Death of DARPA's Superfast Hypersonic Glider Explained

Death of DARPA's Superfast Hypersonic Glider Explained - An ultra-fast U.S. military drone that streaked across the sky at 13,000 mph and met its demise in the Pacific was doomed by the excessive heat of hypersonic travel, which literally peeled away the drone's metal skin, military officials have revealed.

A seven-month study by the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has found that the so-called Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) amazingly recovered from shockwaves that forced it to roll while traveling at Mach 20 (about 20 times the speed of sound) in an August 2011 test. But the unmanned aircraft was unable to cope with damage to its exterior caused by its extreme speed, DARPA officials said.

According to DARPA, "a gradual wearing away of the vehicle's skin as it reached stress tolerance limits was expected. However, larger than anticipated portions of the vehicle’s skin peeled from the aerostructure." 

The entire HTV-2 test flight lasted nine minutes, with HTV-2 actually flying in a controlled manner for three minutes, DARPA officials said.

DARPA launched the arrowhead-shaped HTV-2 flight on Aug. 11 in the second of two tests of a prototype for a hypersonic glider as part of the advanced Conventional Prompt Global Strike weapons program, which is aimed at developing a bomber capable of reaching any target on Earth within an hour. The first test occurred in 2010.

"The initial shockwave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand," DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabrielsaid in a statement. "That's a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight."

The HTV-2 launched atop a rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, then came streaking back to Earth at hypersonic speeds. Hypersonic flight is typically defined as any flight that surpasses the speed of Mach 5.

When HTV-2 reached Mach 20, it experienced temperatures of nearly 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. NASA's space shuttles, for comparison, flew at speeds of up to Mach 25 when they re-entered Earth's atmosphere.

A DARPA engineering review board found"most probable cause of the HTV-2 Flight 2 premature flight termination was unexpected aeroshell degradation, creating multiple upsets of increasing severity that ultimately activated the Flight Safety System."

That safety system, once it realized the HTV-2 was in an unrecoverable situation, destroyed the vehicle by pitching it into the ocean.

"The result of these findings is a profound advancement in understanding the areas we need to focus on to advance aerothermal structures for future hypersonic vehicles. Only actual flight data could have revealed this to us," said Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, DARPA program manager.

DARPA officials said that more analysis on the HTV-2 test flight will continue via ground tests and will be used as a resource for future Conventional Prompt Global Strike weapons technology efforts. ( SPACE.com )

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North Korea Fueling Long-Range Rocket for Defiant Launch

North Korea Fueling Long-Range Rocket for Defiant Launch - North Korea has reportedly begun fueling its new long-range rocket for what it says is a benign satellite launch, despite continuing condemnation by the United States and other countries, which see the flight as a defiant missile test.

The rocket, called Unha-3 (Galaxy-3), could potentially launch as early as Thursday (April 12) to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung. North Korean officials have maintained the rocket will launch a small Earth-observing satellite, but observers in the United States, South Korea, Japan and other countries see the move as a military weapons test in disguise.

"Let me make absolutely clear that any launch by North Korea would be a serious, clear violation of their obligations under already-existing U.N. Security Council resolutions 1718 and 1874," U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told reporters Tuesday (April 10) after a meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba in Washington, D.C.

The United Nations resolutions prohibit North Korea from pursuing military missile launch tests. 

But the reclusive country appears to remain committed to launching the Unha-3 rocket. North Korean space officials began loading the long-range rocket with fuel today and appeared defiant in the face of unwavering foreign criticism, according to Reuters news service.

"We don't really care about the opinions from the outside. This is critical in order to develop our national economy," Reuters quoted Paek Chang-ho, head of the satellite control center for the Korean Committee of Space Technology.

North Korea's Unha-3 rocket is a three-stage booster that stands about 100 feet (30 meters) tall. In photos obtained during a rare presentation to foreign reporters, the rocket appears as a white booster with red detailing (including nose cone) with North Korea's flag and other national markings emblazoned along its exterior.

The rocket will lift off from North Korea's new launch site near the village of Tongchang-ri in the country's northwest, about 35 miles (50 kilometers) from the city of Dandong on the Chinese border. The Unha-3 rocket is expected to launch on a southward trajectory, with its third stage dropping into the ocean near the Philippines, according to press reports.

North Korean space officials have said the rocket will launch the Kwangmyongsong-3, which translates to Bright Shining Star-3. The satellite is reportedly an Earth-watching spacecraft designed to monitor weather conditions and provide imagery to aid disaster relief and other services.

