Saturn's Glorious Rings Dazzle in NASA Photo

NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped this angled shot of Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal. Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is visible as a tiny white speck in the lower lefthand corner. Space.com

MARS Curiosity rover's landing footage

The shot above is the first high(ish) resolution photo shown to the public from its cameras, depicting a shadow of its top, a peculiar Martian landscape and the three-mile Mount Sharp. Just beyond the break, you'll find video footage of the intense descent onto Mars' surface. MadOne

Saturn's Two Largest Moons Line Up

 
Saturn's two biggest moons hang together in a stunning new photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The image shows the heavily cratered Rhea in the foreground, while the hazy orb of the huge moon Titan looms in the distance. Cassini snapped the shot in visible green light on Dec. 10, 2011, and it was released to the public on Monday (Feb. 13). Cassini was about 808,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Rhea and 1.2 million miles (2 million km) from Titan when it took the picture, researchers said. Titan is the largest of Saturn's many satellites; at 3,200 miles (5,150 km) wide, it's nearly 1.5 times bigger than Earth's moon. The only moon in our solar system larger than Titan is Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter. 

 
Titan has a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere that shrouds the frigid body in a soupy brown shroud. Complex organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — swirl about in this atmosphere. The huge moon also has a hydrocarbon-based weather system, with methane rain falling from the sky and pooling in liquid-methane lakes. Astrobiologists speculate that Titan may be one of the best places in the solar system to search for life beyond Earth.

Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon, but it's a shrimp compared to Titan, measuring just 949 miles (1528 km) across. As the new photo shows, Rhea's icy surface is battered and pocked with many craters. Like Titan, Rhea has an atmosphere. But Rhea's is very different; it's much wispier and composed primarily of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Researchers think the oxygen comes from Rhea's surface ice, liberated from water molecules that get blasted apart by charged particles streaming from Saturn's magnetosphere. The source of the carbon dioxide, however, is more mysterious. Space.com

NASA's Kepler confirms 26 new planets

The US space agency said Thursday its Kepler space telescope mission has confirmed 26 new planets outside our solar system, all of them orbiting too close to their host stars to sustain life. Scattered across 11 planetary systems, their temperatures would be too hot for survival, as they all circle their stars closer than Venus, the second planet from the Sun, which has a surface temperature of 464 Celsius (867 F). But NASA scientists were still pleased with the findings, which nearly double the number of confirmed planets that Kepler has found since 2009.

"Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates," he added. "This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits." 

In December last year, NASA announced Kepler had confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system, Kepler 22b, though it remained unclear whether the surface was rocky or gaseous. Such planets have the right distance from their star to support water, plus a suitable temperature and atmosphere to support life. Spinning around its star some 600 light years away, Kepler 22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth and orbits its Sun-like star every 290 days. The 26 planets that Kepler confirmed on Thursday orbit their stars between every six and 143 days. AP

NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone

This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.
CREDIT: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5). The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700. The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one which could conceivably harbor life, scientists said. 

The newfound planet in the habitable zone is called Kepler-22b. It is located about 600 light-years away, orbiting a sun-like star. Kepler-22b's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth, and the two planets have roughly similar temperatures. If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius).

This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.
CREDIT: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Of the total 2,326 candidate planets that Kepler has found to date, 207 are approximately Earth-size. More of them, 680, are a bit larger than our planet, falling into the "super-Earth" category. The total number of candidate planets in the habitable zones of their stars is now 48. To date, just over two dozen of these potential exoplanets have been confirmed, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of the instrument's discoveries should end up being the real deal. Space.com

New Finding Ups the Chances of Life on Jupiter's Moon Europa

Europa, as viewed from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. Visible are plains of bright ice, cracks that run to the horizon, and dark patches that likely contain both ice and dirt.

 
Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, meets not one but two of the critical requirements for life, scientists say. For decades, experts have known about the moon's vast underground ocean — a possible home for living organisms — and now a study shows that the ocean regularly receives influxes of the energy required for life via chaotic processes near the moon's surface. Lead author Britney Schmidt, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that her team studied ice shelves and underground volcanoes on Earth in order to model the formation of odd features called "chaos terrains" that appear all over Europa. The researchers determined that it was heat rising from the moon's deep subterranean ocean and melting ice near the surface, creating briny lakes inside the moon's thick ice shell, that may have caused the collapse of these roughly circular structures above them. These dynamic lakes, which melt and refreeze over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, lie beneath as much as 50 percent of Europa's surface, the scientists said. 

