Or inside the space suit

If you'd ever seen a Lotus Elise, which the Roadster is based on, you's see that you can't fit the body of Jiminy Cricket in the trunk (boot, 'cause it's in the front).

And why are you thinking about places to hide bodies? Will we be reading about you in the papers?

I was actually thinking on that one. Someone in the Space X control room is asking "Has anyone seen Jim?".

New Horizons Captures Record-Breaking Images in the Kuiper Belt

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image – and made history.

The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth – making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.

New Horizons was even farther from home than NASA’s Voyager 1 when it captured the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth. That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager was 3.75 billion miles (6.06 billion kilometers, or about 40.5 astronomical units [AU]) from Earth. Voyager 1’s cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years.

LORRI broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 – further demonstrating how nothing stands still when you’re covering more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) of space each day.

Plot twist, the person in the space suit is alive, the "don't panic" was for them.

The Next Falcon Heavy Will Carry the Most Powerful Atomic Clock Ever Launched into Space

An ultra-precise atomic clock the size of a four-slice toaster is set to zip into outer space this summer, NASA said.

This isn't your average timekeeper. The so-called Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC) is far smaller than Earth-bound atomic clocks, far more precise than the handful of other space-bound atomic clocks, and more resilient against the stresses of space travel than any clock ever made. According to a NASA statement, it's expected to lose no more than 2 nanoseconds (2 billionths of a second) over the course of a day. That comes to about 7 millionths of a second over the course of a decade. [5 of the Most Precise Clocks Ever Made]

In an email to Live Science, Andrew Good, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory representative, said the first DSAC will hitch a ride on the second Falcon Heavy launch, scheduled for June.

NASA tests atomic clock for deep space navigation

In deep space, accurate timekeeping is vital to navigation, but many spacecraft lack precise timepieces on board. For 20 years, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been perfecting a clock. It's not a wristwatch; not something you could buy at a store. It's the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC), an instrument perfect for deep space exploration.

Currently, most missions rely on ground-based antennas paired with atomic clocks for navigation. Ground antennas send narrowly focused signals to spacecraft, which, in turn, return the signal. NASA uses the difference in time between sending a signal and receiving a response to calculate the spacecraft's location, velocity and path.

This method, though reliable, could be made much more efficient. For example, a ground station must wait for the spacecraft to return a signal, so a station can only track one spacecraft at a time. This requires spacecraft to wait for navigation commands from Earth rather than making those decisions on board and in real-time.

"Navigating in deep space requires measuring vast distances using our knowledge of how radio signals propagate in space," said Todd Ely of JPL, DSAC's principal investigator. "Navigating routinely requires distance measurements accurate to a meter or better. Since radio signals travel at the speed of light, that means we need to measure their time-of-flight to a precision of a few nanoseconds. Atomic clocks have done this routinely on the ground for decades. Doing this in space is what DSAC is all about."

The DSAC project aims to provide accurate onboard timekeeping for future NASA missions. Spacecraft using this new technology would no longer have to rely on two-way tracking. A spacecraft could use a signal sent from Earth to calculate position without returning the signal and waiting for commands from the ground, a process that can take hours. Timely location data and onboard control allow for more efficient operations, more precise maneuvering and adjustments to unexpected situations.

This paradigm shift enables spacecraft to focus on mission objectives rather than adjusting their position to point antennas earthward to close a link for two-way tracking.

Pulsating aurora spotted in Canada helps explain northern lights' origin


Scientists have figured out what causes pulsating auroras, a rarely seen form of northern lights in the night sky. And it was partly thanks to a lucky observation of the phenomenon in Canada.

From a Japanese satellite, researchers measured these factors from a point near the Earth:

Waves in the plasma — a gas of charged particles — in the area of outer space surrounding Earth's atmosphere called the magnetosphere.
Levels of particles called electrons that can generate auroras.

Then they tracked the particles to The Pas, Man., where an all-sky camera had captured images of the resulting pulsating aurora. The researchers obtained the data with the help of the Canadian Space Agency.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/pulsa ... -1.4534912

Op-ed: The story behind the satellite that Trump wants dead

It’s difficult to describe all the ways this is stupid.

There were plenty of striking things about Monday's budget news, given that it contained lots of draconian cuts that were simultaneously restored because Congress had boosted spending the week before. But perhaps the most striking among them was an item in the proposed budget for NASA: Trump wants to block the follow on to a highly successful NASA mission.

To truly appreciate just how awful this is, you have to understand the history of that satellite and what it means to the scientific community as a whole. So let's step back and take a look at why the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (or OCO) exists in the first place. It turns out it was built specifically to handle some outstanding questions of the sort that people in the administration say are important, and killing its successor would mean the existing mission never lives up to its full potential.
Real uncertainty

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory's primary job is to see what's happening to the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. You may think that's a solved issue: we're emitting a lot, and levels are going up. And that's true to a point. But once you pass that point, you enter a world where there are lots of details, and many of them matter.

Humanity, it turns out, is just one of a huge number of sources of carbon dioxide—and there are things that remove it as well. Plants, for example, remove so much carbon dioxide through photosynthesis that we can track the seasonal appearance of leaves in the Northern Hemisphere because the process removes so much of the gas from the atmosphere. Some of that gets held for the long-term as wood; another portion returns to the air when the leaves drop in the autumn. Other processes cycle carbon through vast amounts of plankton in the oceans. Geological processes also act as sources and sinks for the atmosphere's carbon dioxide.

So much is going on that one source described the carbon cycle as including "every plant, animal, and microbe, every photosynthesizing leaf and fallen tree, every ocean, lake, pond, and puddle, every soil, sediment, and carbonate rock, every breath of fresh air, volcanic eruption, and bubble rising to the surface of a swamp, among much, much else." Humanity's fossil-fuel burning isn't so much a direct pipeline putting carbon dioxide into the air as it is a subtle lever that's pushing off the balance of a complex system.

Although the carbon cycle is complex, we have a relatively good idea of how it works. And, plus or minus a few gigatonnes here and there, we know the volume of carbon dioxide handled by most of the sources and sinks.

That said, this is still an area where there are significant uncertainties. People make a big deal about false uncertainties in climate science—we know the temperature's rising, and we know human carbon emissions are the primary driver, but people keep trying to pretend there's uncertainty there.

NASA gets involved

These uncertainties were so real and so widely acknowledged by the scientific community that NASA got involved. NASA funded the OCO to provide global coverage of carbon dioxide levels year round. The satellite takes more than a million data readings every day, with each reading covering only about three square kilometers. This will allow us to identify individual sources and sinks and determine how they change with the seasons. And, because it's placed in an orbital train with five other Earth-sensing satellites, any changes can be correlated with what's going on at that location based on what those other satellites are seeing.

In short, the OCO is a recipe for important science. But the importance went well beyond the satellite's technical capabilities. Simply getting any data from the satellite would allow us to start the long-term monitoring of all of the Earth's carbon dioxide processing. We'd have the data we'd need to start detecting whether any of that processing changed as the planet warmed.

In fact, the work of the OCO was considered so important that NASA was willing to do it twice. The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to separate from its launch vehicle and ended up falling back to Earth over the Indian Ocean. NASA built a second and successfully put that one in orbit. It's now been operating just shy of four years, and the first scientific results have already been published. The data's in place to start monitoring for changes in the Earth's carbon budget, and an Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 was in the planning stages.