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Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm.
We design & build innovative technologies to support our command & control strategy for the orbital debris problem.
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New Ideas Sharpen Focus for Greener Aircraft |
Leaner, greener flying machines for the year 2025 are on the drawing boards of three industry teams under contract to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project.
Teams from The Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, Calif., Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, Calif., and Northrop Grumman in El Segundo, Calif., have spent the last year studying how to meet NASA goals to develop technology that would allow future aircraft to burn 50 percent less fuel than aircraft that entered service in 1998 (the baseline for the study), with 75 percent fewer harmful emissions; and to shrink the size of geographic areas affected by objectionable airport noise by 83 percent.
“The real challenge is we want to accomplish all these things simultaneously,” said ERA project manager Fay Collier. “It’s never been done before. We looked at some very difficult metrics and tried to push all those metrics down at the same time.” continue reading
NASA’s Kepler Announces 11 New Planetary Systems Hosting 26 Planets |
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form.
The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen are between Earth and Neptune in size. Further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun.
“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.” continue reading
Dark Side of the Moon Revealed: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s LAMP Reveals Lunar Surface Features |
New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon’s northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible. LAMP’s principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.
The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight. The darker regions are consistent with large surface porosities — indicating “fluffy” soils — while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.
“Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils,” says author Dr. Randy Gladstone, an Institute scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. “This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate.” continue reading
Helix Nebula in New Colors |
ESO’s VISTA telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has captured a striking new image of the Helix Nebula. This picture, taken in infrared light, reveals strands of cold nebular gas that are invisible in images taken in visible light, as well as bringing to light a rich background of stars and galaxies.
The Helix Nebula is one of the closest and most remarkable examples of a planetary nebula*. It lies in the constellation of Aquarius (The Water Bearer), about 700 light-years away from Earth. This strange object formed when a star like the Sun was in the final stages of its life. Unable to hold onto its outer layers, the star slowly shed shells of gas that became the nebula. It is evolving to become a white dwarf star and appears as the tiny blue dot seen at the centre of the image.
The nebula itself is a complex object composed of dust, ionised material as well as molecular gas, arrayed in a beautiful and intricate flower-like pattern and glowing in the fierce glare of ultraviolet light from the central hot star. continue reading
Inside Dragon |
SpaceX has launched a 360° panorama interior view of their Dragon spacecraft (in cargo configuration). Look inside Dragon →
via unknownskywalker
NASA’s Next-Generation Space Flight |
The Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), or Orion, being assembled and tested at Lockheed Martin’s Vertical Testing Facility in Colorado.
Drawing from more than 50 years of spaceflight research and development, Orion is designed to meet the evolving needs of our nation’s space program for decades to come.
As the flagship of our nation’s next-generation space fleet, Orion will push the envelope of human spaceflight far beyond low Earth orbit.
Orion may resemble its Apollo-era predecessors, but its technology and capability are light years apart. Orion features dozens of technology advancements and innovations that have been incorporated into the spacecraft’s subsystem and component design.
A test version of the Orion spacecraft makes a stop at the Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City today, giving residents the chance to see a full scale test version of the vehicle that will take humans into deep space.
Planets With Double Suns Are Common |
Astronomers using NASA’s Kepler mission have discovered two new circumbinary planet systems — planets that orbit two stars, like Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. Their find, which brings the number of known circumbinary planets to three, shows that planets with two suns must be common, with many millions existing in our Galaxy.
“Once again, we’re seeing science fact catching up with science fiction,” said co-author Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The work was published online in the journal Nature and presented by lead author William Welsh (San Diego State University) at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The two new planets, named Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b, are both gaseous Saturn-size planets. Kepler-34b orbits its two Sun-like stars every 289 days, and the stars themselves orbit each other every 28 days. Kepler-35b revolves around a pair of smaller stars (80 and 89 percent of the Sun’s mass) every 131 days, and the stars orbit one another every 21 days. Both systems reside in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, with Kepler-34 located 4,900 light-years from Earth and Kepler-35 at a distance of 5,400 light-years.
Circumbinary planets have two suns, not just one, and due to the orbital motion of the stars, the amount of energy the planet receives varies greatly. This changing energy flow could produce wildly varying climates. continue reading
![Planet Population Is Plentiful: Planets Around Stars Are the Rule Rather Than the Exception |
An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars, the team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception.
Over the past 16 years, astronomers have detected more than 700 confirmed exoplanets [1] and have started to probe the spectra (eso1002) and atmospheres (eso1047) of these worlds. While studying the properties of individual exoplanets is undeniably valuable, a much more basic question remains: how commonplace are planets in the Milky Way?
Most currently known exoplanets were found either by detecting the effect of the gravitational pull of the planet on its host star or by catching the planet as it passes in front of its star and slightly dims it. Both of these techniques are much more sensitive to planets that are either massive or close to their stars, or both, and many planets will be missed.
An international team of astronomers has searched for exoplanets using a totally different method — gravitational microlensing — that can detect planets over a wide range of mass and those that lie much further from their stars. continue reading](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly14hrdpA01qb7n75o1_500.jpg)
Planet Population Is Plentiful: Planets Around Stars Are the Rule Rather Than the Exception |
An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars, the team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception.
Over the past 16 years, astronomers have detected more than 700 confirmed exoplanets [1] and have started to probe the spectra (eso1002) and atmospheres (eso1047) of these worlds. While studying the properties of individual exoplanets is undeniably valuable, a much more basic question remains: how commonplace are planets in the Milky Way?
Most currently known exoplanets were found either by detecting the effect of the gravitational pull of the planet on its host star or by catching the planet as it passes in front of its star and slightly dims it. Both of these techniques are much more sensitive to planets that are either massive or close to their stars, or both, and many planets will be missed.
An international team of astronomers has searched for exoplanets using a totally different method — gravitational microlensing — that can detect planets over a wide range of mass and those that lie much further from their stars. continue reading
