There is a brain etched into Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Big Fella
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There is a brain etched into Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Big Fella
https://teakdoor.com/Gallery/albums/u...rmal_brain.jpg
Of course Mars has winds. It also has an atmosphere, albeit a very thin one. That fact has been known for years.
Mars landing
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Nasa Chief Charles Bolden called the landing a historic moment
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The voyage to Mars spanned 352 million miles
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A HD video of the descent taken by Curiosity straight down to the landing spot is coming. However due to the restrictions of data transmission volume it will take some time. The data however are stored in Curiosity ready to transmit. Other immediate tasks are more important. Some single frames in lower resolution will be available soon.
Late-Breaking News from the Council: VICTORY!
The Council of Elders has confirmed the interception and destruction of the latest mechanized terror from the blue world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
Citizens, it is with great joy that I announce to you the destruction of the invader from the blue world!
The blueworlders' latest robotic instrument of terror was powered by a Pew-238 nucleowarming device which was equipped with a point defense mechanism consisting of a light source so powerful that it could blast away the very red soil upon which we thrive.
Yet at the last moment, when all seemed lost, our forces fired upon the thin umbilical cord connecting the flying invader with its power source and associated optical weapons system. Its connection to its power source severed, the invading vessel flew off in a dizzying spiral and crashed spectacularly into a nearby hillside.
Rejoice, podmates! Our red world is once again safe!
When a junior combat reporter pointed out that the link between the carrier vessel and the mechanized invader may have been designed to be broken at the moment of landing, that the actual threat was the so-called "power source" and not the flying invader, and suggested that if the Martian Defense Force had just waited just a few seconds longer, the squibs holding the skyhook to the skycrane might have failed, resulting in the carrier vessel crashing down upon the invader, thereby destroying both, K'Breel had the combat reporter's gelsacs placed directly in front of the dormant invader's photonic weapons.
"If the blue-shirted denizens of the blue world seek evidence of organic matter so strongly," mused K'Breel, "then let them have their fill of it!"
A most amazing photo has been published by NASA. The photo was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during descent of Curiosity with the High resolution camera HIRISE.
You can clearly see Curiosity on the parachute.
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As I understand months of calculations and fiddling with the orbit and orientation of the satellite have gone into getting the orbiter in just the right position at the right moment to get this photo. Possible only because it was so exactly planned and executed at which moment Curiosity would arrive. This precision was necessary to get the rover in exactly the place where they wanted her to be.
moved to mars thread
Just think, 50 years from now, Brits will be telling the world how they were responsible for exploring Mars.
More likely the Germans.
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New pictures from the Mars rover Curiosity include the first panoramic view of the Red Planet.
The first pictures from the best cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover document a Martian landscape so Earthlike it reminds scientists of home.
"The first impression that you get is how Earthlike this seems, looking at that landscape," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the $2.5 billion mission. "You would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you, and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture."
California's Mojave Desert is less than 100 miles away from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where Grotzinger and his colleagues are poring over each batch of images sent back by the car-sized rover.
Mission manager Jennifer Trosper said 100 megabytes of data had been received from Curiosity as of today, and that figure is sure to grow rapidly once the spacecraft's high-gain antenna gets up to speed.
The day's biggest milestone was the raising of the rover's 3.6-foot-tall (1.1-meter-tall) camera mast on Curiosity's deck, which provides a vantage point 7 feet (2.1 meters) above the Martian surface. The mast houses Curiosity's high-resolution navigation camera system, also known as Navcam, as well as the two-camera Mastcam imaging system — and a laser-zapping rock analysis experiment known as ChemCam.
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Curiosity rover scientists Justin Maki, John Grotzinger and Michael Malin discuss Martian imagery showing a Mojave-like scene on Wednesday.
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This Picassoesque self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity rover is based on images taken by the navigation cameras on the rover's mast. The camera snapped pictures all the way around the rover while pointing down at the rover deck, up and straight ahead. Those images are shown here in a polar projection.
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The first image taken by the navigation cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the shadow of the rover's now-upright mast in the center, and the arm's shadow at left. The arm itself can be seen in the foreground. The position of the shadow helps confirm the sun's location. The rover's name and a simplified smartphone tag are emblazoned on a piece of hardware in the foreground.
