The Universe Is All History

It took 300 years of experiment and calculation to pin down the speed at which light travels in a vacuum: 186,282 miles per second.

Light will travel slightly slower than this through air, and some wild experiments have actually slowed light to a crawl and seemingly made it go backward, but at the scales encountered in our everyday lives, light is so fast that we perceive our surroundings in real time.

Look up into the night sky and this illusion begins to falter. Because light takes time to get here from there, the farther away 'there' is the further in the past light left there and so we see all objects at some time in the past.

We see the relatively close moon as it was 1.2 seconds ago and the more distant sun as it was about 8 minutes ago. The measurements — 1.2 light-seconds and 8 light-minutes — can be thought to describe both time and distance.

The distance to more remote objects such as other stars is so great it is measured in light-years—the distance light will travel in a year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). Even the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, lies more than four light-years away, so it appears to us on Earth as it was just over four years ago when the light began its journey.
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In this way, light's finite speed gives us a valuable view into the past, and as we strain our gaze deeper into the universe we look further back in time. In the case of distant galaxies, we see them as they were billions of years ago when the universe was relatively young.

Glittering star cluster is galactic heavyweight This cluster of thousands of stars lies 20,000 light years from Earth in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy. It is embedded in a star-forming nebula called NGC 3603, a cloud of gas and dust with enough material to form 400,000 stars like the Sun. Most of the bright stars in the image are very hot and massive. Their radiation and stellar winds have blown out a large cavity in the nebula around them.

Some galaxies are so remote that their light hasn't had sufficient time to reach us yet, despite about 13.7 billion years of travel.

There could also be more distant objects that will forever remain unknown to us. Because the universe may be expanding and the expansion appears to be accelerating, there may be distant galaxies which if we can't see them now because their light has not had time to reach us, we will never see.

So we can never see the universe as it is, only as it was at various stages of its development. To interact with remote parts of the universe — to see them as they are now — would require some exotic means of travel, such as to travel faster than light which, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, is impossible as it would require an infinite amount of energy.

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The fantastic skies of Orphan Stars from NASA Science
Hubble finds Youthful-looking galaxy conceals ancient stars
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NASA's Endeavour launch

National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced the launch countdown schedule for space shuttle Endeavour.

NASA delays launch of Endeavour by 24 hours because of unexpected work to resolve an air leak in the crew cabin. Engineers installed a replacement valve taken from the space shuttle Atlantis. Lift off is now set for the evening of Wednesday 8th August.
The launch window lasts 5 minutes.

During the 11-day mission to the ISS International Space Station, Endeavour's crew will add another truss segment to the expanding station, install a gyroscope and add an external spare parts platform.

The flight will also include at least three spacewalks and will debut a new system that enables docked shuttles to draw electrical power from the station to extend visits to the outpost. If the system functions as expected, three days will be added to the mission.

The STS-118 mission is the 119th space shuttle flight, the 20th flight for Endeavour and the 22nd U.S. flight to the ISS. The mission would be Endeavour's first flight in more than four years.
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Space Shuttle Endeavour's Cargo from Space Com
Nuclear fusion could power NASA spacecraft in two decades from Goldenship
The European Space Agency's DARWIN proposals online from Centauri Dreams
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Artes GEO Sat

Small GEO Platform contract signed

Mr Viriglio, ESA's Director of Telecommunication and Navigation, shakes hands with Professor Manfred Fuchs, CEO of OHB-System AG, in Berlin on 28 March 2007, officialising the signing with OHB/Germany of a €100 million framework contract to develop a European Small Geostationary Satellite platform for telecommunication missions.

With this initiative, ESA is supporting European industry in broadening the product portfolio range on offer on the commercial telecommunication satellite market, by covering a market segment where no optimised European solutions currently exist.

