Upcoming missions to asteroids, moons and more

While hoping (and striving) for Enlightenment Civilization to rise up and repel the forces of lobotomization and darkness... I feel I should remind you to be confident! After all, what kind of bozo wallows in gloom when we can fly robo-helicopters on Mars, plumb the earliest moments of the Big Bang and shorten vaccine development times from 15 years to 6 months? And yes, make guilt-tripping wonders like Greta T?

Here's more, to stoke that spirit! A chant I urge upon everyone who stands with the sapient side of our civil war: 

"I'm as proud as hell and I'm not listening to gloomists, anymore! We can do anything!"

== Something tells me it's all happening... out there! ==

Among the missions I am most excited about is JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission — it’ll launch in 2024 to study both Martian moons, eventually returning a sample of Phobos to Earth in 2029. (And I know another group, in stealth mode, aiming at the other one.)

If either moon has traits of a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid (they might once have been) then it could have accessible water and other volatiles and be one of the most valuable sites in the whole Solar System.  The Russians tried to reach it several times. 

This is what the U.S. should be doing in space… partnering with the Japanese and ESA to do things only we can do - while keeping our hand in the Moon robotically and selling/renting landers and hotel rooms to all the Apollo wannabe tourists who are desperate for their “today I am a man” rite-of-passage footprints on Luna’s plain of poison dust. (We did that 50 years ago! Let others have their Bar Moonzvahs while we go for the riches out there.)

Meanwhile, DART - or a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) - will be NASA's first use of the kinetic impactor technique, crashing into an asteroid to change its motion. NASA is set to conduct the mission, what it calls "the first test for planetary defense," on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, to hit the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos, specifically its moonlet, Dimorphos. Targeting a double asteroid allows vastly better post-impact effects analysis.

NASA's VIPER - Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (pictured) will head to the moon's south pole in 2023 to map concentrations of water ice in these permanently shadowed regions - where the sun never shines. At NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - we've funded early phase enabling projects.

And the Psyche mission, set for launch in 2022, will journey to a unique nickel-iron metal asteroid between Mars and Jupiter - likely the core of a proto-planet that never finished forming. And yes, gold & platinum and all that. Rewrite the EXPANSE!

And yes, as you've heard. As NASA prepares to retire the International Space Station after more than two decades in orbit, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has partnered with Sierra Space and Boeing, proposing a new commercial space station to be built in low Earth orbit. Orbital Reef, billed as a "mixed use business park in space," will offer opportunities for micro-gravity research and manufacturing - for commercial, government, and scientific use - as well as space tourism. To be operational in the late 2020s.

== Woof and you think it’s hot? ==

Scientists have a new class of habitable exoplanets to look for life on: Hycean planets... hot planets covered in oceans that have an atmosphere rich in hydrogen -- and they MIGHT be much easier to find and observe than twins of our own planet. They have a larger habitable zone than Earth or Earth-like planets.

Hycean planets can reach up to 2.6 times the size of Earth and reach atmospheric temperatures of almost 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius). Underneath their hydrogen-rich atmosphere are oceans where microbial life could exist. 

Or cold?  An enormous comet — possibly the largest one ever detected — is barreling toward the inner solar system with an estimated arrival time of 10 years from now. The comet, known as the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet (or C/2014 UN271, in astro-speak), is at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) across — about 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet. In our novel Heart of the Comet, Gregory Benford and I explored a comet (Halley) in both science (my PhD thesis!) and speculation in a dramatic space adventure.

Or rich? While the Psyche mission is preparing to robotically explore its namesake asteroid in the outer belt, a huge chunk of almost pure metal, likely from the core of a shattered protoplanet, a few much smaller metal rocks have been found tumbling within (relatively) much easier reach. Astronomers have ‘explored the mining potential of 1986 DA and found that the amount of iron, nickel and cobalt that could be present on the asteroid would exceed all of Earth's global reserves of these metals! While other Near Earth Asteroids contain gigatons of water. A far vaster realm of “resources” than our poor, depleted Moon.

