http://www.insaturnsrings.com/

Next Nasa Mars rover to hunt ancient life

The Day the Earth Smiled: Sneak Preview

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.

The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The "breaks" in the brightness of Saturn's limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions. The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.

Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location in the annotated version. (The two are clearly seen as separate objects in the accompanying narrow angle frame: PIA14949.) The other bright dots nearby are stars.

This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system. The acquisition of this image, along with the accompanying composite narrow- and wide-angle image of Earth and the moon and the full mosaic from which both are taken, marked the first time that inhabitants of Earth knew in advance that their planet was being imaged. That opportunity allowed people around the world to join together in social events to celebrate the occasion.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ring plane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 19, 2013 at a distance of approximately 753,000 miles (1.212 million kilometers) from Saturn, and approximately 898.414 million miles (1.445858 billion kilometers) from Earth. Image scale on Saturn is 43 miles (69 kilometers) per pixel; image scale on the Earth is 53,820 miles (86,620 kilometers) per pixel. The illuminated areas of neither Earth nor the Moon are resolved here. Consequently, the size of each "dot" is the same size that a point of light of comparable brightness would have in the wide-angle camera.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

That looks amazing!

NASA Completes First Review of Asteroid-Capture Concepts

NASA has conducted its first internal review of ideas for its ambitious asteroid-capture mission, agency officials announced Wednesday (July 31).

The review team, composed of NASA leaders from around the country, met Tuesday (July 30) to gauge the technical and programmatic aspects of different concepts proposed by researchers within the agency. NASA will continue developing the most promising ideas to formulate a baseline asteroid-capture mission concept, officials said.

"At this meeting, we engaged in the critically important work of examining initial concepts to meet the goal of asteroid retrieval and exploration," NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot, who chaired the review at the agency's headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "I was extremely proud of the teams and the progress they have made so far. I look forward to integrating the inputs as we develop the mission concept further."

While Tuesday's review focused on internally generated ideas, the team also talked about the 400-plus proposals submitted by industry researchers, academics and the general public, officials said. Those responses flooded in after a June 18 request for information, in which NASA sought input about how to achieve the asteroid-capture mission.

The space agency is currently evaluating those outside ideas, officials said.

NASA unveiled the asteroid mission in April. The plan is to grab a small near-Earth asteroid — one perhaps 23 to 33 feet (7 to 10 meters) wide — using a robotic spacecraft and drag it into a stable orbit near the moon. Astronauts would then visit the space rock using NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket, which are slated to fly crews for the first time in 2021.

The mission represents a way to meet one major goal laid out by President Barack Obama, who in 2010 directed NASA to send humans to an asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

Snagging an asteroid would also help develop asteroid-mining technology, improve scientists' understanding of the early solar system and give humanity crucial experience working in deep space, advocates say.

http://www.space.com/22198-nasa-asteroid-capture-ideas-review.html#sthash.QZyrkQA0.dpuf

NASA will separate twin brothers for a year: one on Earth, one in space

Of all the members of NASA's current crop of distinguished astronauts, only two have the unique distinction of being identical twin brothers. And now NASA is using an idea proposed by the brothers, Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly, to perform a study that's been confined to sci-fi up until now. Beginning in March 2015, the space agency will be monitoring the biological states of both twin brothers over the span of a year, with a twist: Scott will be aboard the International Space Station for the duration of that period, while Mark, who retired from NASA back in 2011, will remain back here on Earth.

read rest

That's such a cool idea!!

*Waits for the experiment to go horribly wrong*

Lol like the twin on earth starts to loose bone density and muscle mass?



Watched this again today. Awesome awesome inspiring vid. Space travel is important!

http://www.universetoday.com/103960/what-will-happen-when-the-suns-magnetic-poles-reverse/

Dwarf Galaxy Caught Ramming Into a Large Spiral Galaxy

Observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a massive cloud of multimillion-degree gas in a galaxy about 60 million light years from Earth. The hot gas cloud is likely caused by a collision between a dwarf galaxy and a much larger galaxy called NGC 1232. If confirmed, this discovery would mark the first time such a collision has been detected only in X-rays, and could have implications for understanding how galaxies grow through similar collisions.

An image combining X-rays and optical light shows the scene of this collision. The impact between the dwarf galaxy and the spiral galaxy caused a shock wave − akin to a sonic boom on Earth – that generated hot gas with a temperature of about six million degrees. Chandra X-ray data, in purple, show the hot gas has a comet-like appearance, caused by the motion of the dwarf galaxy. Optical data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope reveal the spiral galaxy in blue and white. X-ray point sources have been removed from this image to emphasize the diffuse emission.

