Pluto's Moons Offer Clues to Alien Worlds

The "dwarf planet" is helping scientists figure out where to look for planets that circle two parent stars.

THE GIST

• Pluto and its big moon Charon can be used to model binary star systems.
• Pluto’s little moons stand in for extrasolar planets flying around two parent stars.
• New Horizons probe will test computer simulations predicting the moons’ locations and sizes.

This composite of two Hubble images shows Pluto's four satellites in motion.
NASA

Scientists wanting to learn more about how to find families of planets are getting some lessons from Pluto and its partner moon Charon.
The frozen duo, which orbit about 40 times as far away from the sun as Earth, balance a brood of at least three smaller moons, Nix, Hydra and a newly discovered body, designated P4, that flies between the two.
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The whole system takes up less room than the span between Earth and our moon, providing a delicate orbital ballet that has implications for finding planets around dual-star systems beyond the solar system.
Following last year’s discovery of P4 in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers ran computer models to try to pin down the moons’ locations relative to each other and to Pluto and Charon, a proportionally large moon that has about 12 percent of Pluto’s mass.

 

“I was very surprised that they found a new moon in between the other two. It basically meant that it was getting kicked around by these other moon. I thought about what the effects of being kicked around like that and wondered what we could learn about them,” astronomer Andrew Youdin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Discovery News.
“This is generally an issue with extrasolar planets,” he added. “One tries to study the stability of their orbits over time scales of billions of years.”
The research by Youdin and colleagues not only put some limits on how big Pluto’s moons are and where they are located. It also is helping scientists figure out where to look for planets that circle two parent stars. So far, astronomers using NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, for example, have found systems with a single planet orbiting two stars, but not multiple planets, though that may be about to change.
“We’re learning from Pluto and how far away moons have to be for a given mass to last for millions or billions of years,” Youdin said.
The computer simulation will soon get a field test. NASA’s New Horizons probe is en route to the outer corner of the solar system to study Pluto, Charon and the small moons, as well as other objects in the Kuiper Belt region.
“We’ll know in a few years if we’re right or wrong,” Youdin said. “You can study the (moons’) motion through images by Hubble, but it is not as precise as what you can find by going there even on a single flyby.”
The geometry doesn’t leave much space for additional moons close to Pluto, though there could be more orbiting farther away.
NEWS: Hunting Pluto’s Dangerous Rings
Science aside, the prospect of even bits of moons flying near Pluto has the New Horizons team on high alert.
“We’re very concerned about the spacecraft being destroyed,” Alan Stern, New Horizons lead scientist, told Discovery News. “If we hit something even the size of a grain of rice, it would shred the spacecraft.”
Hubble will be tapped to search for potential crash zones until the spacecraft gets close enough to scan with its own cameras. The team also is developing an alternative route to fly by Pluto in case it finds danger looming on the primary path.
“We don’t to put something into the black widow’s web,” Stern said.
Youdin's research will appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

Breaking News:

Tool to turn vintage typewriters moder

Nearly obsolete typewriters can now be upgraded into modern-day equipment by including a USB port which will enable the typewriters to be used on a computer.

WASHINGTON: Good news for those who are still sentimental about their typewriters. Nearly obsolete typewriters can now be upgraded into modern-day equipment by including a USB port which will enable the clatter-making machines to be used on a computer, laptop or tablet, including an iPad.

For those who have not yet joined the computer age, preferring the clatter and ding of their inky typewriters, it might be the perfect solution, the Daily Mail reported.

The upgraded typewriters, which start at 445 pounds (about $720), can still be used the way it was intended -- with keys hitting the paper through an inky ribbon.

As the original computer keyboard was based on the typewriter, nearly all of the keys are the same, allowing writers to type away and see their work on screen.

The makers, usbtypewriter.com built in a Control, Alt and Backspace keys onto the typewriter. The Enter button, which places the cursor on a new line, works in the same way by using the Carriage Return.

Conversion kits are also on sale for around 50 pounds, which transforms old typewriters so that they can be used in the same way on modern computers.

It is the latest in a long line of technology that upgrades 'old-fashioned' and 'retro' devices so that they can be used with computers.

