Pakistan Cyber Force: Satellites

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Russian Satellite Plunges into The Pacific Ocean

MOSCOW: A Russian rocket carrying a US telecommunications satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea platform in Moscow's latest space failure.

The rocket may have veered off course from the moment of take-off because of heavy waves battering the former northern seas oil platform, initial reports said.

The Intelsat-27's loss means the giant Boeing aerospace corporation would for now be unable to fit the final piece of a constellation mean to provide TV feeds across Europe and the United States.

"There was an accident during the Zenit rocket launch," a source at the Energia corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to lift up Intelsat satellites told AFP.

"The rocket fell into the Pacific Ocean."

Officials said no one was hurt on the huge Odyssey platform that was once stationed off the oil-rich coast of Norway before being tugged to the Pacific by an international consortium called Sea Launch.

Energia chief Vitaly Lopota said the Russian rocket's engine appeared to fail less than a minute after the evening take-off but the reason was still unknown reason.

"We had an abnormal situation -- the emergency shutdown of the first stage engine," Lopota told the state RIA Novosti news agency.

"It happened 50 seconds into the flight. We are now looking into what happened."

Several Russian media reports said the platform itself was unstable at the time of the launch because of heavy weather.

Sources said the Zenit had purposefully steered itself as far away from the Odyssey as possible -- instead of going straight up -- because the engines detected a problem and were programmed to save the ground crew.

"The rockets detected an abnormal situation linked to platform instability from the very start, and then switched the engines over (to operations) aimed at steering the rocket away from the platform," a space industry source told the Interfax news agency.

Sea Launch has been using the deep-sea platform to perform commercial operations since 1999. There had been only two complete failures out of the 34 missions conducted prior to Friday's launch.

But analysts said Sea Launch -- having emerged from bankruptcy protection in October 2010 after years of financial difficulties -- will be keen to prove that the accident was an anomaly that should not affect future launches.

"This accident is very unpleasant for Sea Launch, which only recently started to repair its reputation on the commercial space services market," said Moscow's Space News magazine editor Igor Marinin.

Russia's space programme is now especially closely watched because it provides the world's only manned link to the International Space Station (ISS).

The country's space programme also leads the world in the number of commercial launches and is used by other nations to put up both private and military satellites.

The Roscosmos space agency -- a direct descendent of Moscow's once-proud Soviet programme that competed against NASA at the height of the Cold War -- has been beset by a string of accidents in the past two years that prompted sackings at the top of command.

Russia's most recent setback came in November when it temporarily lost contact with all its non-military satellites as well as the space station because of a vital cable cut.

Other high-profile accidents included the loss of a highly-publicised Mars probe in the Earth's orbit and the loss of a cargo vessel taking up supplies to the ISS.

That August 2011 incident caused delays to a string of manned missions and renewed Moscow's attention on finding an eventual replacement to the workhorse Soyuz rocket.

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Sunday, December 2, 2012

Biggest Black Hole Blast Discovered

New ESO observations reveal most powerful quasar outflow ever found

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered a quasar with the most energetic outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date. Quasars are extremely bright galactic centres powered by supermassive black holes. Many blast huge amounts of material out into their host galaxies, and these outflows play a key role in the evolution of galaxies. But, until now, observed quasar outflows weren’t as powerful as predicted by theorists.

Quasars are the intensely luminous centres of distant galaxies that are powered by huge black holes. This new study has looked at one of these energetic objects — known as SDSS J1106+1939 — in great detail, using the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s VLT at the Paranal Observatory in Chile [1]. Although black holes are noted for pulling material in, most quasars also accelerate some of the material around them and eject it at high speed.

“We have discovered the most energetic quasar outflow known to date. The rate that energy is carried away by this huge mass of material ejected at high speed from SDSS J1106+1939 is at least equivalent to two million million times the power output of the Sun. This is about 100 times higher than the total power output of the Milky Way galaxy — it’s a real monster of an outflow,” says team leader Nahum Arav (Virginia Tech, USA). “This is the first time that a quasar outflow has been measured to have the sort of very high energies that are predicted by theory.”

Many theoretical simulations suggest that the impact of these outflows on the galaxies around them may resolve several enigmas in modern cosmology, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass, and why there are so few large galaxies in the Universe. However, whether or not quasars were capable of producing outflows powerful enough to produce these phenomena has remained unclear until now [2].

The newly discovered outflow lies about a thousand light-years away from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar SDSS J1106+1939. This outflow is at least five times more powerful than the previous record holder [3]. The team’s analysis shows that a mass of approximately 400 times that of the Sun is streaming away from this quasar per year, moving at a speed of 8000 kilometres per second.

“We couldn’t have got the high-quality data to make this discovery without the VLT’s X-shooter spectrograph,” says Benoit Borguet (Virginia Tech, USA), lead author of the new paper. “We were able to explore the region around the quasar in great detail for the first time.”

As well as SDSS J1106+1939, the team also observed one other quasar and found that both of these objects have powerful outflows. As these are typical examples of a common, but previously little studied, type of quasars [4], these results should be widely applicable to luminous quasars across the Universe. Borguet and colleagues are currently exploring a dozen more similar quasars to see if this is the case.

“I’ve been looking for something like this for a decade,” says Nahum Arav, “so it’s thrilling to finally find one of the monster outflows that have been predicted!”

Notes
[1] The team observed SDSS J1106+1939 and J1512+1119 in April 2011 and March 2012 using the X-shooter spectrograph instrument attached to ESO’s VLT. By splitting the light up into its component colours and studying in detail the resultant spectrum the astronomers could deduce the velocity and other properties of the material close to the quasar.

[2] The powerful outﬂow observed in SDSS J1106+1939 carries enough kinetic energy to play a major role in active galaxy feedback processes, which typically require a mechanical power input of roughly 5% of the luminosity of the quasar. The rate at which kinetic energy is being transferred by the outflow is described as its kinetic luminosity.

[3] SDSS J1106+1939 has an outflow with a kinetic luminosity of at least 1046 ergs s−1. The distances of the outflows from the central quasar (300–8000 light-years) was greater than expected suggesting that we observe the outflows far from the region in which we assume them to initially accelerated (0.03–0.4 light-years).

[4] A class known as Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasars.

More information
This research was presented in a paper, “Major contributor to AGN feedback: VLT X-shooter observations of SIV BAL QSO outflows”, to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team is composed of B. C. J. Borguet (Virginia Tech, USA), N. Arav (Virginia Tech, USA), D. Edmonds (Virginia Tech, USA), C. Chamberlain (Virginia Tech, USA), C. Benn (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain).

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning the 39-metre European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

(ESO)