http://discovermagazine.com Science, Technology, and The Future http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash/spacetrash.jpg" align="right" alt="">Colliding satellites add to the expanding mass of junk in space. <p>In 2009, after two telecom satellites smashed into each other, the U.S. National Research Council commissioned a team of experts to examine whether NASA was doing enough to address the growing problem of space junk. When it came time to pick the chair of the panel, the choice was obvious: Don Kessler, a 71-year-old retired NASA scientist who has been warning the world about orbital debris for more than 30 years.</p> <p>Kessler grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer but had no money for college, so he joined the Army. After he got out in 1961, he returned home to Houston, where NASA had recently established its manned spaceflight headquarters. Kessler was accepted into the agency’s cooperative education program, which allowed him to earn a degree in physics.</p> <p>He started out studying meteoroids, but his attention soon shifted to debris from space launches. By 1978 he had published his landmark paper, “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites,” detailing the science behind what is now unofficially known as the Kessler Syndrome: Space junk collides with other space junk, producing more and more fragments, until the debris eventually renders low Earth orbit (within about 1,000 miles of Earth’s surface) impassable. Junk was sparse in the 1970s, though, and people tended to think of low orbit as part of infinite space. “Nobody believed it initially,” Kessler says...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash/key_image Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0500 Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe/opener.jpg" align="right" alt=""> <p>Next year will be a doozy for doomsayers. depending on the prophecy, the world is predestined to expire by means of a solar storm, asteroid strike, rogue-planet collision, plague, falling stars, earthquake, debt crisis, or some combination thereof. Of course, nobody seems to be preparing for any of these impending 2012 apocalypses, with the exception of a porn studio reportedly building a clothing-optional underground bunker.</p> <p>And why should we? Scientifically speaking, the prophecies are strictly ballyhoo. Physicists can do a lot better. When it comes to end-times scenarios, cosmological data-crunchers have at their disposal far more meaningful prognostication tools that can tell us how it’s really going to end—not just Earth, but the whole universe. Best of all, they can tell us how to survive it.</p> <p>Science, oddly, is a lot better at predicting things like the death of stars than next week’s weather. The same laws of physics that enable scientists to study the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago also allow them to gaze into the future with great precision. And few people have peered farther than University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Greg Laughlin, science’s leading soothsayer. As a graduate student in 1992, he was plugging away at a simple computer simulation of star formation when he broke for lunch and accidentally left the simulation running. When he returned an hour later, the simulation had advanced 100 million billion years, much further into the future than most scientists ever think (or dare) to explore.</p> <p>The program itself didn’t reveal anything terribly startling—the simulated star had long since gone cold and died—but Laughlin was intrigued by the concept of using physical simulations to traverse enormous gulfs of time. “It opened my eyes to the fact that things are going to evolve and are still going to be there in timescales that dwarf the current age of the universe,” he says.</p> <p>Four years later, still fascinated, Laughlin teamed up with Fred Adams, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, to investigate the future of the universe more rigorously. Working in their spare time, the two researchers coauthored a 57-page paper in the journal<i> Reviews of Modern Physics</i> that detailed a succession of future apocalypses: the death of the sun, the end of the stars, and multiple scenarios for the fate of the universe as a whole.</p> <p><b><i>The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.</i></b></p> Andrew Grant; illustration by Chris Gall http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe/key_image Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:15:00 -0500 Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:15:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96 <p>
When <i>Atlantis</i> came back to Earth last July, marking the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, many lamented the passing of NASA’s big-dreams era (see Top 100 <a href="http://72.32.204.61/2012/jan-feb/06" class="external-link">story #6, a memorial for the space shuttle</a>). The cover of <i>The Economist</i> even went so far as to proclaim “the end of the space age.” But that’s about as far from the truth as Earth is from Mars. We are in fact at the dawn of what might be called Space Age 2.0, in which private citizens will soon be making regular flights to suborbit. Many would therefore argue that the seminal event in spaceflight last year was not the final mission of <i>Atlantis</i> but the continuing evolution of <i>SpaceShipTwo</i>, Virgin Galactic’s two-pilot, six-passenger spacefaring rocket ship...</p> Sam Howe Verhovek http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:55:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:55:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88 <p><img alt="gamma ray map" src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88/cosmos.jpg"></p> <p>This is the night sky as seen in gamma rays, radiation emitted by the most energetic objects in the universe. The bright streak across the middle 
shows where high-speed particles collide with gas and dust scattered between 
the stars of the Milky Way. Pulsars and supernova remnants—relics 
