Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
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41 posts tagged xl
Milky Way’s Black Hole Grazing On Asteroids |
The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be vaporizing and devouring asteroids, which could explain the frequent flares observed, according to astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
For several years Chandra has detected X-ray flares about once a day from the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*, or “Sgr A*” for short. The flares last a few hours with brightness ranging from a few times to nearly one hundred times that of the black hole’s regular output. The flares also have been seen in infrared data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
“People have had doubts about whether asteroids could form at all in the harsh environment near a supermassive black hole,” said Kastytis Zubovas of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the report appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “It’s exciting because our study suggests that a huge number of them are needed to produce these flares.” continue reading
Planck All-Sky Images Show Cold Gas and Strange Haze in Milky Way Galaxy |
New images from the Planck mission show previously undiscovered islands of star formation and a mysterious haze of microwave emissions in our Milky Way galaxy. The views give scientists new treasures to mine and take them closer to understanding the secrets of our galaxy.
Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation.
“The images reveal two exciting aspects of the galaxy in which we live,” said Planck scientist Krzysztof M. Gorski from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Warsaw University Observatory in Poland. “They show a haze around the center of the galaxy, and cold gas where we never saw it before.”
The new images show the entire sky, dominated by the murky band of our Milky Way galaxy. One of them shows the unexplained haze of microwave light previously hinted at in measurements by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
“The haze comes from the region surrounding the center of our galaxy and looks like a form of light energy produced when electrons accelerate through magnetic fields,” said Davide Pietrobon, another JPL Planck scientist. continue reading
![Virgin Galactic Ramping Up Toward Passenger Flights |
This year is key for Virgin Galactic’s bid to become the first commercial spaceliner service, as rocket-powered flights of its SpaceShipTwo are on the books for summer.
Meanwhile, assembly of a second vehicle pair — the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane and another SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane — is in progress at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
“We’re now up to over 75 test flights of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and 16 glide flights of the suborbital spaceship,” Whitesides said. “We will have more glide flights over the course of the spring.” [Rise of SpaceShipTwo: The Test Flights Photos]
For these glide flights, WhiteKnightTwo carries SpaceShipTwo up to mid-air, and then drops the smaller plane to make an unpowered glide back to the ground. However, the company is ramping up toward making the first powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo, which will fire the rocket motor it will eventually use to reach the edge of space. continue reading](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzchbfCbuc1qb7n75o1_500.jpg)
Virgin Galactic Ramping Up Toward Passenger Flights |
This year is key for Virgin Galactic’s bid to become the first commercial spaceliner service, as rocket-powered flights of its SpaceShipTwo are on the books for summer.
Meanwhile, assembly of a second vehicle pair — the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane and another SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane — is in progress at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
“We’re now up to over 75 test flights of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and 16 glide flights of the suborbital spaceship,” Whitesides said. “We will have more glide flights over the course of the spring.” [Rise of SpaceShipTwo: The Test Flights Photos] For these glide flights, WhiteKnightTwo carries SpaceShipTwo up to mid-air, and then drops the smaller plane to make an unpowered glide back to the ground. However, the company is ramping up toward making the first powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo, which will fire the rocket motor it will eventually use to reach the edge of space. continue reading
Rare Ultra-Blue Stars Found in Neighboring Galaxy’s Hub |
Peering deep inside the hub of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a large, rare population of hot, bright stars.
Blue is typically an indicator of hot, young stars. In this case, however, the stellar oddities are aging, Sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely blue-hot cores.
Astronomers were surprised when they spotted these stars because physical models show that only an unusual type of old star can be as hot and as bright in ultraviolet light.
While Hubble has spied these ultra-blue stars before in Andromeda, the new observation covers a much broader area, revealing that these stellar misfits are scattered throughout the galaxy’s bustling center. Astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to find roughly 8,000 of the ultra-blue stars in a stellar census made in ultraviolet light, which traces the glow of the hottest stars. The study is part of the multi-year Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey to map stellar populations across the Andromeda galaxy.
“We were not looking for these stars. They stood out because they were bright in ultraviolet light and very different from the stars we expected to see,” said Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, leader of the Hubble survey. continue reading
The First Look at Mars’ Ocean |
We knew there was water in abundance on Mars, but we never saw its ocean. This is it, as uncovered by strong new evidence found over the course of two years by the MARSIS radar on board ESA’s Mars Express.
Before this discovery, scientists suspected what could have been the shorelines of such ocean. However, this is the first time that this Mars’ ocean has been shown in all its magnitude. According to ESA, Mars Express “has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor within the boundaries of previously identified, ancient shorelines on Mars.”
The sediments are low-density granular material that have been eroded away by water. They have low radar reflectivity, and were detected through all the ocean’s area, 60 to 80 meters (197 to 262 feet) under the surface of the Red Planet. continue reading
Hubble Zooms in On Double Nucleus in Andromeda Galaxy |
A new Hubble Space Telescope image centers on the 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the hub of the neighboring spiral galaxy M31, or the Andromeda galaxy, the only galaxy outside the Milky Way visible to the naked eye and the only other giant galaxy in the local group.
This is the sharpest visible-light image ever made of the nucleus of an external galaxy.
The event horizon, the closest region around the black hole where light can still escape, is too small to be seen, but it lies near the middle of a compact cluster of blue stars at the center of the image. The compact cluster of blue stars is surrounded by the larger “double nucleus” of M31, discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1992. The double nucleus is actually an elliptical ring of old reddish stars in orbit around the black hole but more distant than the blue stars. When the stars are at the farthest point in their orbit they move slower, like cars on a crowded freeway. This gives the illusion of a second nucleus. continue reading
Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity Rover has a tread pattern which will leave an impression on the Martian surface spelling “JPL” in morse code. MSL will enter, descend, and land on the surface of Mars on 5 August 2012.
Space, junk, and living on the edge
This infographic documents satellites in space, which countries own how many, and the amount of space junk we’ve left trailing about out there.
via unknownskywalker
