May 28, 2018

Ross to Create Dept. of Commerce SPACE Administration (Source: Space Policy Online)
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has announced that he will create a Space Policy Advancing Commercial Enterprise (SPACE) Administration that will operate under his direct supervision. It will coordinate the Department’s engagement in commercial space activities and each bureau within the Department with space responsibilities must designate a liaison to the new Administration.

Ross made the announcement following President Trump’s signing of Space Policy Directive-2 (SPD-2) on May 24. One major thrust of SPD-2 is creating a “one-stop shop” at Commerce for commercial space companies to obtain whatever regulatory approvals they need to conduct business. The term is somewhat misleading since many U.S. commercial space companies still need to engage with two other government agencies.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) assigns radio frequencies, which are needed for any space activity that involves sending signals to and receiving signals from space objects. Any company that wants to launch an object into space or bring it back to Earth needs a license from the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) at the FAA, which is part of the Department of Transportation. The Department of Commerce will take care of everything else, however, pursuant to SPD-2. (5/28)

How Do We Get Our Message Aacross to the Extraterrestrials? The Answers are Evolving (Source: GeekWire)
Last year, scientists sent a binary-coded message telling the aliens what time it was. Next year, it’ll be the periodic table of the elements. And someday, they hope to transmit a universal language that even extraterrestrials might relate to. “I think we should treat this as a multigenerational, true experiment as opposed to an observational exercise, like archaeology,” said Doug Vakoch, president of METI International.

Vakoch and other researchers, including linguists, gathered here this weekend at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference to consider the content for future messages to E.T. In the process, they considered the meaning of language as well. “The ideal is, we get a reply back to the experiment,” Vakoch, who has his Ph.D. in clinical psychology, told GeekWire. “But I also think there’s a social value.”

Vakoch has spent almost two decades thinking about how to design messages for the aliens, first as director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute, and since 2016 as METI’s president. (You can probably guess that METI stands for “messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.”) (5/27)

Chang'e-4: Lunar Microsatellite May Be Lost, Queqiao Continues Toward Lagrange Point Beyond Moon (Source: GB Times)
Contact has been lost with one of two microsatellites launched along with the Queqiao Chang'e-4 lunar relay satellite following a standard trajectory correction manoeuvre on the way to the Moon. DSLWP-A and B, also known as Longjiang-1 and -2, piggybacked on the launch of Queqiao, a relay satellite for a planned landing on the lunar far side, on a Long March 4C rocket from Xichang on May 20.

Queqiao passed the Moon at an altitude of 100 km on Friday, successfully performing a braking burn to send it towards its intended destination, the second Earth-Moon Lagrange point, from which it will facilitate communications between the Earth and a lander and rover to be sent to the far side of the Moon. (5/28)

Dark Matter Particles Elude Scientists in the Biggest Search of its Kind (Source: Science News)
The largest particle detector of its kind has failed to turn up any hints of dark matter, despite searching for about a year. Known as XENON1T, the experiment is designed to detect elusive dark matter particles, which are thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos. Physicists don’t know what dark matter is.

One of the most popular explanations is a particle called a WIMP, short for weakly interacting massive particle. XENON1T searches for WIMPs crashing into atomic nuclei in 1,300 kilograms of chilled liquid xenon. But XENON1T saw no such collisions. The particles’ absence further winnowed down their possible hiding places by placing new limits on how frequently WIMPs can interact with nuclei depending on their mass. (5/28)

These Spinning Disks of Gas and Dust Reveal How Planets are Made (Source: WIRED)
Over the past two and half centuries, scientists envisioning the origin of planetary systems (including our own) have focused on a specific scene: a spinning disk around a newborn star, sculpting planets out of gas and dust like clay on a potter’s wheel. But as for testing the idea, by actually spotting an exoplanet coalesce from swirling matter? No luck yet.

“Nowadays, everybody says planets form in protoplanetary disks,” said Ruobing Dong, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona.“This sentence is, technically, a theoretical statement.” Advances over the past few years suggest it won’t stay theoretical for long. Using second-generation instruments mounted on giant ground-based telescopes, several teams have finally resolved the inner regions of a few protoplanetary disks, uncovering unexpected, enigmatic patterns. (5/28)

NASA’s Building New Tools to Manage Water, as Climate Dangers Grow (Source: MIT Technology Review)
After an unusually dry winter, a late-season storm finally soaked California in early March, piling up several feet of snow across the high granite reservoirs of the Sierra Nevada mountains. On the Sunday morning after the weather cleared, a pair of NASA researchers loaded onto a small plane at the Mammoth Yosemite Airport, a single-runway operation that stretches out before the pyramid peak of Mount Morrison.

After final safety checks, the pilots lifted off, marking the Airborne Snow Observatory’s inaugural flight of the season. The ASO is a twin-turboprop Beechcraft King Air 90, equipped with a pair of sensors pointing through a glass cutout on the bottom of the plane. The lidar measures the volume of the mountain snowpack while a spectrometer gauges its reflectivity, together providing a highly accurate estimate of how much water will run off the mountain in the spring and when it will flow through California’s warren of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts.

The data allows water authorities to more carefully manage the water charging hydroelectric power plants, feeding towns and cities, and nourishing one of the United States’ most productive agricultural regions. Doing that job well has become increasingly critical as the state alternately struggles with prolonged droughts and widespread flooding as climate change appears to exacerbate seasonal volatility. (5/28)

Inequality in India Can Be Seen from Outer Space (Source: BBC)
Are night lights on earth captured by satellites from outer space a good way to measure inequality? Economists Praveen Chakravarty and Vivek Dehejia certainly believe so. They acquired images grabbed by satellites from the US Air Force Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme. These satellites circle the earth 14 times a day and record lights from the earth's surface at night with sensors.

They superimposed a map depicting India's districts on their images, allowing them to develop a unique data set of luminosity values, by district and over time. Using data generated by the night lights, they studied of 387 of 640 districts in 12 states. These districts account for 85% of India's population and 80% of its GDP. Some 87% of parliamentary seats are in these districts. Using the novel methodology, the economists documented income divergence in India.

Most of India is dark at night because there is little economic activity going on. But the delicate tracery of lights as seen from space also showed that the states are becoming more unequal between and within them. (5/27)