of exploded stars—show up as bright dots close to the centerline. Many of the red spots above and below are distant, active galaxies where massive black holes stir up gas and sling it around at close to the speed of light...</p> <p><i>Image: NASA/DOE/FERMI LAT Collaboration</i></p> Mary Beth Griggs http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79 <p>The discovery of planets orbiting other stars has made headlines in the past few years. But 2011 also brought a much stranger brand of planet news: In May astronomers announced that they had discovered 10 worlds orbiting nothing at all...</p> Gillian Conahan http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75 <p>Dramatic images of dried-up floodplains and apparent riverbeds have most astronomers convinced that liquid water once gushed on Mars, perhaps supporting ancient life. But last summer NASA astronomers announced that water may still be flowing on the Red Planet...</p> Adam Hadhazy http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:45:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:45:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66 <p>Last August NASA scientists offered a first look at a peculiar class of stellar wallflowers called Y dwarfs. Unlike typical stars, which burn steadily at thousands of degrees, the warmest of these Jupiter-size objects are just hot enough to bake cookies—and the coolest barely break room temperature...</p> Gillian Conahan
 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53 <p>The platinum in your wedding 
ring and the gold in your dental fillings most likely arrived on Earth in a furious meteoric bombardment 200 million years after the planet’s formation, University of Bristol geologist Matthias Willbold reports. According to standard planetary formation models, the gold, platinum, and tungsten that were present when Earth was born should have quickly bonded to iron and sunk into the planet’s core. Those precious metals are thousands of times more prevalent on the surface of Earth and in its mantle than the models predict...</p> Elizabeth Svoboda http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52 <p> When astronomers caught their first glimpse of the superstorm that swept Saturn last year, it appeared as just a small dot on the planet’s hazy surface. Within a few weeks, the dot had transformed into a monster tempest, spawning a vortex nearly as wide as Earth and lightning strikes 10,000 times as energetic as those of terrestrial storms...</p> Jennifer Barone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:35:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:35:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41 <p>The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, was obliterated on September 23 after a productive and unexpectedly long scientific life. It was 20 years old. The cause of death was atmospheric drag...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:30:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:30:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37 <p>The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that a major solar storm could cause $2 trillion in damages, frying GPS satellites and short-circuiting electrical grids. Many of those storms originate at sunspots, dark blemishes on the sun’s surface that are wellsprings of magnetic activity. But help is on the way: Last August scientists reported the first successful predictions of individual sunspots days before they appeared, opening up the possibility of accurately forecasting severe space weather...</p> Adam Hadhazy http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:20:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:20:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33 <p>The most complete census of near-earth asteroids has sharply reduced the estimated risk that a giant rock will collide with our planet and drive humans—like the dinosaurs before them—into extinction...</p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:15:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:15:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25 <p><i>Laurel, Maryland—</i>On the appointed afternoon last March 17, as the Messenger spacecraft prepared to insert itself into orbit around Mercury, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory braced for hundreds of visitors intent on sharing the historic moment. The lab—called by its acronym APL (rhymes with JPL, as in the NASA facility on the West Coast)—lies on a bucolic campus halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Most of the facility’s 400 acres are restricted, including the areas dedicated to the construction of marvels such as Messenger and the New Horizons spacecraft now heading for a 2015 rendezvous with Pluto. Aside from anxiously anticipating the evening’s crucial maneuver, Messenger project manager Peter Bedini was concerned about granting his official guests the prime viewing positions they coveted inside the tense, cramped quarters of the Mission Operations Center, APL’s version of Mission Control.</p> <p>The difficulty of orbiting Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet, has discouraged attempts until now. To catch Mercury in its tight orbit around the sun, a spacecraft must change speed by more than 60,000 miles an hour after leaving Earth, difficult to do with rocket propulsion alone...</p> Dava Sobel http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:10:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:10:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23 <p>Earth’s closest celestial neighbor has a secret, violent past, judging from two reports published last August in the journal <i>Nature</i>. One finding may explain the moon’s peculiar two-faced quality. In the 1960s early space probes showed that the lunar farside—the half never seen from Earth—is covered with steep, scarred mountains and none of the broad, flat volcanic “seas” that mark the side that points toward us. Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, traces this split personality back to a time when Earth had not one moon but two...</p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:05:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:05:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16 <p>After traveling four years and 1.7 billion miles, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta last July, the first stop on its tour of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Until Dawn’s arrival, the only clues about Vesta came from grainy telescope images and meteorites that had fallen to Earth, many of which are believed to have come from the giant asteroid. Dawn’s 1-million-pixel photographs are quickly revealing that Vesta’s landscape is surprisingly complex for a floating rock the size of New Mexico. “Seeing the surface up close for the first time, in its true glory, is amazing,” says lead scientist Christopher Russell. “We’re in awe”...</p> Jennifer Barone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12 On September 29, the flames of a Long March-2FT1 rocket lit the night sky over the Gobi Desert as China launched its Tiangong-1 space lab, a first step toward the construction and deployment of an orbiting manned space station by 2020. That happens to be the year when the International Space Station will be retired and sent on a fiery trajectory into the Pacific Ocean. If everything proceeds according to schedule, China will then be operating the world’s only space station... Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:55:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:55:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/06 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/06 <p>The space shuttle, which long served NASA and humankind as a low-Earth-orbit 18-wheeler, died on July 21 at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after gliding to an uneventful touchdown from a routine mission. It was 39 years old. The shuttle program had been suffering for several years from a wasting loss of enthusiasm for its high price tag and untamed risks. The final cause of death was failure to find any reason to keep pouring billions of dollars into an obsolete space ferry that lacked a stirring mission...</p> David H. Freedman http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/06/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:50:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/04 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/04 <p>Last September NASA held 
a press conference at the Ames Research Center in California to announce a surprising finding from the Kepler observatory. Astronomers had discovered a planet revolving around a binary star—two stars orbiting one another. For many, the discovery of the planet, dubbed Kepler-16b, brought to mind Tatooine, the home world of Luke Skywalker in <i>Star Wars</i>. Fans remember him gazing dreamily across the sandy landscape at a double sunset in the first film. When George Lucas wrote the scene, astronomers doubted that such a planet could exist—they thought the gravitational whirlpool from its two stars would devour it or catapult it into interstellar space. Now science has caught up...</p> <p><b><i>The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.</i></b></p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/04/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:45:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:45:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/02-computer-program-draws-realistic-exoplanets http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/02-computer-program-draws-realistic-exoplanets <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/02-computer-program-draws-realistic-exoplanets/85512b.jpg" align="right" alt=""> <p>When astronomers discover a planet orbiting another star, they can easily deduce its size, temperature, and chemical makeup. But even the most powerful telescope cannot relate what the planet truly looks like. For that, scientists have historically relied on artistic interpretations. Now physicist Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has developed a more accurate resource: software that transforms a constellation of data points into a realistic planetary portrait.</p> <p>The program, called the Scientific Exoplanet Renderer, or SER, takes in observational information about the planet and its parent star, crunches the numbers in various physical models, and spits out an approx­imate likeness...</p> Valerie Ross http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/02-computer-program-draws-realistic-exoplanets/key_image Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:10:00 -0500 Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:10:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/11-destination-science-yeager-speeding-aliens-missing-pilots-drinking http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/11-destination-science-yeager-speeding-aliens-missing-pilots-drinking <p><b>WHERE: 
</b>California’s 
Mojave Desert</p> <p><b>WHAT
: </b>Tour A Restricted 
Air Force Base</p> <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/11-science/eafb.jpg" align="right" alt=""></p> <p><i><b>Aviation Vacation 
