5.30.2011

A video camera on the exterior of the International Space Station captured this image of space shuttle Endeavour a little less than an hour after the two spacecraft undocked. Photo credit: NASA TV

Space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to return to Earth for the final time on Wednesday, June 1, completing a 16-day mission to outfit the International Space Station. If Endeavour lands Wednesday, it will have spent 299 days in space and traveled more than 122.8 million miles during its 25 flights. It launched on its first mission on May 7, 1992.

During the 16-day mission, Endeavour and its crew will delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre.
Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station at 11:55 p.m. Sunday, ending a stay of 11 days, 17 hours and 41 minutes at the orbiting laboratory.

Landing is scheduled for 2:35 a.m. on Wednesday at Kennedy Space Center.

5.29.2011

The recent spell of low solar activity is over. Sunspots are popping up across the solar disk and one of them, C- and M-class solar flares are to expect. So far none of the blasts has been geoeffective, but this could change as the active region turns toward Earth in the days ahead. Today, 29th May , there was a CME showing that solar activity is ramping up.

5.27.2011

A University of Alabama at Birmingham archaeologist has discovered a hidden world in Egypt.

Sarah Parcak, Ph.D., an Egyptologist and assistant professor of archaeology at UAB, used infra-red satellite imaging to discover 17 lost pyramids as well as more than 1,000 tombs and 3,100 ancient settlements.

The European Space Agency, Arianespace and the European Commission announced today that the launch of the first two satellites of Europe's global navigation satellite system is planned to take place on 20 October.

This will be the first of a series of Galileo satellite launches by Arianespace from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

The announcement follows a detailed review held on 12 May, under the chairmanship of the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) and with the participation of Arianespace and industrial prime contractors, which concluded that the space and ground elements will be ready for a launch in October.

This microscope photo shows whole spheres and partial fragments of orange volcanic glass, of the type recovered from Apollo 17 sample 74220 from which the lunar melt inclusions were recovered. The largest sphere in the center is 0.2 millimeters across. Credit: NASA

A team of NASA-funded researchers has measured for the first time water from the moon in the form of tiny globules of molten rock, which have turned to glass-like material trapped within crystals. Data from these newly-discovered lunar melt inclusions indicate the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than previous studies suggested.

The inclusions were found in lunar sample 74220, the famous high-titanium "orange glass soil" of volcanic origin collected during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The scientific team used a state-of-the-art ion microprobe instrument to measure the water content of the inclusions, which were formed during explosive eruptions on the moon approximately 3.7 billion years ago.

5.26.2011

A new, colorful collection of galaxy specimens has been released by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission. It showcases galaxies of several types, from elegant grand design spirals to more patchy flocculent spirals. Some of the galaxies have roundish centers, while others have elongated central bars. The orientation of the galaxies varies as well, with some seeming to peer straight back at us in the face-on configuration while others point to the side, appearing edge-on.

Infrared light has been translated into colors we see with our eyes, such that the shortest wavelengths are blue and the longest are red. The oldest stars appear blue, while pockets of newly formed stars have yellow or reddish hues.

5.25.2011

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will orbit and explore asteroid 1999 RQ36 for more than a year before closing in and collecting a sample of pristine organic material that may have seeded Earth with the building blocks that led to life.

OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with asteroid 1999 RQ36, extend a sample collecting device and return at least 60 grams (a little over 2 ounces) of pristine material to Earth for analysis. (Image: NASA/GSFC/The University of Arizona)

The OSIRIS-REx mission is budgeted for approximately $800 million, excluding the launch vehicle.
The target asteroid – named 1999 RQ36 after the year it was discovered – measures 575 meters (one-third of a mile) in diameter. 1999 RQ36 is a time capsule from the early solar system rich with organic compounds that may have seeded life on Earth.

People sometimes like to see things that aren't there, in some youtube accounts images from SOHO and Stereo are discussed as having UFO footage on them.

An example is the 21th May sungrazer comet , that mislead people not well informed, to think they are seeing a UFO going toward the Sun.

This kind of speculation does not help people to learn .

In wikipedia about sungrazing comets:

A sungrazing comet is a comet that passes extremely close to the Sun at perihelion - sometimes within a few thousand kilometres of the Sun's surface. While small sungrazers can be completely evaporated during such a close approach to the Sun, larger sungrazers can survive many perihelion passages. However, strong evaporation and tidal forces they experience often lead to their fragmentation.

NASA has reached an important milestone for the next U.S. transportation system that will carry humans into deep space. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced today that the system will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. Those plans now will be used to develop a new spacecraft known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV).