The “ARTES 11” programme was approved at the ministerial meeting of the ESA Council held in Berlin in December 2005 and currently eight of the Agency’s Member States are participants.
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ESA open-source software supports Germany's TerraSAR-X
ESA celebrates 50 years of Europe
Jules Verne - Space Station Supply Vehicle - pre flight checks
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Space cooperation

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Roscosmos signing. Credits: ESA

Europe and Russia confirm closer space cooperation
From left to right: ESA Director General, Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Head of the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (Roscosmos), Anatoly Perminov, and European Commission Director General Heinz Zourek met on 21 March 2007, at Roscosmos in Moscow within the framework of the Tripartite Space Dialogue between the European Commission, European Space Agency and Roscosmos.

Cooperation in space science is advancing satisfactorily. Russia will provide a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer instrument to ESA's BepiColombo mission. Russian scientists have also been invited to respond together with European scientists to the call for proposals for the first planning cycle of the new Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 recently issued by ESA.

Cooperation in the technology field will see the parties assessing potential domains of common interest and identifying concrete opportunities.

Cooperation in the launchers domain will see the two sides concentrate on the implementation of Soyuz launches from the Guiana Space Centre as well as looking into technologies for future launchers. Europe and Russia are also involved in discussions related to the next generation of crew vehicles with possible ESA involvement in the development of an Advanced Crew Transportation Vehicle to be tabled for decision at the ESA Council at ministerial level in 2008.


SPACE "The Ultimate Surfing Adventure" - Quasar9

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OSIRIS camera on Rosetta obtains ‘light curve’ of asteroid Steins
IceSAR provides glimpse of future Sentinel-1 images over ice
Space Science - UK invests for the future more from PPARC.
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The Moon & TIME

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La Luna - copyright - 2005 Jerry Lodriguss

The Moon makes a complete orbit about the Earth with respect to the fixed stars (its sidereal period) approximately once every 27.3 days. However, since the Earth is moving in its orbit about the Sun at the same time, it takes slightly longer for the Moon to show its same phase to Earth, which is about 29.5 days (its synodic period). Unlike most satellites of other planets, the Moon orbits near the ecliptic and not the Earth's equatorial plane.

Most of the tidal effects seen on the Earth are caused by the Moon's gravitational pull, with the Sun making only a small contribution. Tidal effects result in an increase of the mean Earth-Moon distance of about 4 meters per century, or 4 centimetres per year. As a result of the conservation of angular momentum, the increasing semimajor axis of the Moon is accompanied by a gradual slowing of the Earth's rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century

How Does Your Brain Tell Time? Study Challenges Theory Of Inner Clock

For decades, scientists have believed that the brain possesses an internal clock that allows it to keep track of time.

The changing colours reflect how a brain cell network evolves over time in response to stimuli. (Credit: Buonomano Lab)

Now a UCLA study in the Feb. 1 edition of Neuron proposes a new model in which a series of physical changes to the brain's cells helps the organ to monitor the passage of time.

The most popular theory assumes that a clock-like mechanism -- which generates and counts regular fixed movements -- underlies timing in the brain. In contrast, Buonomano suggests a physical model that operates without using a clock. He offers an analogy to explain how it works.

"If you toss a pebble into a lake," he explained, "the ripples of water produced by the pebble's impact act like a signature of the pebble's entry time. The farther the ripples travel the more time has passed.

"We propose that a similar process takes place in the brain that allows it to track time," he added. "Every time the brain processes a sensory event, such as a sound or flash of light, it triggers a cascade of reactions between brain cells and their connections. Each reaction leaves a signature that enables the brain-cell network to encode time."

The UCLA team used a computer model to test this theory. By simulating a network of interconnected brain cells in which each connection changed over time in response to stimuli, they were able to show that the network could tell time.

Their simulations indicated that a specific event is encoded within the context of events that precede it. In other words, if one could measure the response of many neurons in the brain to a tone or a flash of light, the response would not only reveal the nature of the event, but the other events that preceded it and when they occurred.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release
issued by University of California - Los Angeles.
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