== More astonishing asteroids ==

Lucy in the sky.... Just launched! NASA has launched Lucy - the first mission to the Trojan asteroids, orbiting near Jupiter. Its twelve year mission will take the probe on a circuitous journey to fly by eight different asteroids (one main belt and seven Trojan asteroids). These asteroids may represent time capsules from the formation of the early solar system. And yes, latest news: worrisome inability of one of Lucy's solar panels to latch. :-(

Scientists have identified two asteroids that are extremely red — more red than anything else seen in the asteroid belt, suggesting a lot of organic material on the surface, something we’ve observed in objects farther from the sun.

Earth crossing asteroid Phaeton, source of the Geminid meteor stream – has an elongated, 524-day orbit that takes the object well within the orbit of Mercury, during which time the Sun heats the asteroid’s surface up to about 1,390 degrees Fahrenheit (750 degrees Celsius). With such a warm orbit, any water, carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide ice near the asteroid’s surface would have baked off long ago. But at that temperature, sodium may be fizzing from the asteroid’s rock and into space, creating both kinds of comet-like comas and possibly even tails… both ionized sodium and dust driven off the surface, explaining the rock’s increased brightness at perihelion.

The process described in this article happens also to be the one I first elucidated in my doctoral thesis, long ago. So, yeah, predictive track record preceded my career in science fiction!

Kleopatra, a “dog-bone” shaped asteroid which orbits the Sun in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupitera is 270 kilometers (~168 miles) long and shaped like… well… more like a peanut. 

Unrelated to my story and screenplay set under the oceans of Venus, titled "The Tumbledowns of Cleapatra Abyss." And yes, it is hard SF. Good script, too!

== Navigating NASA - and beyond ==

I’ve been (proudly) a member of the external advisory council for NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC). We just finished our annual symposium of truly amazing projects – just this side of science fiction - that NIAC seed-funded. You can watch the recorded livestream here or view the projects individually. 

A three times NIAC fellow and former NASA Jet Propulsion Lab employee, Jeff Nosanov, has a new book out: How Things Work At NASA: Everyday Secrets of Space Exploration is a behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the most famous space science organization in the world. Specialized interest but potentially valuable to some of you. 

I might add that I am very impressed with NASA, of late, for the practical reason that former Administrator Bridenstine and others managed to shield the important technology endeavors from raids to fund Donald Trump’s Artemis moondoggle. Perhaps Trump’s (unintentionally) best appointee. 

== And Space Miscellany! ==

A fascinating and gorgeous 3-D rendering of the Veil Nebula.

Dead galaxies? NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found six ancient galaxies, which appeared to have run out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars while most other galaxies were producing new stars at a rapid pace. The gas “could have been expelled and now it's being prevented from accreting back onto the galaxy. Or did the galaxy just use it all up, and the supply is cut off?" Since the galaxies were so old and so far away, scientists spotted them via gravitational lensing. 

Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.

A cool… rather hot… new approach to the magnetic acceleration of atoms to provide thrust in space uses the ‘pop’ of energy when separated magnetic field lines reconnect (as on the sun). One of several ways to offload the power part of the rocket from the propellant part, so both can be optimized separately.

And... a WTH moment. This textbook illustration meant well…

Quasars, supermassive black holes... and Perseverance(!) and more!

Still riding a high from watching Perseverance land on Mars! (Aren't you?)  Okay, Curiosity might have just been a miracle. But this is something far, far better. Repeatable competence!  Putting again into stark contrast those propagandists (and their moron followers) who spread reflexive hate toward all the skilled professions -- the folks who know stuff, or know how to do stuff. 

No, it's not zero sum. Boffins who can do these things or who know a lot haven't paid for it by sacrificing realness, or common sense, or wisdom... or even art or necessarily faith. On average they are more wise about other things, as well. That's how it works. And the wise among us know it.

So how about now let's share even more examples of how skilled folks are opening to our caveman-dazzled eyes ever more wonders of a fantastic universe! And shedding light upon the wonder that is ourselves. Starting with...