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Mike Malin, a member of the Mars Curiosity rover science team, unveils imagery showing where the rover's ballasts hit the surface — as well as a high-resolution view of the rover's heat shield flying away during descent.
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This stereo image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the view looking out toward the rim of Gale Crater on Mars. Put on red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.
Damn. Where did I put those.:)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Lick
I must get stereo glasses, to look at those.
The rover scientist team will live with the martian day of 24h 39m 34,244s. They comunicate with Curiosity mainly during the mars night to program her tasks for the next day so their workday has to adjust.
Nasa's new Mars landing craft Morpheus bursts into flames on take-off
Proving what a feat of engineering the Curiosity rover truly was, Nasa's latest Mars landing project Morpheus is seen bursting into flames during a test at Kennedy Space Centre.
8:14AM BST 10 Aug 2012
Nasa has enjoyed great success with its Curiosity landing craft in recent days but their plans to launch another space rover were brought down to earth with a fiery bump at the Kennedy Space Centre.
During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, Nasa said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."
No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus.
Nasa TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage.
TheUS space agency said engineers were looking into test data to determine the exact cause of Thursday's accident, but further details were not immediately available.
The accident came as Nasa scientists were still hailing the Mars rover Curiosity's decent and landing on the Red Planet earlier this week as a "miracle of engineering.
( for video click on link )
Video: Nasa's new Mars landing craft Morpheus bursts into flames on take-off - Telegraph
Animation of Phoenix Cluster - YouTube
Astronomers have identified a record-breaking galaxy cluster that churns out stars from its centre faster than any cluster ever spotted.
The Phoenix cluster, which was first sighted by the South Pole Telescope in 2010, appears to be generating around 740 new stars a year from its central galaxy -- an astonishing feat when you consider our humble Milky Way produces only one or two in the same period.
"This extreme rate of star formation was really unexpected," said Michael McDonald, a Hubble Fellow at MIT and the lead author of a paper detailing the discovery. "It's nearly five times higher than the next most star-forming central-cluster galaxy, in Abell 1835. So it's really crushing the record."
Phoenix, which appears in a constellation some 5.7 billion light years from Earth, does not rest there with its record-smashing feats -- it also produces more X-rays than any other known cluster and appears to have the largest rate of hot gas cooling in its centre, a fact that adds weight to the argument that star formation relies heavily on this cooling process.
Record-breaking galaxy cluster churns out 740 stars a year (Wired UK)
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US astronaut Neil Armstrong dies, first man on Moon
US astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, has died aged 82.
A statement from his family says he died from complications from heart surgery he had earlier this month.
He set foot on the Moon on 20 July 1969, famously describing the event as "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".
US President Barack Obama said Armstrong was "among the greatest of American heroes - not just of his time, but of all time".
Last November he received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest US civilian award.
He was the commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. More than 500 million TV viewers around the world watched its touchdown on the lunar surface.
Armstrong and fellow astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin spent nearly three hours walking on the moon, collecting samples, conducting experiments and taking photographs.
"The sights were simply magnificent, beyond any visual experience that I had ever been exposed to," Armstrong once said.
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The BBC's Pallab Ghosh, who interviewed Armstrong, says he had an ''ice cool attitude'' which made him an excellent astronaut
We already have a Neil Armstrong died thread, someone else has bumped the famous dead people thread then you've repeated the same 'news' a third time in this thread.
It's for those that perhaps don't visit all threads on TD, SW. Great men deserve recognition especially at a time of passing. Neil Armstrong was one of those men. :)
You're worried that they'll miss the news? CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera have got that covered, I think.
you are assuming he really went to the Moon,Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Lick
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Lick
same old storyQuote:
Originally Posted by Butterfly
The Dawn mission
Somehow it completely escaped my attention, that there is a probe out to go to the biggest asteroids and circle them for observation.
Dawn circled Vesta for more than a year and is now leaving for a 2,5 year flight to reach Ceres, another huge asteroid.
Here is a video assembled from a huge number of photos taken. Well worth looking at, if possible in full screen.
I wonder if the stars were really on those photos but suspect they were added on the computer.
For some reason the link does not embed but clicking on it will get you to the youtube video.