Near the head of the comet-shaped X-ray emission (mouse over the image for the location) is a region containing several very optically bright stars and enhanced X-ray emission. Star formation may have been triggered by the shock wave, producing bright, massive stars. In that case X-ray emission would be generated by massive star winds and by the remains of supernova explosions as massive stars evolve.

The mass of the entire gas cloud is uncertain because it cannot be determined from the two-dimensional image whether the hot gas is concentrated in a thin pancake or distributed over a large, spherical region. If the gas is a pancake, the mass is equivalent to forty thousand Suns. If it is spread out uniformly, the mass could be much larger, about three million times as massive as the Sun. This range agrees with values for dwarf galaxies in the Local Group containing the Milky Way.

The hot gas should continue to glow in X-rays for tens to hundreds of millions of years, depending on the geometry of the collision. The collision itself should last for about 50 million years. Therefore, searching for large regions of hot gas in galaxies might be a way to estimate the frequency of collisions with dwarf galaxies and to understand how important such events are to galaxy growth.

An alternative explanation of the X-ray emission is that the hot gas cloud could have been produced by supernovas and hot winds from large numbers of massive stars, all located on one side of the galaxy. The lack of evidence of expected radio, infrared, or optical features argues against this possibility.

A paper by Gordon Garmire of the Huntingdon Institute for X-ray Astronomy in Huntingdon, PA describing these results is available online and was published in the June 10th, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

Meet the NASA scientist devising a starship warp drive

"Dwarf Galaxy Caught Ramming Into a Large Spiral Galaxy"

Comprehending the sheer magnitude of an event like that, blows the mind...

So pretty....

Space Laser To Prove Increased Broadband Possible

When NASA's Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) begins operation aboard the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission managed by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., it will attempt to show two-way laser communication beyond Earth is possible, expanding the possibility of transmitting huge amounts of data. This new ability could one day allow for 3-D High Definition video transmissions in deep space to become routine.

Read full article

So Saturn likely has water on it...

Massive Storm Reveals Water Deep Within Saturn’s Atmosphere

Remember the huge storm that erupted on Saturn in late 2010? It was one of the largest storms ever observed on the ringed planet, and it was even visible from Earth in amateur-sized telescopes. The latest research has revealed the tempestuous storm churned up something surprising deep within Saturn’s atmosphere: water ice. This is the first detection of water ice on Saturn, observed by the near-infrared instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.

“The new finding from Cassini shows that Saturn can dredge up material from more than 100 miles [160 kilometers],” said Kevin Baines, a co-author of the paper who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “It demonstrates in a very real sense that typically demure-looking Saturn can be just as explosive or even more so than typically stormy Jupiter.”

While Saturn’s moons have lots of water ice, Saturn is almost entirely hydrogen and helium, but it does have trace amounts of other chemicals, including water. When we look at Saturn, we’re actually seeing the upper cloud tops of Saturn’s atmosphere, which are made mostly of frozen crystals of ammonia.

Beneath this upper cloud layer, astronomers think there’s a lower cloud deck made of ammonium hydrosulfide and water. Astronomers thought there was water there, but not very much, and certainly not ice.

Read full article

And scientists may have found a way to detect Super-Earth's with water atmostpheres

Super-Earth’s Probable Water Atmosphere Revealed In Blue Light

Playing with the filters on a telescope can show us amazing things. In a recent case, Japanese astronomers looked at the star Gilese 1214 in blue light and watched its “super-Earth” planet (Gliese 1214 b, or GJ 1214 b) passing across the surface from the viewpoint of Earth. The result — a probable detection of water in the planet’s atmosphere.

Observations with the Subaru Telescope using a blue filter revealed the atmosphere does not preferentially scatter any light. If the Rayleigh scattering had been observed, this would have shown hydrogen in the atmosphere, researchers said. (On Earth, Rayleigh scattering of the atmosphere makes the sky blue.)

“When combined with the findings of previous observations in other colors, this new observational result implies that GJ 1214 b is likely to have a water-rich atmosphere,” stated the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Read full article

"Super-Earth’s Probable Water Atmosphere Revealed In Blue Light"

@ Corr - Thats epic! when we get there we will find a planet full of Squid people!haha.

Space cadets line up for one-way Mars trip

More than 200 000 people from 140 countries have applied to go to Mars and never return, the group behind an ambitious venture to colonise the inhospitable red planet said.

read rest