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Apophis. How This Guy Discovered Four New Planets Without a Telescope. Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane. A super-quiet, hover-capable aircraft design, NASA's experimental one-man Puffin could show just how much electric propulsion can transform our ideas of flight. It looks like nothing less than a flying suit or a jet pack with a cockpit. On the ground, the Puffin is designed to stand on its tail, which splits into four legs to help serve as landing gear.

As a pilot prepares to take off, flaps on the wings would tilt to deflect air from the 2.3-meter-wide propeller rotors upward, keeping the plane on the ground until it was ready to fly and preventing errant gusts from tipping it over. The Puffin would rise, hover and then lean over to fly horizontally, with the pilot lying prone as if in a glider. When landing, the extending spring legs would support the 3.7-meter-long, 4.1-meter-wingspan craft, which is designed with carbon-fiber composites to weigh in at 135 kilograms, not including 45 kilograms of rechargeable lithium phosphate batteries.

This design relies on electric motors. Mars may not be lifeless, say scientists. 6 September 2010Last updated at 13:18 By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News The Vikings probed the Martian soil back in 1976 Carbon-rich organic molecules, which serve as the building blocks of life, may be present on Mars after all, say scientists - challenging a widely-held notion of the Red Planet as barren. When Nasa's two Viking landers picked up and examined samples of Martian soil in 1976, scientists found no evidence for carbon-rich molecules or biology.

But after the Phoenix Mars Lander discovered the chlorine-containing chemical perchlorate in the planet's "arctic" region in 2008, scientists decided to re-visit the issue. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote This doesn't say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars” End QuoteChris McKay Nasa's Ames Research Center They travelled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, where conditions are believed to be similar to those on Mars. Surprising result. Our Solar System — An experiment with CSS3 border-radius, transforms & animations. Kuiper Belt world measured in star pass. 16 June 2010Last updated at 19:46 By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News The Kuiper Belt is home to several dwarf planets, one of which is Pluto Astronomers say they have observed, for the first time, a distant icy world orbiting beyond Neptune as it passed briefly in front of a bright star.

This "stellar occultation" occurs when a planetary body hides a star as it moves across the sky. A US-led team of 18 astronomy groups used the occasion to study KBO 55636 from the Kuiper Belt on the outskirts of the Solar System. They tell the journal Nature that the occultation lasted only 10 seconds. But this was enough time to determine the object's size and albedo, or reflectivity, the team said. The Kuiper Belt is a collection of space objects, remnants from the Solar System's formation. These objects lie beyond the orbit of the Solar System's most remote planet, Neptune.

Space impact The Kuiper Belt is home to several dwarf planets, one of which is Pluto. High albedo. Mystery Object Defies Astronomical Classification. A mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category. The newly discovered mystery companion forms a binary system with the brown dwarf, located 460 light-years away in the Taurus star-forming system. The object is too light to be another brown dwarf, but it’s too young to have formed by accretion, the way a typical planet does. “Although this small companion appears to have a mass that is comparable to the mass of planets around stars, we don’t think it formed like a planet,” said astronomer Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, co-author of the study April 5 in The Astrophysical Journal.

“This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.” Luhman’s team made the discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory. The new object and its companion brown dwarf are orbiting as a binary pair, 15 astronomical units from each other. Images: 1) NASA, ESA, K. Recent discovery of water on the Moon by India. The recent discovery of water on the Moon by India's inaugural lunar mission almost never happened because of a twin helping of good old-fashioned red tape and lingering Cold War suspicions, reports science writer Pallava Bagla. Hidden behind the euphoria of the find is a less publicised tale of complex back room dealings between Indian and American space science teams.

Back in 2004, scientists from the two countries were eager to collaborate, but the Bureau of Export Control in the US did not share this enthusiasm. In fact it was seen by some on the Indian side as being singularly obstinate. It is accused of not being willing to clear the paperwork that would allow sophisticated American-made instruments to be airlifted to Bangalore for the mission. It is also accused of using "all the tricks in it is pockets" to scuttle the operation before then US President George W Bush reportedly intervened to make sure this did not happen. 'Not acceptable' 'Hurdles'

Venus. Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Venus Cloud Tops Viewed by Hubble Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is located between Mercury and the Earth. The planet has been known to exist since ancient times. The average distance from Venus to the Sun is 108.21 million km. Venus takes 224.7 days to complete one orbit around the Sun. Scientists consider Venus to be a twin of Earth because of its many similarities. A day on Venus lasts 243 days; which is unusual considering the fact that a year on Venus is only 224.7 days. Radar imaging of Venus’ surface has shown that it does have impact craters around the planet, and evidence of wide scale volcanism.

Although Venus has many similarities to Earth, it has some enormous differences. At one time scientists and science fiction writers alike thought that the surface of Venus was tropical in nature. Because of its thick clouds, Venus has been impossible to observe from Earth. UK researchers have developed a device to drag space junk out of orbit. The CubeSail mission would expect to operate for about a year UK researchers have developed a device to drag space junk out of orbit. They plan to launch a demonstration of their "CubeSail" next year. It is a small satellite cube that deploys a thin, 25-sq-m plastic sheet. Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft's low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull the object out of the sky much faster than is normal.

The Surrey Space Centre team says the concept could be fitted to larger satellites and even rocket stages. The group also envisages that a mature system would even be sent to rendezvous and dock with redundant spacecraft to clean them from orbit. "Our system is simple and very low cost; but we need to demonstrate that it can be done," said Dr Vaios Lappas, lead researcher on the project and senior lecturer in space vehicle control. "It would help make space a sustainable business. Simplicity of approach Force of sunlight A demo of how the stowed sail would deploy. The entropy force: a new direction for gravity - physics-math - 20 ... Editorial: A gravity story to take us out of Newton's orchard WHAT exactly is gravity? Everybody experiences it, but pinning down why the universe has gravity in the first place has proved difficult.

Although gravity has been successfully described with laws devised by Isaac Newton and later Albert Einstein, we still don't know how the fundamental properties of the universe combine to create the phenomenon. Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Russia 'plans to stop asteroid' The head of Russia's federal space agency has said it will work to divert an asteroid which will make several passes near the Earth from 2029. Anatoly Perminov told the Voice of Russia radio service that the agency's science council would hold a closed meeting to discuss the issue.

Any eventual plan is likely to be an international collaboration, he said. The US space agency said in October that there is a one-in-250,000 chance of Apophis hitting Earth in 2036. That announcement was a significant reduction in the probability of an impact, based on previous calculations that put the chances at about one-in-45,000. The asteroid is estimated to pass within about 30,000 km of the Earth in 2029. Mr Perminov, who is the chief of Roscosmos, gave little detail of any plans that the agency has, but was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying that the solution would not entail the use of nuclear weapons.