Hayabusa & Hayabusa2 – Hunting Asteroids

We have heard more about Rosetta mission and how epic it was. We landed a space probe on a comet, and that’s some achievement not only for ESA but also for whole humanity. Now another mission by JAXA (Japanese space agency) was sent yesterday (Dec 3, 2014) to pursue C-Type asteroid named “1999 JU3”. Hayabusa2 is as name suggests a second mission for exploring asteroids.

Hayabusa mission was launched in 2003 to collect samples from s-type asteroid “Itokawa” and it returned to Earth in 2010, successfully completing the mission with asteroid samples. The reason behind Hayabusa’s mission was to study about the birth of our solar system. You might ask why asteroid, why we are searching for answers for our solar system in asteroids.

Hayabusa

Only extra-terrestrial samples we have gathered so far is from our moon, but like our Earth, moon too went terrestrial transformation over the billions of years due to the thermal processes, therefore these samples from moon or anything from our Earth cannot provide more accurate data about the birth of our solar system. Asteroids were produced at the birth of the solar system and since they are so small, they went little or no transformation over these billions of years. Therefore studying the samples from asteroid will give more accurate details about our solar system.

In a technological perspective, Hayabusa mission has another feat. It used ion engine as the main propeller. Ion engines are high-efficient engines still in technological making and will become important key player in future space exploration.

Hayabusa also used autonomous navigation system, one that allow the space craft to navigate to the target without human intervention. It uses optical navigation camera for light detection and ranging.

Hayabusa2 is going after c-type asteroid, they are considered to be more ancient than s-type and is considered to contain more organic materials than that of s-type. Studying c-type asteroid will yield more details about origin of organic materials and water in our solar system. Hayabusa2 uses identical configuration of Hayabusa, but some parts are improvised, such as flat-disk high gain antenna.

Hayabusa2 will reach asteroid 1999 JU3 in mid-2018 and orbit it for one and a half years to collect samples and then return to Earth around the end of 2020. After it return with collected samples, we will have more knowledge about what and how organic materials and water came to solar system and also some questions about life formation also more likely to be answered.

Scientists explain nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Earth with plate tectonics

Earth, unlike its neighbor planets Venus and Mars, has 78% nitrogen in its atmosphere. Our current day atmosphere is a result of billions of years of photosynthesis by plants, but that only increased the amount of oxygen to almost 20% of atmosphere, but why there is too much nitrogen in the atmosphere is still not understood well.

Now scientists try to explain abundance of nitrogen with plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the reason for mountains and also volcanoes, when volcano erupts it does bring lot of deep earth stuffs into the surface of earth.

Gases like sulfur, carbon dioxide and nitrogen are the gases usually comes out of volcanic eruption.

Scientists say that nitrogen is locked into the silicate rocks in the earth’s crust. When this silicate rocks interact with oxygen based compounds, they break into water (H2O) and nitrogen (N2). This nitrogen then came out of volcanic eruption to the atmosphere.

This is why Mars and Venus have little nitrogen because they don’t have plate tectonics.

Read more at arstechnica

Image: NOAA via arstechnica

The thinnest phone yet, Oppo R5

Oppo R5 is the world's thinnest smart phone! With just 4.85 mm thickness, this phone just looks like metal plate.

The phone features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 chipset with octa-core running at 1.5Ghz. The phone also comes with 2 GB of RAM and has full HD screen (1920x1080). It also has 13MP Sony rear camera and 5MP front camera.

R5 only comes with 2000 mAh battery, most probably due to the slim size. It also has only 16 GB internal storage and no SD card slot.

Whether this phone too prone to bendgate is yet to be tested! Well the phone goes on sale in December and available off contract at $499 USD.

Source & Image: engadget

Germany Demands Google to Show Their Searching Algorithms

Heiko Mass, Germany’s justice minister, wants Google to open their searching algorithms so the way Google works will be much more transparent. Google has lot of impact on businesses lately, and depending on how businesses are shown in Google’s search results make a major impact in businesses.

With Google dominating online search market with more than 60%, Google has become a standard for online search, and many of Europe countries including Germany feels that Google take this as an advantage and promoting its own brand of services over native services in Europe.

So Germany’s minister believes that Google must expose how it’s searching algorithms works, therefore explaining the search results with high Google service dominance.

Even though Google’s many works are open source, including all famous Android OS, but very important aspects of Google’s primary income generating businesses are closed source and proprietary. Google Search is one of these deeply closed and guarded project. Showing the algorithm to authorities may ended up in technology breach and others copying the algorithms.

Microsoft’s EMET 5.0 is Released, Providing Extensive Defense Against Cyber-Attacks

Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit is Microsoft’s second layer of security that was primarily available for enterprise customers, it helps prevent damages against cyber-attacks, and providing methods to detect and block exploitations techniques that are used by cyber criminals. It provides real time protection against such attacks and help secure your system before your formal anti-virus or anti-malware get updates with the patch for such attacks.

EMET is less known by normal users, because it wasn’t much advertised by Microsoft, but now this EMET is free and anyone can use it, even on your home computers, and it gives you extra protection against hackers.

EMET is also compatible with most anti-virus and anti-malware applications, so it can work alongside to provide more security.

Download EMET 5.0 here (11MB)

More details on EMET here.

Material Design Comes to Google Chrome Beta for Android

Google revealed Android 5 in their IO conference, it is called Android L, and it has some new UI makeovers, that Google called it Material Design. It gives more attention to type and have lot of animation based UI changes.

Before releasing the actual OS, Google has already showed off few of their apps with Material Design such as Gmail and Maps. Now Google released Chrome Beta for Android with Material Design.

Chrome Beta 37 has totally new look, but the dev team said they were experimenting with some of the elements of Material Design. It seems they will continue to work with the new design and finally it will come to Chrome for Android.

Download Chrome Beta for Android here.

Here is the full gallery at arstechnica

Three Super Massive Black Holes Rotating Closely

4.3 billion light years away, in a distance galaxy, 2 black holes have been identified, they are not ordinary black holes, they are supermassive black holes, that is they are millions or billions time massive than our Sun. Usually these kind of black holes lies in the center of the galaxy.

Super massive black holes are surrounded by disk of glowing hot gas, commonly with that it forms quasar. Quasars are monstrous objects in space and with its colossal power can outshine the entire galaxy.

The quasar named SDSS J1502+1115 is in constellation Bootes, 4.3 light years away is actually 2 supper massive black holes and are almost 24,000 light years apart. But when scientists looked one black hole closely with intercontinental array of radio dishes – which can produce sharper images than Hubble Space Telescope – they discovered that one of the black hole is actually a duo.

This new found pair of black holes are actually 450 light years apart and orbiting each other every 4 million years. There is only one more tightly paired black hole we ever discovered and that is 24 light years apart.

Scientists believe that tightly paired black holes can help detect “gravitational wave” predicted by general relativity, but so far no known binary black holes are tight enough to cause detectable gravitational wave.

Source: ScienceMag