== Put this in perspective, hm? ==

Hot news about where and when we are! Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15 years by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA.   

The new map suggests that the center of the Galaxy, and the supermassive black hole which resides there, is located 25800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985. The velocity component of the map indicates that Earth is traveling at 227 km/s as it orbits around the Galactic Center. This is faster than the official value of 220 km/s. So… not quite as far into the boonies as we thought.

Recently discovered, that the farthest known quasar -  about 13.03 billion light-years from Earth - can be dated back to just 670 million years after the Big Bang (the universe at this time was a mere 5% of its current age), making it the most distant and earliest quasar ever found. This quasar also hosts a giga-supermassive black hole that has a mass equal to 1.6 billion of our suns. It produced a wind of super-heated gas flowing from around the galaxy's supermassive black hole, with this gas traveling at one fifth the speed of light. Fascinating. Beyond its intrinsic interest, including wonder over how a black hole could get so incredibly massive, so fast, there’s the fact that remnant giga-black holes left over from that era may be near us, now quiescent since the epoch we reside in is – naturally – much older. 

Oh, but let's take that thought farther! If some astronomers have recently observed supermassive Black Holes, others have proposed that a few might measure up to a QUINTILLION solar masses. Um... gulp?

SLABS would be  "Stupendously LArge Black holeS". “at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, at 4 million solar masses, and the most photogenic SMBH in the Universe, M87*, at 6.5 billion solar masses. The chonkiest black holes we've detected are ultramassive, more than 10 billion (but less than 100 billion) solar masses. These include an absolute beast clocking in at 40 billion solar masses in the centre of a galaxy named Holmberg 15A.” Based on the primordial black hole model, the team calculated exactly how stupendously large these black holes could be, between 100 billion and 1 quintillion (that's 18 zeroes) solar masses.

Okay do I get predictive cred here? Again, while some astronomers are speculating humungous black holes somewhere in the cosmos that are vastly, vastly bigger than the biggest at the cores of galaxies... see my short story “Bubbles.”

== More mundane? Just... galaxies...==

Scientists Say There Are Likely Fewer Galaxies in Space Than They Previously Thought . While NASA previously determined that there were around two trillion galaxies in the universe, new findings say the number is more likely hundreds of billions. 

More modest densities in the news. Astronomers have found the spectra of calcium and other metals at the surfaces of some white dwarf stellar remnants in the same rations as continental crust, suggesting that these thin coatings came from former planets...a concept you can find eerily similar to a plot element in Heaven’s Reach.

TESS is taking up where Kepler left off, and wonders continue!  “Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the recently discovered Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars less than 3% the age of our solar system that stretches across one-third of the sky.” Actually, this article offers FIVE  ways this system is really interesting. 

== A new era for visual astronomy? ==

It’s a bit abstract and complicated… but a recent discovery using the fastest ever atomic clocks and the newly coined time measure – a Zeptosecond (sounds like a Marx Brother!) – enabled researchers to prove that “the electron shell in a molecule does not react to light everywhere at the same time. The time delay (247 zs = 2.47e-18 s --GDN) occurs because information within the molecule only spreads at the speed of light.”  This means that the phased arrival of visible light rays can be measured , the way radio astronomers have long done it with long radio waves, letting them do Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

My very first job as a Caltech undergraduate, the summer of 1969, was as assistant to Professor Marshall Cohen, hauling and setting up big ol’ reels of computer tape for VLBI post-analysis, using the recorded phase timings at dishes widely separated across the planet to do interferometry… turning those far-apart radio telescopes into essentially one instrument, able to parse sky-angles of incredibly small width, distinguishing objects both small and very far away. This new discovery might – perhaps – let us do this with much shorter wavelengths of visible light, possibly with baselines that span the inner solar system!

“While the Goethe work is technologically still far from an operational interferometer wavefront time-tagging capability, this seems about 100 million times better than would be needed for the optical wavelength Event Horizon Telescope that recently gave us the first image of an active black hole!” The article also speculates that aliens might be able to see us from a distance better than we thought possible.

