China launches spacecraft in longest-ever manned mission

The Shenzhou 11 astronauts are Jing Haipeng, who is flying his third mission, and 37-year-old Chen Dong.

The Shenzhou 11 mission took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China. China launched a pair of astronauts into space Monday on a mission to dock with an experimental space station and remain aboard for 30 days in preparation for the start of operations by a full-bore facility six years from now. The Shenzhou 11 mission took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China at 7:30 a.m. (2330 GMT) aboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket. It will dock with the Tiangong 2 space station precursor facility within two days, conduct experiments in medicine and various space-related technologies, and test systems and processes in preparation for the launching of the station's core module in 2018. Space program commander-in-chief Gen. Zhang Youxia declared the launch a success at 7:46 a.m. (2346 GMT). Defense Minister Fan Changlong then read a congratulatory message from President Xi Jinping calling for China's astronauts to explore space "more deeply and more broadly." Premier Li Keqiang and propaganda chief Liu Yunshan visited the Beijing control center to congratulate staff. It is the sixth time

China has launched astronauts into space and the duration will be the longest by far. Following the attachment of two experiment modules, the completed station is set to begin full operations in 2022 and will run for at least a decade. An earlier Tiangong 1 experimental space station launched in 2011 went out of service in March after docking with three visiting spacecraft and extending its mission for two years. The Tiangong, or "Heavenly Palace," stations are considered stepping stones to a mission to Mars by the end of the decade. The Shenzhou 11 astronauts are Jing Haipeng, who is flying his third mission, and 37-year-old Chen Dong. "It is any astronaut's dream and pursuit to be able to perform many space missions," Jing, who turns 50 during his time in space, told a briefing Sunday. China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, becoming only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so, and has since staged a spacewalk and landed its Yutu rover on the moon. Administrators suggest a crewed landing on the moon may also be in the program's future. China was prevented from participating in the International Space Station, mainly due to US concerns over the Chinese space program's strongly military character. Chinese officials are now looking to internationalize their own program by offering to help finance other countries' missions to Tiangong 2. China's space program also opened its massive fourth spacecraft launch site at Wenchang on China's southernmost island province of Hainan in June. It was inaugurated with the launch of the newly developed Long March 7 rocket that was hailed as a breakthrough in the use of safer, more environmentally friendly fuels. China is currently developing the Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket needed to launch the Tiangong 2's additional components and other massive payloads. China also plans to land a rover on Mars by 2020, attempting to recreate the success of the US Viking 1 mission that landed a rover on the planet four decades ago. A source of enormous national pride, China's space program plans a total of 20 missions. (This story first appeared in Deccan Chronicle) Source: The Asian Age

Read More........→October 17, 2016

Quantum Computing With Time Travel

Credit: Adapted from npj Quantum Information, doi:10.1038/npjqi.2015.7 (2015)

Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? Because it may be the key to solving currently intractable problems. That's the claim of an international collaboration who have just published a paper in npj Quantum Information. It turns out that an unopened message can be exceedingly useful. This is true if the experimenter entangles the message with some other system in the laboratory before sending it. Entanglement, a strange effect only possible in the realm of quantum physics, creates correlations between the time-travelling message and the laboratory system. These correlations can fuel a quantum computation. If the universe allows 'open timelike curves', particles travelling back in time along them could help to perform currently intractable computations. Even though such curves don't allow for interaction with anything in the past, researchers writing in npj Quantum Information show there is a gain in computational power as long as the time-travelling particle is entangled with one kept in the present. Around ten years ago researcher Dave Bacon, now at Google, showed that a time-travelling quantum computer could quickly solve a group of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard. The problem was, Bacon's quantum computer was travelling around 'closed timelike curves'. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity allows such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime known as wormholes. Physicists argue something must stop such opportunities arising because it would threaten 'causality' -- in the classic example, someone could travel back in time and kill their grandfather, negating their own existence. And it's not only family ties that are threatened. Breaking the causal flow of time has consequences for quantum physics too. Over the past two decades, researchers have shown that foundational principles of quantum physics break in the presence of closed timelike curves: you can beat the uncertainty principle, an inherent fuzziness of quantum properties, and the no-cloning theorem, which says quantum states can't be copied. However, the new work shows that a quantum computer can solve insoluble problems even if it is travelling along 'open timelike curves', which don't create causality problems. That's because they don't allow direct interaction with anything in the object's own past: the time travelling particles (or data they contain) never interact with themselves. Nevertheless, the strange quantum properties that permit 'impossible' computations are left intact. "We avoid 'classical' paradoxes, like the grandfathers paradox, but you still get all these weird results," says Mile Gu, who led the work. Gu is at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University in Beijing. His eight other coauthors come from these institutions, the University of Oxford, UK, Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and QKD Corp in Toronto, Canada. "Whenever we present the idea, people say no way can this have an effect" says Jayne Thompson, a co-author at CQT. But it does: quantum particles sent on a timeloop could gain super computational power, even though the particles never interact with anything in the past. "The reason there is an effect is because some information is stored in the entangling correlations: this is what we're harnessing," Thompson says. There is a caveat -- not all physicists think that these open timeline curves are any more likely to be realisable in the physical universe than the closed ones. One argument against closed timelike curves is that no-one from the future has ever visited us. That argument, at least, doesn't apply to the open kind, because any messages from the future would be locked. The research is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China Grant 2011CBA00300, 2011CBA00302, the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 11450110058, 61033001, 61361136003, the 1000 talents program of China, the National Research Foundation and Ministry of Education in Singapore, the Tier 3 MOE2012-T3-1-009 Grant 'Random numbers from quantum processes', and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology Project number CE110001027 and the John Templeton Foundation grant 54914,'Occam's Quantum Mechanical Razor: Can Quantum theory admit the Simplest Understanding of Reality?' Contacts and sources:  Jenny Hogan, Mile Gu ,Visiting Senior Research Fellow Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, Assistant Professor, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Citation: Xiao Yuan et al, 'Replicating the benefits of Deutschian closed timelike curves without breaking causality' npj Quantum Information, doi:10.1038/npjqi.2015.7 (2015) http://www.nature.com/articles/npjqi20157 Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5596. Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/

