Incredible Pics from ISS by NASA astronaut Wheelock Go Discovery! It was October 23, 2007 at 11:40am EST when I had my first ride to space on Discovery. She’s beautiful… just sad that this will be her last voyage. Looking forward to climbing aboard the flight deck when Discovery arrives at the Space Station in November. (9-23-2010). On September 22, 2010, with the departure of the Expedition 23 crew, Colonel Douglas H. We thought that we should put some of the space photos together as a tribute to him and the whole ISS crew. The following space photos are all visible on Astro_Wheels’ twitpic account, and we are eternally grateful to him for sharing these space photos with the world. Incredible Photos from Space: ‘Earthshine’… The Space Station basking in blue Earthshine as the rising sun pierces our razor-thin atmosphere to cover the Space Station with blue light. NASA astronaut Douglas H. Incredible Photos from Space: Isle Juan de Nova In the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and the African mainland.
Dark Jupiter May Haunt Edge of Solar System | Wired Science A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth. “We’ve accumulated 10 years’ more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you could have a Jupiter-mass object out there.” In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them. In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet. “But we began to ask, what kind of an object could you hope to infer from the present data that we are seeing?” See Also:
"Page One" Story of the Century? NASA May Announce Thursday to Have Found Life on Saturn's Moon Titan NASA has called a 2 p.m. news conference for Thursday "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." The group includes Pamela Conrad, author of a paper on geology and life on Mars; and James Elser, an Arizona State University professor involved in a NASA-funded program that emphasizes looking at the chemistry of environments where life evolves (and not just looking at water or carbon or oxygen); Felisa Wolfe-Simon (an oceanographer) has written extensively on photosynthesis using arsenic recently (she worked on the team mentioned in this article); Steven Benner (a biologist) is on the "Titan Team" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they're looking at Titan (Saturn's largest moon) as an early-Earth-like chemical environment. This is likely related to the Cassini mission. The space agency did not release more details, but the list of news conference participants is telling, according to blogger Jason Kottke. Casey Kazan via Kotte.org
Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over | Wired Science Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns. That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation. The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. See Also:
NASA contemplates manned mission to Mars - one-way The project for human colonization of the Red Planet is called the Hundred Year Starship, and the space agency has already received $1.6 million in seed funding to begin research into it, Britain's Daily Mail reports. The source of the $1.6 million has not been revealed. NASA itself is chipping in $100,000 to fund the Ames Research Center team's initial work, which is being co-sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden publicly disclosed the project's existence in a talk that was part of an event called "Long Conversation," a six-hour roundtable idea exchange that took place Oct. 16 at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum. "The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Among those billionaires Worden is inveigling is Google co-founder Larry Page. Depending on Mars' position in its orbit around the sun, the distance between it and Earth varies from 34 million to 250 million miles.
In Flyby of Saturn's Moon Rhea, Cassini Probe Gets First Whiff of Non-Earthly Oxygen NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken a breath of oxygen while passing over the icy surface of Saturn's second-largest moon, marking the first time a spacecraft has directly sampled oxygen in the atmosphere of another body. Cruising just 60 miles above Rhea, one of more than 60 moons orbiting Saturn, Cassini found an extremely thin atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide likely sustained by high-energy particles slamming into the moon's frozen surface. Rhea's isn't the only other atmosphere in the universe, but it is so thin that Cassini had to fly through it just to confirm that it was there at all (other atmosphere's have been detected and studied from afar by tools like the Hubble Space Telescope). According to Cassini's onboard science instruments, Rhea's atmosphere contains something like 50 billion oxygen molecules per cubic meter, matched by 20 billion carbon dioxide molecules. [Guardian]
Spaceman: Landing on Mars in 2016 Super-Earth Atmosphere May Be Mostly Water | Wired Science The first direct measurement of a super-Earth exoplanet's atmosphere finds the world is either shrouded in steam or covered in clouds. "This is the first probe of an atmosphere of a super-Earth planet," said exoplanet observer Jacob Bean of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of a paper describing the cloudy world in the Dec. 2 Nature. "It's a real big step in the direction of doing this kind of work for a planet that's potentially habitable." The planet, called GJ 1214b, is the smallest planet yet to have its atmosphere examined -- but it's just the latest in nearly a decade of probing exoplanet atmospheres. When the first exoplanet atmosphere was measured in 2002, many astronomers dismissed it as a one-time success. Astronomers hope eventually to find true twins of Earth: small rocky planets with liquid water and atmospheres that could support life. "Ultimately the goal is to try to look for biosignatures," Bean said. Image: Paul A.
Distant Star Enveloped By Ingredients for Fake Diamonds A faraway star sparkles with the largest amount of zirconium ? the stuff fake diamonds are made from ? ever seen, according to a new study. The star has about 10,000 times more zirconium than our sun, in a form never recorded by astronomers before, researchers said. The strange star also has far more than the usual amounts of other elements like strontium, germanium and yttrium, they added. [Illustration of zirconium-rich star] "The huge excess of zirconium was a complete surprise," the study's lead author, Naslim Neelamkodan, from Northern Ireland's Armagh Observatory, said in a statement. The researchers estimate that the zirconium cloud layer on the star weighs about 4 billion tons, or 4,000 times the world's annual production of zirconium. A dying subdwarf The star, called LS IV-14 116, is found about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the border between the constellations Capricornus and Aquarius. They found evidence of various common elements, as expected.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Researchers Find Galaxy-Scale Bubbles Extending from the Milky Way A group of astrophysicists has located two massive bubbles of plasma, each extending tens of thousands of light-years, emitting high-energy radiation above and below the plane of the galaxy. The researchers found the structures in publicly released data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which was launched in 2008 to investigate sources of extremely energetic photons—namely, gamma rays, which have higher frequencies than x-rays. From its orbital perch hundreds of kilometers above Earth's surface, Fermi has charted the location of gamma-ray sources with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). "There are many kinds of emission in the Fermi maps—there are things that we're expecting to see, like the dust-correlated emission," Finkbeiner said in an interview during the May meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Finkbeiner compared the shape of the lobes of the so-called Fermi bubbles with teardrops or hot-air balloons.
First humanoid robot in space about to blast off | Space, Military and Medicine First humanoid robot to be sent to space Help with cleaning International Space Station Currently only a top half. Legs to follow. Robonaut 2 will fly to the International Space Station this week. Picture: NASA SPACE is about to get its first humanoid from planet Earth. Robonaut 2 - affectionately known as R2 - is hitching a one-way ride to the International Space Station this week aboard the final flight of space shuttle Discovery. It's the first humanoid robot ever bound for space, a $2.5 million mechanical and electrical marvel that NASA hopes one day will assist flesh-and-bone astronauts in orbit. Imagine, its creators say, a future where Robonaut could take over space station cleaning duties; spend hours outside in the extreme heat and cold, patiently holding tools for spacewalking astronauts; and handle emergencies like toxic leaks or fires. Why, Robonaut's descendants could even scout out asteroids, Mars and other worlds in the decades ahead, paving the way for humans.