Aliens

[Tach Deneva]

POOF!

[Falker]

Explanation: Streaking skyward, a Delta II rocket carries NASA's Kepler spacecraft aloft into the clear night of March 6. The dramatic scene was recorded in a time exposure from the crowded pier in Jetty Park at the northern end of Cocoa Beach, Florida, about 3 miles from the Cape Canaveral launch site. Kepler's mission is to search for Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone of other stars. A planet orbiting within a star's habitable zone would have a surface temperature capable of supporting liquid water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. To find Earth-like planets, Kepler's telescope and large, sensitive camera will examine a rich star field near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Located in the constellation Cygnus, Kepler's field of view will allow it to monitor the brightness of many stars in the solar neighborhood and detect a slight dimming as a potential Earth-like planet crosses in front of the star.

Comments: I’m definitely going to be tracking this one.
I hope they find what their looking for. This new telescope is money well spent.

[Falker]

An intrepid spider may have survived the long months at the International Space Station, with scientists eager to know for sure once it returns to Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery.


The arachnid, one of two orb weaving spiders sent to the station last November, is due to land with Discovery's astronaut crew in Florida on Saturday afternoon. The spiders, and some butterfly larvae, are part of an educational experiment with students on Earth to compare their development in zero gravity with their counterparts on Earth.


"Everybody is rooting for the spider," NASA's station program scientist Julie Robinson told SPACE.com Thursday.


Space station astronauts named the spiders Elmo and Spiderman and checked in on them from time to time during their months in orbit. The arachnids are the same as the spider "Charlotte" in the children's book "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White.


"The spider habitat was very hard to see inside because there were quite a bit of fruit fly carcasses, as you might expect from a hungry spider," station commander Michael Fincke radioed Mission Control this week as he packed the spider and butterfly larvae habitats for Discovery's Wednesday departure. "Spiderman and Elmo are on their way home."


As of February, scientists knew that at least one of the spiders was still alive because they saw it in a camera that was watching the two arachnids, Robinson said. But it was hard to see through the webs inside the enclosure to learn the second spider's fate, she added.


The Painted Lady butterfly larvae did not fare as well.

Of the many larvae sent to the station - in a different enclosure than the spiders - only two managed to form a chrysalis but neither emerged as a butterfly, Robinson said. In the months since they launched, the nectar provided as their food had turned moldy, Fincke said.

"That's not necessarily surprising because developmental biology is affected by microgravity," Robinson said. But even on Earth, trying to cultivate butterflies is tricky, so it is difficult to know for sure, she added.

BioServe Space Technologies of the University of Colorado in Boulder is overseeing the spider and butterfly experiment, with scientists planning to open the two habitats for the first time on Sunday. It is one of several efforts to encourage student interest in science, technology and math by through space station science, Robinson said.

There is also an added bonus, she added.

Another group of scientists is interested in the dead fruit flies used to feed Elmo and Spiderman. Initially launched as spider chow, the flies appeared to have multiplied over time to give the spiders a steady food supply.

Robinson said it turned into an accidental experiment in long-duration, multi-generational fruit fly spaceflight.

"There might be a possibility that there may be a live fruit fly alive in there and they'll be looking for that," she said.

Discovery undocked from the space station on Wednesday and is poised to land Saturday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to end a 13-day mission. While the spiders spun their webs inside the station, the astronauts performed three spacewalks to add the last pair of U.S. solar arrays to the station, boosting it to full power.

They also swapped out one crewmember, NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, who arrived at the station last November with the spiders. It was students from Magnus's hometown of Belleville, Ill., who suggested the names Elmo and Spiderman.

As for the spiders themselves, scientists are hopeful but only time will tell.

"A spider can live a long time," Robinson said, adding that arachnids can also slow their metabolism to survive. "They can hang in there."

SPACE.com is providing continuous coverage of STS-119 with reporter Clara Moskowitz and senior editor Tariq Malik in New York. Click here for shuttle mission updates and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video feed.

[Tach Deneva]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512767,00.html

Giant 'Hand' Reaches Across Space

"Tiny and dying but still-powerful stars called pulsars spin like crazy and light up their surroundings, often with ghostly glows.