The Unha-3 rocket flight will mark the third attempted space launch by North Korea. The country claimed its most recent attempt, the 2009 test of the two-stage Unha-2 rocket, succeeded in launching a satellite, but outside observers reported no evidence that any craft reached orbit and concluded it failed.

Clinton said any launch will likely be followed by a coordinated international response.

"We are consulting closely in capitals and at the United Nations in New York, and we will be pursuing appropriate action," Clinton said. "But I would just underscore that if North Korea wants a peaceful, better future for their people, it should not conduct another launch that would be a direct threat to regional security." ( SPACE.com )

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Curiosity Rover Snaps 1st Photos of Mars at Night

Curiosity Rover Snaps 1st Photos of Mars at Night - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has captured its first nighttime view of the Red Planet using a camera and ultraviolet light on its robotic arm.

Curiosity snapped the Mars night photos in visible and ultraviolet light on Wednesday (Jan. 22) to take an up-close look at a rock called "Sayunei," which the rover had scuffed with a wheel to scratch off surface dust, NASA announced Thursday. One goal was to seek out any fluorescent minerals, they added.

The rover took the photos with the help of small light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that serve as lights for the Mars Hand Lens Imager — or MAHLI — a microscope-like camera at the end of Curiosity's robot arm. The camera has an adjustable focus and several LED light sources for its Martian photography.

"The purpose of acquiring observations under ultraviolet illumination was to look for fluorescent minerals," MAHLI principal investigator Ken Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, Calif., said in a statement Thursday. "These data just arrived this morning. The science team is still assessing the observations. If something looked green, yellow, orange or red under the ultraviolet illumination, that'd be a more clear-cut indicator of fluorescence."

The MAHLI camera is one of 10 science instruments on Curiosity, which is a car-size rover capable of examining the surface of Mars in unprecedented detail.

This image of a Martian rock illuminated by white-light LEDs (light emitting diodes) is part of the first set of nighttime images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the robotic arm of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. MAHLI took the images on Jan. 22, 2012 (PST).

Curiosity is currently exploring a shallow depression on Mars that mission scientists have named Yellowknife Bay. The nighttime photo target Sayunei is near the site of where the rover is expected to use its drill for the first time on Mars.

The $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity landed inside the vast Gale Crater on Aug. 5 to begin a two-year primary mission aimed at determining if the region could have ever supported microbial life. After leaving Yellowknife Bay, the rover will continue on toward a destination called Glenelg, which is located near the base of a 3-mile (5 kilometers) mountain rising up from the center of Gale Crater. ( space.com )

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Venus to Cross Face of Sun This Year

Venus to Cross Face of Sun This Year - On your 2012 calendar, be sure to put a big red circle around June 5. On that day, a celestial occurrence that will not be seen by human eyes until well into the 22nd century — the year 2117 to be exact — will take place.

The planet Venus will cross the face of the sun.

Through the balance of this winter season and well into the spring of 2012, Venus will gradually climb higher in the sky and grow progressively brighter, eventually becoming an "evening lantern" for those commuting home from work and school.

By the end of May 2012, however, Venus will be rapidly dropping back toward the sun's vicinity, ultimately to disappear as it makes the transition back into the morning sky. That transition day will come on June 5.

Normally, Venus would pass unseen, hidden in the brilliant glare of the sun. But not this time.

From June 5-6, 2012, an exceedingly rare occurrence is to take place: from here on Earth, we will be able to see Venus cross in front of the sun, making itself evident as a small black spot slowly moving across the solar disk.

Rare celestial spectacle

This is among the rarest of astronomical events.

In fact, between the years 2000 B.C. and 4000 A.D., there have been only 81 Venus transits. Humans have recorded witnessing only six of them (in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882, and most recently, in 2004). It's not impossible that a transit of this planet might have once been seen by chance in ancient times, near sunrise or sunset. Or perhaps some ancient observer with a keen eye, viewing the sun on an unusually hazy day, might have glimpsed Venus's dark image (reporting it as "a dark mark on the sun") on the solar disk.

Soon after the transit of 1882 had taken place, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, sometimes referred to as the "Carl Sagan of the 19th century" because of his many popular books and articles on astronomy, compiled a listing of transits running from 1631 to 2984.

"We see that astronomers do not allow themselves to be taken unawares," Flammarion wrote. "Astronomy is, after all, the only science which enjoys the privilege of reading the future as it does the past, and it avails itself of it. The special details of the 'approaching' transit of June 8 of the year 2004 have already been calculated with precision, as well as those of the transit of June 5, 2012, and we might almost say that the various expeditions are arranged, with the exception of the names of the astronomers who will take part in them."

