News (Page 894)

Opportunity Starts Historic Descent of Tantalizing Martian Gully to Find Out How Was It Carved Historic 1st descent down Martian gully. Panoramic view looking down Perseverance Valley after entry at top was acquired by NASA’s Opportunity rover scanning from north to south. It shows numerous wheel tracks at left, center and right as rover conducted walkabout tour prior to starting historic first decent down a Martian gully – possibly carved by water – and looks into the interior of Endeavour crater. Perseverance Valley terminates down near the crater floor in the center of the panorama. The far rim of Endeavour crater is seen in theRead More →

Cassini Finds that Titan is Building the Chemicals that Might Have Led to Life on Earth Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has been a source of mystery ever since scientists began studying it over a century ago. These mysteries have only deepened with the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens mission in the system back in 2004. In addition to finding evidence of a methane cycle, prebiotic conditions and organic chemistry, the Cassini-Huygens mission has also discovered that Titan may have the ingredient that help give rise to life. Such is the argument made in a recent study by an international team of scientists. After examining data obtained byRead More →

Hubble Sees Tiny Phobos Orbiting Mars Mars’ moon Phobos is a pretty fascinating customer! Compared to Mars other moon Deimos, Phobos (named after the Greek personification of fear) is the larger and innermost satellite of the Red Planet. Due to its rapid orbital speed, the irregularly-shaped moon orbits Mars once every 7 hours, 39 minutes, and 12 seconds. In other words, it completes over three orbits of Mar within a single Earth day. It’s not too surprising then that during a recent observation of Mars with the Hubble space telescope,  Phobos chose to photobomb the picture! It all took place in May of 2016, whenRead More →

New Comet: C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN Takes Earth by Surprise Getting brighter… Comet O1 ASAS-SN from July 23rd. Image credit and copyright: iTelescope/Rolando Ligustri. A new comet discovery crept up on us this past weekend, one that should be visible for northern hemisphere observers soon. We’re talking about Comet C/2017 O1 ASAS-SN, a long period comet currently visiting the inner solar system. When it was discovered on July 19th, 2017 by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) system, Comet O1 ASAS-SN was at a faint magnitude +15.3 in the constellation Cetus. In just a few short days, however, the comet jumped up a hundred-foldRead More →

Breakthrough Lofts the Smallest Satellites Ever, not Interstellar Yet, but a Step Forward In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner established Breakthrough Initiatives, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In April of the following year, he and the organization be founded announced the creation of Breakthrough Starshot, a program to create a lightsail-driven “wafercraft” that would make the journey to the nearest star system – Alpha Centauri – within our lifetime. This past June, the organization took a major step towards achieving this goal. After hitching a ride on some satellites being deployed to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Breakthrough conductedRead More →

Ready to Leave Low Earth Orbit? Prototype Construction Begins for a Deep Space Habitat In 2010, NASA accounted its commitment to mount a crewed mission to Mars by the third decade of the 21st century. Towards this end, they have working hard to create the necessary technologies – such as the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft. At the same time, they have partnered with the private sector to develop the necessary components and expertise needed to get crews beyond Earth and the Moon. To this end, NASA recently awarded a Phase II contract to Lockheed Martin to create a new spaceRead More →

Dream Chaser Mini-Shuttle to Fly ISS Resupply Missions on ULA Atlas V Artist’s concept of the Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser spacecraft launching atop the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in the 552 configuration on cargo missions to the International Space Station. Credit: ULA The first two missions of the unmanned Dream Chaser mini-shuttle carrying critical cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) will fly on the most powerful version of the Atlas V rocket and start as soon as 2020, announced Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and United Launch Alliance (ULA). “We have selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket to launch our firstRead More →

Ancient Volcanoes on Mars Could Have Been the Place for Life For decades, Mars has been the focal point of intense research. Beginning in the 1960s, literally dozens of robotic spacecraft, orbiters and rovers have explored Mars’ atmosphere and surface, looking for clues to the planet’s past. From this, scientists now know that billions of years ago, Mars was a warmer, wetter place. Not only did liquid water exist on its surface, but it is possible life existed there in some form as well. Granted, some recent findings have cast some doubt in this, indicating that Mars’ surface may have been hostile to microbes. ButRead More →

