical image yet, revealing new insi ... more		Scripps-led team discovers 4 new deep-sea worm species A pink flatworm-like animal known by a single species found in waters off Sweden has puzzled biologists for nearly six decades. New discoveries half a world away by a team of scientists from Scripps ... more		New Animation Takes a Colorful Flight Over Ceres A colorful new animation shows a simulated flight over the surface of dwarf planet Ceres, based on images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The movie shows Ceres in enhanced color, which helps to h ... more

	Phase of the moon affects amount of rainfall When the moon is high in the sky, it creates bulges in the planet's atmosphere that creates imperceptible changes in the amount of rain that falls below. New University of Washington research ... more		Understanding the magnetic sun The surface of the sun writhes and dances. Far from the still, whitish-yellow disk it appears to be from the ground, the sun sports twisting, towering loops and swirling cyclones that reach into the ... more

AALTO plans Zephyr stratospheric hub in northern Australia and seeks local payload partners

Ancient guano drove Chincha coastal power

UAH lands first DARPA award for biological sciences department

Hubble Finds Misbehaving Spiral		Antarctic fungi survive Martian conditions on the International Space Station		A new magnetoresistance effect occurring in materials with strong spin-orbit coupling		Astronomers discover largest solar system		Giant gas cloud boomeranging back into Milky Way
Galaxy cluster environment not dictated by its mass alone		A new quantum approach to big data		LISA Pathfinder Thrusters Operated Successfully		Galaxy Clusters Reveal New Dark Matter Insights		Making new stars by 'adopting' stray cosmic gases

Ceres: Keeping Well-Guarded Secrets for 215 Years

The Milky Way's clean and tidy galactic neighbor

NASA assigns early design contracts for Asteroid Redirect mission

Anti-hydrogen origin revealed by collision simulation

Solving hard quantum problems: Everything is connected

Integral X-rays Earth's aurora

Cassini Heads for 'Higher Ground' at Saturn

Advanced Civilizations Could Thrive in Chaotic Star Clusters

The aliens are silent because they're dead

How to clock the beginning of the Universe

Watching electrons cool in 30 quadrillionths of a second

Lonely Planet Finds a Mum a Trillion Km Away

Understanding Universe's Secrets with Euclid Spacecraft

Microsoft donates cloud computing 'worth $1 bn'

In galaxy clustering, mass may not be the only thing that matters

New Theory Turns Back Clock on Conditions Behind Universe's Origin

Quantum knots are real

How the first stars sprung to life in early universe

LISA Pathfinder arrives at its worksite

Voyager Mission Celebrates 30 Years Since Uranus

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