The circumstances of the transits of Venus repeat themselves with great exactness after a period of 243 years. The intervals between individual transits (in years) currently go as follows: 8 + 121.5 + 8 + 105.5 = 243. In other words, a pair of transits may occur over a time span of just eight years, but following the second transit, the next will not occur again for more than a century.

Transits of Venus occurred on Dec. 9, 1874 and Dec. 6, 1882. The upcoming Venus transit of June 5, 2012 is the first one since 2004. Should anyone miss it, it will unfortunately be a long wait once again, until Dec. 11, 2117, when Venus will again pass in front of the sun — a bit too far into the future for most of us.

Regions of Visibility

On June 5, the entire transit will last almost 6 3/4hours and will be visible in some form across approximately three-quarters of our planet.

The beginning will be visible from the northwestern part of South America, and all of North America, Hawaii, central and western Asia, New Zealand and the eastern two-thirds of Australia.

The end will be visible from northern and northwestern North America, New Zealand, Australia, Asia, the eastern half of Africa and most of Europe. From the contiguous 48 states as well as most of Canada, the beginning stages occur before sunset. For much of Europe, the sun will rise on the morning of June 6, with Venus already on the sun's disk with the transit nearly over.

Unfortunately, those living across the western half of Africa, southern and western parts of Spain, all of Portugal and the central and eastern parts of South America will be precluded from seeing any part of this spectacle, as the sun will be below the horizon when it is taking place.

Quite unlike the transits of Mercury, those of Venus are readily visible with the unaided eye.

When Venus is in transit across the solar disk, the planet appears as a distinct, albeit tiny, round black spot with a diameter just 1/32 that of the sun. This size is large enough to perceive with the naked eye.

However,prospective observers must take special precautions (as with a solar eclipse) in attempting to view the silhouette of Venus against the blindingly brilliant disk of the sun. Looking directly at the sun without eye protection could cause serious injury. ( space.com )

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Physicists closing in on 'God particle'

Physicists closing in on 'God particle' - Experiments at the world's biggest atom smasher have yielded tantalising hints that a long-sought sub-atomic particle truly exists, with final proof likely by late 2012, physicists said Monday.

"We know everything about the Higgs boson except whether it exists," said Rolf Heuer, director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

"We can settle this Shakespearean question -- to be or not to be -- by the end of next year," he told journalists at a web-cast press conference at CERN headquarters in Geneva.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Fermilab, meanwhile, also reported telltale signs of the elusive particle, heating up a longstanding rivalry between the two high-energy physics laboratories.

A monitor showing the first ultra high-energy collisions is seen at the CMS experiment control room of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 2010 near Geneva. Experiments at the world's biggest atom smasher have yielded tantalising hints that a long-sought sub-atomic particle truly exists, with final proof likely by late 2012, physicists said


European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists talk in the Alice experiment control room in 2010 near Geneva during an experiment in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Experiments at the world's biggest atom smasher have yielded tantalising hints that a long-sought sub-atomic particle truly exists, with final proof likely by late 2012, physicists said

CERN and Fermilab have both reduced the range of mass within which the "God particle," as it is known, might be found to a fairly narrow, low-mass band.

"The search for the Higgs boson is entering its most exciting, final stage," Stefan Soldner-Rembold, spokesman for one of Fermilab's two key experiments, said last week in a statement.

Higgs or no Higgs, the stakes are huge either way, and could easily earn a Nobel Prize for the scientists who can take credit for the breakthrough.

The long-postulated particle, first proposed in 1964, is the missing cornerstone of an otherwise well-tested theory, called the Standard Model, which explains how known sub-atomic elements in the universe interact.

Without the 'God particle', however, that whole edifice falls apart because the Standard Model fails to answer one fundamental question: why do most elementary particles have mass?

British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs proposed a mechanism that would "save" the theory -- if the particle named for him truly exists.

"If you find the Boson Higgs, the Standard Model is complete. If you don't find it, then the Model has a serious problem. Both outcomes are discoveries," Heuer said.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- a 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel 100 metres (325 feet) below ground straddling the French-Swiss border -- was on track to crack the puzzle within 18 months, he said.

"The LHC is working beyond my expectations, as are the experiments" which, he added, are "now ready to bring us into unchartered territory."

Scientists have increased the amount of collisions delivered to the experiments by a factor of 20 over the last year, he noted.

