Baumgartner has many safety precautions in place for his jump, including the latest technologically advanced gear built by specialized engineers. When he leaps from a balloon filled with helium floating at the cusp of the earth’s atmosphere, Baumgartner will don a pressurized space suit that traces its origins to the orange suits astronauts wear at launch and will protect his blood from boiling at such great heights. Reaching 120,000 feet above Roswell, New Mexico will take time, two and a half hours to reach the planned height, while the free fall will only take about 10 minutes before Baumgartner opens his parachute.

While a dangerous plan even with so many precautions and so much preparation, Fearless Felix is no novice to daredevilish dives. In July he succeeded in a 18.3 mile skydive from the Red Bull Stratos balloon, where he reached a top speed of  536 mph. This time, he’s hoping to move faster than sound moves through air. If successful, Baumgartner will become the only human to travel that fast outside the safe walls of a machine.

A member of Baumgartner’s team, Joe Kittinger, holds the previous record for the longest jump from space. In August 1960, Kittinger lept almost 20 miles; in October 2012, he’ll assist his successor through radio communication from the ground below.

Barring any other delays, the attempt has been postponed just a bit longer: until Thursday, October 11. When the mission is finally a go, fans will be able to cheer him on and watch the jump live in high definition here.

Featured photo credit: Reistlin Magere/Shutterstock.com

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Weak transfer works like this: a slow-moving rock fragment travels to the outer edge of Earth’s gravitational pull and launches back into space, floating freely until it’s pulled in by another planetary system. Researchers say that planet could be something like Mars — or a planet in an entirely different solar system. The process also proves that the opposite could be true: a microbe-covered fragment from another planet could have crashed down onto Earth, sparking the onset of human existence here. Researchers estimate that anywhere between 100 trillion and 30 quadrillion fragments could have been exchanged between our solar system and our neighboring solar system, with as many as 200 billion of those rocks originating from Earth.

The only time in history when this phenomenon was possible was between 164 million to 288 million years after the formation of the solar system, according to the study. For any of this to point to Earth as the springboard for life in other solar systems, life on Earth would have had to be present 3.8 billion years ago when the conditions for weak transfer were right. Science currently clocks the first appearance of microorganisms on Earth at about 3.6 billion years ago.

The weak transfer theory is one of several proposed by scientists to answer the age-old mystery surrounding the origin of human life. Other popular hypotheses and beliefs used to explain the spark of life include that life originated when aliens landed on Earth, human life occurred spontaneously, or that it originated from God.

Featured photo credit: Sebastian Tomus/Shutterstock.com

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Florida wants NASA to turn over the land to the state’s aerospace development agency Space Florida, which recently agreed to spend $2.3 million on studies of the area to prepare for the construction of Cape Canaveral Spaceport, a state-owned facility for the purpose of commercial space travel. Now that the space shuttle program has ended, Space Florida believes that the land is more than the government needs and that they can put it to better use, using it to get Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build its third launch site there.

“I’m anxious for the next-generation of providers, both the launch companies and the satellite owner-operators, to have Florida be the place where they seek to do business,” said Space Florida president and chief executive Frank DiBello.

The land in question is partially owned by the state of Florida, with the remainder having been granted to NASA while needed for the federal space program. If it is no longer used for that purpose, the original agreement was that the land would be returned to the state to use as it sees fit. Space Florida plans to use that to their advantage in order to secure the land for its own use and development.

Several other spaceports have either been proposed or are currently under construction in Alaska, Virginia, California, Texas and New Mexico. The most well-known of them may just be Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America, currently being built out by Sir Richard Branson near Truth of Consequences, NM. However, recent news about financial struggles in the region surrounding the new spaceport have raised questions about the viability of the industry to attract outside investors and vendors. While 500 individuals have signed up to pay $200,000 each for space flights with Virgin Galactic, development around the spaceport has been slow to materialize, which some blame a lack of legislative support in the state to exempt spacecraft suppliers from liability for accidents.

Space Florida hopes to avoid a repeat of what is happening in New Mexico, as it had already passed permanent liability exemption laws necessary to encourage outside investments in their facilities. While the days of watching the space shuttle lift off from Cape Canaveral are over, soon we could be watching commercial spaceships filled with tourists taking off from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport instead.

[via ScienceDaily]

Image Credit: Space Florida

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The Orlando Sentinel received copies of NASA documents that detail the organization’s grand plans to build an outpost 38,000 miles from the moon in a region of deep space where the gravities of Earth and the moon reach equilibrium, creating a unique force field that would help the outpost to “stick” in place. The enormous rocket needed to get astronauts to the outpost is set to be built by 2017. NASA wants to build the outpost using a Russian-built module, parts from Italy and leftover components from the $100 billion International Space Station.

