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XPRIZE clears Japanese mission to the moon

Team Hakuto rovers
Japan’s Team Hakuto is testing two small rovers known as Tetris (left foreground) and Moonraker (right background). The rovers would ride along with Team Indus’ spacecraft. (Team Hakuto Photo)

The rocketeers on Japan’s Team Hakuto say they’ve gotten the Google Lunar XPRIZE’s seal of approval on its plans for a mission to the moon.

The XPRIZE verification of Team Hakuto’s launch agreement with India’s Team Indus boosts the number of approved competitors to five. That includes Team Indus as well as Moon Express, Synergy Moon and SpaceIL.

“The Google Lunar XPRIZE has always pushed us beyond our limits” Takeshi Hakamada, Team Hakuto’s leader, said in today’s news release. “We will continue to challenge ourselves next year and choose an optimal path to reach the moon.”

Team Hakuto is run by a Tokyo-based startup called ispace, and draws upon expertise from faculty and students at Tohoku University.

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Who would you go to Mars with? Here’s a list

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence star in the movie “Passengers,” which tells the tale of a space journey far beyond Mars. (Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures)

A just-for-fun survey suggests that three out of every 10 Americans have thought about going to Mars, and almost half of them have thought about it more seriously after the presidential election.

The finding come from an online survey conducted by Kelton Global to mesh with National Geographic Channel’s six-part TV miniseries, “Mars,” which finishes up with an episode premiering tonight.

The breakdown suggests that men give more thought to Mars trips than women, and that Millennials are more on board with the idea than baby boomers. Overall, 44 percent of the 1,024 survey respondents said they’re more likely to want to travel to Mars in the wake of last month’s election.

So who would they want to leave behind? Actually, President-elect Donald Trump was the most popular candidate on the survey’s list: He was chosen by 46 percent of those surveyed, with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Hillary Clinton close behind. (To be fair, the respondents could select more than one celebrity to drop off.)

There was also a list of potential traveling companions. Actress Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as a space traveler in the newly released movie “Passengers,” scored the highest overall.

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SoftBank boosts OneWeb satellite network

Image: Satellite web
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)

The OneWeb internet satellite venture says it has secured another $1.2 billion in investment, including a billion dollars from SoftBank Group.

OneWeb said the new infusion of capital will support the construction of a high-volume satellite production facility in Exploration Park, Fla., capable of producing 15 satellites a week. Production is to begin in 2018, with an eye toward having OneWeb’s network operating by as early as 2019.

The operation is expected to create nearly 3,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next four years, including jobs in engineering and manufacturing, OneWeb said.

SoftBank’s investment serves as an initial follow-through on a pledge made by the Japan-based conglomerate’s chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son, to President-elect Donald Trump. During a meeting in New York this month, Son told Trump that he’d invest $50 billion in the U.S. to create 50,000 jobs.

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Star Wars fans turn out in Force for ‘Rogue One’

Margaret Urfer as Jedi knight
Software engineer Margaret Urfer strikes a Jedi knight pose after a “Rogue One” showing at Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

“Rogue One” may not have a Roman numeral in its name, but Dec. 15’s debut nevertheless brought out costumed Jedi knights and other Star Wars fans in droves.

Most of them went back into the night with smiles on their faces. And at least one of them, Makenna Hoffard, thought it was better than VII.

“I was expecting not to like it,” Hoffard, a recent graduate from the University of Washington, said after the 10:30 p.m. showing at Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, Wash.

She knows the ins and outs of the Star Wars canon, based on myriad spin-off books as well as the movies, and she said the latest film “upheld the story” even though it’s a stand-alone film and not officially part of the nine-episode big-screen masterwork.

“They made it modern and funny, like a Marvel movie kind of vibe,” she said.

Hoffard couldn’t say the same for last year’s Episode VII, “The Force Awakens,” which she faulted for taking too many liberties with the canon. “I cried after the seventh movie, and not in a good way,” she said.

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Water, water everywhere on dwarf planet Ceres

Hydrogen on Ceres
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft determined the hydrogen content of the upper yard, or meter, of Ceres’ surface. Blue indicates where hydrogen content is higher, near the poles, while red indicates lower content at lower latitudes. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI Photo)

Readings from instruments aboard NASA’s Dawn orbiter support the view that a treasure trove of frozen water lies just beneath the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres.

Researchers reported those findings today at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting San Francisco, as well as in two papers published by Nature Astronomy and Science.

The findings are based on hydrogen readings from Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector, or GRaND, as well as from the spacecraft’s cameras and infrared mapping spectrometer.

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‘Rogue One’ and more: 10 movies to watch for

Felicity Jones in "Rogue One"
Felicity Jones stars in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” (Disney / Lucasfilm Photo)

Tonight’s the first chance most of us will have to see “Rogue One,” the latest addition to the big-screen Star Wars saga, but we already know it’s the best film of the batch. Or one of the worst.

