Space... The Final Frontier

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No Way! Flying to the Moon at Warp Speed May Actually Happen Soon

Annie Daly
Contributing Editor
May 4, 2015

No Way! Flying to the Moon at Warp Speed May Actually Happen Soon
It may not take many moons to reach the moon.

Will we one day be traveling in a cool space machine like something out of Star Wars? We will if NASA has anything to say about it.

The company recently announced on its website NASASpaceFlightdotcom that it has successfully tested a new way to travel through space that could one day get you to the moon in the same amount of time as it takes to fly across the country.

The vehicle would carry about half a dozen passengers, plus their luggage, to the moon in about four hours. (For context, it originally took Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew exactly four days, six hours, and 45 minutes to reach the moon.) Or, to go even more extreme, it could take you to faraway star Alpha Centauri in less than a century, at almost one-tenth the speed of light.

The technology that may make the fast travel happen, called the electromagnetic drive, or EM drive, has actually been around for the past 15 years or so. But it hasn’t gained as much traction as you’d think because it’s fairly controversial, in that it seems to violate the classic laws of physics. (For those who are interested in these things: The law of conservation of momentum states that momentum can only be changed by one of the forces described by Newton’s laws of motion. And yet, the EM drive creates momentum without doing so.)

Now, don’t go packing your moon bag just yet. The technology is still in testing right now at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. It will also require many more tests, in order to verify that it’s legitimate. Any space vehicle that uses an EM drive in the future will need to have a nuclear power plant on board that still needs to be developed for use in space.

In the meantime, the engineer who is working on the EM drive, Paul March, explained to cnetdotcom that his work on the EM drive could be “a robust and cost-effective power and propulsion technology that can break us loose from the shackles of the rocket equation.”

It may also break us loose from the notion that flying Star Wars style only happens in the movies.

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When asked to name a comet, most people will remember Halley's. Tonight (May 5), the Eta Aquarid meteor shower, produced by debris from Halley's Comet, will peak in the night sky, and you can watch live coverage of this Cinco de Mayo meteor shower online.

Late tonight (May 5) and during the early morning hours tomorrow (May 6), skywatchers will have a chance of sighting a few pieces of Halley's Comet – "comet litter," if you will – zipping through our atmosphere in the form of meteors. The online Slooh community observatory will host a free webcast of the shower starting at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT) that will stream live at: sloohdotcom

You can also watch the Eta Aquarid webcast live on Spacedotcom, courtesy of Slooh.

When and Where to Watch

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is predicted to peak on the night of May 5 and into the early morning hours of May 6. Under ideal conditions (a dark, moonless sky) about 40 of these very swift meteors can be seen per hour. The shower appears at about one-quarter peak strength for about three or four days before and after May 6.

There are, however, two drawbacks if you plan to watch for these meteors this year. First, there is the moon, which was full on Sunday. Although it is now waning (losing illumination), it will still be a bright gibbous phase on the peak morning and will likely "muscle in" on the fainter meteor streaks by brightening the early morning sky with its light.

The other obstacle — at least for those watching from north of the equator — is that the radiant (the emanation point of these meteors) is at the "Water Jar" of the constellation Aquarius, which comes above the southeast horizon around 3 a.m. local daylight time, and never gets very high as seen from north temperate latitudes, so the actual observed rates are usually much lower than the oft-quoted 40 per hour. In North America, typical rates are 10 meteors per hour at 26-degrees north latitude, half this at 35-degrees latitude and practically zero north of 40 degrees.

Catch an Earthgrazer

For most skywatchers, the best hope is catching a glimpse of a meteor emerging from the radiant that will skim the atmosphere horizontally -- much like a bug skimming the side window of an automobile. Meteor watchers call such shooting stars "Earthgrazers." They leave colorful, long-lasting trails.

"These meteors are extremely long," said Robert Lunsford, of the International Meteor Organization. "They tend to hug the horizon rather than shooting overhead where most cameras are aimed."

