Galaxy - Progressive

We got starry-eyed last month about Japanese plans to send humanoid robots to the moon, but now we're, well, over the moon to see that the Japanese want to build a whole robot base on the heavenly body by 2020.

A Japanese government panel has produced a draft paper outlining how humanoid rover robots will begin surveying the moon by 2015, according to a report by the prime minister's office.

As part of the $2.2 billion project, the droids will begin construction of an unmanned base near the south pole of the moon that will be powered by solar panels, according to the panel chaired by Waseda University President Katsuhiko Shirai.

Weighing about 660 pounds, the droids will roll on treads and operate within a 60-mile radius of the base. They'll be equipped with solar panels, seismographs to investigate the moon's inner structure, high-def cameras, and arms to gather rock samples, which will be returned to Earth via rocket.

NASA authorities report that an unknown object approaching the Earth from deep space is almost certainly artificial in origin rather than being an asteroid. Object 2010 KQ was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona earlier this month, and subsequently tracked by NASA's asteroid-watching service, the Near-Earth Object Program headquartered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Observations by astronomer S J Bus, using the NASA-sponsored Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, indicate that 2010 KQ's spectral characteristics do not match any of the known asteroid types, and the object's absolute magnitude (28.9) suggests it is only a few meters in size.

The mysterious artificial object has apparently made a close pass by the Earth, coming in almost to the distance of the Moon's orbit, and is now headed away again into the interplanetary void. The object has used no propulsion during the time NASA has had it under observation. However the spacewatch experts believe that it must have moved under its own power at some point, given its position and velocity.

"The orbit of this object is very similar to that of the Earth, and one would not expect a object to remain in this type of orbit for very long," said Paul Chodas, at JPL.

The experts believe that the object must be a spacecraft, or part of one - likely to be a booster stage from an interplanetary mission of the past, now drifting back in to Earth and out again. The next visit will probably be 2036, at which time there's a small chance that 2010 KQ will crash into the atmosphere and burn up.

The NASA graphic above shows the trajectory of the near-Earth object known as 2010 KQ, which the space agency said is likely a spent rocket stage that escaped the Earth-moon system years ago, and not an asteroid.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/05/nasa-could-approaching-space-object-be-artificial.html

 

Asteroid 2010 KQ: Probably a Rocket Body

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news168.html

Radio science result from 2008 Phobos Flyby now accepted for publication

• We report independent results from two subgroups of the Mars Express Radio Science (MaRS) team who independently analyzed Mars Express (MEX) radio tracking data for the purpose of determining consistently the gravitational attraction of the moon Phobos on the MEX spacecraft, and hence the mass of Phobos. New values for the gravitational parameter (GM=0.7127 ± 0.0021 x 10-³ km³/s²) and density of Phobos (1876 ± 20 kg/m³) provide meaningful new constraints on the corresponding range of the body's porosity (30% ± 5%), provide a basis for improved interpretation of the internal structure. We conclude that the interior of Phobos likely contains large voids. When applied to various hypotheses bearing on the origin of Phobos, these results are inconsistent with the proposition that Phobos is a captured asteroid.

http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/7/1085

You Couldn't Make This Up Dept: "Why is Mars' Moon Phobos Hollow?"

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/05/you-couldnt-make-this-up-european-space-agency-rumors-mars-moon-phobos-is-an-artificial-satellite.html

Russian President Calls For International Space Summit

• "Space is our highest priority, regardless of how hard the economic situation is in the country. Space will always remain our priority. This is not just somebody's interpretation, it's our official state position. I am here in my presidential office and when addressing you, I can confirm again the significance of space for the government," Medvedev

http://flametrench.flatoday.net/2010/04/russian-president-calls-for.html

Phobos an ancient Tetrahedral Spaceship?

http://www.enterprisemission.com/Phobos.html

Stephen Hawking proclaims in a new television upcoming Discovery Channel documentary series, that in a universe with 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, it is unlikely that earth is the only place where life has evolved.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said, according to Great Britain's The Sunday Times. "The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like."

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," Hawking said. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

 

In his famous lecture on Life in the Universe, Stephen Hawking asks: "What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life, as we explore the galaxy?"

If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?"

Why hasn't the Earth been visited, and even colonized? Hawking asks. "I discount suggestions that UFO's contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant."

Hawking continues: "What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence."

We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution, Hawking emphasized,  but it is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.