It’s a grand idea that comes with a grand price tag. Space officials say the project could cost billions — perhaps tens of billions — of dollars, though the exact amount is unknown. With the national economy in rocky water, it’s unclear whether the federal government will lend support to such and expensive and potentially dangerous space project. Top space officials acknowledge that the project would put astronauts at an extreme level of risk unparalleled by previous space missions due to the outpost’s deep-in-space location. The NASA documents received by the Orlando Sentinel note that the venture would require participants to accept a higher level of risk than posed by prior space missions, in part due to the fact that the risk of radiation exposure would be extremely high because the base would be located outside Earth’s protective magnetic field.

At best, the outpost could help NASA put the first human footsteps on Mars. At worst, it could be deadly. The state of the economy and the near-future political climate will be among the top indicators to determine whether NASA will get the funding and support to move forward with this ambitious project.

Main photo image: olly/Shutterstock.com

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The Aug. 24 flight experiment was the brainchild of Ron Fugelseth, a California-based motion graphics producer whose son has a beloved toy train named Stanley. Fugelseth decided to launch Stanley into the air using a weather balloon affixed to a three-foot parachute. The procedure involved several months of monitoring the winds, as well as calling the Federal Aviation Administration prior to launch to confirm that the train-toting balloon would not interfere with any airplane flight paths. The hour-long climb into the stratosphere ended with a 20-minute fall into a corn field where Fugelseth and his son retrieved Stanley.

Fugelseth caught the flight on video with an HD camera focused on Stanley, who was secured atop a wooden dowel perch. The footage has been edited into a two-and-a-half minute YouTube video that has already garnered more than one million views. Fugelseth even went so far as to animate Stanley’s face using After Effects and Photoshop to mimic how he imagines his son sees the toy train.

In order to easily find the landed train, Fugelseth equipped Stanley’s balloon with an old cell phone for GPS. The foam box surrounding the camera and phone was also colored bright orange for easy spotting — which, in a corn field, was surely useful. In addition, the dad used the University of Wyoming’s balloon trajectory website to plan a launch site that would keep Stanley from hitting anyone.

“I launched him from a location that I knew would bring him down into farm land,” Fugelseth wrote in the YouTube video description. “The prediction website was only 5-10 miles off, so he landed safely in a corn field, far away from any towns…. I didn’t want Stanley to be a murderer. Plus, I wanted to make sure my son got Stanley back. ”

Photo and video credit: Ron Fugelseth/YouTube

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“If we as humans modify the stratosphere, it may – through the chain of events we demonstrate in this study – also impact the ocean circulation,” said Thomas Reichler, senior author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. “Good examples of how we modify the stratosphere are the ozone hole and also fossil-fuel burning that adds carbon dioxide to the stratosphere. These changes to the stratosphere can alter the ocean, and any change to the ocean is extremely important to global climate.”

Scientists have long known that the movement of the stratosphere can affect the troposphere — the air that’s closer to Earth, at six miles or less above the surface. They’ve also known that weather affects the oceans. But this is the first study to put the system together and show how winds far above the Earth’s surface can move the seas.

To understand the vast systems involved in these relationships, the researchers used weather observations and computer programs that could simulate 4,000 years of weather. What they found was decade-scale changes in stratospheric wind patterns called the polar vortex and correlated changes in deep-sea circulation.

The key to the connection between sky and sea is in the North Atlantic, south of Greenland. It’s a spot where the water can get so cold and salty that it becomes significantly denser than the ocean around it, causing it to sink. That sinking “drives the three-dimensional oceanic conveyor belt circulation,” Reichler said. And even small amounts of heating or cooling from the atmosphere — coming down from the stratospheric winds — can determine whether the water sinks or not.

Main image credit: Brenda Starr/Flickr. Illustration courtesy of Thomas Reichler, University of Utah.

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A woman who wears her hair in a ponytail while jogging does not move her head from side to side, yet her ponytail whips back and forth like a pendulum. A trio of American and British researchers who studied the physics behind this phenomenon earned themselves the Ig Noble’s 2012 Physics Prize. Their research examines the combination of forces — gravity, elasticity — that explain why human hair contained by an elastic sways even when the human does not.

Another Ig Nobel winner offers a polite way to get someone to stop talking. Instead of telling the person to “shut up,” you can use a machine that plays back the speaker’s voice on a short delay. Inventors Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada of Japan found that hearing one’s own words played back will force the speaker into silence. The result of their findings is the SpeechJammer, a machine that can stop a person from speaking mid-sentence without causing any physical harm. The creators say the machine, which won the Acoustics Prize, can be used to prevent two people from talking over one another in debates or to reduce background noise in places like classrooms and trains.