5.24.2011

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is proving itself to be a prolific planet hunter. Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system.

In particular, the Kepler systems with multiple planets are much flatter than our solar system. They have to be for Kepler to spot them. Kepler watches for a planet to cross in front of its star, blocking a tiny fraction of the star’s light. By measuring how much the star dims during such a transit, astronomers can calculate the planet’s size, and by observing the time between successive events they can derive the orbital period -- how long it takes the planet to revolve around its star.

5.23.2011

China has announced plans to put its own space station in orbit by 2020. The 60-tonne construction will be one-seventh the weight of the ISS and will focus on scientific experiments. However, military involvement with the project is causing concern.

Artistic rendition of a proposed Chinese space station, courtesy of the Chinese Society of Astronautics

Beijing’s Space City research center is opening its doors to the media, as China has announced its intention to build a rival to the International Space Station.
While some see Chinese advances in space travel as a potential threat, the country’s officials are keen to stress the spirit of co-operation, which they say is behind China’s space program.

An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.

5.19.2011

We are living on exciting times , hundreds even thousands of possible planets are being discovered almost every day in other stars opening our mind to the possibility of life somewhere in the vast universe.

But closer to us, much closer, there are places where life can be present , and what a important discovery it would be!

German geologists inspecting the Hoba meteorite in 1929. Image courtesy of Marmet-Meteorites.com.

One morning in 1920, Mr Jacobus Hermanus Brits, a farmer from Grootfontein in northern Namibia, was ploughing in his Hoba West Farm land with an ox when the plough came to a sudden screeching halt as it jammed up against something just below the surface. He began digging thinking he would find a large rock to pull out, and while he did find a rock, large turned out to be an understatement.

As Mr Brits kept removing soil covering the rock he soon realised this was no ordinary stone. To begin with it gave off a metallic sound when he hit it with his spade, and then there was the size; after much digging around it he finally uncovered the top, a square shape measuring almost 3 meters on each side.
When it was finally fully excavated it was found to be a solid piece of metal measuring 2.85 x 2.95 meters, with a thickness ranging from 0.75 to 1.2 meters.

5.18.2011

This artist's conception illustrates a Jupiter-like planet alone in the dark of space, floating freely without a parent star. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.

The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during 2006 and 2007, revealing evidence for up to 10 free-floating planets roughly the mass of Jupiter. The isolated orbs, also known as orphan planets, are difficult to spot, and had gone undetected until now. The newfound planets are located at an average approximate distance of 10,000 to 20,000 light-years from Earth.

"Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected, holding major implications for planetary formation and evolution models," said Mario Perez, exoplanet program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

One of the planets that revolve around the star Gliese 581 dwarf could be "habitable" with climate conducive to the existence of liquid water and life, according to a study that a team of climate scientists has just published. Astronomers want to determine whether any of the 500 exoplanets discovered are able to harbor life.

UC Berkeley's SETI survey will target the most Earth-like of the 1,235 Kepler Objects of Interest. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center, W.Stenzel

Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.

The search began on Saturday, May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope -- the largest steerable radio telescope in the world -- dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers.

5.16.2011

A misreported April Fool’s joke sparked panic on the internet over a comet discovered by a Russian astronomer. Conspiracy theorists believe that the Elenin comet is an alien spaceship and demand that the scientist discloses data hushed up by NASA.

5.14.2011

Thermal and visual imagery was recently collected from high above California’s Mojave Desert through a NASA-funded airborne study designed to aid in detection of caves on Earth, the moon and Mars.

“This is important because once we develop techniques for detecting caves on Earth, we can then apply these techniques to looking for caves on Mars,” said Judson "Jut" Wynne, a doctoral candidate at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and a researcher at the SETI Institute.

Wynne, project manager of the study, said caves may be a source of shelter for astronauts establishing colonies in the harsh conditions of the moon and Mars, and are the best place to search for evidence of life on Mars.

5.13.2011

A rare number of Hot Jupiter planets orbit their stars in a direction opposite to the star's rotation. This violates basic ideas of planet and star formation. Now, new research may explain how these planets flipped their orbits.

Artist's conception of an exoplanet in a retrograde orbit. Credit: ESO/A. C. Cameron

More than 500 extrasolar planets - planets that orbit stars other than the Sun -have been discovered since 1995. But only in the last few years have astronomers observed that in some of these systems the star is spinning one way and the planet, a “hot Jupiter,” is orbiting the star in the opposite direction.

