Author: Alan Boyle

Mastermind 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.

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Here’s how Jeff Bezos looks as ‘Star Trek’ alien

Jeff Bezos wears a Starfleet uniform (and heavy makeup) in “Star Trek Beyond.” (Credit: Justin Lin)

You’d hardly recognize Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in the super-heavy makeup he wears as an alien Starfleet official in “Star Trek Beyond,” the latest big-screen voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

But just to make sure you’re able to spot him, Bezos posted a Vine video in which you can see him getting a bite while waiting for his scene. “Cheers,” he says into the camera.

In a Twitter update, Bezos said the “Star Trek” appearance checked off an item on his bucket list. He also gave a shout-out to director Justin Lin, the cast and the crew.

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SpaceX delivers new door to space station

SpaceX’s Dragon is firmly in the grip of the International Space Station’s robotic arm during the berthing operation. (Credit: NASA TV)

Two days after its launch, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule was pulled in for its hookup to the International Space Station today as the spacecraft soared 252 miles above the California-Oregon state line.

Among the nearly 5,000 pounds of cargo were the first DNA sequencer destined for use in space, and a 5-foot-wide docking adapter that will accommodate future commercial space taxis – including an upgraded version of the uncrewed Dragon that pulled in today.

“We’ve captured us a Dragon,” said NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, who grappled the capsule with the station’s robotic arm. “We look forward to the work it brings.”

Dragon’s arrival marked the week’s second orbital delivery: A robotic Russian Progress cargo ship docked with the station on Monday night, bringing another 5,300 pounds of food, water, air, propellant and other supplies. It’ll take weeks to unload all the goodies.

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Pokémon Go on HoloLens? Make it so!

A mixed-reality view through a Microsoft HoloLens headset shows a Charizard taunting a Pokemon Go player. (Credit: Koder via YouTube)

Millions of Pokémon Go players are peering into smartphones to look for animated characters in an augmented-reality world, but what if they could look for them wearing Microsoft’s HoloLens headset instead?

That’s not commercially available at this point, but a couple of coding teams thought it would be cool to work up prototypes for a Pokeman/HoloLens mash-up – and now they’re sharing their results.

California-based Koder developed one such prototype. “My colleague [Paul Nguyen] and I built it over a 2-day period and made a video to show the experience,” Elmer Morales, Koder’s founder and CEO, told GeekWire in an email.

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Apollo 11 anniversary adds to space appetite

A photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, signed by the astronaut himself, is among the hundreds of items offered at a space-themed auction this week. The print is expected to sell for $2,500 to $3,500. (Credit: NASA via Bonhams)

Forty-seven years ago this week, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission put humans on the moon for the first time – and although we don’t currently have the hardware to do that again, the anniversary offers opportunities to own a piece of past achievements in space.

For example, Bonhams auction house in New York is selling hundreds of artifacts from the U.S. and Russian space programs on Wednesday, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The big-ticket items include an Apollo 11 navigational chart that moonwalker Buzz Aldrin used during the mission, expected to go for as much as $35,000.

There’s also a Gemini training console, which duplicates the panels that were arrayed in NASA’s Gemini capsules and were used to train astronauts in the early 1960s. That’s expected to sell for $60,000 to $90,000. A Russian-style spacesuit that NASA astronaut Don Pettit wore when he rode a Soyuz craft down to Earth in 2003 has a pre-sale estimate of $25,000 to $30,000.

The live auction takes place in New York on Wednesday, but bids can also be placed online.

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Pluto stamp honored as farthest-out postage

The 1991 stamp that served as the rallying cry for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto is “updated” by members of the New Horizons science team on July 14, 2015, the day the spacecraft reached Pluto. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

We’ve known for years that a 1991 Pluto stamp included on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is the farthest-out piece of postage, but now the U.S. Postal Service and Guinness World Records have officially put it in the record books.

The message on the stamp, “Pluto: Not Yet Explored,” was basically canceled a year ago when New Horizons flew past the dwarf planet, taking pictures as it zoomed by at 36,000 mph.

To celebrate the record – and the New Horizons achievement that rendered the stamp obsolete – the USPS played host to the New Horizons team and Guinness World Records adjudicator Jimmy Coggins today at its Washington headquarters. Coggins presented a certificate recognizing the record to the Postal Service’s Jim Cochrane, NASA’s Jim Green and the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission.