The Ig Nobel Anatomy Prize went to the Netherland’s Frans de Waal and America’s Jennifer Pokorny. Humans can tell a lot from a person’s face: their mood, their approximate age and — almost always — you can determine their gender. Pokorny and de Waal found this is not true for certain species of monkeys, such as chimpanzees, which are more apt to identify the gender of other chimpanzees from seeing their rear ends. In addition to proving that chimps can differentiate between male and female behinds, their study also cast doubt that chimps can do the same from looking at another chimp’s face.

Featured photo credit: klohka/Shutterstock; Secondary photo credit: AJancso/Shutterstock

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Believe it or not, these ethereal sky lights actually originate with the sun. Occasionally, solar activity triggers a release of gas, something scientists call a coronal mass ejection (CME). It takes two or three days for these emissions to reach the Earth’s magnetic field, where it generates currents of charged particles upon impact. According to Sten Odenwald, author of The 23rd Cycle: Learning to Live with a Stormy Star, these particles are boosted in energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere, and when they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms, they produce dazzling auroral light.

Normally, the Northern Lights are a special treat reserved only for those in higher altitudes, like Canada, Alaska and the Arctic. During a couple of very specific times of year, however, they become easier to see from lower elevations. One peak season for spotting the aurora borealis is in the weeks before and after the vernal equinox, which marks the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and the other starts right around the autumnal equinox (now!) and lasts through the end of October.

According to Janet Green, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the times around the equinoxes are when geomagnetic storms — disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field — are strongest.

Unfortunately, spotting the Northern Lights isn’t like an eclipse or shooting star. There’s no precise way to predict when or where the auroral light will be visible. The best advice we found comes from Joe Rao at Space.com:

“If your newspaper, radio or TV reports that shortwave radio communications have been disturbed or interrupted, and especially if they say this had to do with something happening on the sun, or if you’re a trucker and notice unusual skip conditions on your CB radio, then, that night, the next night and even the next, get out away from city lights and look up toward the north.”

Good luck and happy autumn!

Main photo credit: Magdanatka/Shutterstock

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In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was, in fact, expanding — and not static. Once Einstein knew the universe was expanding, he discarded his cosmological constant theory and later called it “the biggest blunder of his life.”

Fast forward 90 years and the world’s most powerful digital camera has photographed the very thing that Einstein felt was the biggest blunder of his life: dark energy.

Another theory, however, suggests that dark energy is a new force and will eventually fade away just as it arose, but that is somewhat beside the point.

The point is, there is a new, totally badass camera that can photograph the affects of dark energy on space and time — and do so from a mountaintop in Chile.

What is Dark Energy?

According to NASA’s Astrophysics division, more is unknown than is known about dark energy. We know it is there because of how it affects the universe’s expansion, but that’s about it. Most scientists currently believe that roughly 70 percent of the Universe is dark energy, 25 percent is dark matter, and the rest — everything we’ve ever observed from Earth — makes up the remaining 5 percent.

Makes ya feel kind of small, eh?

Why is the Dark Energy Camera Significant?

The official press release states:

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.

The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, and light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away is able to be viewed in each snapshot.

In December, after the camera has been fully tested, scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken. Over the next five years they will basically create a detailed color map of one-eighth of the sky, discovering and measuring 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 supernovae.

Read more about the Dark Energy Camera and check out the video below for a cool timelapse of the camera’s construction below:

Photo: The Blanco telescope in Chile. Credit: T. Abbott and NOAO/AURA/NSF

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Remaining in peak physical condition is difficult for astronauts living aboard the space station, since the absence of gravity means very little muscle resistance. Astronauts must use special cardio and strength training equipment in order to give their muscles a workout in a weightless world. Since Williams is the commander of the Expedition 33 crew aboard the space station, which is orbiting about 240 miles above the Earth, she had to set a good example.

After “swimming” half a mile (0.8 km), biking 18 miles (29 km), and running 4 miles (6.4 km), Williams finished with a time of one hour, 48 minutes and 33 seconds.

The space station already had its own treadmill and stationary bike, which use a uncomfortable-looking tangle of harnesses and straps to keep astronauts from floating away while they exercise. To simulate the swimming portion of the race, Williams used what’s called the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) to do weightlifting and resistance exercises that approximate swimming in microgravity.

Speaking to NASA TV from space, Williams said: “I’m happy to be done. It wasn’t easy, and I’m sure everybody in California’s very happy to be done too.”

Sunita, we salute you! Now we’ll never be able to complain about going to the regular, old Earth gym again.

Photo credit: NASA

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