</b></i></p> <p>I’ve been fascinated with Edwards Air Force Base ever since I saw Sam Shepard play Chuck Yeager in <i>The Right Stuff</i>. The legendary pilot took off from Edwards, situated deep in California’s Mojave Desert, when he first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The base has played a vital role in the space age ever since. Edwards test pilots were the first to fly high enough to see the curvature of Earth, and NASA used the base’s runways for 57 of the 135 space shuttle landings.</p> <p>The shuttle will never touch down there again and Yeager’s flying days are long past, but Edwards remains the nation’s premier aerospace testing facility. As a travel destination, it’s a must-see for aviation buffs and for people like me who are simply curious about the history and future of the country’s military and civilian aerospace programs. The vast majority of U.S. military planes must prove their worth at Edwards. The base is also home to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Test Center, a civilian research station established in 1946 to develop new aerospace designs, including the X-1, the craft Yeager piloted. Today NASA maintains a fleet of aircraft there with a decidedly nonmilitary focus, investigating the science of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, and astronomy.</p> <p>The base is just two hours northeast of my home in Los Angeles, close enough that from my patio I could hear the sonic boom of the space shuttle as it re-entered the atmosphere. This spring, using the “enrichment” of my 5-year-old stepson as added motivation, I <a href="http://www.edwards.af.mil/">signed up online</> to attend one of the free, twice-monthly tours of Edwards. Short of enlisting with the Air Force or becoming a crack NASA engineer, these tightly controlled visits are the only way to access the base...</p> <p><i>In a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, a Global Hawk drone is subjected to strong electromagnetic fields to assess its durability. Courtesy Chad Bellay/Air Force Photo</i></p> Leeaundra Keany
 http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/11-destination-science-yeager-speeding-aliens-missing-pilots-drinking/key_image Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:50:00 -0500 Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/06-russias-super-sensitive-telescope-wee http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/06-russias-super-sensitive-telescope-wee <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/06-russias-super-sensitive-telescope-wee/superscope.jpg" align="right" alt="RadioAstron telescope">A RadioAstron model points skyward in a Russian lab.<br><br>Courtesy Astro Space Center</p> <p>Only in the Brobdingnagian world of radio telescopes is an 8,000-pound, 33-foot dish considered something of a runt. But while the new Russian space observatory, RadioAstron, is only a thirtieth the size of the largest radio telescopes on Earth, it could reveal more about the universe than any of them.</p> <p>How? It has better perspective. Russia launched the satellite on July 18 into an orbit that will stretch 200,000 miles from Earth. From this distance, more than 25 times the diameter of the planet, RadioAstron will claim the title of most powerful radio telescope ever created by virtue of something called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This technique combines disparate radio signals from distant telescopes to produce images of far greater resolution than what any one scope can manage. The bigger the baseline, or distance between telescopes, the higher the resolution. RadioAstron’s baseline will be more than 10 times as great as the previous longest, achieved by Japan’s VLBI Space Observatory Programme...</p> Joseph A. Bernstein http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/06-russias-super-sensitive-telescope-wee/key_image Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-out-of-the-blue-into-the-black http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-out-of-the-blue-into-the-black <p><img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-out-of-the-blue-into-the-black/vg.jpg" alt=""></p> <p>Early one clear, still morning this past May, I slipped out of the funky old hot-springs town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and headed southeast into the high desert. As a reddish sky gave way to sunrise over the San Andres Mountains, I crossed a stretch of arid wilderness so harsh and unforgiving that 17th-century Spanish explorers called it the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jornada_del_Muerto">Jornada del Muerto</a>: the Journey of the Dead Man. The bumpy country road wound deeper into the scrubland until at last an undulating shape appeared in the distance. As I got closer, I could see it was in fact a hangar, shaped a bit like a giant crab, built into a berm. Just beyond it, a tabletop-flat slab of concrete runway stretched for two miles. There, on an arid patch of land surrounded by ancient mesas, was my destination: <a href="http://www.spaceportamerica.com/">Spaceport America</a>, the world’s first complex built solely for commercial space exploration.</p> <p>The day’s main event was the launch of a 20-foot-tall rocket owned by Colorado-based <a href="http://www.upaerospace.us.com/">UP Aerospace</a>, one of two permanent tenants at the state-run facility. Clouds of dirt, dust, and flames billowed out from beneath the craft as it lifted. No one was aboard, unless you count the cremated remains of about 20 people. Relatives of the dead had paid up to $1,295 so that a gram or more of their beloved’s ashes could take a ride aboard a rocket that briefly touched the face of the cosmos, peaking 73.5 miles above Earth, before dropping back down to the ground a half hour later. The rest of the rocket’s manifest was a collection worthy of a bazaar in Marrakech: wedding rings from Tokyo, Harley-Davidson pins from a local motorcycle dealer, and a flag from a Swedish high school, with room left over for a classified U.S. Air Force parcel and 27 student science experiments. One experiment tested the effects of electricity harnessed from mechanical vibrations on a New Mexican–grown chili pepper (not enough to cook it thoroughly, it turned out); another examined how high up a cell phone and a satellite phone could go before they stopped receiving text messages. Such is the offbeat nature of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.