The New Editor - Space

Curiosity Successfully Lands on Mars

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:35:29 -0600

NASA's Voyager 1 on verge of entering Milky Way

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:48:00 -0700

This is very cool.

The Telegraph's Tom Kennedy reports:

The spacecraft is close to leaving the Solar System and into the uncharted territory of the Milky Way after more than three decades in space.

Voyager 1 was launched with its twin, Voyager 2, by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) in 1977.

Voyager 1 is travelling at just under 11 miles per second and sending information from nearly 11 billion miles away from the sun.

It is about to become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System, although Nasa expects it to take between several months and years before it completely enters interstellar space. Voyager 2 will follow later.

VLT (Very Large Telescope) HD Timelapse Footage

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 28 May 2011 00:03:00 -0600

Popular Science magazine's Clay Dillow writes:

The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.

It's awesome.

A Fizzy Ocean on Enceladus

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 10:43:00 -0700

From NASA:

For years researchers have been debating whether Enceladus, a tiny moon floating just outside Saturn's rings, is home to a vast underground ocean. Is it wet--or not? Now, new evidence is tipping the scales. Not only does Enceladus likely have an ocean, that ocean is probably fizzy like a soft drink and could be friendly to microbial life.

The story begins in 2005 when NASA's Cassini probe flew past Enceladus for a close encounter.

"Geophysicists expected this little world to be a lump of ice, cold, dead, and uninteresting," says Dennis Matson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Boy, were we surprised!"

Read the whole piece.

US scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:02:00 -0600

It will be called "Berkeley." No, not really.

Obama's new mission for NASA: Reach out to Muslim world

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:03:00 -0600

The politicization of space exploration appears to be front-and-center on the agenda for the Obama Administration, according to Byron York, who writes, in part: (emphasis added)

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation?s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to "re-inspire children" to study science and math, to "expand our international relationships," and to ?reach out to the Muslim world." Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is "perhaps foremost," because it will help Islamic nations "feel good" about their scientific accomplishments.

In the same interview, Bolden also said the United States, which first sent men to the moon in 1969, is no longer capable of reaching beyond low earth orbit without help from other nations. Bolden made the statements during a recent trip to the Middle East. He told al-Jazeera that in the wake of the president's speech in Cairo last year, the American space agency is now pursuing "a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world." Then:

When I became the NASA Administrator -- before I became the NASA Administrator -- [Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.
...

Bolden's trip included a June 15 speech at the American University in Cairo. In that speech, he said in the past NASA worked mostly with countries that are capable of space exploration. But that, too, has changed in light of Obama's Cairo initiative. "He asked NASA to change?by reaching out to 'non-traditional' partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations," Bolden said. "NASA has embraced this charge."

"NASA is not only a space exploration agency," Bolden concluded, "but also an earth improvement agency."

Read the whole piece.

NASA radar finds ice on moon's north pole

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:33:00 -0700

From the Sydney Morning Herald: (emphasis added)

A US radar launched into space aboard an Indian spacecraft has detected craters filled with ice on the moon's north pole, NASA scientists said Monday.

The US space agency's Mini-SAR radar found more than 40 small craters ranging in size from one to nine miles (1.6 to 15 kilometers), each full of water ice.

"Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice," NASA said in a statement.
...

The lightweight, synthetic aperture radar's findings "show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought," said Paul Spudis, lead investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

Scientist eyes 39-day voyage to Mars

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:03:00 -0700

From Physorg.com:

A journey from Earth to Mars could in the future take just 39 days -- cutting current travel time nearly six times -- according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency.

Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket, now on track for liftoff after decades of development.
...

His rocket would use electricity to transform a fuel -- likely hydrogen, helium or deuterium -- into plasma gas that is heated to 51.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (11 million degrees Celsius). The plasma gas is then channeled into tailpipes using magnetic fields to propel the spacecraft.

That would send a shuttle hurtling toward the moon or Mars at ever faster speeds up to an estimated 35 miles (55 kilometers) per second until the engines are reversed.

Could Hole in the Moon Serve as Shelter for Colonists?

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:55:00 -0700

Not only is there water on the moon, but maybe they've also found a place for a permanent lunar colony that might "shield colonists from radiation and meteor strikes."

Space.com's Robert Roy Britt reports:

"We discovered a vertical hole on the moon," an international team of scientists recently announced.

The gaping, dark pit on the near side of the moon is as big as a city block and deep as a modest skyscraper. It is thought to be a collapsed lava tube, created perhaps billions of years ago when the moon was warmer and volcanically active.

The discovery, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in October, was made using data from the moon-orbiting Japanese SELENE spacecraft. It was not widely reported at the time, and the journal announced it today. The work was led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Space Agency JAXA.

The International Space Station Comes Together

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:02:00 -0700

A cool graphic from USA Today.

Halfway to Pluto!

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:01:00 -0700

From Discover's Bad Astronomy blog:

Today, December 29, 2009, the New Horizons Pluto probe crosses an arbitrary but psychologically important line: it is now closer to Pluto than it is to Earth.

... I?m sure that back on Earth, the team behind NH are pretty happy. This probe has a checkered history, having been planned, canceled, re-planned, delayed, on and on. It?s amazing it got to launch at all. But on January 19, 2006 the small, half-ton probe was sent on its way, and on July 14, 2015 it?ll sail past Pluto and its collection of moons, snapping pictures and taking data.

Top Ten Space Pictures From 2009

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:03:00 -0700

Some cool photos from National Geographic...

The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:53:00 -0700

Very, very cool.

What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:03:00 -0700

This is cool.

NASA finds water on the moon

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:04:59 -0700

From Agence France-Press:

A "significant amount" of frozen water has been found on the moon, the US space agency said Friday heralding a giant leap forward in space exploration and boosting hopes of a permanent lunar base.