‘Moon village first stop to Mars’

Fourth gravitational wave detected

ADELAIDE, Australia, Sept 28, (Agencies): Setting up a permanent village on the moon is the first step towards exploring Mars, the European Space Agency said Thursday as plans to reach and colonise the Red Planet gathered pace.

At an annual gathering of 4,000 global space experts in Adelaide, the ESA said the Moon was the “right place to be” as humans expand economic activities beyond low-Earth orbit, even while Mars remained the “ultimate destination”.

“We have been living in low-Earth orbit for the last 17 years on board a space station and we are on our journey to Mars for the first human mission,” ESA’s Piero Messina told AFP at the congress. “In between, we believe that there is an opportunity to create a permanent ... sustainable presence on the surface of the Moon.”

Reaching and colonising Mars has been viewed by private and public interests as the next stage in exploring the final frontier, and has been a key part of this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide.

Messina said the more immediate goal was to have a permanent presence on the Moon, even if it was just a robot, by the end of the next decade.

“There are a series of missions planned to the moon over the next 10 years, and all these missions will create a movement, a momentum, and will create a wealth of data that will enable building the village,” he added.

“I think it’s the right time now to start discussing, start planning for something which is as inspiring as the space station but on a truly global, international-cooperation basis.”

The space agency has been touting the permanent lunar colony as a replacement for the orbiting International Space Station, which is due to

which is to be exhibited at the Helsinki National Museum next year.

This kind of discovery is rare but not the first in the Scandinavian region. (AFP)

Climate disasters cost $240bn:

Weather extremes and air pollution from burning fossil fuels cost the United States $240 billion a year in the past decade, according to a report on Wednesday that be decommissioned in 2024.

Also on the cards is a NASA-led project to build the first lunar space station as part of a programme called the Deep Space Gateway.

Russia and the United States agreed Wednesday to cooperate on a NASAled project to build the first lunar space station, part of a long-term project to send humans to Mars.

The US space agency said earlier this year that it was exploring a programme called the Deep Space Gateway, a multi-stage project to push further into the solar system.

The project envisages building a crew-tended spaceport in lunar orbit that would serve as a “gateway to deep space and the lunar surface,” NASA has said.

An international base for lunar exploration for humans and robots and a stopover for spacecraft is a leading contender to succeed the $100 billion International Space Station (ISS), the world’s largest space project to date.

On Wednesday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA said they had signed a cooperation agreement at an astronautical congress in Adelaide.

NASA said the agreement reflected the two agencies’ common vision for human exploration.

A fourth gravitational wave has been detected — this time with help from Italy-based equipment — after two black holes collided, sending ripples through the fabric of space and time, researchers said Wednesday. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity, but the first hard evidence of their existence came only in 2015, when two US detectors found the first such signal.

urged President Donald Trump to combat climate change.

This year is likely to be the most expensive on record with an estimated $300 billion in losses from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and a spate of wildfires in western states in the past two months, it said.

“The evidence is undeniable: the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate continues to change,” leading scientists wrote in the study published by the nonprofit

to do more

The latest space-time ripples were detected on Aug 14 at 10:30 GMT when two giant black holes with masses about 31 and 25 times the mass of the Sun merged about 1.8 billion lightyears away.

“The newly produced spinning black hole has about 53 times the mass of our Sun,” said a statement from the international scientists at Virgo detector, located at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Cascina, near Pisa, Italy.

“While this new event is of astrophysical relevance, its detection comes with an additional asset: this is the first significant gravitational wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector.”

The Virgo detector — an underground L-shaped instrument that tracks gravitational waves using the physics of laser light and space — recently underwent an upgrade, and while still less sensitive than its US counterparts, it was able to confirm the same signal.

Known as interferometers, these high-tech underground stations do not rely on light in the sky like a telescope does, but instead sense vibrations in space and can pick up the “chirp” created by a gravitational wave.

CAIRO:

Also:

Egypt’s government says it has approved draft legislation to create a national space agency.

A Cabinet statement Wednesday says the proposed agency will aim to build and launch satellites from Egypt to serve “development objectives.”

It would also represent Egypt internationally in the field of space technology. The draft legislation will be referred to parliament for approval.

Egypt has a satellite company, Nilesat, which runs communication satellites that are manufactured and put in orbit by foreign operators.

Universal Ecological Fund. (RTRS)

Canadian rocks hold life evidence:

Rocky outcrops in eastern Canada contain what may be some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth, dating back about 3.95 billion years. Scientists said on Wednesday they found indirect evidence of life in the form of bits of graphite contained in sedimentary rocks from northern Labrador that they believe are remnants of primordial marine microorganisms.

The researchers carried out a geological analysis of the Labrador rocks and measured concentrations and isotope compositions of the graphite, and concluded that it was produced by a living organism.

They did not find fossils of the microorganisms that may have left behind the graphite, a form of carbon, but said they may have been bacteria.

“The organisms inhabited an open ocean,” said University of Tokyo geologist Tsuyoshi Komiya, who led the study published in the journal Science. (RTRS)

120,000 flee Bali volcano:

More than 122,000 people have fled their homes on the resort island of Bali, fearful that a rumbling volcano could erupt at any time, disaster officials said.

Mount Agung, 75 kms (47 miles) from the resort hub of Kuta, has been shaking since August and threatening to erupt for the first time since 1963 -- a potential blow to the country’s lucrative tourism industry.

Officials at an evacuation centre in Klungkung district said 122,490 people had left their homes, taking refuge at nearly 500 makeshift shelters or moving in with relatives. (AFP)