Bill Cooke, a member of the Space Environments team at the Marshall Space Flight Center, said, "Earthgrazers are rarely numerous. But even if you only see a few, you're likely to remember them."

Comet Crumbs

If you do catch sight of tonight's meteor shower, keep in mind that you'll likely be seeing the incandescent streak produced by material that originated from the nucleus of Halley's Comet. When these tiny bits of comet collide with Earth, friction with our atmosphere raises them to a white heat and produces the effect popularly referred to as "shooting stars."

So it is, that the shooting stars that we have come to call the Eta Aquarids are really an encounter with the traces of a famous visitor from the depths of space and from the dawn of creation.

Halley's Comet travels around the sun in an elliptical orbit that takes it beyond the orbit of Neptune and as close to the sun as inside the orbit of Venus; a trek that takes roughly 75 years to complete. Halley made its last visit to the sun in 1986 and will return to the vicinity of the sun and Earth in summer 2061.

I'd love to be around to greet Halley when it returns, but that's not likely to happen. You see, I was 30 years old at its last appearance; I'll stick to my vitamins and do a lot of good wishing, but . . . well, you do the math. It's possible, not probable.

And yet, during these next few mornings, both you and I will have a chance of sighting a few pieces of Halley zipping through our atmosphere in the form of meteors.

The orbit of Halley's Comet closely approaches the Earth's orbit at two places. One point is in the middle to latter part of October, producing a meteor display known as the Orionids. The other point comes in the early part of May, producing the Eta Aquarids.

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Sun Unleashes Most Powerful Solar Flare of 2015
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | May 06, 2015 06:23am ET

The sun unleashed its most intense flare of the year Tuesday (May 5), a monstrous blast that caused temporary radio blackouts throughout the Pacific region.

The X-class solar flare — the most powerful category of sun storm — erupted Tuesday from a sunspot called Active Region 2339 (AR2339), peaking at 6:11 p.m. EDT (2211 GMT). NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft captured a gorgeous video of the solar flare, recording it in multiple wavelengths of light.

Despite the radio blackouts, the blast is unlikely to cause major issues here on Earth, researchers said.

X2.7 Solar Flare, May 5, 2015
Pin It NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of an X2.7 solar flare (visible on left side of sun) on May 5, 2015.
Credit: NASA/SDOView full size image
"Given the impulsive nature of this event, as well as the source location on the eastern limb of the sun, we are not expecting a radiation storm at Earth," scientists with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado, which is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in an update Tuesday evening.

"We will be on the lookout for new imagery from the NASA SOHO [Solar and Heliospheric Observatory] mission to determine if there was an associated coronal mass ejection (CME) with this event," they added. "Given the same logic above, however, we do not expect there to be one that would impact Earth."

CMEs are massive clouds of solar particles rocketed into space at millions of miles per hour. (Solar flares, by contrast, are blasts of high-energy radiation.) CMEs that hit Earth can trigger geomagnetic storms that can disrupt powergrids and satellite navigation.

Scientists classify strong solar flares into three categories: C (weakest), M (mid-level) and X (the most powerful). X flares are 10 times more potent than M flares. Wednesday's outburst clocked in at X2.7, outranking the previous flare champion of 2015 — an X2.2 storm that erupted March 11 from a sunspot known as AR12297.

There could be more sun-storm action coming soon, SWPC researchers said.

"We are expecting several active regions to be rotating onto the visible disk later this week and into the weekend," they wrote in the update. "We have observed a few energetic CMEs on the back side of the sun with these regions, so we expect that overall solar activity will be on the rise in the short to medium term."

[Condor]

We can almost scratch the moon...Imagine in the not so far future...........

[The Cobra]

Baloney.................that won`t be Halley`s Comet tonite. It`ll be Carey Price getting launched by Habs fans when the Habs lose again to the Bolts.