Dawn's Farewell Portrait of Giant Asteroid Vesta - YouTube
For comparison here the best pictures that can be taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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A guided tour through the ISS. A must see for anybody who is interested in the Space Station. With all modules of the station. The russian part looks distinctly different.
ESA astronaut André Kuipers' tour of the International Space Station - YouTube
Again it does not embed, but the link works fine.
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NASA's Cassini orbiter captured this view of Saturn on June 15, from a distance of about 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers). The rings' shadow runs across the planet's sunlit side. The speck in the lower left corner is Enceladus, a 313-mile-wide (504-kilometer-wide) moon of Saturn.
NASA's Cassini sent back this big, beautiful, black-and-white picture of Saturn — but what's that little white speck in the corner?
The image, unveiled by Cassini's imaging team on Monday, shows tiny Enceladus at lower left. It's just 313 miles wide (504 kilometers wide), and yet it shines brightly from a distance of 2 million miles or so. Enceladus is arguably as intriguing as Saturn, and here's why: The icy moon has geysers of water spouting up from cracks in its surface, suggesting that there's a deep ocean and perhaps even some sort of life down below.
To get a more imaginative view of Enceladus, check out this posting on the io9 blog, featuring an illustration from "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions," a big, beautiful, full-color coffee-table book by Michael Benson. NPR's Robert Krulwich showed off the same image earlier this month on his Krulwich Wonders blog.
Enceladus is just one of the moons of the solar system that's been soaking up the spotlight lately: Also this month, NASA's Curiosity rover watched Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, pass over the sun's disk during a series of mini-eclipses. The rover won't see such a sight again for 11 months or so. Here's a smooth animation of Deimos' transit from Nahum Chazarra on UnmannedSpaceflight.com. And if you haven't seen it already, you'll want to catch up with the sight of a crescent Phobos in Mars' dusky sky.
Planet with four suns disovered
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Astronomers have found a planet whose skies are illuminated by four different suns - the first known of its type.
The distant world orbits one pair of stars and has a second stellar pair revolving around it.
It remains a mystery how the Neptune-like world avoids being pulled apart by the gravitational forces generated its four stars.
The find was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website along with a team from UK and US institutes.
A scientific paper outlining the quadruple star system has been posted on the Arxiv pre-print server.
The planet, located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters site.
It is thought to be a "gas giant" slightly larger than Neptune but over six times the size of the Earth.
"You don't have to go back too far before you would have got really good odds against one of these systems existing," Dr Chris Lintott, from the University of Oxford, told BBC News.
"All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit.
That's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."
Binary stars - systems with pairs of stars - are not uncommon. But only a handful of the planets have been found to orbit such binaries. And none of these are known to have another pair of stars circling them.
On how the planet survives without being pulled apart, Dr Lintott said: "There are six other well-established planets around double stars, and they're all pretty close to those stars. So I think what this is telling us is planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs (the torus of dense gas that gives rise to planetary systems).
"The planets are forming close in and able to cling to a stable orbit there. That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere."
PH1 was discovered by two US volunteers using the Planethunters.org website: Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano from Cottonwood, Arizona.
They spotted faint dips in light caused by the planet passing in front of its parent stars. The team of professional astronomers then confirmed the discovery using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Founded in 2010, Planethunters.org aims to harness human pattern recognition to identify transits in publicly available data gathered by Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope.
Kepler was launched in March 2009 to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
Visitors to the Planet Hunters website have access to randomly selected data from one of Kepler's target stars.
Volunteers are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits - when a planet passes in front of its parent star. Since December 2010, more than 170,000 members of the public have participated in the project.
Exoplanet around Alpha Centauri is nearest-ever
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Astronomers have found the nearest planet outside our Solar System, circling one of the stars of Alpha Centauri just four light-years away.
The planet has at minimum the same mass as Earth, but circles its star far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.
It is therefore outside the "habitable zone" denoting the possibility of life, as the researchers report in Nature.
However, studies on exoplanets increasingly show that a star with one planet is likely to have several.
At the very least, the work answers the question first posed in ancient times about planets around our nearest stellar neighbours.
The closest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which is believed to be part of a three-star system that includes the brighter stars Alpha Centauri A and B.
The planet was found near Alpha Centauri B by the Harps instrument at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.