5.12.2011

New images of the Nili Fossae region are helping scientists understand unique geological features in the area. Methane in Mars' atmosphere is enhanced over Nili Fossae, leading some scientists to believe that the gas is produced there. The origins of the Mars methane could be geological or perhaps even biological.

Newly released images from ESA’s Mars Express show Nili Fossae, a system of deep fractures around the giant Isidis impact basin. Some of these incisions into the martian crust are up to 500 m deep and probably formed at the same time as the basin.

5.11.2011

A comet just discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov is diving past the sun today, and it will probably not survive. Bellow the movie of the death plunge recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

A Hubble visible light image of the Crab Nebula inset against a full-sky gamma ray map showing the location of the nebula (croshairs). Credit: NASA

The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than any flare previously seen from the object. On April 12, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first detected the outburst, which lasted six days.

Theprophecyis based ontheallegedpredictionsBendandiRaffaele,aself-taughtscientistandastronomer(died1979)who discoveredfournewplanets99 years agoandwhowas also interested inseismography.
Raffaele Bendandi (Faenza, October 17, 1893 – Faenza, November 3, 1979) was an Italian pseudo scientist. During the Fascist period was appointed Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Later he was forbidden from Mussolini to publish forecasts on earthquakes, otherwise it would have been sent into exile. His theory is based on the fact that the Moon as the other planets of the solar system, including the Sun, are the cause of the movements of the earth’s crust.

5.10.2011

Beginning their return from the moon to an April 27, 1972, splashdown, Astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke captured about four seconds of video footage of an object that seemed to look a lot like Hollywood's version of a spacecraft from another world.

Image above: High-resolution, digital scan of a full frame from the original Apollo 16 film showing the object in question (top center) and its position relative to the moon. Reflections in the window are also visible (left and right). Credit: NASA

Research shows that increasing wind speeds and wave heights could be linked to climate change. However, not all recent and extreme weather events are due to changing climate. A separate study indicates that the record heat in Russia recorded in 2010 was a fluke, and unrelated to climate trends.

Surfers, kiteboarders, and other ocean joy-riders might be pleased with this latest bit of news. Wind speeds and wave heights have been increasing over the past quarter century, a result possibly linked to warmer waters caused by climate change.

5.09.2011

The Torino Scale is a "Richter Scale" for categorizing the Earth impact hazard associated with newly discovered asteroids and comets. It is intended to serve as a communication tool for astronomers and the public to assess the seriousness of predictions of close encounters by asteroids and comets during the 21st century.

5.05.2011

You may have heard the news: Comet Elenin is coming to the inner-solar system this fall. Comet Elenin (also known by its astronomical name C/2010 X1), was first detected on Dec. 10, 2010 by Leonid Elenin, an observer in Lyubertsy, Russia, who made the discovery "remotely" using the ISON-NM observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. At the time of the discovery, the comet was about 647 million kilometers (401 million miles) from Earth.

5.03.2011

Since the dawn of the space age, humanity has sent 16 robotic emissaries to fly by some of the solar system's most intriguing and nomadic occupants -- comets and asteroids. The data and imagery collected on these deep-space missions of exploration have helped redefine our understanding of how Earth and our part of the galaxy came to be.
But this fall, Mother Nature is giving scientists around the world a close-up view of one of her good-sized space rocks -no rocket required.

5.02.2011

Efforts to reach the martian moon Phobos have long been outshined by missions to the Red Planet itself. Now, scientists in Russia, Canada and the U.S. are preparing their own missions to the largest moon of Mars.

Mars actually has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. They might more properly be called satellites, however, because they are extremely small, only a few kilometers in diameter. In fact, some scientists think Phobos and Deimos could be asteroids that somehow ended up orbiting Mars instead of crashing into the planet, or they could be leftovers from the time of planetary formation. Another option is that the moons are fragments of Mars, blasted off the planet’s surface by a large asteroid or comet impact.

5.01.2011

New observations of '55 Cancri e' indicate that the planet is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth, but eight times more massive. The data also indicates that 55 Cancri e orbits so close to its star that it is baked to a temperature of 4,900 degrees F.

A planet that we thought we knew turns out to be rather different than first suspected. A revised view comes from new data released by an international team of astronomers, who made their observations of the planet "55 Cancri e" based on calculations by Harvard graduate student Rebekah Dawson (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). Dawson worked with Daniel Fabrycky (now at the University of California, Santa Cruz) to predict when the planet crosses in front of its star as seen from Earth. Such transits give crucial information about a planet's size and orbit.