"So it is with PSR B1509-58, which long ago collapsed into a sphere just 12 miles in diameter after running out of fuel.

"And what a strange scene this one has created."

[PanzerMeyer]

Giant 'Hand' Reaches Across Space

It's the hand of Adonais which previously grabbed the Enterprise.

[Tach Deneva]

Who Mourns for Adonais?

[PanzerMeyer]

Who Mourns for Adonais?

Not I and neither does Kirk!

[Falker]

Yeah that was a popular pic when it came out. Looks spiritual. Like the good vs. bad scenario.

[Falker]

NASA's shuttle Discovery and a seven-astronaut crew launched toward the International Space Station (ISS) on May 31, 2008 to deliver a massive Japanese laboratory during their STS-124 mission.

Wouldn’t it have been something if it was this year. Discovery would have possibly met up with Atlantis with the crew waving out the window while passing by. It would have also been the first time Earth has had a fleet of space ships in orbit.

[Falker]

Space Tornadoes


Dorothy's tornado was nothing compared to the giant swirls of plasma that storm in outer space. Space tornadoes are funnels of hot charged particles around the Earth that flow at more than a million mph (1.6 million kph). As the ions circle, they produce strong electrical currents that help create the gorgeous light show known as the aurora.

New observations of these cosmic storms by a suite of NASA spacecraft called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) help shed light on their inner workings. THEMIS found that space tornadoes can produce electrical currents greater than 100,000 amperes (for comparison, a 60-watt light bulb draws about half an ampere).

The tornadoes then channel this current of flowing electric charge along twisted magnetic field lines into Earth's ionosphere to spark bright and colorful auroras. The five space probes that make up THEMIS lifted off in February 2007 on a mission to study the origin of magnetic storms that power the aurora (also known as the Northern and Southern Lights).

THEMIS measured the tornadoes while traveling through them at about 40,000 miles above Earth. Ground telescopes watched simultaneously to confirm the observations. The intense currents don't pose any threat to humans, the researchers said. But on the ground they can damage man-made communication devices, such as power transformers.

A better understanding of all this is needed to improve space storm forecasting and to predict what might happen to power grids. Experts say the next period of maximum solar activity — due around 2012 — could bring a level of storminess not seen in many decades. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a major storm during the next peak could cripple power grids and other communications systems, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.

[Tach Deneva]

— due around 2012 —

Oh noes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_doomsday_prediction

[Falker]

lol : )


I recall reading about the 2012 doomsday a few years ago. I think it might have been Nostradamus at predicting the future once again. He said we were going to War , or someone from the middle east lunched several rockets in the sky that causes the death of thousands and deserves retaliation. "IF" that were the case , my guess it would be started by Iran and finished by Israel. I could be wrong , but the date rings a bell. Thanks for the heads up. Now I’m going to need to look further into it.

<S>

[Falker]

Lost robot crosses city by asking directions


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... tions.html

[Falker]

This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. Because Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera's color filters, the inset image shows a combination of four panoramic images zoomed in on Earth.


Maybe someday my great , great , grandkids will see this view with their own eyes.

[Falker]

Earth's protective shield is stealing our air
30 May 2009 by Jessica Griggs

AS WELL as safeguarding our atmosphere, the Earth's protective shield may be stealing some of it on the sly.

The region in space that contains the Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, protects us from the charged particles that come streaming from the sun. By acting as a barrier to this solar wind, it is also thought to prevent these particles transferring enough of their energy to gas molecules in the atmosphere for these molecules to escape the Earth's gravitational pull.

This may be only half the story, though. At the poles, the magnetosphere might be aiding loss of the atmosphere, according to Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, who is principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission. Barabash bases his suggestion on measurements of the flow of ions escaping from Venus, Mars and Earth. It is thought that Venus has never had a magnetosphere, whereas Mars did until its magnetic dynamo wound down 3.5 billion years ago.

Taking into account the different masses of the three planets, their atmospheric make-up and their distance from the sun, Barabash compared the rate of loss of oxygen ions from each one. He focused on oxygen ions because these are the most abundant ions in the ionospheres of all three planets. He found that Earth lost oxygen around three times as fast as the other planets.

