About time that NASA does something.
I'm surprised they are using an American rocket and not going to the Russians or even the Chinese for the launch.
The State Column
NASA officials spent much of the weekend putting the last-minute touches on a rover headed to Mars this week.
NASA will launch the rover — nicknamed Curiosity — using an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on November 26, space agency officials said. The launch was originally scheduled to blast off on November 25, however, officials said Sunday that the launch will be delayed in order to replace a suspect battery on the rover’s rocket...
The rover will travel to Mars, where it will land in Gale crater, which is thought to be about three and a half billion years old and more than 95 miles in diameter. The crater has a combined size of Connecticut and Rhode Island with a three-mile-high mountain of layered sedimentary rock at its bottom — an enticing area of exploration for scientists.
Monday, November 21, 2011
NASA set to launch Mars rover searching for signs of water, life
Saturday, October 1, 2011
TEVATRON SHUTS DOWN AFTER 28-YEAR RUN
The End of an Era
Slowly America is losing ground in research and exploration.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Strange Particles May Travel Faster Than Light
This cosmic speed limit, 299,792,458 meters per second (about 700 million miles an hour), forms the backbone of Einstein's seminal Theory of Special Relativity, published in 1905. To rewrite this law would have broad-ranging implications, including even the possibility of time travel.
Could Einsteins theory finally be disproved?
Foxnews
Nothing goes faster than the speed of light. At least, we didn't think so.
New results from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland seem to break this cardinal rule of physics, calling into question one of the most trusted laws discovered by Albert Einstein.
Physicists have found that tiny particles called neutrinos are making a 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip faster than they should — more quickly, in fact, than light could do. If the results are confirmed, they could throw much of modern physics into upheaval.
The results come from the OPERA experiment, which sends sprays of neutrinos from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. After analyzing the results from 15,000 particles, it seems the neutrinos are crossing the distance at a velocity 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light.
By making use of advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks, the researchers were able to determine this speed to an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds (.00000001 seconds)
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Fifty new alien worlds revealed
Always something new and exciting in space.
Cosmic Log/MSNBC
European astronomers have announced the discovery of more than 50 new planets beyond our solar system, including 16 that are just a notch above our own planet in mass. They say their record-breaking findings suggest that more than half of the stars like our sun possess planets, and that many of those worlds are less massive than Saturn.
The pick of the litter is a planet that's already been in the spotlight: HD 85512 b, a world at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth that's located 36 light-years away in the constellation Vela. HD 85512 b is the only one of the 16 super-Earths on today's list that is located in its star system's habitable zone. That's the area around a star where scientists believe water could exist in liquid form, which would make a rocky planet potentially livable.
HD 85512 b's status came to light a couple of weeks ago in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but the team behind the discovery provided more details about that super-Earth and the dozens of other worlds in papers presented today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Wyoming.
The findings came from the team behind the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, which is installed at the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Tributes to Terrorism Victims are on Mars
Way cool.
NASA JPL
In September 2001, Honeybee Robotics employees in lower Manhattan were building a pair of tools for grinding weathered rinds off rocks on Mars, so that scientific instruments on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity could inspect the rocks' interiors.
That month's attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, less than a mile away, shook the lives of the employees and millions of others.
Work on the rock abrasion tools needed to meet a tight schedule to allow thorough testing before launch dates governed by the motions of the planets. The people building the tools could not spend much time helping at shelters or in other ways to cope with the life-changing tragedy of Sept. 11. However, they did find a special way to pay tribute to the thousands of victims who perished in the attack.
An aluminum cuff serving as a cable shield on each of the rock abrasion tools on Mars was made from aluminum recovered from the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The metal bears the image of an American flag and fills a renewed purpose as part of solar system exploration.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Aliens May Strike Humans To Save The Galaxy
The 2012 doomsday prophecy is nothing compared to Aliens being so pissed off at how we take care of the earth that they are going to obliterate us to save the Galaxy!
Time to start drinking folks !
IBTimes
Global warming may not remain merely 'global' anymore, as a new study suggests its cosmic impact.