I have to wonder how this might augment or replace the notion that I wrote about in EXISTENCE… and that we’re now funding at NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC)… to send missions to the solar gravitational lens distance (starting at 550AU), where the sun’s gravity focuses convoluted images from very far away. Fascinating…

…especially since it suggests advanced aliens might have excellent images of past eras of Earth that they might share with us, solving many mysteries. And we might start collecting such libraries, too.

Exoplanets, waterworlds and asteroids

After three postings about politics and winning this phase of the Civil War... how about some space stuff?  Proof that we are members of a dynamic, bold, competent scientific civilization.

A planetary system similar to our own: Epsilon Eridani, at 10.5 light years, is one of the nearest solitary stars roughly similar to our sun, and hence was inspected by Frank Drake, in the 1960s, for possible SETI signals. Now, as well reported on the SETI Institute’s site, new infrared observations reveal a system very similar to ours, with a Jovian planet riding herd just outside a silicate-dominated asteroid ring and an outermost ring much like our Kuiper Belt… but with a third debris field also orbiting where we would have Uranus.  

It appears that most habitable planets may be waterworlds: On Gizmodo, George Dvorsky reports on a new study published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that most habitable planets are wet. “Like, extremely wet. Using computer models, astronomer Fergus Simpson from the Institute of Cosmos Science at the University of Barcelona found that habitable exoplanets, at least simulated ones, tend to be overrun by water, in most cases accounting for 90 percent or more of the total surface area,” unlike Earth’s relatively dry 70%.  Here’s the original paper’s abstract.

In fact, the authors’ inferences are a bit weak. Still, I have been saying that Earth is likely to be dry, for a water world, for 30 years.  Going back to this classic paper in the 1983 Quarterly Journal of  Royal Astronomical Society.

  

Or in this way fun youtube riff you’ll enjoy, I promise!

In fact, this is the safest and best "soft landing" to the Fermi Paradox.That the universe is filled with life-rich water worlds, but our Earth, skating the inner edge of the Sun's CHZ or Goldilocks Zone, has unusually more land surface. Hence hands-and-fire races like us are the rare thing.  When we build starships, we'll find lots of other folks out there... with flippers and such. Interesting to talk to, but not competitors.  

Of course there's another aspect to us skating the inner edge of the Sun's CHZ or Goldilocks Zone.  It explains why Earth has to shed heat so efficiently and even a little bit of greenhouse gas excess can be lethal.  But then, members of the Denialist Cult don't read my blog. And you science lovers don't need to be convinced.

== Again, the case for asteroids ==

A question asker over on Quora someone asked: “Is space mining sci-fi or a legitimate concept?”

In fact, some of the smartest people on the planet have studied the material properties of meteorites, which are bits of asteroids or comets that have fallen to Earth. Back in the 1980s, John Lewis's book Mining the Sky (or his more recent Asteroid Mining 101) made clear that simple estimates of the various types of asteroids and their relative abundance reveal what’s out there…

…and what’s out there is a bonanza. Just one 1-km asteroid of the right type — if melted and cast using solar concentrators — would produce:

• the entire Earth’s iron/steel/nickel production for a year.
• Earth’s gold and silver production for 100 years.
• Earth’s platinum group production for 1000 years. And that’s one such asteroid, and there are millions

Do we yet know how to “melt and cast using solar concentrators” in space? Only in computer models. But a different kind of asteroid is rich in water, so we’d harvest that resource much sooner, just by throwing a baggie around one and siphoning the evaporated volatiles.

Is all this guaranteed? Of course not. Do the payoffs seem to warrant some capital investment? Um, duh?

Oh, about “bringing asteroids to Earth”… the answer is you don’t do that! You bring them to lunar orbit and process them there. Which means that a lunar orbit station would be valuable in all sorts of ways. Including the profitable selling of services to all the wannabe nations — China, Russia, India, Europe and billionaires — who want to plant their own footprints on that sterile and (for now) utterly useless surface.

