Day: September 13, 2019

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NASA Puts Bigelow Aerospace’s Giant Inflatable Space Habitat Prototype to the Test (Photos)

https://www.space.com/bigelow-aerospace-space-habitat-nasa-test.html

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — NASA is kicking the tires on one of its prospective astronaut abodes.

The space agency is currently conducting a two-week ground test on Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 habitat here at the company’s headquarters. Eight NASA astronauts have participated in the trial so far, and four were on the scene Thursday (Sept. 12) to assess various aspects of the big, expandable module.

The tests, which involve two B330 test units, are part of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program. In 2016, NextSTEP awarded funding to Bigelow and five other companies to develop ground prototypes for habitats that could help NASA astronauts journey to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations.

Related: Inflatable Space Stations of Bigelow Aerospace (Infographic)

Bigelow is the last of the awardees to go through this round of ground tests, NASA officials said. But that doesn’t mean a decision is imminent.

“The purpose of this test program is not to pick a winner or a loser but to find what we like and what we don’t like,” former NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, the principal investigator for the NextSTEP habitat-testing program, said during a media event here Thursday. (Reporters were allowed to photograph the interior of one of the test modules, the all-steel Mars Transporter Testing Unit. But the other one was off-limits for imagery.)

“And that will all be melded into requirements going forward for the final flight design,” added Gernhardt, who flew four space shuttle missions during his astronaut career. 

Inside Bigelow Aerospace's all-steel Mars Transporter Testing Unit, during a NASA ground test of the company’s B330 habitat concept on Sept. 12, 2019.

Inside Bigelow Aerospace’s all-steel Mars Transporter Testing Unit, during a NASA ground test of the company’s B330 habitat concept on Sept. 12, 2019.

(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)

The B330 is designed to be an independent space station; it will have its own life-support and propulsion systems, for example. The module takes its name from its 330 cubic meters (11,650 cubic feet) of internal volume. That’s a lot of space. For comparison, the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station (ISS) is about 930 cubic m (32,840 cubic feet).  

The B330 is designed to support four astronauts indefinitely and five “for many months,” Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow said in a statement today.

Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow (left) and former NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, the principal investigator of NASA's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) habitat-testing program, stand outside Bigelow’s Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019.

Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow (left) and former NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, the principal investigator of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) habitat-testing program, stand outside Bigelow’s Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019.

(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)

Like Bigelow’s other habitats, the B330 is expandable; see, for example, the much smaller and more bare-bones Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, which has been attached to the ISS on a test run since 2016. At launch, the B330 will be compressed enough to fit inside a 16.5-foot-wide (5 m) payload fairing. After it reaches space, the module will be inflated using onboard gas canisters.

The module’s expandable nature is its chief selling point; the B330 will provide much more habitable volume per unit of launch mass than is available in a traditional aluminum module, Bigelow Aerospace representatives stressed. 

Blair Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace's Vice President of Corporate Strategy, gives a tour of the company's Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019. (The "does not exist" tags point out pieces that would not be part of the real space habitat, which wouldn't need walkways and other gravity-related structural elements.)

Blair Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace’s Vice President of Corporate Strategy, gives a tour of the company’s Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019. (The “does not exist” tags point out pieces that will not be part of the real space habitat, which won’t need walkways and other gravity-related structural elements.)

(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)

Bigelow hopes that NASA ultimately selects the B330 for use on the Lunar Gateway, the moon-orbiting space station the agency plans to begin assembling in 2022 as part of the Artemis program. (Artemis also aims to put two astronauts down near the lunar south pole by 2024 and to establish a sustainable, long-term presence on and around the moon by 2028).  

Indeed, much of the current ground test is Gateway-centric, Gernhardt said. For example, one of the many test tasks involves assessing how astronauts would operate rovers on the lunar surface from the various habitats.

Bigelow Aerospace's B330 habitat will feature two lavatories.

Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 habitat will feature two lavatories.

(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)

Getting a B330 up to the Gateway is the company’s chief focus at the moment, Robert Bigelow said during Thursday’s event. If NASA does go with a B330, he added, Bigelow Aerospace could get one ready for launch within 42 months of receiving the green light.

NASA envisions the Gateway, and the lunar exploration it will help enable, as a steppingstone to the ultimate human-spaceflight destination: Mars. And the Gateway could also be the start of even bigger things for the B330, if things go according to plan for Bigelow.

“It can go anywhere,” Robert Bigelow said. “We have an architecture where we make it a lunar base.”

Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

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September 13, 2019 at 05:47AM

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This Ridiculously Speedy Star Might Be Running Away from a Rare, Unproven Type of Black Hole

https://www.space.com/runaway-star-mid-mass-black-hole.html

Astronomers have discovered a bright, young star that is running away from home. Why? What did the star’s parents do to deserve this? According to a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, it’s nobody’s fault; it seems the young star simply fell in with the wrong crowd — namely, a very hungry black hole. 

The star, which is named PG 1610+062, was first observed hurtling across the sky in a 1986 star survey, though little attention has been paid to the stellar renegade’s story since then. In the present study, astronomers working at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano took the closest-ever look at the runaway. They confirmed it is one of the fastest stars ever seen shooting out of the Milky Way’s galactic disk. 

The team calculated the star’s velocity to be about 1.2 million mph (2 million km/h), which isn’t quite enough to escape the bonds of the galaxy’s gravity, but fast enough for it to be able to leave the star’s home solar system in the cosmic dust.

Related: 11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy

There are a few different processes that explain how a star can get booted out of its home system, and they usually involve binary partnerships — that is, two stars orbiting around a common center of mass. If one member of the pair were to theoretically disappear — say, by exploding in a supernova or getting swallowed up by a supermassive black hole —the remaining star might get such a sudden, energetic kick in the pants that it would slingshot straight out of its home system, or even out of its home galaxy entirely. 