</p> <p>After it all whooshed into the clouds without incident, hundreds of schoolchildren cheered exuberantly, and UP Aerospace was celebrating its eighth successful launch in four years. The launch also marked a small victory for the politicians of New Mexico who created Spaceport America in 2004 with more than $200 million in taxpayer dollars as part of an ambitious plan to capitalize on new technology and stimulate economic growth. (Florida, California, Texas, and Oklahoma are also vying for a piece of the private space business.) UP Aerospace is the spaceport’s most active lessee, but state officials, who are now grappling with a projected $450 million shortfall for 2012, are pinning their investment hopes on the facility’s other, much bigger, and far more celebrated client. That would be <a href="http://www.virgingalactic.com/">Virgin Galactic</a> (VG), the pet project of British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, whose nascent spaceliner may be just a year or two away from becoming the first private company to blast paying passengers into space...</p> <p><i>Image: SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. Courtesy of Spaceport America.</i></p> Sam Howe Verhovek http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-out-of-the-blue-into-the-black/key_image Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:55:00 -0400 Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:55:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-one-giant-leap-for-machine-kind http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-one-giant-leap-for-machine-kind <p><img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-one-giant-leap-for-machine-kind/rover.jpg" alt="Curiosity Mars rover"></p> <p>The robots are out there, dozens of them, going where their soft-bodied, oxygen-breathing creators can’t or won’t anytime soon. They own space. While a handful of humans hunker down in near-Earth orbit in the International Space Station, an aging craft conceived in the Reagan era, unmanned machines at this very moment are orbiting Mercury, trundling across the sands of Mars, even preparing to leave the confines of the solar system.</p> <p>The space station is a thing of beauty in its way, the apotheosis of Apollo-style technology. But in terms of scientific achievements it suffers in comparison with NASA’s spaceborne fleet of robots—currently 55 strong—especially given the large funding gap that has always existed between the manned and unmanned space programs. NASA’s budget for 2012 provides about $4.5 billion for robotic space science, versus $8.3 billion for human space exploration, almost $3 billion of which goes to the station alone. And that is the outlay for a NASA without shuttle flights or plans to send people back to the moon.</p> <p>Noble as human exploration may be, we would know very little about anything in the cosmos much more distant than the moon were it not for robotic explorers. Through them we have learned of lava plains on Venus, a buried ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa, lakes of methane on Saturn’s moon Titan, and salty geysers on another Saturnian moon, Enceladus. And manned missions? Since the Apollo moon landing of 1969, NASA has mostly confirmed what it knew from the outset, which is that hurtling humans deep into space is expensive, dangerous and, for the foreseeable future, beyond reach. The reality is, when it comes to carrying out serious space science, humans simply can’t compete with spacefaring hardware. And that is probably not going to happen in our lifetime...</p> <p><i>Image: Curiosity, NASA's new Mars rover, under construction. A shell of graphite and aluminum will shield the robot's electronics from heat. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-CALTECH</i></p> Tim Folger http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/11-one-giant-leap-for-machine-kind/key_image Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:15:00 -0400 Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:15:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/oct/13-next-gen-honking-big-recession-proof-alien-hunting http://discovermagazine.com/2011/oct/13-next-gen-honking-big-recession-proof-alien-hunting <p class="imgcapright"><img kupu-src="http://72.32.204.61/2011/oct/13-next-gen-honking-big-recession-proof-alien-hunting/dishes.jpg" class="inline" src="dishes.jpg" alt="">SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions</p> <p>This spring, the Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, a cluster of 42 radio astronomy dishes about 300 miles north of San Francisco, became the latest science casualty of California’s budget crisis, when the University of California, Berkeley, pulled its funding for the project. The ATA had operated as a listening station for alien transmissions for four years, and its loss was to be a significant hit to our hopes of finding little green men.</p> <p>Within a few months, however, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (which ran the ATA with UC) <a style="" class="external-link" href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/08/7309356-donations-revive-seti-quest">managed to raise $200,000</a> through public donations, enough to keep the telescope going for the near future.<br></p> <p>With some luck (and money), the ATA will continue its search for extraterrestrial civilizations at least through 2016, when there will be a new, much bigger kid on the block: the $2.1 billion <a style="" class="external-link" href="http://www.skatelescope.org/">Square Kilometre Array</a>, or SKA, a collaboration among 70 organizations in 20 countries...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2011/oct/13-next-gen-honking-big-recession-proof-alien-hunting/key_image Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:05:00 -0400 Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:05:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/photos/15-dont-send-astronaut-do-space-robot-job http://discovermagazine.com/photos/15-dont-send-astronaut-do-space-robot-job <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/photos/15-dont-send-astronaut-do-space-robot-job">Click through to view gallery</a> http://discovermagazine.com/photos/15-dont-send-astronaut-do-space-robot-job/key_image Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:00 -0400 Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:00 -0400 Photo Gallery