Good News for Future Moon Bases. There’s Water Inside the Moon Since the Apollo program wrapped up in the early 1970s, people all around the world have dreamed of the day when we might return to the Moon, and stay there. And in recent years, however, that actual proposals for a lunar settlement have begun to take shape. As a result, a great deal of attention and research has been focused on whether or not the Moon has indigenous sources of water. Thanks to missions like Chandrayaan-1 and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists know that there are vast amounts of surface ice on the Moon.Read More →

Carnival of Space #519 This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Brad Rogers at The Evolving Planet blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #519. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out,Read More →

What is the Weather Like on Mercury? With the dawning of the Space Age in the 1950s, human beings were no longer confined to studying the Solar planets and other astronomical bodies with Earth-based instruments alone. Instead crewed missions have gone into orbit and to the Moon while robotic missions have traveled to every corner of the Solar System. And in the process, we have learned some interesting things about the planets, planetoids, and asteroids in our Solar neighborhood. For example, we have learned that all the Solar planets have their own particular patterns and cycles. For instance, even though Mercury is an airless body,Read More →

Messier 51 – the Whirlpool Galaxy Welcome back to Messier Monday! In our ongoing tribute to the great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at Orion’s Nebula’s “little brother”, the De Marian’s Nebula! During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noted the presence of several “nebulous objects” in the night sky. Having originally mistaken them for comets, he began compiling a list of them so that others would not make the same mistake he did. In time, this list (known as the Messier Catalog) would come to include 100 of the most fabulous objects in the night sky. One of these is theRead More →

Musk Drops Propulsive Landing Plans for SpaceX Crew Dragon Artists concept for sending SpaceX Red Dragon spacecraft to land propulsively on Mars as early as 2020. Credit: SpaceX SpaceX is dropping its original plans to propulsively ground land the advanced crewed version of their Dragon spacecraft planned for missions carrying astronauts returning from the International Space Station (ISS) – in a decision that potentially impacts future plans for Mars landings as well. The announcement came directly from SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk while speaking at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, D.C. on July 19. For “safety” reasons, Musk saidRead More →

Earth-Sized Planet Takes Just Four Hours to Orbit its Star The Kepler space observatory has made some interesting finds since it began its mission back in March of 2009. Even after the mission suffered the loss of two reaction wheels, it has continued to make discoveries as part of its K2 mission. All told, the Kepler and K2 missions have detected a total of 5,106 planetary candidates, and confirmed the existence of 2,493 planets. One of the latest finds made using Kepler is EPIC 228813918 b, a terrestrial (i.e. rocky) planet that orbits a red dwarf star some 264 to 355 light years from Earth.Read More →

Advanced Civilizations Could Build a Galactic Internet with Planetary Transits Decades after Enrico Fermi’s uttered his famous words – “Where is everybody?” – the Paradox that bears his name still haunts us. Despite repeated attempts to locate radio signals coming from space and our ongoing efforts to find visible indications of alien civilizations in distant star systems, the search extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to produce anything substantive. But as history has taught us, failure has a way of stimulated new and interesting ideas. For example, in a recently-published paper, Dr. Duncan H. Forgan of St. Andrews University proposed that extra-terrestrial civilizations could be communicatingRead More →

Hey Map Collectors, Here’s a New Map of Pluto! On July 14th, 2015, the New Horizons mission made history when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a flyby of Pluto and its moons. In the course of making its way through this system, the probe gathered volumes of data on Pluto and its many satellites using a sophisticated suite of instruments. These included the first detailed images of what Pluto and its largest moon (Charon) look like up close. And while scientists are still analyzing the volumes of data that the probe has sent home (and probably will be for years to come), theRead More →

One. More. Month: Our Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse Totality! An incredible moment from the March 29th, 2006 total solar eclipse. Credit and copyright: Alan Dyer/Amazing Sky Photography Have you heard? I remember, getting into astronomy as a kid back in the 1970s, building a pinhole projector in a shoe box and watching the partial solar eclipse of February 26th, 1979 from our living room in northern Maine. I had no Learjet, no magic carpet to whisk me off to that thin thread of a path of totality way out west along the Pacific coast. As I settled for the 66% partial solar eclipse,Read More →

Carnival of Space #518 It’s that time again! This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Pamela Hoffman at the Everyday Spacer blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #518. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really wantRead More →