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Mission to the Red
Planet An artist’s conception of a spacecraft envisioned by Inspiration Mars, a private group funded by former rocket scientist Dennis Tito. Reuters/Inspiration Mars Foundation handout Black hole spinning at speed of light Trends Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE Dying stars may clue us into
extra-terrestrial life |
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Mission to the Red
Planet The first humans on Mars will spend 501 days cooped up in a tiny space,
so a ‘tried and tested’ male-female partnership has been proposed
THE first humans on Mars could be a married couple, after organisers of an ambitious manned mission to the Red Planet said that only a “tried and tested” male-female partnership could cope with the close confinement of a return trip. Dennis Tito, the multi-millionaire financier and former rocket scientist behind the planned 2018 mission, said he was confident of raising the estimated $1.5bn to $2bn (£1bn-£1.3bn) needed to send a two-person mixed crew to Mars — but admitted that the total funding has yet to be found. Tito, who once worked for NASA, promised to fund the Inspiration Mars mission for the next two years, and will ask other wealthy individuals and charitable foundations to contribute to the final cost of building and launching the manned space craft. “I will come out a lot poorer because of this mission, but my grandchildren will come out a lot richer in terms of inspiration,” Tito said in Washington DC. In addition to charitable and personal donations, Tito said he expected to raise money from television and media rights. The choice of a mixed crew of one man and one woman would heighten media interest, he said. The privately-funded mission has signed a “space act” agreement with NASA. A wide range of industrial partners has already approached the group with the hope of collaborating. Selecting the man and woman who will become the first people to journey beyond the Moon will be a lengthy and complicated process. “The requirements are going to be so high. It’s going to be quite a crew-selection process,” Tito said. The Spartan nature of the crew’s journey is outlined in a scientific paper to be presented this weekend by Tito to an aerospace conference in Montana. There will be no luxuries or privacy, with both crew members expected to share the same small space for eating, sleeping and toileting. “The journey is treated as a high-risk mission, which drives towards reliable — but minimalist — accommodations and provisions… that would meet only basic human needs to support metabolic requirements and limited crew comfort allowances,” the feasibility study says. Jane Poynter of Paragon Space Development, who is an adviser on the mission, said the man and the woman would have to be in a stable relationship. “The idea of a man and woman going on this mission is an important idea. It’s important also that they are a tried-and-trusted couple,” Dr Poynter said. “It’s also important that they are man and a woman because they represent humanity…and just as important they represent our children,” she said. Each crew member will be psychologically profiled so that they are able to endure the long return journey together, with no prospect of an emergency abort procedure if things go wrong. The fact that the two crew members will share the same living space for 501 days suggests that the man and woman will have to know each other intimately before the mission. The feasibility study points out that a man and a woman working and living together may be better than two people of the same sex. A key aspect of the mission will be trust between the crew and mission control, which must be staffed by people who are sensitive to the psychological needs of the two astronauts. The plan is for the two crew members to spend an extended period of time living and working together before the mission begins. “Experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to train, select and evaluate a crew team without those individuals having had experience living and working in an isolated confined environment for an extended period of time, preferable for the full mission duration, but for at least six months,” the study says. “Working on this mission will also be a means to train the skilled workforce needed for the future manned Mars mission…. Sending humans on an expedition to Mars will be a defining event for humanity as well as an inspiration to our youth,” it says. “Social media provides an opportunity for people to meaningfully participate in the mission, likely making this the most engaging human endeavour in modern history,” it concludes.
— The Independent
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Black hole spinning at speed of light THE outer reaches of a ‘supermassive’ black hole, more than two million miles across, or eight times the Earth-Moon distance, is spinning at nearly the speed of light. The gigantic object is at the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. Astronomers measured its jaw-dropping spin rate using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellites. “This is the first time anyone has accurately measured the spin of a supermassive black hole,” Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) and INAF-Arcetri Observatory, who led the study, was reported as saying by the journal Nature. Astronomers want to know the black hole’s spin for several reasons. The first is physical — only two numbers define a black hole: mass and spin. By learning those two numbers, you learn everything there is to know about the black hole. Most importantly, the black hole’s spin gives clues to its past and by extension the evolution of its host galaxy. “The black hole’s spin is a memory, a record, of the past history of the galaxy as a whole,” explained Risaliti, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian statement. Although the black hole in NGC 1365 is currently as massive as several million suns, it wasn’t born that big. It grew over billions of years by accreting stars and gas, and by merging with other black holes. Similarly, if the black hole grew randomly by pulling in matter from all directions, its spin would be low. Since its spin is so close to the maximum possible, the black hole in NGC 1365 must have grown through “ordered accretion” rather than multiple random events. Studying a supermassive black hole also allows theorists to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity in extreme conditions. Relativity describes how gravity affects the structure of space-time, and nowhere is space-time more distorted than in the immediate vicinity of a black hole.
— IANS
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Trends BEIJING:
China’s next manned space mission will launch sometime between June and August, carrying three astronauts to an experimental space module, state media said on Thursday, the latest part of an ambitious plan to build a space station. The Shenzhou 10 and its crew will launch from a remote site in the Gobi desert and then link up with the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1 module, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Chinese astronauts had carried out a manned docking with the module for the first time last June.
Seals take scientists to Antarctic’s ocean floor SYDNEY:
Elephant seals wearing head sensors and swimming deep beneath Antarctic ice have helped scientists better understand how the ocean’s coldest, deepest waters are formed, providing vital clues to understanding its role in the world’s climate. The tagged seals, along with sophisticated satellite data and moorings in ocean canyons, all played a role in providing data from the extreme Antarctic environment, where observations are very rare and ships could not go, said researchers at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystem CRC in Tasmania.
White House directs open access for government research WASHINGTON:
The White House has moved to make the results of federally funded research available to the public for free within a year, bowing to public pressure for unfettered access to scholarly articles and other materials produced at taxpayers' expense. “Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support,” John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote on the White House website. — Reuters
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THIS UNIVERSE If we rub a scale with a piece of silk vigorously, it gets charged. But the scale is made up of plastic, which is an insulator, so how does it acquire charge? And if a positively charged electroscope is connected to an uncharged electroscope with a copper wire, the charges in both the electroscopes become the same. But as we know that protons don't move and only electrons move, how do protons move to the uncharged electroscope? Plastics are also made of molecules and atoms. The electrons inhabit a region that is a hundred thousand times bigger than the nuclei. So when we rub two solids together hoping that there might be some transfer of material, from one to the other, only electrons can move. That is the obvious reason that in electrostatics we think of only electron movement. Protons or nuclei are residing deep inside the atoms. Thus, when we connect two electroscopes together, we will not suck out the nuclei from inside the atoms. This should be enough to understand what happens and what does not. Readers can e-mail questions to Prof Yash Pal at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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Dying stars may clue us into
extra-terrestrial life WASHINGTON: Dying stars could also host planets with life — if they do, they might be able to clue our scientists into it within the next decade. “In the quest for extra-terrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs,” said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA). Loeb and his colleague Dan Maoz (Tel Aviv University) estimate that a survey of the 500 closest white dwarfs could spot one or more habitable Earths, the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reports.
— IANS
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THE first humans on Mars could be a married couple, after organisers of an ambitious manned mission to the Red Planet said that only a “tried and tested” male-female partnership could cope with the close confinement of a return trip.
BEIJING: China’s next manned space mission will launch sometime between June and August, carrying three astronauts to an experimental space module, state media said on Thursday, the latest part of an ambitious plan to build a space station. The Shenzhou 10 and its crew will launch from a remote site in the Gobi desert and then link up with the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1 module, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