Adobe launches CS6 - which Creative Suite is for you?

 

Adobe launches CS6 - which Creative Suite is for you?

Adobe India has unveiled the latest version of its Creative Suite of applications, CS6, aimed at artists and creative professionals. The suite includes latest versions of popular apps like Photoshop, InDesign and others.

CS6 applications are available individually or as part of 4 different suites, each aimed at a different kind of professional. The entry level suite is the Design Standard, which includes four of the most popular Adobe apps, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat X Pro as well as two supplementary apps, Bridge and Media Encoder. While Bridge is a manager for digital assets like photographs, Media Encoder automates the process of creating multiple encoded versions of source files.

Design and Web Premium suite features Photoshop extended instead of Photoshop and adds the three popular web authoring tools Adobe acquired from Macromedia, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. The Production Premium suite is aimed at video-editing professionals and includes Photoshop, Illustrator, in addition to video-focussed tools like Flash Professional, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore and Story. The Master Collection suite includes all the aforementioned apps.

Pricing for the suites vary from Rs. 77,786 for the Design Standard suite up to 1,55,571 for the Master Collection suite. Competitive upgrade pricing is offered as well for existing CS existing customers (see table below).



For the first time, customers in India can buy CS online, by logging onto the Adobe India online store. Adobe promises to ship CS6 orders staring May 7th.

Coming to the individual applications, Adobe Photoshop CS 6 sports an improved interface that bundles a host of new features that are sure to save creative professionals a lot of time. The content-aware patch and move tools, in particular, will continue to wow users with its effectiveness every time it's used. Read more about all the new features in Photoshop CS6 in our hands-on.

The standout feature in InDesign CS6 is the all-new layout system. InDesign CS6 lets you quickly layout your content for various devices/ screen sizes/ orientations with minimum of effort. For the first time, InDesign comes with support for 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi and Tamil.

Users also have the option to buy the popular apps individually.

NASA's Spitzer Finds Galaxy With Split Personality

The infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that the Sombrero galaxy -- named after its appearance in visible light to a wide-brimmed hat -- is in fact two galaxies in one. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
PASADENA, Calif. -- While some galaxies are rotund and others are slender disks like our spiral Milky Way, new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show that the Sombrero galaxy is both. The galaxy, which is a round elliptical galaxy with a thin disk embedded inside, is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of the two different types. The findings will lead to a better understanding of galaxy evolution, a topic still poorly understood.

"The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought," said Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "The only way to understand all we know about this galaxy is to think of it as two galaxies, one inside the other."

The Sombrero galaxy, also known as NGC 4594, is located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. From our viewpoint on Earth, we can see the thin edge of its flat disk and a central bulge of stars, making it resemble a wide-brimmed hat. Astronomers do not know whether the Sombrero's disk is shaped like a ring or a spiral, but agree it belongs to the disk class.

"Spitzer is helping to unravel secrets behind an object that has been imaged thousands of times," said Sean Carey of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It is intriguing Spitzer can read the fossil record of events that occurred billions of years ago within this beautiful and archetypal galaxy."

Spitzer captures a different view of the galaxy than visible-light telescopes. In visible views, the galaxy appears to be immersed in a glowing halo, which scientists had thought was relatively light and small. With Spitzer's infrared vision, a different view emerges. Spitzer sees old stars through the dust and reveals the halo has the right size and mass to be a giant elliptical galaxy.

While it is tempting to think the giant elliptical swallowed a spiral disk, astronomers say this is highly unlikely because that process would have destroyed the disk structure. Instead, one scenario they propose is that a giant elliptical galaxy was inundated with gas more than nine billion years ago. Early in the history of our universe, networks of gas clouds were common, and they sometimes fed growing galaxies, causing them to bulk up. The gas would have been pulled into the galaxy by gravity, falling into orbit around the center and spinning out into a flat disk. Stars would have formed from the gas in the disk.

"This poses all sorts of questions," said Rubén Sánchez-Janssen from the European Southern Observatory, co-author of the study. "How did such a large disk take shape and survive inside such a massive elliptical? How unusual is such a formation process?"