That puts it far closer to Earth than any of the more than 840 confirmed exoplanets
Like a dance between one enormous and one tiny partner, as an exoplanet orbits its much larger host star, its gravity causes the star to move in a small orbit.
Harps and instruments like it measure the subtle change in colour - the redshift or blueshift - of the host star's light as its orbit moves it slightly closer to and further away from Earth.
What has delayed this finding is that because Alpha Centauri is itself a complicated system of stars orbiting one another, the effect of a comparatively tiny planet is difficult to detect.
What is redshift?
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- The term "redshift" arises from the fact that light from more distant objects shows up on Earth more red than when it left its source
- The colour shift comes about because of the Doppler effect, which acts to "stretch" or "compress" waves from moving objects
- It is at work in the sound of a moving siren: an approaching siren sounds higher-pitched and a receding one sounds lower-pitched
- In the case of light, approaching objects appear more blue and receding objects appear more red
- The expansion of the Universe is accelerating, so in general, more distant objects are moving away from us (and each other, and everything else) more quickly than nearer ones
- Exoplanet hunters use the same red- and blueshift of stars' light as evidence of planets tugging on them
But careful measurements over four years showed that the planet whips around Alpha Centauri B in just 3.6 days, and is estimated to have a surface temperature of about 1,200C.
Many planets in similar orbits are "tidally locked", meaning the same side is always facing the host star, but further observations will be required to examine the planet further, finding out for example if it has an atmosphere.
Since the very first planets outside our solar system were discovered in the early 1990s, the hope has been to find an "Earth twin" - a planet like ours, orbiting a star like ours, at a distance like ours.
The new planet around Alpha Centauri B matches Earth only in terms of its mass - making it among the smallest exoplanets we know of.
But in a catalogue with hundreds of confirmed planets and thousands of planet candidates added since 1992, it is otherwise unremarkable - except for its proximity.
"Alpha Centauri B is of course a very special case - it's our next door neighbour," said Stephane Udry of the Observatory in Geneva and senior author of the paper.
"So even if the discovery just stands perfectly normally in the discoveries we have had up to now, it's a landmark discovery, because it's very low-mass and it's our closest neighbour."
Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said that beyond that, the planet's very existence makes a tantalising suggestion.
"Everything that we've discovered in the last few years tells us that where we find one small, rocky planet there are likely to be others," he told BBC News.
"I think the odds are very good that there may well be other planets in this system a little further out, perhaps a little more comfortable temperatures - so I think the hunt is on."
Distant planets
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An artist's impression of the planet 55 Cancri e orbiting its sun in the constellation of Cancer. The rocky planet, made largely out of diamond, moves so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18 hours
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Kepler-22b, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered, is circling a star 600 light years away. It is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface - among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth.
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An icy planet-forming disk around a young star called TW Hydrae, located about 175 light-years away in the Hydra, or Sea Serpent, constellation
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A view of a Saturn-sized planet orbiting 79 Ceti.
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A newly discovered planet, designated by the unglamorous identifier of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, orbits a red star five times less massive than the Sun and located at a distance of about 20,000 light years
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Kepler-11, a sun-like star around which six planets orbit. At times, two or more planets pass in front of the star at once, as shown in a simultaneous transit of three planets.
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The Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. The planet is a 'hot Jupiter', so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit in only 2.2 days.
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A hot, rocky, geologically active planet glowing in the deep red light of its nearby parent star, the M dwarf Gliese 876. The heat and the reddish light are among the few things about the planet that are certain, depending on the thickness and composition of its atmosphere - if any - it could range from being a barren, cratered ball of rock like Mercury or the Moon, to being a featureless, cloud-shrouded cue-ball like Venus.
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The first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."
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A baffling planet, known as HAT-P-1, that is much larger than theory predicts. The planet has a radius about 1.38 times Jupiter's but contains only half Jupiter's mass.
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A rich starry sky fills the view from an ancient gas-giant planet in the core of the globular star cluster M4. The 13-billion-year-old planet orbits a helium white-dwarf star and the millisecond pulsar B1620-26, seen at lower left. The globular cluster is deficient in heavier elements for making planets, so the existence of such a world implies that planet formation may have been quite efficient in the early universe
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The circumbinary planet Kepler-16b - the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars. The cold planet, with its gaseous surface, is not thought to be habitable. The largest of the two stars, a K dwarf, is about 69 percent the mass of our sun, and the smallest, a red dwarf, is about 20 percent the sun's mass. These star pairs are called eclipsing binaries.
