Responding to potential asteroid redirect mission targets

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~4/3l8C3oGKxxQ

One year ago, on Feb. 15, 2013, the world was witness to the dangers presented by near-Earth Objects (NEOs) when a relatively small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere, exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb. Tracking near-Earth asteroids has been a significant endeavor for NASA and the broader astronomical community, which has discovered 10,713 known near-Earth objects to date. NASA is now pursuing new partnerships and collaborations in an Asteroid Grand Challenge to accelerate NASA’s existing planetary defense work, which will help find all asteroid threats to human population and know what to do about them. In parallel, NASA is developing an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) — a first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a safe orbit of Earth’s moon for future exploration by astronauts in the 2020s.ARM will use capabilities in development, including the new Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and high-power Solar Electric Propulsion. All are critical components of deep-space exploration and essential to meet NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s. The mission represents an unprecedented technological feat, raising the bar for human exploration and discovery, while helping protect our home planet and bringing us closer to a human mission to one of these intriguing objects.NASA is assessing two concepts to robotically capture and redirect an asteroid mass into a stable orbit around the moon. In the first proposed concept, NASA would capture and redirect an entire very small asteroid. In the alternative concept, NASA would retrieve a large, boulder-like mass from a larger asteroid and return it to this same lunar orbit. In both cases, astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft would then study the redirected asteroid mass in the vicinity of the moon and bring back samples.Very few known near-Earth objects are ARM candidates. …


Read More: Responding to potential asteroid redirect mission targets

#Atomic, #Defense, #Nasa, #Objectprogram, #Orbit, #Planet, #Program, #Result, #Space

Massive neutrinos solve a cosmological conundrum

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~4/VAgGrHJ9XDI

Scientists have solved a major problem with the current standard model of cosmology identified by combining results from the Planck spacecraft and measurements of gravitational lensing in order to deduce the mass of ghostly sub-atomic particles called neutrinos.The team, from the universities of Manchester and Nottingham, used observations of the Big Bang and the curvature of space-time to accurately measure the mass of these elementary particles for the first time.The recent Planck spacecraft observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the fading glow of the Big Bang — highlighted a discrepancy between these cosmological results and the predictions from other types of observations.The CMB is the oldest light in the Universe, and its study has allowed scientists to accurately measure cosmological parameters, such as the amount of matter in the Universe and its age. But an inconsistency arises when large-scale structures of the Universe, such as the distribution of galaxies, are observed.Professor Richard Battye, from The University of Manchester School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “We observe fewer galaxy clusters than we would expect from the Planck results and there is a weaker signal from gravitational lensing of galaxies than the CMB would suggest.”A possible way of resolving this discrepancy is for neutrinos to have mass. The effect of these massive neutrinos would be to suppress the growth of dense structures that lead to the formation of clusters of galaxies.”Neutrinos interact very weakly with matter and so are extremely hard to study. They were originally thought to be massless but particle physics experiments have shown that neutrinos do indeed have mass and that there are several types, known as flavours by particle physicists. The sum of the masses of these different types has previously been suggested to lie above 0.06 eV (much less than a billionth of the mass of a proton).In this paper, Professor Battye and co-author Dr Adam Moss, from the University of Nottingham, have combined the data from Planck with gravitational lensing observations in which images of galaxies are warped by the curvature of space-time. They conclude that the current discrepancies can be resolved if massive neutrinos are included in the standard cosmological model. They estimate that the sum of masses of neutrinos is 0.320 +/- 0.081 eV (assuming active neutrinos with three flavours).Dr Moss said: “If this result is borne out by further analysis, it not only adds significantly to our understanding of the sub-atomic world studied by particle physicists, but it would also be an important extension to the standard model of cosmology which has been developed over the last decade.”The paper is published in Physical Review Letters and has been selected as an Editor’s choice.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of Manchester. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


Read More: Massive neutrinos solve a cosmological conundrum

#Atomic, #Cosmology, #Current, #Model, #Nottingham, #Particles, #Physics, #Planck, #Spacecraft