Researchers say the answers could help them piece together how other galaxies evolve. Another galaxy, called Centaurus A, appears also to be an elliptical galaxy with a disk inside it. But its disk does not contain many stars. Astronomers speculate that Centaurus A could be at an earlier stage of evolution than the Sombrero and might eventually look similar.

The findings also answer a mystery about the number of globular clusters in the Sombrero galaxy. Globular clusters are spherical nuggets of old stars. Ellipticals typically have a few thousand, while spirals contain a few hundred. The Sombrero has almost 2,000, a number that makes sense now but had puzzled astronomers when they thought it was only a disk galaxy.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

Planetary Resources: mining asteroids project launched

Space-faring robots could be extracting gold and platinum from asteroids within 10 years if a new venture backed by two Silicon Valley titans and filmmaker James Cameron goes as planned.

Outside experts are sceptical about the project, announced at a news conference in Seattle on Tuesday, which would likely require untold millions, or perhaps billions of dollars and huge advances in technology.

But the same entrepreneurs pioneered the selling of space rides to tourists – a notion that seemed fanciful not long ago, too.

"Since my early teenage years, I've wanted to be an asteroid miner. I always viewed it as a glamorous vision of where we could go," Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of Planetary Resources, said at a news conference at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. The company's vision "is to make the resources of space available to humanity."

The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for the right type of asteroids.

The plan is to use commercially built robotic ships to squeeze rocket fuel and valuable minerals out of the rocks that routinely whizz by Earth. One of the company founders predicts they could have their version of a space-based gas station up and running by 2020.

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Several scientists not involved in the project said they were simultaneously thrilled and wary, calling the plan daring, difficult – and very pricey. They do not see how it could be cost-effective, even with platinum and gold worth nearly $1,600 an ounce. An forthcoming NASA mission to return just 2 ounces (60 grams) of an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1 billion.
But the entrepreneurs behind Planetary Resources Inc. have a track record of profiting off space ventures. Diamandis and co-founder Eric Anderson and pioneered the idea of selling rides into space to tourists, and Diamandis' company offers "weightless" aeroplane flights.
Investors and advisers to the new company include Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and explorer and Cameron, the man behind the blockbusters "Titanic" and "Avatar."
Anderson says the group will prove naysayers wrong. "Before we started launching people into space as private citizens, people thought that was a pie-in-the-sky idea," Anderson said. "We're in this for decades. But it's not a charity. And we'll make money from the beginning."
The mining, fuel processing and later refuelling would all be done without humans, Anderson said.
"It is the stuff of science fiction, but like in so many other areas of science fiction, it's possible to begin the process of making them reality," said former astronaut Thomas Jones, an adviser to the company.
The target-hunting telescopes would be tubes only a couple of feet (less than a metre) long, weighing only a few dozen pounds and small enough to be held in your hand. They should cost less than $10 million, company officials said.
The idea that asteroids could be mined for resources has been around for years. Asteroids are the leftovers of a failed attempt to form a planet billions of years ago. Most of the remnants became the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but some pieces were pushed out to roam the solar system.
Asteroids are made mostly of rock and metal and range from a couple of dozen feet (7 meters) wide to nearly 10 miles (16 kilometres) long. The new venture targets the free-flying asteroids, seeking to extract from them the rare Earth platinum metals that are used in batteries, electronics and medical devices, Diamandis said.
Water can be broken down in space to liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel. Water is very expensive to get off the ground so the plan is to take it from an asteroid to a spot in space where it can be converted into fuel. From there, it can easily and cheaply be shipped to Earth orbit for refuelling commercial satellites or spaceships from NASA and other countries.
In the past couple of years, NASA and other space agencies have shifted their attention from the moon and other planets toward asteroids. Because asteroids don't have any substantial gravity, targeting them costs less fuel and money than going to the moon, Anderson said in a phone interview.
There are probably 1,500 asteroids that pass near Earth that would be good initial targets. They are at least 160 feet (50 meters) wide, and Anderson figures 10 per cent of them have water and other valuable minerals.
"A depot within a decade seems incredible. I hope there will be someone to use it," said Andrew Cheng at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, who was the chief scientist for a NASA mission to an asteroid a decade ago. "And I have high hopes that commercial uses of space will become profitable beyond Earth orbit. Maybe the time has come."
Diamandis and Anderson would not disclose how much the project will cost overall. By building and launching quickly, the company hopes to operate much more cheaply than NASA.
Harvard's Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center, said getting drilling equipment into space and operating safely sounds "expensive and difficult."
"It would be awfully hard to make money on it," Spahr said.
Richard Binzel, professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the effort "may be many decades ahead of its time. But you have to start somewhere."