Beyond endangering the earthly inhabitants, humans may have posed a serious threat to the entire galaxy, possibly prompting aliens to destroy humanity in order to end global warming and save the rest of the galaxy from being contaminated as well.
Surprisingly, the suggestion comes from one of NASA's scientists.
The scenario was brought up in a joint study by Penn State University and the NASA Planetary Science Division, titled "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis."
"A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand," the study says. "Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions."
By using spectrometry, extraterrestrials could detect changes in Earth's atmosphere and deduce that we're out of control, speculated the researchers, among a number of other scenarios discussed in the 33-page paper.
World's oldest fossils discovered
Pre Oxygen Sulphur life !
Now think about that and look at all the Planets and exoplanets there are in the Universe and honestly say there is no life in it other than on Earth.
TG Daily
Scientists say they've found the world's oldest fossils, the remains of tiny creatures that lived 3.4 billion years ago in a pre-oxygen world.
‘At last we have good solid evidence for life over 3.4 billion years ago. It confirms there were bacteria at this time, living without oxygen,’ says Professor Martin Brasier of the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford.
The Earth was hotter than today, and dominated by volcanic activity. The oceans were as warm as a bath, and circulating currents were very strong. Land masses were small and the tidal range was huge.
And without plants or algae to photosynthesise and produce oxygen, very little oxygen was present. The early life appears to have been based on sulphur rather than oxygen for energy and growth.
"Such bacteria are still common today. Sulphur bacteria are found in smelly ditches, soil, hot springs, hydrothermal vents – anywhere where there’s little free oxygen and they can live off organic matter,’ says Brasier.
The microfossils were found in a remote part of Western Australia called Strelley Pool - the remains of the oldest beach or shoreline known on Earth - in some of the oldest sedimentary rocks that can be found anywhere.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Spaceport USA, Report.
When I was working in Texas, I had tried to visit this jobsite, Nothin doin from the contractors.
Nothing like fresh concrete paving the desert floor.
How Pretty.
So when I get rich I will definitely drop the 200,000 or what ever it may be by that time, to go into space; my better half says different but...
Foxnews
In the deserts of the western United States, space tourism is becoming a reality as construction progresses on Spaceport America -- the world’s first purpose-built commercial space travel facility, 45 miles north of Las Cruces, N.M.
Today, concrete and rebar litter the ground here as crews build walls and windows, roads and runways. They've been toiling for a year and a half and will continue until 2013, when a glowing, round disk standing testimony to the future will be unveiled in the desert -- at least according to artists' imaginations of the facility.
When the facility is finished, a mere $200,000 will let you take a voyage at least partway to the stars: Virgin Galactic will be the first carrier to transport space-curious passengers from Spaceport America on its sub-orbital missions.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Best Ways to Watch Perseid Meteor Shower, Despite Full Moon Interference
Last year they were phenomenal, this year not so good maybe.
But well worth getting up a bit early for.
IBTimes
While the several nights before the peak give you better chances to observe the beauty of meteors on the dark sky, it is too early to give up on the full moon-lit sky this weekend.
Turn your back on the bright moon, and look mainly to the northwest, below the summer triangle of Vega, Deneb, and Altair. Space.com also advised stargazers to look away from the radiant, because the longest and brightest meteors will be about 90 degrees away. The radiant is now located in the constellation Cassiopeia, not Perseus, with its characteristic "W" shape.
The best hours for the meteor shower to monopolize the night sky is after the moon has set and before the sun rises. Following the best viewing nights on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday night will also see a window of dark skies, while it's shorter. The meteor will be best seen from 3:29 a.m. to 3:56 a.m. in Boston, and 4:02 a.m. to 4:32 a.m. in Washington D.C. on Thursday, according to a table provided by Space.com.
On the very night of Friday to Saturday, 2 a.m. will be the peak of the Perseids, when over 100 meteors per hour will light up the sky.
Falcon hypersonic vehicle test flight fails
The Falcon bit the dust after 9 minutes, as did the first time they tried this.
Mach5 is the point we can not get past, it is very unstable to fly anything past that.
surely they will attempt it again in the future when they can get some funding in order.
The Los Angeles Times
A test flight of an experimental aircraft traveling at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped vehicle failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were monitoring the mission.
The unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was meant to test new technologies that could give the Pentagon the capability to deliver non-nuclear military strikes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.
But the Falcon's test flight ended prematurely and it plunged into the Pacific Ocean. It was the second and last scheduled flight for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million. Both flights failed to go the distance.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Experimental Aircraft to Go From Zero to 13,000 in Hypersonic Test Launch
Awesome stuff, but I don't know if the Human body can take such speeds within Earths atmosphere...
The goal of the project is to eventually enable the U.S. military to strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour
Oh! That explains it.
Foxnews
An unmanned aircraft that can travel at the breakneck speed of 20 times the speed of sound will take off Wednesday from an Air Force base in California for a test flight.
The Falcon HTV-2 is an arrow-shaped aircraft that launches on a rocket, separates and then glides at hypersonic speeds of 13,000 mph through the Earth’s atmosphere. (To put it in perspective, it would take less than 12 minutes to fly from New York to Los Angeles.)
Wednesday’s launch marks the aircraft's second flight. In April 2010, the Falcon flew for nine minutes, including 130 seconds of Mach 22 to Mach 17 flight, according to DARPA, the military's research arm.
The goal of the second flight is to "validate our assumptions and gain further insight into extremely high Mach regimes that we cannot fully replicate on the ground," Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz said in a DARPA news release.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Abundant Antimatter Circles the Earth
The find could one day open the door to fueling spacecraft with the exotic particle, an idea already being explored from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts.
Right out of Star Trek.
Funny how Science Fiction Always turns into Fact.
International Business Times
A band of anti-protons have been discovered ringing around the earth, researchers have found, adding to the list of particles Earth holds within its magnetic field.
Cosmic rays constantly rain in from space, colliding with earth's atmosphere and creating a spray of new particles. Scientists have observed antiparticles before, such as anti-protons, but this is the first time antiprotons have been observed.
Many of these particles become trapped inside Earth's Van Allen radiation belts, the donut shaped zones around Earth where particles spiral around the planet's magnetic field.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
NASA’s Juno explorer launches on its 5-year journey to Jupiter
Seeing as how their is no Space shuttle anymore, we at least have this to look forward too.
One of the greatest things America has ever done is explored space, and with budgets being cut the private sector will take over; Boeing is starting a space taxi service.
The Bulletin
LOS ANGELES — NASA’s spacecraft Juno lifted off Friday in an incandescent arc over the Atlantic Ocean, the start of a five-year, 1.7 billion-mile trip to Jupiter that scientists believe will unlock some of the secrets behind the origin of the solar system.
Juno launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida aboard an Atlas V rocket, soaring into warm, blue skies.
The craft then conducted two “burns” — bracketing a scheduled coast at 17,500 mph — to set it on the right trajectory.
Juno’s massive solar panels, configured like the spokes of a Ferris wheel, unfurled without a hitch, said Scott Bolton, the mission’s principal investigator and the director of space science at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Salty water may flow on Mars
Water on Mars? Why not, their is water here and water in space.
Water = Life.
The Los Angeles Times
Salty water may flow on Mars in the form of strange, dark lines on the terrain that grow and fade with the seasons, according to recent images. The findings, reported in the journal Science, provide a new line of evidence that life could exist on the Red Planet.
The findings, released Thursday, describe images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently circling the planet. The otherwise unremarkable lines on the planet's slopes grow more prominent during the warm season, proliferating from late Martian spring into early fall. This suggests they were made by volatile chemicals that can boil at relatively low temperatures, such as water and carbon dioxide, the authors wrote.
They look rather like flow lines that would be left by running water, ending in light-colored patches that could be material deposited by the flow, the authors added.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
'Trojan' asteroid shares Earth's orbit
Amazing things are always found in space, not that asteroids are just amazing; but finding one in the same orbit as Earth in 2011, thats amazing.
With all the technology floating out in space, 2010 TK7 (the new Asteroids official name) is only just discovered.
AFP
PARIS — Earth is not alone in its orbit around the Sun - a small 'Trojan' asteroid sits in front of our planet and leads it, according to British science revue Nature, which published the discovery Thursday.