Europa's liquid water ocean "meets one of the critical requirements for life," Hoehler said, noting that its ocean chemistry is believed to be suitable for sustaining living things. "And what you're hearing about today from Britney bears on a second crucial requirement, and that is the requirement for energy." Cut off from the sun, Europa's subterranean ocean would need some other energy source to sustain life. Hoehler said spacecraft observations show that there is a huge amount of stored energy in Europa's mineral-rich crust, but it is separated from the liquid ocean below by at least 6 miles (10 km) of ice. Like the two terminals of a battery, energy can flow from the surface material to the ocean only if the two are somehow connected, he said. Europan life isn't a done deal just yet, though. Water and energy aren't the only ingredients on the checklist for life, and scientists aren't sure whether Europa has the others, such as the necessary organic chemicals. SPACE.COM

Newly found 'super-Earth' could potentially support life

 

More than 50 new alien planets — including one so-called super-Earth that could potentially support life — have been discovered by an exoplanet-hunting telescope from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The newfound haul of alien planets includes 16 super-Earths, which are potentially rocky worlds that are more massive than our planet. One in particular - called HD 85512 b - has captured astronomers' attention because it orbits at the edge of its star's habitable zone, suggesting conditions could be ripe to support life. 

The potentially habitable super-Earth, officially called HD 85512 b, is estimated to be only 3.6 times more massive than Earth, and its parent star is located about 35 light-years away, making it relatively nearby. HD 85512 b was found to orbit at the edge of its star's habitable zone, which is a narrow region in which the distance is just right that liquid water could exist given the right conditions. Astronomers have previously discovered 564 confirmed alien planets, with roughly 1,200 additional candidate worlds under investigation based on data from the Kepler space observatory, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Space.com

 

James Webb Space Telescope to Now Cost $8.7 Billion

 
WASHINGTON — NASA has confirmed a new cost estimate for its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that a key congressional appropriator and critic cited in July in proposing to terminate the flagship-class astronomy mission.

"NASA has completed a JWST replan that assumes a revised life-cycle-cost of about $8.7 billion and a launch readiness date of October 2018," agency spokesman Trent Perrotto said in an Aug. 26 email to Space News. "The $8.7 billion life-cycle-cost includes development, launch, and five years of operations and science costs."
That figure is $2.2 billion higher than the already budget-busting lifecycle cost estimate provided by an independent review panel last year. At that time, NASA’s official cost estimate for the James Webb Space Telescope, the designated successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, was about $5 billion.

The Webb telescope, unlike Hubble, would be deployed far from the Earth at an Earth-sun Lagrange point — a point in space where the respective gravitational pulls of the two bodies cancel one another out. Hubble, on the other hand, is in a low Earth orbit and was deployed and later serviced by space shuttle astronauts.
Whereas Hubble makes its observations in visible light spectrum — and to a lesser degree in the ultraviolet and infrared spectra — JWST is optimized for observations in infrared wavelengths. Space.com

Potential Liquid Water On Mars 'A Big Deal

Picture of Martian Surface from NASA's Spirit Rover

 

Claims of water on Mars have been made before, but a new discovery of potential liquid water on the Red Planet's surface last week is still making waves in the science world. What differentiates the new find from previous discoveries is the fact that it's the strongest evidence yet for liquid water, as opposed to ice, and it's on the Martian surface, as opposed to miles underground where it would be difficult to verify its presence. The research is based on observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which observed seasonal changes in slopes carved into the planet's surface that appear most likely to have been formed by flowing salty, briny water. Scientists not involved with the project agree that the discovery could be big.

Not only does the new discovery rekindle hopes that Mars hosts life, but it offers the chance that finding it might not be as difficult as once thought. Until now, many searches for life have also focused on the Red Planet's potential for past habitability on the surface, when Mars was thought to be a much wetter world. "Identification of environments where life might be able to survive on present-day Mars could shift our focus from past to present-day habitability," Carr said. "The subsurface might be one good place to look, but areas with potential liquid brines at the surface are much more accessible." 

But before we start counting our Martians before they hatch, all the scientists advised caution until more data is available to prove that the slopes are actually caused by water. Space.com

NASA spacecraft begins 5-year trip to Jupiter

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — A sun-powered robotic explorer named Juno is rocketing toward Jupiter on a fresh quest to discover the secret recipe for making planets. Juno is solar powered, a first for a spacecraft meant to roam so far from the sun. The three huge solar panels popped open an hour into the flight, each one stretching as long and wide as a tractor-trailer. Previous spacecraft to the outer planets have relied on nuclear energy. Jupiter is so big it could contain everything in the solar system, minus the sun, and still be twice as massive. Astronomers say it probably was the first planet in the solar system to form.