Read More........→December 11, 2015

Isro's PSLV-C28 successfully places 5 British satellites in orbit

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Friday successfully launched five British commercial satellites aboard its PSLV-C28 launch vehicle from its space port in Sriharikota, marking its heaviest commercial mission ever. ISRO's workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C28, in its 13th flight, placed the five satellites, including three identical DMC3 optical earth observation satellites, in sun synchronous orbit about 20 minutes after lift-off at 9.58 PM from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota. The three DMC3 satellites, each weighing 447 kg, were launched into a 647 km sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) using the high-end version of PSLV (PSLV-XL). ''It's been a wonderful mission… an extremely successful mission,'' a beaming ISRO chairman Kiran Kumar said from the Mission Control Centre. The three identical DMC3 optical earth observation satellites were built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) of the United Kingdom. The PSLV-C28 also carried two auxiliary satellites from the UK, viz, CBNT-1, a technology demonstrator earth observation micro satellite built by SSTL, and De-OrbitSail, a technology demonstrator nano satellite built by Surrey Space Centre. PSLV-C28 will be the ninth flight of the launch vehicle in 'XL' configuration. With the overall lift-off mass of 1,440 kg of the five satellites, this launch becomes the heaviest commercial mission till date undertaken by Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of ISRO . Accommodating the three DMC3 satellites each with a height of about 3 metre within the existing payload fairing of PSLV was a challenge, according to Isro. To mount these satellites onto the launcher, Isro designed a circular launcher adaptor called L-adaptor and a triangular deck called Multiple Satellite Adapter-Version 2 (MSA-V2). These international customer satellites have been launched as part of the arrangement entered into between DMC International Imaging (DMCii), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SSTL, UK and Isro's Antrix Corporation Limited (Antrix). The DMC3 constellation, comprising of three advanced mini-satellites DMC3-1, DMC3-2 and DMC3-3, is designed to address the need for simultaneous high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution optical earth observation. Launched into a single low-earth orbit plane and phased with a separation of 120° between them, these satellites can image any target on the Earth's surface every day. Major application areas include surveying the resources on earth and its environment, managing urban infrastructure and monitoring of disasters. CBNT-1, weighing 91 kg, is an optical earth observation technology demonstration micro satellite built by SSTL. The 7-kg De-orbitSail from Surrey Space Centre, is an experimental nano satellite for demonstration of large thin membrane sail and drag deorbiting using this sail. Source: Article 

Read More........→July 19, 2015

Solar-powered plane breaks solo flight record

The solar-powered aircraft, Solar Impulse, flying from Japan to Hawaii, on the most perilous leg of a round-the-globe bid, has beaten the record for the longest solo flight, organisers said yesterday. They admitted though that veteran Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg was exhausted after over four days of continuous flying, which made the final 24 hours of flight particularly challenging. The plane was set to land this morning local time at Kalaeloa Airport on the main Hawaiian island of Oahu, some 20 miles (30 kilometers) west of Honolulu. By 7:30pm GMT (1am IST, Friday) on Thursday, Solar Impulse 2 had traveled 86 per cent of the way to the tropical US state, after flying 7,075 kilometers. However, it was in the process of crossing a cold front that required careful navigation on the part of Borschberg, which would significantly increase stress levels for the 62-year-old. Borschberg had so far flown over 97 hours easily beating the previous longest solo endurance flight undertaken in 2006. The Japan to Hawaii trip was expected to take 120 hours. The Swiss aviator was napping for only 20 minutes at a time so as to maintain control of the pioneering plane and has on the plane a parachute and life raft, in case he needed to ditch in the Pacific. The experimental solar-powered aircraft left Japan around 6pm GMT (11:30pm IST) on Sunday the early hours of Monday local time after spending a month in the central city of Nagoya. The aircraft, piloted alternately by Swiss explorers Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, embarked on its 22,000-mile (35,000-km) journey around the world from Abu Dhabi on 9 March. ''Can you imagine that a solar powered airplane without fuel can now fly longer than a jet plane!'' said Piccard in a statement. ''This is a clear message that clean technologies can achieve impossible goals.'' The plane, weighs about as much as a family sedan and has 17,000 solar cells across its wingspan. The aircraft was expected to make the trip around the globe in some 25 flight days, broken up into 12 legs at speeds between 30 to 60 miles per hour. The Solar Impulse 2 initially left Nanjing, China, on 31 May for Hawaii, but its bid was cut short a day later due to what Borschberg termed ''a wall of clouds'' over the Pacific. The plane landed in the central Japanese city of Nagoya. The solo record was earlier set in 2006 by American adventurer Steve Fossett, who flew the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer for 76 hours non-stop. Source: domain-b.com

Read More........→July 05, 2015

Nobel Prize for Physics 2014

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2014 to (1) Isamu Akasaki: Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan and Nagoya University, Japan (2) Hiroshi Amano 

Nagoya:  University, Japan (3) Shuji Nakamura: University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources. --> The invention of an energy source that lights up our computer and/ormobile phone screens and holds promise to brighten up the quality of life of over 1.5 billion people around the world, has been awarded the Nobel prize for physics 2014.--> The laureates were rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source — the blue light-emitting diode (LED). --> According
to the committee, the laureates' inventions revolutionized the field of illumination technology. --> As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. --> When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Source: Article,

Read More........→October 08, 2014