“The farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp is a quite an impressive achievement, as it spans many planets and billions of miles. As stamps are synonymous with travel, it is fitting that one would travel within the solar system,” Coggins said in a news release. “It’s an honor to be a part of this historic moment and welcome the United States Postal Service to the Guinness World Records family.”

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Revived Kepler mission adds 104 planets to list

An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Kepler telescope observing four planets as they pass across the disk of their parent star. The comparative sizes of the spacecraft and the star are not to scale. (Credit: NASA / JPL)

Astronomers say they’ve confirmed the existence of 104 worlds to add to the list of extrasolar planets detected by NASA’s Kepler K2 mission, and at least two of them appear to be potentially habitable super-Earths.

The two prospects are among four planets orbiting K2-72, a red dwarf (or M dwarf) star that’s 181 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

All four of the planets are between 20 and 50 percent wider than Earth. They all come closer to K2-72 than Mercury comes to our own sun. But because the red dwarf is so much cooler than our sun, the worlds known as K2-72c and K2-72e lie in the star system’s habitable zone. That means it’s conceivable that liquid water could exist on those planets.

K2-72c makes a complete orbit of its sun every 15 Earth days and is thought to be about 10 percent warmer than Earth. K2-72e is farther out: It has a 24-day orbit and should be about 6 percent cooler than Earth.

Study leader Ian Crossfield, who works at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of life arising in such red dwarf environments.

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NASA moves ahead with Mars rover and orbiter

Artwork shows NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relaying data. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

NASA says it’s selected five aerospace companies, including Boeing, to conduct concept studies for a Mars telecommunications orbiter that’s likely to launch in 2022. It’s also given the formal go-ahead for the final design of its long-planned 2020 Mars rover.

In addition to Boeing, the companies contracted for the four-month concept studies include Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK and Space Systems/Loral. The concept studies will be managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We’re excited to continue planning for the next decade of Mars exploration,” Geoffrey Yoder, NASA’s acting associate administrator for science, said in today’s announcement of the contracts.

The orbiter mission would provide advanced telecommunication capabilities as well as global high-resolution imaging of Mars. NASA’s move follows up on recommendations made by the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group.

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Scientists store data in chlorine atoms

An atomic memory grid shows how a passage from physicist Richard Feynman’s famous lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” was encoded using chlorine atoms on a copper surface. The grid is 96 nanometers wide and 126 nanometers deep. (Credit: TU Delft)

Researchers have stored and read out a kilobyte’s worth of data using the world’s smallest hard disk – a speck of copper that stores the bits on chlorine atoms – and they say the technology could someday hold vast amounts of data in a minuscule space.

The team says they reached a storage density of 500 trillion bits per square inch, which is 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk currently available.

“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” Sander Otte, a researcher at Delft University’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands, said in a news release.

The technique is described today in a paper published online by Nature Nanotechnology.

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Boeing bans Pokémon Go at work

You can catch Pokemon characters on Boeing jets, as shown in this lineup for All Nippon Airways, but don’t try catching them at Boeing facilities. (Credit: ANA / Nintendo via Japan Info)

Mark off the Boeing Co. as one more place where you shouldn’t be playing Pokémon Go, the monster-catching game that’s been taking smartphones by storm.

It’s not that Boeing has anything against Charmander or those other cute virtual critters: It’s just that the game sucks up bandwidth as well as work time – and also poses potential safety risks.

9to5Mac reported last week that the game was being installed on more than 100 work phones at a large aerospace company, and that one employee almost got hurt due to gameplay distraction. Tweets and follow-ups made clear that the company was Boeing, and that Pokémon Go was added to a software blacklist that bans carrier bloatware apps.

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Startup to build rockets with ‘zero human labor’

Two engineers with experience at Blue Origin and SpaceX have raised almost $10 million for their own rocket startup, Relativity Space, which promises to build orbital rockets “with zero human labor.”

The funding rounds are described in two documents filed in May and this month with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The first filing reports that $1.1 million in equity was sold to investors. The second filing serves as a new notice of $8.4 million in equity sold, out of a $9.6 million offering.

The filings indicate that Relativity Space is based in Seattle, but in response to an email inquiry, the company declined to say anything further about its location, its business plan or its investors. “We are entirely in stealth mode and will comment more when we are ready,” the company said.

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