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2007 OR10 deserves a better name

Image: Dwarf planets compared
An illustration lines up the solar system’s four largest dwarf planets, with 2007 OR10 in the middle of the pack. (Credit: Andras Pal / Konkoly Observatory, Ivan Eder / Hungarian Astronomical Association, NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggest that the icy world known as 2007 OR10 is bigger than astronomers thought –and that’s adding to the pressure to give the probable dwarf planet an official name, nine years after its discovery.

Some of the suggestions pick up on the recent controversy over a British ship-naming contest in which Boaty McBoatface emerged as the overwhelming favorite. So how about Dwarfplanety McDwarfplanetface, or Plutoid McPlutoface?

The cause of all this mirth is a research paper in the Astronomical Journal that provides a new size estimate for 2007 OR10, which lies far out in the Kuiper Belt, the broad ring of icy material just beyond Neptune. The object traces an eccentric orbit that takes 547.51 Earth years to complete, and ranges as far out as 66.9 times Earth’s distance from the sun (6.2 billion miles).

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Hyperloop One zooms through speed test

Image: Hyperloop One sled
Hyperloop One’s propulsion test sled zooms down a Nevada desert track. (Credit: Hyperloop One)

The newly renamed Hyperloop One venture sent an electrically propelled sled down a Nevada test track at speeds that went beyond 100 mph in just two seconds, marking the public debut of its rapid-transit propulsion system.

Hundreds of journalists and VIPs watched the open-air propulsion test, which represents a milestone in the effort to commercialize a high-speed transportation system conceived three years ago by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

Theoretically, such a system could transport passengers in levitating pods through elevated tubes at near-supersonic speeds, bridging the distance between, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles in a half-hour.

But turning theory into fact will probably require spending billions of dollars, pioneering scores of technologies and negotiating unprecedented regulatory hurdles. Today’s test was meant to demonstrate first-generation Hyperloop technology, and show that Hyperloop One was serious about building hardware and laying track, albeit for scaled-down testing.

Hyperloop One already has raised more than $100 million for its venture, including$80 million in investments that were announced on May 10.

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Boeing delays its astronaut trips to 2018

Image: Boeing Starliner hull
The hull of a CST-100 Starliner structural test vehicle is assembled inside Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Credit: NASA)

A top Boeing executive said today that the company plans to start sending crews into orbit aboard its CST-100 Starliner space taxi in 2018, which represents a slight delay in NASA’s previous development schedule.

“We’re working toward our first unmanned flight in 2017, followed by a manned astronaut flight in 2018,” Leanne Caret, who is Boeing’s executive vice president as well as president and chief executive officer of Boeing’s defense, space and security division, said at a briefing for investors.

Previously, Boeing said both test flights, uncrewed and crewed, were scheduled for 2017. Just this week, Aviation Week reported that Boeing was sticking to the 2017 schedule, even though it’s been working through challenges related to the mass of the spacecraft and aeroacoustic issues related to integration with its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 launch vehicle.

In a follow-up to Caret’s comments, Boeing spokeswoman Rebecca Regan told GeekWire that those factors contributed to the schedule slip. In addition, NASA software updates have added more work for developers.

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SpaceX Dragon returns year-in-space samples

SpaceX splashdown
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule descends toward the Pacific at the end of its parachutes. (Credit: SpaceX)

A month after delivering an expandable prototype habitat and other goodies to the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today  with tons of equipment and scientific samples.

Among the roughly 3,700 pounds of cargo are freezers containing blood, saliva, urine and stool samples from astronaut Scott Kelly, who served as an experimental subject during a nearly yearlong stint on the station. Those samples will be studied to see how long-term spaceflight affected Kelly’s metabolic functions, including the function of the gut bacteria in his bowels.

The results could affect how NASA plans for even longer journeys to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

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Hyperloop One gets an $80 million boost

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Components for a Hyperloop One test track are laid out in North Las Vegas. (Credit: Hyperloop One)

Forget Hyperloop Technologies: Now the company is called Hyperloop One, and it’s backed by $80 million in new investment from heavy hitters including Khosla Ventures, GE Ventures and the French high-speed rail company SNCF.

Today’s unveiling of the new name and new financing, as well as an international array of partners and a tuned-up business plan, is part of a fast-track plan for building high-speed tube transit systems – not only in California, but potentially in Scandinavia and Switzerland as well.

L.A.-based Hyperloop One is due to demonstrate its propulsion system on an open-air test track in North Las Vegas on Wednesday. It’s gearing up for full-scale trials in a 2-mile-long tube by the end of the year. It’s also planning a “Hyperloop One Global Challenge” for folks who want to propose transportation applications for the Hyperloop concept. (Deadline for entries is Sept. 15.)

