Bili Buzz - Popular Science, Nature, Medicine, Archeology, Future & Myths

The wheels continue to turn on Europe’s billion-euro project to put a robotic rover on the surface of the Red Planet.

Engineers working towards the flagship ExoMars mission have unveiled a sophisticated new vehicle prototype.

The demonstrator will test a possible suspension and locomotion set-up to be built into the final rover design.

ExoMars, which has yet to receive final sign-off from space ministers, is scheduled to leave Earth in 2013 and land on the fourth planet a year later.

It will carry a suite of instruments across the Martian landscape, looking for signs of past or present life.

The new prototype, developed by the Canadian MDA Corporation, will help engineers understand how the real rover will behave when it moves through the rocky terrain.

“This will be the first element that touches the surface of Mars as ExoMars rolls off the lander,” explains Nadeem Ghafoor, MDA’s manager of planetary exploration.

“And when you’ve decided where you want to go, this is the system that gets you there and gets you over any obstacles on the way,” he told BBC News.

More…

The Russian and European space agencies have signed a deal to build a six-seat manned spacecraft to travel to the Moon, a Russian space official said Wednesday.

Russian space agency Roskosmos and the Europen Space Agency  on Tuesday signed an accord on the creation of a manned vessel to transport up to six people around the Earth and to the Moon,” Roskosmos spokesman Alexander Vorobyev told AFP.

Testing of the 20-tonne vehicle is due to begin in 2015, with the first launch to take place in 2018 in the planned Vostochny space base in Siberia, Vorobyev said.

The new craft will be phased in with the replacement of the Russian Soyuz Rocket, which currently carries most Russian and American crews to the International Space Station, he said.

US space agency NASA’s planned Orion space vehicle is due to ferry astronauts humans to the International Space Station from 2015 following the retirement of the US space shuttle programme in 2010.

Astronomers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way galaxy, still just a baby at 140 years old. The scientists, who announced their findings Wednesday, used a radio observatory in New Mexico and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in space to identify when the supernova, or stellar, explosion occurred. They put the star-dying event at sometime around 1868.

Before this, the youngest supernova in the Milky Way was thought to have occurred around 1680.

A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star that releases an extraordinary amount of energy, enough to outshine an entire galaxy.

This new baby supernova is located near the center of the galaxy and obscured by dense gas and dust, making it virtually impossible to see in optical light.

Two to three supernovae are thought to occur every century in the Milky Way. As a result, there are probably even younger ones out there waiting to be identified, said David Green of the University of Cambridge in England, who led the radio observatory study.

Green and others have been tracking the remnant of this supernova since 1985 via the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array, a radio astronomy observatory. But it wasn’t until last year that a team led by North Carolina State University physicist Stephen Reynolds found with help from Chandra how much the remnant had expanded. That indicated the supernova was much younger than initial estimates ranging from 400 to 1,000 years old.

The Very Large Array made new observations in March and helped pinpoint the age at 140 years, possibly less if the expansion has been slowing.

“It’s the combination of the radio and the X-ray, the older technique and the new one, that tells us what this object really is. So you get a lot more when you put all of these clues together,” said Robert Kirshner, a Harvard University astronomer who is not affiliated with the study.

“It’s a little like one of those shows on TV where they investigate a death. This is a stellar death, all right, and the corpse is still warm,” Kirshner said during a teleconference with reporters.

Astronomers typically observe supernova remnants that are 10,000 or so years old, not relative infants like this one. Getting the total picture, from the start, is important in figuring out how often supernovae explode in the Milky Way.

In this case, “you’re actually getting to see the rock that made the splash, not the wave that’s going out into the pond,” Kirshner said.