Cosmic LogMastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
For a time, the Internet was agog over Leonardo DiCaprio’s claim that he’s getting a ticket to Mars – presumably as part of SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk’s plan to send a million people to the Red Planet over the next century.
Then the truth came out: The Oscar-winning star of “Titanic” and “The Revenant” was only joking. Which you could have figured out immediately by watching the video of Oct. 3’s repartee with President Barack Obama and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
How do you channel a flood of almost 5 million images into useful applications? Google Cloud is doing it with more than 30 years’ worth of satellite imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 missions, for free.
Satellite views have long been part of Google’s global mapping operation, of course. But putting them on the cloud is a different matter.
One of the newly added data sets draws upon the complete catalog of pictures from Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8, amounting to 1.3 petabytes of data that go back to 1984. The other data set takes advantage of more than 430 terabytes’ worth of multispectral imaging from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, which is part of the Copernicus program to monitor global environmental indicators.
The Landsat database keeps track of 4 million scenes, while the Sentinel-2 set offers 970,000 images. More pictures are being added daily.
David Thouless, a British-born professor emeritus at the University of Washington, has been awarded half of this year’s Nobel physics prize for untangling the topological mysteries of superconductors, superfluids and other weird materials.
“Over the last decade, this area has boosted front-line research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in today’s announcement of the award.
The other physicists named as Nobel laureates are Princeton’s Duncan Haldane and Brown University’s Michael Kosterlitz. The Nobel Prize committee allocated half of the $930,000 (8 million Swedish kronor) award to Thouless, with the other half to be shared by Haldane and Kosterlitz.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has to pass up a historic date for its next flight test, due to unacceptable weather.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship had been due to blast off from the company’s test range in West Texas on Oct. 4, which is the 59th anniversary of the Sputnik launch that ushered in the Space Age.
However, the company said today that the flight (and the live webcast that goes with it) had to be rescheduled for Oct.5.
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – A multimillion-dollar campaign to look for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations has added telescopic observations of the nearest known exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b, to its agenda.
Last month’s announcement about the detection of Proxima b caused a sensation because scientists said the planet is only a little more massive than Earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star that’s closest to our own solar system. That put Proxima b at the top of the list of prospects in the search for life beyond the solar system.
It may take a decade or two, but the Breakthrough Prize Foundation says it is looking into the options for direct imaging of Proxima b, a mere 4.3 light-years away,
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe today descended to a mission-ending impact on the comet that it followed for more than two years.
The car-sized probe continued to transmit data as it dove toward the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, 446 million miles from Earth. When the data stream flatlined, scientists and engineers at ESA’s mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, knew it was all over.
The end was greeted at 1:19 p.m. CEST (4:19 a.m. PT) with a prolonged “Ohhh,” followed by applause and hugs.
“This is it,” said Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin. “I can announce the full success of this historic descent of Rosetta toward 67P, and I declare hereby the mission operations ended for Rosetta. … Farewell, Rosetta. You’ve done the job.”
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – If the world wants to create a village on the moon, the Federal Aviation Administration is willing to start up an online trading post for lunar services.
George Nield, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, says he doesn’t even need to wait for the village to be built.
Nield offered to set up what he called LMASS – the Lunar Marketplace and Swap Shop – during one of today’s sessions at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.
“Think of it as a corkboard,” Nield said. The potential traders could include businesses that are working on ways to move cargo from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, or on moon landers, or on habitats, or surface transportation, or communication services, or other technologies that will eventually be needed for lunar operations.
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – In order to make the figures work for Elon Musk’s plan to put settlers on Mars, SpaceX will have to build boosters and interplanetary spaceships for less than the price of a Boeing 777x jet, on a shorter time frame.
What’s more, Musk is aiming to ramp up to building 1,000 of those spaceships. That’s three times the number of 777x orders to date.
The comparisons between Boeing’s next airplane and SpaceX’s ultimate spaceship suggest Musk is overly optimistic about what it’ll take to get a million settlers to Mars by the end of the century.
So what else is new?
There’s a “new, new” name in the invention business: Xinova, a company that’s been spun out from Intellectual Ventures and is now in the midst of reinventing itself.
Xinova used to be known as the Intellectual Ventures Invention Development Fund. For the past decade, it’s played a key role in the company that technology pioneer Nathan Myhrvold founded to develop and manage intellectual property.
In May, IDF was transformed into an independent company, joining other IV spin-outs such as TerraPower, Kymeta and Echodyne. Its CEO is Thomas Kang, formerly of Seoul Securities. The company is getting ready to move from its current digs in Bellevue, Wash., to downtown Seattle. And today it was officially rechristened with a name that blends the Chinese word for “new” (xin, or 新) with the equivalent word in Latin (nova).
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made some ambitious sales pitches in his career, but today’s big reveal about his plan to transport a million settlers to Mars over the next few decades has to be the topper.
The billionaire began his 95-minute talk with the existential concern over Earth’s long-term future, and the need to set up a civilization beyond Earth to safeguard the species.
“I hope you’d agree this is the right way to go. Yes? … That’s what we want,” he told a crowd of 3,000 attendees at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.
From there on, Musk laid out a step-by-step blueprint that culminated in a vision of a totally reusable super-spaceship that could transport 100 to 200 passengers and their luggage to the Red Planet.