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Planet 2003UB313, the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun, at the lonely outer fringes of our solar system. Our sun can be seen in the distance. The planet is at least as big as Pluto and about three times farther away from the Sun than Pluto
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A Jupiter-sized planet passing in front of its parent star. Such events are called transits. When the planet transits the star, the star's apparent brightness drops by a few percent for a short period.
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An exoplanet 6 times the size of Earth circulating around its low-mass host star at a distance equal to 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance (L).
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A unique type of exoplanet discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope. The planet is so close it to its star that it completes an orbit in 10.5 hours. The planet is only 750,000 miles from the star, or 1/130th the distance between Earth and the Sun.
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A fledgling solar system containing deep within it enough water vapor to fill all the oceans on Earth five times, located in our Milky Way galaxy about 1,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus.
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The first photograph of a planet beyond our solar system, released by the University of Jena and the European Space Observatory April 5, 2005. The planet, orbiting a star similiar to our young Sun known as GQ Lupi, is thought to be one to two times as massive as Jupiter.
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A view of the Whirlpool Galaxy showing the spiral galaxy's curving arms where newborn stars reside and its yellowish central core that serves as home for older stars.
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The Elephant's Trunk Nebula, an elongated dark globule within the emission nebula IC 1396 in the constellation of Cepheus
Galaxies like fireflies, a bridge of hot gas, and a catastrophic decline in cosmic GDP
Our pick of the best space-related images from November includes a graph illustrating the terminal decline in the universe's output
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The sky over the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert, Chile, studded with cosmic bling. The most prominent is the Carina Nebula, glowing red in the middle of the image
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Astronomers concluded that a pair of white dwarf stars are orbiting each other at the centre of this planetary nebula, Fleming 1 in the constellation Centaurus. The stars' orbital motions explain the remarkably symmetric structures of the jets in the surrounding gas clouds in this new image from the ESO Very Large Telescope
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Australians were treated to a rare spectacle on 14 November: the 'diamond ring effect' shortly after totality during a solar eclipse. Eclipse hunters flocked to Queensland's tropical northeast to watch the region's first total solar eclipse in 1,300 years. This picture was taken at Palm Cove
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Nasa released this composite image of the star factory Cygnus OB2. The image comprises x-ray data from the Chandra observatory (blue), infrared from Spitzer (red), and optical data from the Isaac Newton Telescope (orange). Cygnus OB2 is the closest massive star cluster to Earth, and is thought to contain around 1,500 stars under seven million years old – mere babies by cosmic standards
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The afterglow of a supernova or exploding star about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle). Supernova remnant W44 measures about 100 light-years across. All that remains of the massive star is the spinning core of a neutron star, or pulsar, top left
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Jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy, Hercules A. The picture was created using the combined imaging power of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico
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At only 1,500 light years away, the Orion nebula is the brightest diffuse nebula in the night sky. This optical image shows a large cavity created by the radiation pressure from newborn stars in the brightest region, lying within a huge cloud of dust and gas
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The Planck space telescope discovered a bridge of hot gas that connects galaxy clusters Abell 399 (lower centre) and Abell 401 (top left). The pair of clusters is about a billion light-years from Earth, and the gas bridge extends approximately 10m light-years between them
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Instruments aboard Nasa's Messenger spacecraft studying Mercury – the closest planet to the sun – provided compelling evidence that there is water ice and organic molecules in the permanent shade of its polar craters. 'Small, airless, sun-blasted Mercury would seem the last place in the solar system one should expect to find ice fields and frozen organic molecules. But Nasa says they're there … ' reported the Guardian's astronomy blogger, Stuart Clark
Raise ya :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Lick
The Best Astronomy Images of 2012
I couldn’t pick just 10—you have to see all 21 of these mind-bending shots.