This diminutive asteroid has a diameter of just 300 metres but is called a Trojan because of its particular position in a stable spot either in front of a planet or behind it. Because the asteroid and planet are constantly on the same orbit, they can never collide.
Jupiter, Mars and Neptune also have Trojan asteroids accompanying them, as do two of Saturn's moons.
NASA scientists discovered the asteroid, which lies 80 million kilometres (50 million miles) from Earth, using its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.
Astronomers have long thought that Earth did have some Trojans but their discovery has proved elusive because of the difficulty of seeing them in daylight.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Advertise on NYTimes.com NASA Picks Rover Destination: Mountain on Mars
At least we will have this, at least for now.
NASA would like to continue with space exploration, aside from this they have also announced plans to put Astronauts on a Asteroid.
Funding, of course, stands to be cut from the NASA Budget leaving us with nothing to pay attention to in space. 
The New York Times
NASA’s next Mars rover — the ambitious, beleaguered, delayed Mars Science Laboratory finally has a destination.
Mission scientists announced Friday that the rover, a nuclear-powered vehicle the size of a small S.U.V., would head to Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator. What attracted them there is a mountain that rises upward nearly three miles at the center, making it taller, for example, than Mount Rainier outside Seattle.
“The thing about this mountain is it’s not a tall spire,” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist, said at a news conference at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. “It’s a broad, low, moundlike shape. What it means is we can drive up it with a rover. So this might be the tallest mountain anywhere in the solar system that we could actually climb with a rover.”
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Largest Reservoir of Water Discovered in Space
Sounds like a good place for a swim !
International Business Timeshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Astromomers found a reservoir of water in space that measures 140 trillion times the earth's ocean water.
It is also the farthest reservoir of water ever discovered in the universe, according to two teams of researchers.
The water surrounds a huge, feeding black hole called a "quasar" more than 12 billion light-years away. The quasar is powered by a giant black hole which gradually consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust, while spewing out enormous amounts of energy.
Astronomers studied a quasar called APM 08279+5255, where the black hole is 20 billion times greater than the sun. They discovered water vapor distributed around the black holestretching out to hundreds of light-years in size.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
'Atlantis is home!'
Lets hope that the U.S Government can pull its collective head out of its ass long enough to get on with the next phase of space exploration, So we may see events like this again !
USA Today
Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space center on the final U.S. shuttle mission after 30 years.
Update at 6:05 a.m. ET: NASA notes that Atlantis, the youngest of the shuttles, has flown 33 missions and traveled more than 125 million miles. It will now go on display at the Kennedy Space Center.
Update at 5:58 a.m. ET: NASA control: "Atlantis is home. Its journey complete. A moment to be savored."
Update at 5:56 a.m. ET: Atlantis touches down.
Update at 5:47 a.m. ET: Shuttle is 10 minutes from touchdown.
What should be the Name of Pluto’s Fourth Moon?
Amazing after all these years and with the phenomenal telescopes that have been built in the years since Pluto was discovered, they discover a new moon.
International Business Times
Astronomers have discovered a fourth moon orbiting the distant planet of Pluto using the Hubble Space Telescope. The latest discovery has been temporarily named P4 and joins the planet's other three satellites; Charon, Nix and Hydra.
The finding has been the result of the ongoing work supporting NASA's New Horizons mission which is scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.
"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," stated Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.
Although P4 is the temporary designation of Pluto's new satellite, astronomers and space researchers have been dwelling on all possible names for the fourth moon.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Dawn probe has date with asteroid
Unfortunately after the shuttle lands this will be the only space stuff we hear of.
not that it is not interesting or cool, it is just a step backwards for the space program.
BBC
The US space agency says its Dawn probe should now be in orbit around the asteroid Vesta.
The robotic satellite will be spending a year at the 530km-wide body before moving on to the "dwarf planet" Ceres.
New pictures on Dawn's approach to Vesta show the giant rock in unprecedented detail.
The asteroid looks like a punctured football, the result of a colossal collision sometime in its past that knocked off its south polar region.
Confirmation that Dawn is safely circling the rock should come on Sunday (GMT) when the probe is due to return data on its status.