First private spacecraft launch to International Space Station delayed

Washington:  Dragon, the first private spacecraft to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS), is scheduled to blast off May 7, a week later than previously scheduled, NASA said on its website.

The launch, initially scheduled for April 30, was delayed to conduct additional tests of the unmanned spacecraft's software. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are at Cape Canaveral undergoing final preparations ahead of the launch.

"We appreciate that SpaceX is taking the necessary time to help ensure the success of this historic flight. We will continue to work with SpaceX in preparing for the May 7 launch to the International Space Station," NASA said in a statement.

The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule have already been taken to Cape Canaveral and are undergoing final preparations.

SpaceX has already conducted two successful Falcon 9 launches and a demonstration flight of the Dragon capsule in December 2010. It became the first privately built and operated spacecraft to be launched to and recovered from the Earth's orbit.

The Dragon can carry a payload of about six metric tonnes to the near-earth orbit, and recover three metric tonnes of payload from the orbit.

Dragon was designed and built by California-based Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX as part of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme to encourage private companies into developing spacecrafts delivering payloads to near-earth orbit and the ISS.

Under the programme, SpaceX received $376 million out of the $396-million funding from the US space agency.

Another company, Orbital Sciences Corporation, is scheduled to send its Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS Sep 1.

Mars astronauts may be risking DNA damage

Future astronauts working on the Red Planet’s surface risk general changes in health at the DNA level because of an increased radiation exposure, a prominent Russian academic has said. Anatoly Grigoryev, the deputy head of Russia's Academy of Sciences, said it Monday during a presentation at the International Symposium on the results of ground-based experiment Mars-500. "According to our estimates, researchers on the surface of Mars can expect a number of adverse factors, such as cardiac arrhythmia, reduced stability and performance, sensory impairments, as well as more long-term consequences in the form of changes at the DNA level, and demineralisation of bone tissue,” said Grigoryev. In addition, according to the academic, astronauts could also face a number of adverse psycho-physiological factors during the flight to Mars, such as hypokinesia (decreased motor activity), monotony and frustration. According to the material published on the results of preliminary processing of scientific data, obtained during the 520-day isolation volunteers, after leaving the laboratory module, all participants of the experiment of ground simulation of the flight to the Red Planet fully preserved the health and performance. The unique Moscow-based Mars-500 experiment was completed Nov 4. It attempted to recreate at least some of the conditions of a flight to the Red Planet by locking six men away in a mock spacecraft. They spent 520 days in an environment simulating space flight. The six volunteers - researcher Alexander Smoleyevsky, flight engineer Roman Charles, crew commander Alexei Sitev, medical doctor Sukhrob Kamolov, and researchers Diego Urbina and Wang Yueh - were isolated from the outside world in a specially designed complex simulating a spaceship.

Scientists find magnetic reconnection near Venus

BEIJING: The magnetic phenomenon that causes auroras on Earth has now been discovered around Venus, a planet without a magnetic field.
Scientists from China, the US and Austria have jointly found this phenomenon called "magnetic reconnection" in the near-Venus magnetotail.
The findings, issued in the latest Science Magazine released this week are likely to promote research into climate change on Venus and help find solutions to similar problems on Earth, Professor Zhang Tielong, the team leader with University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), said.

The magnetic reconnection may explain the auroras around Venus, and the atmosphere escape that led to the transformation of the planet rich in water 4 billion years ago to its current state, Zhang said.
Similar to Earth in bulk, density and quality, Venus was once considered the planet which was most likely to have life.
However, the temperature on the planet can reach 400 degrees Celsius and it has no water.
Supported by China's national natural science foundation, the project was jointly conducted by USTC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Science.
The findings were based on observations with the Venus Express magnetometer and a low-energy particle detector, Zhang was quoted by state run Xinhua news agency here today.
Venus Express is a spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency.