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The Sun’s Arch Rival
On Aug. 31, 2012, the Sun had a major hissy fit: A vast arch of material was lifted up off the surface by the Sun’s powerful magnetic field. Sometimes these arches collapse back down, but this one erupted, blasting literally hundreds of millions of tons of superheated plasma into space at a speed of 1,400 kilometers per second (900 miles per second)—over a thousand times faster than a rifle bullet. The scale of this is crushing—the arch was 300,000 kilometers (200,000) miles) across, 25 times larger than the Earth. As we near the peak of the Sun’s magnetic cycle, we’ll be seeing even more activity like this in the coming months.
slate.com
need to follow the link for the rest .....................
Best astronomy images 2012: See the most beautiful images of the universe. - Slate Magazine
Great photos Mid.
Here a photo of the Dragon spacecraft that will fly to the ISS in february/march on the right, nicely packaged.
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Merry Christmas:)
Here is something extremely exciting, that has happened a few days ago.
Single Camera: Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight 12/17/12 - YouTube
Again for some reason it will not embed, but you can see the video clicking on the link. A youtube video of the SpaceX grashopper test vehicle. It may not look impressive to you but is to me. What you don't get from the video, this thing is huge. A 10 storey high structure making a flight of 12 storeys high. It is not designed and build originally for such hops. It is exactly the hardware built as the first stage of a launch vehicle that has alredy delivered cargo to the ISS and will soon be able to launch astronauts. The grashopper is cleared by aviation authorities to fly up to 3,5km high. This are only the very first baby steps. Next year it is expected to fly supersonic then return to the launch pad and have a soft landing. The owner of the company said recently, he expecs that the craft will probably produce a few craters, but that is not to worry, just normal during extensive testing.
The grashopper is a testvehicle that will lead to reusable rockets, initially the first stage, but later the second stage too. The first stage will make a soft landing after launching the second stage and payload. The purpose is to bring launch cost way down.
A version, that embeds.
Multi-Angle:]Multi-Angle: Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight 12/17/12 - YouTube Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight 12/17/12
To give a sense of proportion, see the cowboy.:)
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These images of Saturn in eclipse with the sun, taken recently from Cassini, are superb.
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What sort of image is that? doesnt look real.
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Looks a bit photo-shopped.
I did not think the rings would be bright enough to illuminate the darkside of Saturn so much.
The illumination is green but the rings are white (made of ice) and Saturn itself is not green.
Why is it only the northern hemisphere that is illuminated?
The inner ring is dense enough to catch the light from the sun and be visible but apparently not dense enough to obscure the backside illumination of Saturn at all :confused:
Apparently the colour is original, probably due to the filters used.
Quote:
Images taken using infrared, red and violet spectral filters were combined to create this enhanced-color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2012 at a distance of approximately 500,000 miles
It seems space is starting to attract private investors who actually believe money can be made out there other than with comm satellites and earth observation like meteosats.
There are now two companies who claim their business model will be mining asteroids or even actually building stuff out there.
Deep Space Industries vs. Planetary Resources: Is outer-space asteroid mining the new gold rush?
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Here a link to an articlea bout the newest competitor in this field. They claim they want to bring asteroids near earth, mine them and make stuff using asteroid material and a 3D-printer that can make complex structures using nickel, which is a common ingredient of nickel-iron asateroids.
But probably the first thing to produce in space would be water. That would be helpful for Astronauts living out there and for making oxygen and rocket fuel - LH (liquid hydrogen) and LOX (liquid oxygen).
The first company in that field is Planetary Resources.
Boeing outlines technology for crewed Mars missions
Boeing has introduced a mission outline for a possible Mars mission. Here a link to an article about the mission plan.
Boeing outlines technology for crewed Mars missions | NASASpaceFlight.com
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Part of the vehicle would be an inflatable habitat for the crew. Inflatables are lighter than rigid metal structures as used so far for the ISS. They also provide more space for the long flight and better protection against radiation and micrometeorites.
And the most revolutionary part is the propulsion. It uses SEP - solar electric power and electric thrusters. Funny to think that commercial aviation on earth cannot possibly use solar energy directly, but a Mars vehicle can. There are two reasons why it is possible in space. You can build really large but very light structures in space and you can take months to accelerate and decelerate. A low but steady impulse will get you where you want eventually.
In recent years both solar panels and ion thrusters using for example argon gas have come a long way and are now feasible. The suggested solar arrays will yield 1 MW near Earth and app. half of that near Mars.