The complex is designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, creating collisions that briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun.

Researchers search the fleeting, sub-atomic rubble for clues to a host of unsolved mysteries about the origin and make-up of the universe.

"But don't expect too much too quickly," Heuer cautioned. "We are a factor of ten away from [the collision force] we hope to have at the end of next year. We are just in the middle," he said. ( AFP )

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Mystery "creation" particle evades scientists

Mystery "creation" particle evades scientists - The mysterious "creation" particle believed to have turned flying debris into stars and planets at the dawn of the universe has evaded capture in a year of hot pursuit, physicists said Monday.

Rolf Heuer, director-general of the CERN research center near Geneva, said he was now looking to 2012 to turn up traces of the particle, the Higgs Boson, and signs of other concepts that were once the preserve of science fiction.

Confirming that intensive scrutiny of the results of more than 70 million particle collisions in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had not yet identified the Higgs, Heuer said: "I hope the big discoveries will come next year."

He was speaking at an international conference of physicists in the French city of Grenoble, at which presentations of the results of research in the LHC, deep under the border between Switzerland and France, were a key highlight.

A baby star sprouts two identical jets, seen as green lines emanating from a fuzzy star, in this photograph taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope

Other CERN scientists at the gathering, parts of which were being streamed live over the Internet, reported that they had spotted strange "fluctuations" in the data gathered from the mega-velocity collisions staged in the oval-shaped LHC.

But they cautioned that these could simply be misreadings or passing phenomena that will be explained later. They said it was important to avoid "discovering" the Higgs before it was found, as one researcher had done earlier this year.

MATTER INTO MASS

The Higgs is named after British physicist Peter Higgs who said three decades back that it was the agent that turned the matter spewed out by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago into the mass that became the material of the known cosmos.

Some scientists worry that it may not exist at all, or not in the form suggested by Higgs and two Belgian researchers who came up with the idea at the same time in the late 1970s.

"One way or another, it or something like it has to be there, otherwise we wouldn't be here," Heuer told reporters in 2008, just before LHC's first, aborted, $10 billion start-up. It resumed operations successfully in March 2010.

Discovery of the Higgs would complete the essential elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics that emerged from the work of Albert Einstein and his successors early in the 20th century, and cleared the way for "New Physics."

This domain would include super-symmetry, the underpinning of string theory and the idea of parallel universes, dark matter or the hidden stuff of the cosmos, and the dark energy that is believed to be driving galaxies apart.

The vast volumes of information gathered so far from the LHC particle collisions, each effectively recreating the Big Bang and what came just after, "provide sound bases for the discoveries to come," Heuer told CERN staff at the weekend.

"Our field of physics, which focuses on rare phenomena, requires (a huge volume of) statistics," he said.

So definitive answers on the Higgs or signals pointing to what were once the wilder shores of speculation could still be a while away. ( Reuters )

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Scientists Discover Magma Ocean on Jupiter's Moon Io

Scientists Discover Magma Ocean on Jupiter's Moon Io - Old spacecraft never die. Well, actually, they do die, and sometimes in spectacular fashion - burning up as they plunge through a planet's atmosphere or into the fires of the sun. The venerable Galileo probe, which was launched in 1989 and arrived at Jupiter in 1995, was sent on just such a suicide dive into the planet when its work was done in 2003 - the better to avoid even the tiny risk that it would crash onto one of the Jovian moons and contaminate it with Earthly bacteria.

But if spacecraft are mortal, their data stream lives forever, and scientists with new theories and new analytic methods often pore over the old records, looking for insights that may have slipped past earlier investigators. A collaborative team from UCLA, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently did exactly that with some of the data Galileo collected about the Jovian moon Io and found that bubbling just beneath the surface of the little world is a massive ocean of magma - a feature unlike any other found anywhere else in the modern solar system.

It was in 1979 when astronomers learned how hot and geologically active Io is, when the Voyager I spacecraft returned images of a massive volcanic plume rising 160 miles (257 km) into space. On Earth, the same column of fire would climb 30 times as high as the peak of Mount Everest. Io comes by all that heat rightly. Jupiter's moon census changes all the time, as more and more of the smallest ones are detected. The current count is 63, but it's the four biggest ones - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - that are the most complex.

Io, as the innermost of the four, has the hardest life. Held tight in the gravity fist of Jupiter, it orbits the planet close and fast, repeatedly outpacing its slower, more distant sister. Every time Io laps another moon, however, that body's gravity briefly grabs it, causing Io to flex slightly. Do that again and again over the course of 4.5 billion years and the interior heats up the way a wire hanger becomes almost hot enough to burn your fingers when you bend it back and forth rapidly.

As Galileo observed, that constant heating causes volcanoes to erupt all over Io all the time, and astronomers estimate that the moon produces 100 times as much lava in a single year as do all of Earth's volcanoes combined. What was unknown was the size of the magma reservoir that feeds the constant sky fire.

To find out, UCLA's Krishan Khurana led a study reanalyzing a quirky bit of data Galileo picked up in Jupiter's magnetic field - something the investigators called a sort of "sounding signal." The anomaly would be coming not from Jupiter but from its interactions with one of its satellites. That was as far as the analysis went in the past, but much newer work in mineral physics - specifically concerning what are known as ultramafic rocks - has changed all that.

Ultramafics are igneous rocks - formed volcanically - that become capable of carrying electrical current when they are melted back down into magma. Every ultramafic has a different composition, though all are high in magnesium and iron. The precise nature of the current the rock conducts is determined by the rock's precise makeup and quantity. The signal buried in the Galileo data indicated that it came from a type of rock similar to lherzolite - a coarse-grained, relatively loosely compressed rock - within Io, and quite a lot of it.

On Earth, lherzolite is never found below certain depths since the pressure would convert into a different, denser type of rock. The same should be true on Io, and indeed, the reanalysis of the Galileo data suggests that the moon's main magma deposits are as little as 20 miles (30 km) below the surface, forming a vast ocean at least 30 miles (50 km) deep. The temperature of the ocean is a searing 2200°F (1200°C).

Why do we care? Well, there are a few reasons. First, is a world like Io cool or what? Seriously. As scientists (and science geeks) everywhere can tell you, one of the reasons we go looking for new findings is that what we discover can often flat-out amaze us - particularly when the answer was in our data cache all along, just waiting for us to get smart enough to dig it out.

Closer to home, the nature of Io may tell us a lot about the nature of Earth and our own now cold moon. "It has been suggested that both the Earth and the moon may have had similar magma oceans billions of years ago," says Torrence Johnson, a former Galileo scientist not involved in the current study. "Io's volcanism informs us how volcanoes work and provides a window in time."

Finally, the more we learn about the gravitational flexing that keeps Io's flames burning, the better we can understand how similar processes play out on its sister moon, the ice world Europa. There, the subsurface ocean that's thought to exist is made not of magma but of ordinary water - rich in minerals and hydrocarbons, with billions of years of history and enough natural heat to lead, theoretically, to life. It's Io that caught scientists' eyes first, but it's Europa - with its potentially living innards - that may be home to the true Jovian wonders. ( time.com )

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Life of family of stars revealed in new photo

Life of family of stars revealed in new photo. Snapshot is largest patch of sky yet to be imaged with adaptive optics. The life of a large family of stars has been revealed in stunning detail by a technique that removes the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere.

The young star cluster Trumpler 14 can be seen clearly in the new image taken by the adaptive optics system on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).

ESO/H. Sana

This impressive image of the open cluster known as Trumpler 14 was obtained with the Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The cluster resides at the outskirts of the central region of the Carina Nebula, located some 8,000 light-years away towards the constellation of Carina (the Keel)

The snapshot represents the largest patch of sky yet to be imaged with adaptive optics. The technique counteracts interference from Earth's atmosphere by making swift, real-time changes in the shape of a telescope's mirror during observations.

At less than 1 million years old, Trumpler 14 is the youngest cluster of stars in the Carina Nebula (also noted for hosting Eta Carinae — one of the wildest and most massive stars in our galaxy). The large open cluster is located about 8,000 light-years away from Earth.

The high quality of the VLT image showed astronomers that not only is Trumpler 14 the youngest cluster in the nebula — with a newly refined age estimate of just 500,000 years — but also one of the most populous star clusters within the nebula.

The astronomers who observed the cluster counted about 2,000 stars in their image spanning the entirerange of stellar sizes, from less than one-tenth the mass of our sun up to a factor of several tens of times its mass. All of these stars are packed into a space just 6 light-years across — less than the distance between the sun and its nearest stellar neighbor.

The most prominent star in the cluster is the supergiant HD 93129A, one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This titan has an estimated mass of about 80 times that of the sun and is approximately 2.5 million times brighter. It is part of a stellar pair— or binary star— with another bright, massive star.

Astronomers expect the adaptive optics technique used to make the Trumpler 14 image will be crucial to the next generation of large telescopes. ( sapace.com )

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