(If you meet a “back to the moon!” zealot inside the US, it will always be a republican, whose other mantra is “screw science!”)

== METI Redux ==

Over on Quora someone asked: “Stephen Hawking believes we should not attempt to contact alien civilizations. What’s his thinking? And do you agree?”

I have been cataloguing answers to the “Fermi Paradox” - the question of why we see no blatant signs of other sapient species - since 1983, before it was even called the “Fermi Paradox”! In all that time, I have found that the brightest people — e.g. Hawking — tend to leap to declare “Aha! I know the reason!” 

It seems an immature habit, given this is a topic that has no known subject matter! ;-)

Seriously, the best we can do is catalogue and maybe rank-order these notions by plausibility. In my novel Existence, for example, I go through more than a dozen hypothetical reasons why interstellar AI probes might sit in the Asteroid Belt, tune in to our Internet, yet refrain from making themselves known.

Among the 100 or so “Fermi” explanations, a few seem plausible (e.g. we may have anomalous-fluke intelligence), some are optimistic (e.g. Earth happens to be “dry” compared to most Water Worlds, and hence, most other bright races have fins, not hands.) And a fair number are pessimistic or dangerous, (I go through more than a few of those, in Existence.)

The dangerous ones aren’t totally compelling - though they worry folks like Nicholas Bostrom and Lord Martin Rees. And Hawking. But they seem plausible enough to put a burden of proof on those silly radio astronomers who eagerly seek to beam “yoohoo!” messages into space. I am among the SETI scholars who object to this foolishness called METI or Messaging to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligences.

This is not a place to go into detail, but you can find a very biting rundown of why so many of us object to this stunt on my website.

== The Politics of SETI ==

Stranger danger: Extraterrestrial first contact as a political problem, by John Hickman and Koby Boatwright offers an interesting essay on political decisions whether to respond to a SETI detection and the difficulties of communications with aliens.

Just released: Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, edited by Jim Al-Khalili, with contributions from Martin Rees, Paul Davies and others.

And consider this: Nuclear explosions and submarine comms distort space weather near the earth: Very-low-frequency (VLF) signals are emitted by ground stations "at huge powers" so they can reach submarines deep below the ocean's surface. Now comes a (still controversial) finding that these VLF signals can affect the Van Allen radiation belts above the Earth.  Satellites report that the inner boundary of the inner VAB has shifted over time. Measurements from the 1960s, when VLF transmissions were more limited, suggest that the inner edge of the Van Allen belts was closer to Earth then than it is today, according to NASA. It's possible that the inner boundary of the Van Allen belts is an "impenetrable barrier" and that, if humans did not send out VLF signals, the boundary would stretch closer to our planet.  

Gawrsh. There’s a sci fi premise that writes itself.  

 == Cartoons re SETI & METI! == 

Fom: SMBC Comics: 


We debated whether to send signals to earth...

Why we might worry...

How come we never hear from aliens?

From: XKCD Comics:

If planets are common, where is everyone?

The first ants to achieve sentience...

Brewster Rockit on METI and REGRETI

Peering upward and outward - alien megastructures? Fusion rockets and more.

Discovery.com reports on the recent attempt by the SETI Institute’s Allen Array to examine KIC 8462852, the star with an anomalous set of transit brightness dips that may be due to swarms of comets… or else conceivably a convoy of orbiting alien mega structures. 

I wouldn’t put any money on the latter, unless given great odds. Moreover, preliminary negative results obtained by a couple of Allen Array SETI scans set (rather high) upper limits to the radio activity of such a civilization cluster. Later scans are planned. Still, the ensuing public interest and conversations have been vivid and interesting.

It’s worth noting that we’re talking about a very large, co-orbiting swarm of purported alien structures that presumably collect and utilize sunlight (hence blocking our view of the star, part of the time). This would be be a substantial step — by perhaps a few percentages — toward a Kardashev Type II civilization, utilizing large fractions of the star’s emitted energy.  At one extreme this would become a “Dyson Swarm or Sphere.” 