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Robonaut at work
Robonaut 2 is shown on Jan. 2 in the International Space Station's Destiny laboratory during a round of testing. Ground teams remotely commanded the two-armed humanoid robot to operate valves on a task board. Robonaut is a testbed for exploring new robotic capabilities in space. Its form and dexterity allow it to use the same tools and control panels as its human counterparts do aboard the station.
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Strapped in
Scientists surround a monkey ahead of a space launch in an undisclosed location in Iran on Jan. 28. Iranian officials said the gray-tufted monkey was strapped in a pod resembling an infant's car seat, was sent into space on an Iranian rocket and was returned safely to Earth. They called it a significant step toward Tehran's goal of human spaceflight.
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The future of space exploration
NASA astronauts accompany a full-size model of the Orion space capsule past the presidential viewing stand during the parade honoring President Barack Obama's inauguration on Jan. 21. The Orion is the agency's crew vehicle for exploration beyond Earth orbit. Its first test flight is scheduled for 2014.
Habitable Zone For Planets Redefined, Shifting Ranks Of Exoplanets In 'Goldilocks' Range
Habitable Zone For Planets Redefined, Shifting Ranks Of Exoplanets In 'Goldilocks' Range
Posted: 01/30/2013 8:26 am EST
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By: Clara Moskowitz
Published: 01/29/2013 11:37 AM EST on SPACE.com
One of the most important characteristics of an alien planet is whether or not it falls into what's called the habitable zone [at]— a Goldilocks-like range of not-too-close, not-too-far distances from the parent star that might allow the planet to host life.
Now scientists have redefined the boundaries of the habitable zone for alien planets, potentially kicking out some exoplanaets that were thought to fall within it, and maybe allowing a few that had been excluded to squeeze in.
"This will have a significant impact on the number of exoplanets that are within habitable zone," said research team leader Ravi Kumar Kopparapu of Penn State University.
The habitable zone defines the region where a planet might be able to retain liquid water on its surface. Any closer to the star and water would vaporize away; any farther, and it would freeze to ice. But water in its liquid state is what scientists are after, since that is thought to be a prerequisite for life.
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The graphic shows habitable zone distances around various types of stars, according to an updated habitable zone definition. Some of the known extrasolar planets that are considered to be in the habitable zone of their stars are also shown. On this scale, Earth-Sun distance is 1 astronomical unit, which is roughly 150 million kilometers.
The new definition of the habitable zone is based on updated atmospheric databases called HITRAN (high-resolution transmission molecular absorption) and HITEMP (high-temperature spectroscopic absorption parameters), which give the absorption parameters of water and carbon dioxide — two properties that strongly influence the atmospheres of exoplanets, determining whether those planets could host liquid water. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]
The scientists cautioned that the habitable zone definition still does not take into account feedback effects from clouds, which will also affect a planet's habitability.
The previous habitable zone definitions were derived about 20 years ago by Penn State researcher James Kasting, who was also part of the team behind the updates.
"At the time when he wrote that paper no exoplanets were discovered," Kopparapu told SPACE.com. "In 20 years, hundreds, maybe thousands have been discovered."
The new definition isn't radically different from the old one. For example, in our own solar system, the boundaries of the habitable zone have shifted from between 0.95 astronomical units (AU, or the distance between Earth and the sun) and 1.67 AU, to the new range of 0.99 AU to 1.7 AU.
"It's a surprise that Earth is so close to the inner edge of the habitable zone," said astronomer Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, who was not part of the team behind the redefinition.
Méndez manages a list, called the Habitable Exoplanet Catalog, off all the known planets beyond our solar system that could be habitable to life. The new study will necessitate some adjustments to the catalog, he said.
"Right now as I see it as a significant change," Méndez said. "Many of those planets that we believe were inside are now outside. But on the other side, it extends the habitable zone's outer edge, so a few planets that are farther away might fall inside the habitable zone now."
He mentioned one planet in particular, Gliese 581d, was thought to lie at the outer edge of its star's habitable zone. With the new definition, though, it falls almost smack in the middle, making it perhaps a better candidate for extraterrestrial life.
"That will be a big change for that particular planet," Méndez said. "That means the prospects for life on the planet will be much better."
The researchers detail their new habitable zone definition in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
To explore the Habitable Planet Catalog directy, visit: The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog - Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo