Voyager 1 Bids the Solar System Farewell

UMD Right Now - 8.16.13

Voyager 1 appears to have at long last left our solar system and entered interstellar space, says a University of Maryland-led team of researchers.

Carrying Earthly greetings on a gold plated phonograph record and still-operational scientific instruments – including the Low Energy Charged Particle detector designed, built and overseen, in part, by UMD's Space Physics Group – NASA's Voyager 1 has traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object. And now, these researchers say, it has begun the first exploration of our galaxy beyond the Sun's influence.

"It's a somewhat controversial view, but we think Voyager has finally left the Solar System, and is truly beginning its travels through the Milky Way," says UMD research scientist Marc Swisdak, lead author of a new paper published online this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Swisdak and fellow plasma physicists James F. Drake, also of the University of Maryland, and Merav Opher of Boston University have constructed a model of the outer edge of the Solar System that fits recent observations, both expected and unexpected.


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Where Are All The Alien Self-Replicating Robotic Space Probes?

The Daily Galaxy - 7.20.13

"Likewise, the surface of the moon and portions of Mars have been searched at a sufficient resolution to have uncovered any non-terrestrial artifacts that could have been present. However, the deep oceans of Earth and the subsurface of the Moon are largely unexplored territory, while regions such as the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and stable orbits around other Solar System planets could also contain non-terrestrial artifacts that have so far escaped human observation."

Researchers from Edinburgh University have said 'self replicating' robotic space probes from alien civilisations could already have arrived in our solar system according to mathematicians Duncan Forgan and Arwen Nicholson referred to in their paper 'Slingshot Dynamics for Self Replicating Probes and the Effect on Exploration Timescales', could be so hi-tech that they're invisible to human beings, the researchers said. According to the researchers' calculations alien probes would only need to travel at one tenth of the speed of light in order to explore every part of our galaxy within 10 million years.


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Steering Spacecraft Via Mind-Meld (2 Brains Better Than 1)

New Scientist - 2.1.13 by Paul Marks

TURNS out two heads really are better than one. Two people have successfully steered a virtual spacecraft by combining the power of their thoughts - and their efforts were far more accurate than one person acting alone. One day groups of people hooked up to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might work together to control complex robotic and telepresence systems, maybe even in space.

A BCI system records the brain's electrical activity using EEG signals, which are detected with electrodes attached to the scalp. Machine-learning software learns to recognise the patterns generated by each user as they think of a certain concept, such as "left" or "right". BCIs have helped people with disabilities to steer a wheelchair, for example.

Researchers are discovering, however, that they get better results in some tasks by combining the signals from multiple BCI users. Until now, this "collaborative BCI" technique has been used in simple pattern-recognition tasks, but a team at the University of Essex in the UK wanted to test it more rigorously.

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A Friendly (Robot) Face in Space

Atlantic - Nov. 30, 2012

You know the only thing lonelier than Sgt. Pepper's Hearts Club Band, and the Heartbreak Hotel, and the number one? Being alone and also not on Earth. Space, for all its wonder, for all its provocations, for all its adventure, is an isolating place -- which is why behavioral screening is part of the astronaut selection process, and also why some the most intriguing scientific experiments being conducted aboard the ISS are psychological in scope.

For Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, though, space-borne loneliness may be assuaged by a different kind of experiment. A team of researchers at Tokyo University -- along with the robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi and the ad agency Dentsu -- have been since 2011 spearheading a project to give Wakata some companionship during his upcoming stint on the International Space Station. That project? A small humanoid robot that will be sent to live with Wakata on the orbiting laboratory. The android will be 13.4 inches tall and 2.2 pounds. It will arrive at the ISS next summer, a few months ahead of Wakata's own arrival. Its name is still to be determined -- by a public contest -- but it will look, per a sketch released yesterday, something like this:



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Star Trek Propulsion Becomes Real - Dilithium Crystal Fusion

WIRED.COM.UK - October 5, 2012 by Ian Steadman

Humanity has been in space for a while, but we really haven't managed to go very far. Carl Sagan once said that "the surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean, and recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep" -- that was in 1980, and we haven't risked testing the water any deeper since then.

One of the main reasons for that, though, is that space is so frustratingly massive. Voyager 1 is the fastest manmade thing ever, but 17 kilometres per second is a piffling fraction of the speed of light. Even getting to one of our nearest neighbours, Mars, would take six to eight months using conventional spaceship engines. Ideas like warp drives are still theoretical, and unlikely to be seen within our lifetimes. However, it might be possible to cut that trip to Mars down to as few as three months using a form of fusion fuel -- "dilithium crystals". Yep, just like Star Trek.



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