The way you look for such an advanced system is by finding one with a huge excess in the infra-red, radiating waste heat into space. No such profound infrared excess is observed at KIC 8462852 — another crack in the alien civilization hypothesis. 

Only hold on a second. One fellow I know -- long time space power systems promotor Keith Henson -- has pointed out that such co-orbiting mega structures would orient their cooling systems the way we do, on the International Space Station, so that the radiator panels line their edges toward the sun, and their big, flat faces either north or southward, orthogonal, or at ninety degrees away from the hot star. 

Envision the situation.  We are observing these objects (whether comets, planets or cities) transiting — passing between us and the star — precisely because we are lined up with their orbital planes.  So any heat dissipation radiators would likewise be edge-on to us, as well!  And hence we would be unlikely to see much infra-red excess, even if these are prodigious, Kardashev-type structures. 

Hence, the lack of an infra-red excess may not be meaningful after all.  The jury is still out.  So stay tuned. Keep watching and listening to the skies! And meanwhile, let’s stay quiet ourselves.

Oh... and no these are not Kardashian structures.  Remember the topic is intelligent life.

== Interesting! ==

Among the cool projects seed funded by NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group is Helion Energy - they received a $3.8M DoE grant for fusion energy production and are an outgrowth directly from a NIAC grant! The Fusion Driven rocket (FDR) represents a revolutionary approach to fusion propulsion where the power source releases its energy directly into the propellant, not requiring conversion to electricity. 

I am proud to serve on NIAC's board of external councilors. We just gathered at NIAC's symposium -- under the Seattle Space Needle -- and I'll have more to say about that in-future.  Meanwhile...

Do you have the right stuff? NASA is accepting applications for future space missions. 

See the latest roundup on the Billionaires' Bet on new approaches to manned spaceflight, from SpaceX to Blue Origins to Virgin Galactic and so on.

One of the best TED talks ever. My colleague Michelle Thaller takes you on a tour of galactic gravitational lensing and Dark Matter and just about everything else. Hugely enlightening!  

== Exploring the Solar System ==

New results from NASA's MAVEN mission indicate that massive solar storms and shocks obliterated the early atmosphere of Mars.

NASA is eyeing potential landing sites on Mars for a future manned mission.

All right, the headline in the Daily Mail is (typically) lurid: “Could bombing Mars make it habitable? Nuclear warheads would heat the red planet to make it more Earth-like, claims Elon Musk.” 

Hmmm. I dig the heck out of my friend Elon, but in this case my physicist instincts call the proposal iffy.  I know a better way.  Develop techniques to use tiny nudges to send comets plummeting into the polar ice and permafrost.  That pasting would be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce and orders of magnitude more powerful in outcome, and without radioactive fallout.   Heck we almost had an example, had comet Siding Springs passed just a wee bit closer to Mars, last year.  See this comparison detailed here. 

To be clear, I’d not want this done till we had a major civilization working in space, in order to detect and easily stop anyone from using the same method… to settle grudges on Earth.

Micro-satellite capture: A new, NASA-funded device will draw as well as repel satellites at the same time, meaning it will hold a satellite at a distance and won’t allow it to move away or toward the capture device. This will enable the capability to capture and possibly manipulate micro-satellites or other objects without making physical contact with them.  Based on Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) technology, a more efficient way to transmit electromagnetic energy. Strategic applications of MFA technology and the use of its hover engines include structural isolation, recreation and entertainment, industrial automation, and transportation.  

The Comet Hitchhiker concept: NASA is developing plans to hitch rides on passing comets, using tethers and harpoons. This started as a project we funded at NIAC!

A wonderfully innovative lander explorer for small bodies in the solar system… the “hedgehog” uses flywheel momentum to spin and flip itself over any obstacle. We got to play with this and it is so cool. Go NIAC.  Go us! 

Oh my. Pluto is so gorgeously strange. Cryovolcanism: NASA's New Horizons finds evidence for ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet. See the latest images from New Horizons. WE DID THIS. YOU HELPED PAY FOR IT. A couple of bucks. Worth it. 

