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How to shield a probe for trip to Alpha Centauri

Image: Starshot nano-probe
An artist’s conception suggests how light from a battery of laser-equipped antennas can power a sail to the Alpha Centauri system. (Credit: Breakthrough Initiatives)

The scientists behind the Breakthrough Starshot mission are already fine-tuning the design for their nano-probes to increase the odds they’ll survive the trip to Proxima Centauri b.

In a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server last week, researchers lay out their latest calculations on the kinds of damage their scaled-down spacecraft could face as they speed toward the Alpha Centauri system at 20 percent of the speed of light.

The mission and the study have taken on greater importance, due to this week’s announcement that a potentially habitable planet has been detected in orbit around Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that’s part of the star system. It’s the star that’s closest to our own solar system, lying only 4.2 light-years away.

In astronomical terms, Proxima Centauri is right next door. But in mission planning terms, it’s far, far away. It would take tens of thousands of years for a conventional spacecraft to get there.

To reduce that time frame, Breakthrough Starshot has proposed sending bunches of lightweight electronic wafers, known as “Starchips.” The Starchips would be accelerated to relativistic speeds by aiming powerful lasers at film-thin light sails that carry the probes along.

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Map shows where climate will move species

Image: Migrations in Motion
A visualization shows the likely routes that would be taken by mammals (pink), birds (blue) and amphibians (yellow) as they move northward in response to climate change. (Credit: Mapbox / OpenStreetMap / Migrations in Motion / Nature Conservancy)

A University of Washington professor’s research into climate-caused migrations has been transformed into a hypnotic map of the Americas that gets the message across.

The animated map, titled “Migrations in Motion,” shows the trajectories that species are expected to take in response to the warming trend that’s likely to unfold over the course of the coming decades.

“One of the nice things about the map is that it gives you a look at the main effects of climate change for animals: that species are going to move around,” UW ecologist Joshua Lawler told GeekWire.

Three years ago, Lawler and his colleagues published a study in Ecology Letters that laid out the likely impact of rising temperatures on migration patterns for nearly 3,000 species.

The study suggested that species in North America would tend to shift toward more northerly habitats, following routes that went through higher elevations and less developed terrain. In the eastern United States, the Appalachian Mountains stuck out as a superhighway for species shifts.

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Concrete poured for Blue Origin space complex

Image: Blue Origin construction work
Workers pour concrete at the site of Blue Origin’s rocket factory in Florida. (Credit: Space Florida)

Work is progressing on the facility in Florida where Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture plans to build its orbital spaceships.

Bezos called attention to the groundbreaking milestone for the 750,000-square-foot rocket factory in June. Today, Space Florida, the state development agency that’s leasing the property and Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 to Blue Origin, tweeted that concrete is being poured for the campus’ first building.

The $200 million manufacturing and launch facility at Kennedy Space Center’s Exploration Park is expected to open by early 2018 and employ about 300 people.

That’s in addition to the folks who work at Blue Origin’s headquarters and production facility in Kent, Wash., and at its suborbital launch complex in West Texas. The company says it has about 700 employees today.

Blue Origin is currently focusing on its suborbital space effort. So far it’s conducted four fully successful uncrewed tests of its reusable, hydrogen-fueled New Shepard spaceship, which is built in Kent and flown in Texas.

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Dragon brings cargo from orbit with a splash

Image: SpaceX Dragon
SpaceX’s Dragon pulls away from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA TV)

SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today, carrying more than 3,000 pounds of cargo and science samples back down to Earth from the International Space Station.

NASA’s Kate Rubins and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi worked with the station’s robotic arm to pull the Dragon away from its berth and set it free at 3:11 a.m. PT. “Dragon depart successfully commanded,” Rubins reported.

Mission Control passed along thanks to the crew for their efforts, “and to the Dragon recovery team, fair winds and following seas.”

Over the five and a half hours that followed, SpaceX confirmed that the capsule successfully executed its deorbiting maneuvers and made a parachute-assisted splashdown, about 300 miles southwest of Baja California.

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Pow! Rosetta probe spots comet eruption

Image: Rosetta image of comet eruption
The OSIRIS wide-angle camera on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe captured this view of an outburst from the Atum region on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Feb. 19. (Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team, MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA)

The scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to a comet today released an amazing series of pictures showing the space mountain flashing with an outburst of dust and gas.

They suspect that the Feb. 19 outburst, captured by Rosetta’s instruments from a distance of about 20 miles, may have been triggered by a landslide.

