Photos - Camilla, un poulet en caoutchouc devenu vedette de la NASA Avez-vous déjà partagé cet article? Partager sur Facebook Partager sur Twitter Pour sensibiliser le public à sa mission d’étude, l’Observatoire des dynamiques solaires (SDO) de la NASA a mis en scène un personnage quelque peu particulier : un poulet en caoutchouc qui rêve de s’envoler dans l’espace. Camilla Corona aurait pu rester une simple et anonyme cocotte de caoutchouc destinée à divertir les animaux de compagnie, toutefois le destin en a voulu autrement. Sa mission quotidienne consiste à partager ses expériences à travers les différents réseaux sociaux sur lesquels la suivent plus de 20.000 internautes. Dans un entretien téléphonique, il confie à Wired : "J’espère pouvoir emmener Camilla à la Station Spatiale Internationale et lui apporter une bonne visibilité". Un succès inattendu Mais comment Camilla est-elle passée du simple poulet de caoutchouc à l’astronaute en formation ? "Nous ne savions pas comment le public réagirait face à un poulet en caoutchouc.
Interactive 3D model of Solar System Planets and Night Sky NASAs 'Curiosity' Search for Life Targets Water-Altered Rock This rock's composition is unlike any other Opportunity has investigated during nine years on Mars -- higher in aluminum and silica, lower in calcium and iron. "Based on our current solar-array dust models, we intend to reach an area of 15 degrees northerly tilt before Opportunity's sixth Martian winter," said JPL's Scott Lever, mission manager. "Solander Point gives us that tilt and may allow us to move around quite a bit for winter science observations." Northerly tilt increases output from the rover's solar panels during southern-hemisphere winter. The first drive away from Esperance covered 81.7 feet (24.9 meters) on May 14. "There appears to have been extensive, but weak, alteration of Whitewater Lake, but intense alteration of Esperance along fractures that provided conduits for fluid flow," Squyres said. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project launched Opportunity to Mars on July 7, 2003, about a month after its twin rover, Spirit. The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL
Space Science - ESA makes the Sun available to everyone A mega-filament erupts on the Sun as seen on JHelioviwer ESA makes the Sun available to everyone 14 December 2010 New software developed by ESA makes available online to everyone, everywhere at anytime, the entire library of images from the SOHO solar and heliospheric observatory. A solar prominence in JHelioviewer JHelioviewer is new visualisation software that enables everyone to explore the Sun. More than a million images from SOHO can already be accessed, and new images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are being added every day. A prominence arcs up from the solar surface. Using this new software, users can create their own movies of the Sun, colour the images as they wish, and image-process the movies in real time. “We wanted to make it easy to view solar images from different observatories and instruments, and to make it easy to make movies,” says Daniel Müller, ESA SOHO Deputy Project Scientist. A prominence twists above the solar surface. For more information, click here
Kepler Mission To Find Earth-like Planets By Studying Planetary Transits Earlier this week we spoke about finding Earth-like planets, and how hard it is to find them. We would like to see other planets similar to Earth, and we have a few absolutely necessary conditions: the planet must be rocky, solid, dense like Earth, a source of power like a Sun, chemicals resulted from volcanic activity, and liquid water. The most important thing however, is that the planet must be located in the Goldilocks zone, the area where the planet is not too far and not too close from a star. In order to find such planets NASA has begun the Kepler Mission which will last four year. In the search of alien life scientists will have to be pay a lot of attention to the planetary transits because the changes of the brightness are very, very small. If you thought that it’s easy then please note that the Suns might change their brightness due to natural variation, and if a transit doesn’t repeat itself more than once in a year then chances are that’s not an exoplanet. via Physorg
Physics To Go: Explore Physics on your own Hubble 25 Anniversary