Space

r/space – Likely Breakup of an Indonesian Commsat Over Guam. Chinese Long March-3B/G2 Failed During 3rd Stage

Oh dear – another one disintegrates over Guam

Source: www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/fxtfx9/likely_breakup_of_an_indonesian_commsat_over_guam/

 

50 Years Ago: NASA Cancels Apollo 20 Mission

50 Years Ago: NASA Cancels Apollo 20 Mission

Source: www.nasa.gov/feature/50-years-ago-nasa-cancels-apollo-20-mission/

Computer searches telescope data for evidence of distant planets

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets.

Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone.

In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time. The researchers also trained their system to rate debris disks according to their likelihood of containing detectable exoplanets. In a paper describing the new work in the journal Astronomy and Computing, the MIT researchers report that their system identified 367 previously unexamined celestial objects as particularly promising candidates for further study.

The work represents an unusual approach to machine learning, which has been championed by one of the paper’s coauthors, Victor Pankratius, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory. Typically, a machine-learning system will comb through a wealth of training data, looking for consistent correlations between features of the data and some label applied by a human analyst — in this case, stars circled by debris disks.

Source: news.mit.edu/2018/computer-searches-telescope-data-evidence-distant-planets-0330

Very interesting read about the microprocessors used in various spacecraft . Throughout the years, microprocessors have played a large role in spacecrafts. space-qualified microprocessors are designed to be exceptionally reliable and highly durable. Due to their unique nature, the same set of chips that have been tested and proven to work are used in many spacecrafts. 

microprocessors used in spacecrafts

 

New Horizons

There’s a very good reason – it wasn’t discovered until 1992. At that stage, Voyager 1 was almost all the way across the the Kuiper Belt and Voyager 2 halfway through it!

Source: pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Perspectives.php?page=piPerspective_02_28_2018

From the article – 

“But, perhaps most important is the question: could Voyager have flown by a small KBO as New Horizons will do this December and January? Regrettably, the answer is no, for a number of reasons. First, even once the Kuiper Belt had been detected in 1992, the Hubble Space Telescope (the only telescope capable of finding such distant flyby targets, even today) hadn’t been repaired to properly focus light. That repair didn’t occur until December 1993. By then, Voyager 1 was exiting the Kuiper Belt near 55 AU, and Voyager 2 was near 42 AU. But even after its repair, the Hubble wasn’t sensitive enough to detect KBOs as small and common as MU69, so there would have been no way to find a flyby target—that capability only came in 2009, when a more advanced and sensitive wide-field camera was placed aboard the Hubble during a servicing mission.”

Launceston planetarium marks 50 years

Time stands still for Launceston’s planetarium with little changing in the past 50 years.

Source: www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-23/launceston-planetarium-marks-50-years/9408338

NASA Is Bringing Back Cold War-Era Atomic Rockets to Get to Mars

Nuclear-powered spacecraft would cut travel time to the red planet.

Source: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-15/nasa-is-bringing-back-cold-war-era-atomic-rockets-to-get-to-mars

 

Pluto’s Methane Snowcaps on the Edge of Darkness

The southernmost part of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft could “see” during closest approach in July 2015 contains a range of fascinating geological features, and offers clues into what might lurk in the regions shrouded in darkness during the flyby.

Source: www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-methane-snowcaps-on-the-edge-of-darkness