The case of PG 1610+062 may be a bit unusual though, the researchers wrote. Judging by the star’s mass, velocity and likely origin (the team traced it to the Sagittarius spiral arm of the galaxy), it seems unlikely that the star ever came close enough to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy to see its partner star gobbled up. 

Rather, the star’s fast-but-not-too-fast movement seems to suggest that it had a run-in with a mid-mass black hole — that is, a black hole with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun (as opposed to a stellar black hole, which can have up to about 20 suns’ worth of mass, or a supermassive black hole, which can be millions or billions of times the sun’s mass, according to NASA).

Scientists have never found convincing evidence that mid-mass black holes exist in our galaxy. This stellar runaway still isn’t hard proof of their existence, but it does strengthen the case that mid-mass black holes could be out there, the researchers wrote. Now, “the race is on to actually find them,” lead study author Andreas Irrgang, an astronomer at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said in a statement. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Have a news tip, correction or comment? Let us know at community@space.com.

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September 13, 2019 at 05:47AM

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The EPA’s roll back of the Clean Water Act could impact drinking water for millions of Americans

https://www.popsci.com/clean-water-act-roll-back/

Small streams could be in danger

Small streams could be in danger (Joao Branco/Unsplash/)

The Trump Administration just announced yet another blow to the country’s environmental protections. On Thursday, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repealed an Obama administration update to the 1972 Clean Water Act, which had expanded protection to wetlands and streams that are disconnected from navigable rivers. "They’re effectively sending us back 30 years in our protections of U.S. waters," says Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship winner for his work as a climate and water scientist.

The 2015 rule has broadened the definition of "waters of the United States," which allowed the EPA to regulate pollutants in a much greater proportion of waterways than before. Dry washes and streams may only flow intermittently, but according to an EPA report they make up about 59 percent of streams in the U.S. and 81 percent of those in the Southwest. Another EPA report, which supported the 2015 rule, reviewed more than 1,200 studies on small streams and wetlands and found that they’re critical to the health of downstream rivers: "There is ample evidence that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains, even when lacking surface water connections, provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters." And yet, many of these waters now have no protection under federal law.

The original definition of "waters of the United States" mainly covered large rivers, their tributaries, and adjacent wetlands. The Clean Water Act requires industrial and municipal polluters discharging to these rivers to obtain permits from the EPA and the 2015 update expanded those regulations to include smaller streams and wetlands. Thursday’s repeal will soon be followed by a rule change, and the replacement text would basically revert to the ’70s-level protections. Officials have stated that the change would remove a current "regulatory patchwork"—the 2015 update only applies to 22 states, Washington D.C. and U.S. territories because other states have challenged the rule in court. In a press release, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said redefining "water of the United States" would "provide greater regulatory certainty for farmers, landowners, home builders, and developers nationwide."

But despite whatever uncertainty there may have been, the 2015 update was enacted for a reason: the streams and wetlands that aren’t flowing into or right next to major rivers are still crucial for wildlife and humans. Drinking water for one in three people in the lower 48 comes from same waters that just lost their federal protection in the repeal, as PopSci has reported previously. "The weakening that we’re seeing today is really serious—It’s really cutting protection for drinking water for a lot of Americans," says Gleick. "A lot of our groundwater resources and a lot of our surface water resources are now going to be vulnerable to far more pollution."

The 2015 rule also regulated pesticides and nutrients leaching from many farmers’ fields—a diffuse but cumulatively significant source of pollution. In the Mississippi basin, for example, the pollutants from numerous farms that trickle into small streams and wetlands eventually flow into the river and then into the Gulf of Mexico, says Gleick. This impacts water quality and leads to the growth of massive algal blooms and fish die offs. “Some farmers would have had to get permits to discharge pollutants into the streams and wetlands,” says Gleick. But now that requirement has been lifted, and our waters will suffer for it.

Overall, says Gleick, “We can expect more pollution in our waterways, more threats to drinking water supplies, more court cases, and more confusion about where this country ought to go on environmental protection.”

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

September 13, 2019 at 07:14AM

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‘Flying fish’ drone actually explodes out of the water

https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/13/flying-fish-drone-actually-explodes-out-of-the-water/

Drones that can both swim and fly are no longer in the distant future. Imperial College London’s Aerial Robotics Lab built a concept for multimodal swimming robot it calls AquaMAV that can jump out of water. The scientists behind AquaMAV presented their findings in a paper published this week in Science Robotics.

According to IEE Spectrum, the AquaMAV combines combustible power and water in order to propel itself. The drone contains calcium carbide powder. When mixed with water, the drone creates acetylene gas, which then gets funneled into a combustion chamber along with air and water. When ignited, the mixture then explodes, forcing the water out of the combustion chamber and propelling the drone into air.

The AquaMAV can fly up to 26 meters in the air, and creates so much force it can even propel itself out of choppy waters. Scientists believe it can be used to collect water samples during natural disasters such as floods or to monitor ocean pollution. You can watch the AquaMAV in action in the video below.

Via: IEEE

Source: Science Robotics

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

September 13, 2019 at 02:33AM

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New Zealand Moves To Create Firearm Registry And Stiffen Penalties For Gun Crimes

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760460922/new-zealand-moves-to-create-firearm-registry-and-stiffen-penalties-for-gun-crime?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says her government is creating a national gun registry "to prevent firearms from reaching the hands of criminals." She announced the new plan alongside Police Minister Stuart Nash.

"Owning a firearm is a privilege not a right," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said six months after a gunman killed 51 people in Christchurch.

(Image credit: Tessa Burrows/Getty Images)

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September 13, 2019 at 08:02AM