That’s based on the reviews from fans and critics that have come out since the previews started rolling out over the past few days.

Unless you’ve been locked up in a slab of carbonite, Han Solo-style, you already know that “Rogue One” is a standalone story in the Star Wars oeuvre, The movie is about a band of rebels who take on the Galactic Empire in the stretch of time between Episode III (“Revenge of the Sith”) and Episode IV (“A New Hope”), when Darth Vader was digging the Dark Side.

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Hurricane-watching microsatellites go in orbit

Rocket deployment
A photo taken from a NASA F-18 chase plane shows Orbital ATK’s L-1011 Stargazer jet deploying a Pegasus XL rocket to launch eight CYGNSS satellites. (NASA Photo / Lori Losey)

After several days of delays, a squadron of eight microsatellites was sent into orbit by a rocket launched from a high-flying airplane. Their mission? To study the winds that power the heart of a hurricane.

The launch was originally scheduled for Dec. 12, and then for Dec. 14. Each time, technical glitches forced a postponement. But today, it was all systems go as Orbital ATK’s Lockheed L-1011 Stargazer jet took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Fliroda.

An hour after takeoff, the airplane released a three-stage Pegasus rocket from an altitude of 39,000 feet. The Pegasus fired up its rocket engines and deployed the eight suitcase-sized satellites into low Earth orbit.

“The deployments looked great,” said Southwest Research Institute’s John Scherrer, a project manager for the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS. “Right on time.”

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Buzz Aldrin on his health scare and John Glenn

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin check out the engines on a Saturn V rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I’m feeling better and my rocket is ready to launch,” he tweeted. (Buzz Aldrin Photo via Twitter)
Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin check out the engines on a Saturn V rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I’m feeling better and my rocket is ready to launch,” he tweeted. (Buzz Aldrin Photo via Twitter)

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin made light of what some might consider a close brush with death during an interview that aired today on NBC’s “Today” show – but he made a serious point as well.

A medical emergency at the South Pole forced Aldrin’s evacuation from the South Pole during a tourism trek on Nov. 30. “I got out of breath,” the 86-year-old told interviewer Al Roker at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “You know, that’s nothing new, except it’s a little more concentrated.”

Aldrin suffered from respiratory problems associated with Antarctica’s cold temperatures and high altitude. “Not much air to breathe up there,” he said. He was airlifted to a hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand, for a week of recuperation.

It didn’t sound as if he had any regrets.

“When turning back is about as difficult as pressing on, you press on, because you’ve got an objective,” Aldrin said. “Especially when they tell me that I just set a record – the oldest guy to the South Pole. See, now it was worth it, really!”

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Syria crisis tests BlackSky satellite data portal

Image: BlackSky platform provides Aleppo data
BlackSky’s online imaging platform can link a satellite view of the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo to real-time social media streams about the area to provide greater context. (Spaceflight Industries Graphic)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is giving early adopters a preview of its online BlackSky satellite imagery platform, which blends overhead views of sites around the world with social-media posts and other reports about what’s shown in the pictures.

One of the first subjects to be tackled is the humanitarian crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in devastating bombing attacks and house-to-house fighting. That’s apt, because the members of the early adopter program include the United Nations as well as the World Bank and RS Metrics, a company that uses satellite imagery to track global developments.

“Tracking critical global events as they happen is of interest to all of our early customers,” Jodi Sorenson, vice president of marketing and communications at Spaceflight Industries, told GeekWire in an emailed comment. “We chose to use Aleppo as an example to demonstrate the platform’s ability to provide insights on areas of particular international importance.”

The BlackSky platform offers access to imagery from more than 10 Earth-watching satellites, including Korea’s KOMPSAT spacecraft and UrtheCast’s Deimos-2. Customers can also use the platform to order up near-real-time images of specified sites.

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Curiosity rover fleshes out picture of old Mars

Mars geology in Gale Crater
This schematic illustrates how the creation and disappearance of a Martian lake created different layers of rock in the region being explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover. (NASA / JPL Graphic)

Scientists say they’re putting together the puzzle pieces provided by NASA’s Curiosity rover to get a better picture of how the outlook for habitability on Mars brightened and dimmed over the course of billions of years.

“We see all the properties in place that we like to associate with habitability,” Caltech planetary scientist John Grotzinger said today during a session at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco.

As Curiosity makes its way up the layered slopes of a 3-mile-high peak known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, it’s encountering different layers of material that hint at how the region around the mountain was formed.

Grotzinger and his colleagues said that clay minerals, boron and an iron-bearing mineral known as hematite are more abundant in the higher layers. Their presence suggests that there was dynamic chemical interaction between the rocks and groundwater in ancient times.

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