Rosetta probe reveals Comet 67's complex water cycle: "The data suggest that water ice on and a few centimeters below the surface ‘sublimates’ when illuminated by sunlight, turning it into gas that then flows away from the comet. Then, as the comet rotates and the same region falls into darkness, the surface rapidly cools again. However, the underlying layers remain warm owing to the sunlight they received in the previous hours, and, as a result, subsurface water ice keeps sublimating and finding its way to the surface through the comet’s porous interior. But as soon as this ‘underground’ water vapor reaches the cold surface, it freezes again, blanketing that patch of comet surface with a thin layer of fresh ice. Eventually, as the Sun rises again over this part of the surface on the next comet day, the molecules in the newly formed ice layer are the first to sublimate and flow away from the comet, restarting the cycle."

To Scale: The Solar System   On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe. 

== And the cosmos ==

Giant ring-like structure spans the cosmos: A survey of gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) – among the most energetic events known – has revealed an unexpected pattern in the sky which suggests some kind of bubble structure up to 5 billion light years across.  Not mentioned in the article – rings of such scale could indicate causal contact with “other universes.” 

Mapping the universe: The Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera – the world’s largest – at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). 

What happens when black holes smash together? A pair of co-rotating quasar black holes 3.6 billion light years away may be only a few light weeks apart, spiraling toward imminent collision that will send gravitational waves pounding across space.  "The pair of black holes was initially discovered last winter, by a team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, through the flickering lights called quasars that black holes produce as they burn through the gas and and dust around them. Typically, quasars illuminate sporadically. When two black holes are about to collide, however, the quasars brighten at regular intervals. These particular quasars, PG 1302-102, were found to brighten by 14 percent every five years."

Alien oceans could be detected by looking for surface glint.

== Life in the cosmos? ==

At a conference of the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) in Leeds, a straw poll of the group's 20 members were split down the middle over the issue of beaming yoohoo messages into the cosmos. "We did a show of hands and we were perfectly evenly split," said Dr Anders Sandberg, speaking to journalists at the British Science Festival in Bradford. I'm very explicitly in favour," Dr. Jill Stuart, who studies space law and policy at the London School of Economics.

Yes, but I have a standing offer of a wager.  That such conclaves will always shift toward less willingness to transmit, after they are exposed to detailed facts in a debate between "message" zealots and those calling for caution.  It happens every single time.  Which is why the zealots so strenuously avoid such debates.

Remember (above) talking about Kardashev type 2 (or lower) civilizations. Well we've been looking also for something a wee bit bigger.

Co

No Signs of Galactic Super-Civilizations: Have astronomers eliminated the possibility of Kardashev Type 3 civilizations in the universe? A group at Penn State, Jason Wright and colleagues Matthew Povich and my longtime compatriot Steinn Sigurðsson have been conducting the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies (G-HAT) project, which scans data in the infrared from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission and the Spitzer Space Telescope. In their sampling: “…out of the 100,000 galaxies that WISE could see in sufficient detail, none of them is widely populated by an alien civilization using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes,” reports Paul Gilster.

Another group -- M. Garrett of Leiden University and his team -- have searched through the G-Hat data for galaxies emitting the kind of infrared excess that might come from billions of stellar systems surrounded by Dyson spheres or swarms, sucking in nearly all of the high energy photons and re-emitting waste heat. No blatant “type 3 signatures” were found.

Fascinating news.  Though my gut-check guesstimate is that they've only eliminated type 3 down to maybe 2.7… (on a Richter-like logarithmic scale)… where a majority of stars are left alone and less than a third are surrounded and dyson-sorbed...which is pretty much the situation I described in Heaven's Reach. 

In fact, a full Type 3 seems silly, because it leaves no room for creation of new generations of sapient life at nursery worlds.  Such monomania would be seen as threatening by other type 2.5 civilizations. who might step in, deeming the type 3s to be insatiable perverts.

Finally, the Ig Nobel prizes for this year: studies that make you go "Huh?"