Looking Upward and Outward...

Let's all knock on wood or send good vibes or just hopes out to the Planetary Society's little Project LightSail! Yes, the Japanese IKAROS craft broke the 60 year jinx on deployment and testing of the solar sail concept... but only just barely. LightSail will set important milestones toward opening up the solar system.

Follow the progress of the Planetary Society's crowd-funded LightSail Mission  --  a test flight was launched last month; a second demonstration is planned for 2016. Join me in donating to support solar sailing into the future...or even send your selfie to space with LightSail.

 Asteroid Day, June 30, is a global awareness campaign where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids and learn what we can do to protect our planet, communities and future generations from asteroid impacts. The main events - with VIP receptions - will be at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and in London -- sponsored in partnership with the B6-12 Foundation's Sentinel Mission. Find local events in your area or start your own!

== Looking to the Skies ==

Rogue stars...As many as half of all stars in the universe may lie in the vast gulfs of space between galaxies.  This result has far-reaching consequences.  It means that many more stars have been ejected from their home galaxies by galactic encounters.  If verified, it means that inter-galactic space is less empty than we thought. This jibes with other recent results, that Andromeda galaxy may be surrounded by a huge halo of added material… 

… and it suggests that regular, baryonic matter may be closer to equal than we thought, to the presumed quantity of so-called “dark matter” physicists have been looking for.  All told, stunning times to be alive.

(And there are those who refuse to enjoy any of this! Preferring to dismiss science as “irrelevant” to important matters. Wow. That fact, itself, is simply mind-blowing.)

See a special feature on Astronomy.com: How the Hubble Space Telescope changed the cosmos!

Meanwhile, the Hubble has been up there long enough to catch changes in faraway galaxies.  A fierce jet, spewing from the central black hole of one of the brightest galaxies of them all, appears to feature fast lumps catching up violently with slower lumps.  Wow.  We need to be a people who do science over long spans!  

Hubble has observed a unique, rapidly evolving, Wolf-Rayet star -- never before observed in the Milky Way Galaxy -- nicknamed "Nasty 1."

A new radio telescope array developed by a consortium led by Caltech and now operating at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory has the ability to image simultaneously the entire sky at radio wavelengths with unmatched speed, helping astronomers to search for objects and phenomena that pulse, flicker, flare, or explode. Our new telescope lets us see the entire sky all at once, and we can image everything instantaneously," says Gregg Hallinan, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and OV-LWA's principal investigator.  

Whole sky surveys of transient events will be of great importance for another reason!  To quickly discover events pertinent to ... SETI. 

== Mission Updates ==

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Space Agency plans to send a compact car-sized probe into orbit around Mars in July of 2020. The UAE’s stated goal is to become an ambitious player in the burgeoning $300 billion a year global space industry. The Al-Amal probe will study the ways Mars lost its atmosphere and became a desert world.  Seems apropos.  

A new Mars Lander is scheduled to launch in March 2016 and is called InSight, a very NASA abbreviation for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport." InSight will analyze the deep interior of Mars to better understand the seismological processes that shaped the geology of the rocky planets. 

The ExoMars missions (sponsored by the ESA and the Russian Space Agency) will search for signs of life on Mars (past or present) -- to be launched from 2016 through 2018.  

Watch live! NASA's "Flying Saucer" LDSD test flight -- the disc-shaped Low Density Supersonic Decelerator will test landing technologies for future Mars Missions.

Cassini has just taken its last close-up look at Saturn's large irregular moon, Hyperion -- and in mid June, it will pass just 321 miles above Saturn's icy moon Dione.

Ceres: NASA image

Wow! Close-ups of Ceres from the Dawn spacecraft are getting better and better… along with improved views of those mysterious (though probably icy) bright spots.  

Gregory Benford offers a terrific and moving article about both the scientific and science-fiction wonders of Pluto... as we near the epochal New Horizons encounter in July -- New Horizons is sending back ever more detailed images of Pluto. 

The scientific instruments that will be aboard the (generally conceived) mission to Europa have been chosen.  A potent mix of great experiments!  Still I am confused.  The mission won’t orbit Europa itself but swing past it, forty or so times, in order to mostly stay away from the worst of Jupiter’s radiation belts.  So… in fact it is a Jupiter mission that will emphasize Europa.  This article doesn’t go into that. Can anyone link to one that does?  

A look at the far side of the moon. Click the video! The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has completed a maneuver that lowered the spacecraft’s orbit to within 20 kilometers (12 miles) above areas near the lunar South Pole, where ice lingers in shaded cold spots.  Wow that’s close.

Looking for gravitational waves:The Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detection system is coming online.

== Solving the problems of the future ==

Huh.  Talk of equipping the International Space Station with a laser that could blast dangerous space debris out of the sky before it comes close to the ISS.

Will we get Solar Power from space? This video portraying the construction and operation of a GEO space solar power system is very well made… and kinda inspiring.  The contest it was entered in was won by a team supported by the Chinese government.  Worth noting.  Just 3000 of these could entirely replace the three cubic miles of oil (equivalent) of fossil fuel the human race uses each year. “By the early 2030s if we got on it soon,” says system architect Keith Henson.  

And finally...

Will future space exploration be left to robots... or will humans venture out there? In Beyond: Our Future in Space, University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey examines our urge to explore -- and the technologies (space elevators, asteroid mining, 3D printing, suspended animation) that will propel the next century of exploration and colonization, as we head toward this new frontier.

"Surprised as they were, the astronomers that discovered the four quasars inside the rare giant nebula, made up of cool, dense hydrogen gas, they merrily decided to call it the ”Jackpot Nebula”.  Quasars are the early, blaring-loud and extravagant eating phases of the black holes at galactic centers. So… FOUR of them in one nebula?  I gotta wonder if this science "journalist" pulled a boner.  But interested!  Anyone got confirmation?  

Legends of an Australian aboriginal tribe tell of a fire demon from the sky… striking exactly where there is now a national meteorite reserve.