Social rank 'linked to immunity'

The social movements of rhesus monkeys are well studied, but health effects remain to be understood

Continue reading the main story

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A study of rhesus macaque monkeys may have solved a long-standing puzzle on a link between social rank and health.

A study of 10 social groups of macaque females showed that the activity level of an individual's immune genes was an accurate predictor of her social rank.
In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team also showed that the monkey's immunity changed when social rank was altered.
The work suggests that status drives immune health, rather than vice-versa.
A great many studies have shown associations in both humans and non-human primates between social environment and biological markers of health.
In previous studies of rhesus macaques, the so-called dominance rank has been correlated to levels of the stress-linked glucocorticoid hormones, sex hormones, the brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine, and white blood cell counts.
But one unanswered question concerns cause and effect: does a compromised immunity or imbalance of some chemical cause a particular social rank, or does taking on a particular social rank set the immune system and neural dials?
Jenny Tung, now at Duke University, and colleagues addressed this question by carefully assigning social rank to 10 groups of rhesus macaques, each containing five females.
This can be done by altering the order in which females are introduced into the group; the later she arrives, the lower her social rank.

The level of the blood's immunity seem to respond to changes in social rank

The team then measured the levels of a broad class of immune cells, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in the bloodstream.
They found that on the basis of those levels of circulating immune cells alone, they could predict an individual female's social rank with 80% accuracy.
Further studies that investigated the degree to which hundreds of immunity-related genes were "switched on" also showed increased immune activity in higher-ranking females.
What is more, the team found that as rank shifted among seven of the females, the data corresponding to gene activity was again enough to guess an individual's new rank with an accuracy of 85%.
"The current results support the idea that changes in gene regulation help to explain links between the social environment and physiology, potentially supplying an important piece to the puzzle of how social effects 'get under the skin'," the team wrote.
Though the findings might seem to suggest that low social rank, or a decrease in social rank, can lead to reduced immune health, the team said it was "encouraging" that the effects can be counteracted by a change in the social environment.
"Our results motivate efforts to develop a nuanced understanding of social effects on gene regulation," they wrote, "with the aim of both exploring its evolutionary and ecological consequences and addressing its effects on human health."

Space

'NASA's spacecraft fuel shortage can be tackled by 2017'

Tags: NASA, Spacecraft fuel, Plutonium-238

Washington: Shortage of spacecraft fuel that has cast doubts over NASA's future space missions may soon be prevented, as the US space agency is likely to receive new batches of plutonium-238 by as early as 2017.

The US hasn't produced plutonium-238 -- a radioactive isotope that's been powering NASA space probes for five decades -- since the late 1980s, and planetary scientists say stockpiles are worryingly low.

But a production restart is now underway, according to officials with the US Department of Energy (DOE) that supplies plutonium-238 to the space agency.

"We have turned the spade in starting the project for renewed plutonium production," Wade Carroll, DOE's deputy director of space and defence power systems, was quoted as saying by SPACE.com.

"It'll take probably five or six years before the next new plutonium is available," Carroll said at the Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space conference in Texas recently.

Plutonium-238 is not used to make nuclear weapons though its isotopic cousin, plutonium-239, is a common bomb-making material. However, scientists take advantage of radioactive nature of the isotope, as they convert the heat it emits to power using a device called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG).

RTGs have long been the power system of choice for NASA missions to destinations in deep space, where scant sunlight makes solar panels impractical. RTGs have powered some of the space agency's most famous spacecraft, including the Voyager probes that are nearing the edge of the solar system and the Cassini spacecraft currently surveying Saturn and its moons.

Plutonium is also fuelling NASA's New Horizons probe, which launched in 2006 and will make a close flyby of Pluto in 2015, as well as the car-size Curiosity rover, which is due to land on the Red Planet this August.

While the DOE doesn't publicly disclose the size of the nation's plutonium-238 stores, many planetary scientists think the cupboard is almost bare after the November launch of Curiosity, which carries 3.6 kg of the stuff.

NASA officials, for their part, have said there's enough of the isotope left to fuel space missions through 2020 or thereabouts.