This week’s revelations pick up the pace in a crowded commercial race, aimed at capitalizing on a rapid-transit concept laid out almost three years ago by Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

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Software helps scientists double planet count

Image: Planet diversity
A graphic shows the diversity of planets. (Credit: NASA)

The scientists behind NASA’s Kepler mission are using statistics to put their campaign to identify new planets into overdrive: New software that automates the process has verified 1,284 candidates as genuine planets rather than celestial “impostors,” more than doubling its database of confirmed worlds.

“This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time,” Princeton University researcher Timothy Morton said today during a teleconference revealing the latest counts.

Kepler’s official tally of potentially habitable planets close to Earth’s size took a jump as well, from 12 to 21.

NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan hailed the rapid progress. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” she said in a statement.

The dramatic acceleration in the planet hunt is due to a statistical method pioneered by Morton and his colleagues, and described in a paper published in theAstrophysical Journal.

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Blue Origin and SpaceX revisit rocket landings

Image: Blue Origin view
A view from the “vent cam” on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital booster shows a West Texas landscape during an April 2 flight, plus a “toasty brown” ring fin at the top. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Will seeing a spaceship land on its feet ever get old? The novelty is still there in newly released videos from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, showing new perspectives on their most recent rocket landings.

Blue Origin’s video recaps the April 2 flight of its New Shepard suborbital space vehicle, as seen from a camera pointing out from one of the booster’s vents. The 2:38 clip begins with a shot of the curving blue Earth below the blackness of space – a view that paying passengers could see as early as 2018.

Then there’s the supersonic descent back through the atmosphere. If you look closely at the full-frame, high-definition video, you might be able to pick out the Rio Grande River running through the West Texas landscape surrounding Blue Origin’s launch and landing site.

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$50M contest sparks buzz over electric vehicles

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A plug-in hybrid vehicle gets an electric boost from a charging station in Portland, Ore. (Credit: PGE)

The winner of the $50 million Smart City Challenge won’t be announced until next month, but the organizers have already picked at least one winning technology for transforming transportation and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions: electric vehicles.

Switching over to electric vehicles will be a “central pillar” for urban transportation strategies, said Spencer Reeder, senior program officer for climate and energy at Seattle billionaire Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. Vulcan is contributing $10 million to support the challenge, while the U.S. Department of Transportation has pledged up to $40 million.

The challenge started last December, with the aim of encouraging mid-sized cities to develop safer, more efficient and more environmentally sound transportation systems. Seventy-eight cities submitted proposals, and in March, the field was trimmed down to seven finalists: Austin, in Texas, Columbus in Ohio, Denver, Kansas City in Missouri, Pittsburgh, Portland in Oregon and San Francisco.

The final submissions are due on May 24, and the winning city will receive the lion’s share of the prize money to help turn its plan into a demonstration project.

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Early Earth’s atmosphere was way lighter

Image: Australian rock
The layers on this 2.7 billion-year-old rock, a stromatolite from Western Australia, show evidence of single-celled, photosynthetic life on the shore of a large lake. The new result suggests that this microbial life thrived despite a thin atmosphere. (Credit: Roger Buick / UW)

Tiny bubbles that were trapped inside 2.7 billion-year-old rocks have led scientists to conclude that Earth’s atmosphere was less than half as dense as it is today – which runs counter to conventional wisdom.

Scientists had assumed that our planet’s atmosphere was thicker billions of years ago, in order to retain heat and keep the planet warm enough for life during an era when the sun shone less brightly than it does today.

“Our result is the opposite of what we were expecting,” Sanjoy Som, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said in a news releasefrom the University of Washington.

Som is the principal author of a study reporting the findings, published today by Nature Geoscience. He conducted the research during his doctoral studies at the UW, and retains a Seattle connection as the CEO of a nonprofit space science outreach group called Blue Marble Space.

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Robotic hand learns to become more dexterous

Image: Robotic hand
A human hand makes contact with the University of Washington’s robotic hand. (Credit: UW)

Pianists, surgeons, typists, gamers and baton-twirlers all learn to use their hands more skillfully as they ply their trade, but what about robots? Researchers at the University of Washington say they’ve developed a five-fingered robot hand that’s more capable than ours, and can learn to handle objects better and better without human intervention.

The ADROIT Manipulation Platform draws upon machine learning and real-world feedback to improve its performance, rather than relying on its programmers to specify its every move.

“Such dynamic dexterous manipulation with free objects has never been demonstrated before even in simulation, let along the physical hardware results we have,” Vikash Kumar, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering, told GeekWire in an email. Kumar and his colleagues discuss the project in a paper to be presented May 17 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

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