“Over the last year, Rosetta has show that although activity can be prolonged, when it comes to outbursts, the timing is highly unpredictable, so catching an event like this was pure luck,” Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, said in a news release. “By happy coincidence, we were pointing the majority of instruments at the comet at this time, and having these simultaneous measurements provides us with the most complete set of data on an outburst ever collected.”

The readings were sent back soon after the eruption, but it took months to reconstruct the chain of events behind it. Now a research paper about the phenomenon has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Feds approve $2.6 billion Tesla-SolarCity merger

Image: Elon Musk
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk talks about the Model 3 during its unveiling in April. (Credit: Tesla)

The Federal Trade Commission has given its approval for Tesla Motors’ acquisition of the SolarCity power panel company, saying that the combination would create no antitrust concerns.

The go-ahead removes another hurdle to the $2.6 billion all-stock deal, which was proposed in June. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is the largest investor in both companies. He’s the CEO of Tesla, and the chairman of SolarCity.

Musk argues that the deal will create a consumer-friendly, one-stop energy shop for electric cars, solar panels and battery storage systems.

The next hurdle is a vote by the disinterested shareholders of the two companies, which will exclude the shares held by Musk and other executives. That vote is expected to clear the way for the merger to take effect later this year.

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This galaxy is made of 99.99% dark matter

Image: Dragonfly 44
The dark galaxy Dragonfly 44 appears to have about as much mass as our own Milky Way galaxy, but only 0.01 percent of that mass is in the form of stars and normal matter. The rest is dark matter, scientists say. (Credit: Pieter van Dokkum and Roberto Abraham / Gemini Observatory / AURA)

About 85 percent of the mass of the universe consists of mysterious stuff known as dark matter, but a galaxy called Dragonfly 44 appears to be even darker: 99.99 percent dark, according to newly published findings.

Dragonfly 44, which lies about 300 million light-years away in the Coma galaxy cluster, is the subject of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“It has so few stars that it would quickly be ripped apart unless something was holding it together,” Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, the study’s lead author, said in a news release.

Van Dokkum and his colleagues tracked the motions of the stars in the galaxy using the Keck Observatory and the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. The stars’ motions told the astronomers about the gravitational field surrounding Dragonfly 44.

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Flying saucer? No, it’s a drone pizza delivery

Image: Pizza drone
A Flirtey drone lowers a pizza box from the skies above Auckland, New Zealand. (Credit: Domino’s)

Domino’s Pizza Enterprises and Flirtey teamed up today to demonstrate a drone delivery system that could theoretically bring you a pizza in 30 minutes or less – from the air.

The first delivery was lowered by tether onto a picnic blanket spread out beneath drippy skies at a test site in Auckland, New Zealand. Within a minute, Transport Minister Simon Bridges and other dignitaries were sampling the wares and nodding in approval.

Flights are due to expand to customer homes in New Zealand later this year.

Why New Zealand?

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Astronaut breaks NASA record for time in space

Image: Jeff Williams
NASA astronaut Jeff Williams shows off mission patches from his spaceflights. (Credit: NASA)

Retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly may hold the U.S. record for most consecutive days in space, but he’s been surpassed by Jeff Williams, the International Space Station’s current commander, when it comes to total days in orbit.

Today Williams zoomed past Kelly’s 520-day cumulative record, and by the time his six-month stint on the space station ends on Sept. 6, he’ll have racked up 534 days in all.

Kelly called up his congratulations from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

“But I do have one question for you,” Kelly cracked, “and my question is, you got another 190 days in you?”

“One hundred and ninety days in me?” Williams replied. “That question is not for me. That’s for my wife.”

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Cancer center puts the art of science on display

Image: Brain tumor cell
“Sunrise” is a microscopic image of a dividing human brain tumor cell. The red lines are tubulins, which act as guides for the transport of chromosomes along the cell’s mitotic spindle. The bright spots are kinetochores, which promote attachments between the chromosomes and the spindle. Researchers at Patrick Paddison’s Fred Hutch lab have found that kinetochore regulation is altered in brain tumors. (Credit: Paddison Lab / Fred Hutch)

Cancer researchers have to deal with some of nature’s ugliest diseases, but they do find bits of beauty along the way – and that beauty is the focus of an art walk presented by Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on Aug. 25.

The event features scientific images that were captured by researchers at Fred Hutch, and will be put on display from 5:30 to 8 p.m. in the Mundie Courtyard on the research center’s South Lake Union Campus, at 1100 Fairview Ave. N.

One picture focuses in on a single dividing tumor cell from a human brain, glowing red with bright blue spots called kinetochores. Another shows a burst of brain cells in the cerebral cortex of a developing mouse, illuminated in blue, green and fuchsia.

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