Barabash points out that a planet's magnetosphere will always be far larger than the planet itself or its atmosphere. This, he reasons, means that a planet with a magnetic field will absorb more energy from the solar wind than it would if it didn't have one. This extra energy would be funnelled down towards the magnetic poles, so molecules in the ionosphere above these regions could be accelerated enough to escape (see diagram). Barabash presented the results this month at the International Conference on Comparative Planetology at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.

The idea is supported by past studies of the magnetosphere, such as the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, which have shown that ions escape from the Earth's poles at twice the rate or more compared with the average for the planet as a whole.

At present we are experiencing low solar activity, but a stronger solar wind when Earth and Mars were young could have played a role in shaping these planets' early atmospheres. Barabash estimates that only some 60,000 tonnes of the Earth's thousands of trillions of tonnes of gas are lost every year, so we are in no danger of losing the atmosphere altogether.

Janet Luhmann of the University of California, Berkeley, who also spoke at the conference, described the idea as "provocative", but remains unconvinced. She says that the energy trapped by the magnetosphere could be used in other ways apart from accelerating ions, like stirring up winds or simply heating the atmosphere.

[Falker]

A Jupiter-like planet has been discovered orbiting one of the smallest stars known, suggesting that planets could be more common than previously thought.

This exoplanet finding is the first discovery for a long-proposed tool for hunting planets, called astrometry.

"This is an exciting discovery because it shows that planets can be found around extremely lightweight stars," said Wesley Traub, the chief scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is a hint that nature likes to form planets, even around stars very different from the sun."

[Falker]

SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor test-fired for first time 22:41 29 May 2009 by Paul Marks

The hybrid rocket motor that is intended to power tourist trips to the edge of space aboard Vergin Galactic's Space Ship II has undergone its first successful test-firings. The rocket motor's design incorporates lessons learned after a fatal rocket propellant explosion in 2007.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to be carried to an altitude of 15 kilometres by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. There, it will detach from the plane and fire its rocket to take passengers to the edge of space, at an altitude of about 100 km.

The pair are scaled-up versions of a carrier plane and spaceship that won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for commercial spaceflight in 2004. Video footage released by Virgin Galactic shows the hybrid motor roaring into life, sending vast plumes of scorched sand into the air.

"This is a scaled-up version of the SpaceShipOne rocket motor and is, we believe, the largest nitrous oxide hybrid rocket ever built," says Virgin Galactic's president, Will Whitehorn.

Its motor is called a hybrid because it burns both liquid oxidiser and solid fuel: volatile nitrous oxide and a benign rubber. It was during tests with the nitrous oxide that a devastating explosion occurred at Scaled Composites, the California-based company that is building SpaceShipTwo, on 26 July 2007. Three engineers were killed and three more were seriously injured.

[Falker]

Astronomy Picture of the Day




Explanation: This rocket is headed for the Moon. Pictured above, a huge Altas V rocket roared off the launch pad last week to start NASA's first missions to Earth's Moon in 10 years. The rocket is carrying two robotic spacecraft. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is scheduled to orbit and better map the Moon, search for buried and hidden ice, and return many high resolution images. Some images will be below one-meter in resolution and include images of historic Apollo landing sites. Exploratory data and images should allow a more informed choice of possible future astronaut landing sites. The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is scheduled to monitor the controlled impact of the rocket's upper stage into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole. This impact, which should occur in about three months, might be visible on Earth through small telescopes.

[Tach Deneva]

Jupiter takes a hit:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/rele ... uise.shtml

[Falker]

Thanks for keeping pace Tech. I’m actually waiting for them Space robots to come out and start exploring the Moon. I guess it will be any week now? Yeah I’ve heard about that impact on Jupiter. It caught everyone by surprise.

All I got to say is ….…THANK YOU JUPITER!!!!! For saving the Earth once again! Your our Goalie. What would the Earth be like without it’s big brother to protect it year after year.

Someday...I’m going to have my great great grand son stationed up there on one of Jupiter's 63 Moons . O_-