Juno will venture much closer to Jupiter than any of the eight spacecraft that have visited since the 1970s, most of them just passing by. It's by far the most focused and elaborate Jupiter mission. "We look deeper. We go much closer. We're going over the poles. So we're doing a lot of new things that have never been done, and we're going to get all this brand-new information," Bolton said. The $1.1 billion mission — which will end with Juno taking a fatal plunge into Jupiter in 2017 — kicks off a flurry of astronomy missions by NASA.

If all goes well, Juno will go into orbit around Jupiter's poles — a first — on July 4, 2016.

NASA's Next Mars Rover to Land at Huge Gale Crater

 

WASHINGTON — It's official: NASA's next Mars rover has a landing site, and it's a giant crater called Gale. NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is slated to launch in late November, and will drop a car-size rover named Curiosity at the Gale crater. Gale crater is about 96 miles (154 kilometers) wide and has a mountain at its center that rises higher, from the crater floor up, than Mount Rainer near Seattle. The crater, which is named after Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale, is so large that the U.S. states of Connecticut and Rhode Island could fit inside it, NASA officials said. 

Gale crater is also thought to harbor clues of ancient water activity on the Martian surface, and one of Curiosity's primary tasks will be to root around for evidence that Mars is, or was, capable of supporting microbial life. 

The agency revealed the landing site (July 22) in a briefing hosted by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The announcement coincides with the museum's celebration of Mars Day, which commemorates the 35th anniversary of NASA's Viking 1 Mars landing on July 20, 1976. Space.com

Bright galaxy sheds light on early Universe

This NASA image obtained in February 2011 shows black holes.

Light from a bright, ancient galaxy with a super-massive black hole at its core, a finding that would help explain aspects of the young Universe. The phenomenon is called a quasar, which are very bright but very distant galaxies with a mighty black hole at their heart. 

Measurements show the quasar's black hole has a mass about two billion times that of the Sun, a size hard to reconcile with current theories. Super-massive black holes, according to a common hypothesis, should take billions of years to build up as they gradually suck in matter from their surroundings.
AFP

Orion Unveiled: Spitzer Telescope Spies Nebula’s Infrared Secrets

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion nebula, the closest massive star-making factory to Earth. Space.com 

Giant Black Hole's Massive Jets Get Close-Up

Merging X-ray data (blue) from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with microwave (orange) and visible images reveals the jets and radio-emitting lobes emanating from Centaurus A's central black hole.

Energetic jets spewed forth from a galaxy's supermassive black hole got a close-up in their most detailed image ever taken by Earth radio telescopes. The picture shows jets racing away at one-third the speed of light from a huge black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Most matter falling toward a black hole becomes trapped, but some matter at the base of the jets gets ejected outward at about one-third the speed of light. In this case, the black hole sits at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy.


The matter in the jets has created a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes that each stretch almost a million light-years long. That makes the Centaurus A galaxy appear almost 20 times the size of a full moon when seen in radio waves, despite being 12 million light-years away from Earth. Space.com

US astronomers start looking for alien life

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets, US astronomers said Friday. The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one. 

Astronomers hope the powerful Green Bank Telescope, a previous incarnation of which was felled in a windstorm in 1988, will provide targeted information about potential life-supporting planets. "Our search employs the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and the most sensitive radio telescope in the world capable of undertaking a SETI search of this kind," Siemion told AFP.

"We will be looking at a much wider range of frequencies and signal types than has ever been possible before," he added, describing the instrumentation as "at the very cutting edge of radio astronomy technology."
The surface of the telescope is 100 by 110 meters and it can record nearly one gigabyte of data per second, Siemion said. 

The project will likely take about a year to complete, and will be helped by a team of one million at-home astronomers, known as SETI@home users, who will help process the data on personal computers.

All Signs Point to Hidden Ocean on Saturn Moon Titan

A huge ocean of liquid water may indeed slosh about beneath the frigid surface of Saturn's moon Titan, according to new evidence collected by a NASA spacecraft. 

The observations were made by NASA's Cassini probe, which has been eyeing Saturn and its rings and moons from orbit since arriving at the gas giant in 2004.
Certain details of Titan's orbit and rotation aren't compatible with the behavior of a celestial body that is completely solid all the way through. But these details make a lot of sense if the huge moon is assumed to have a subsurface ocean, likely of liquid water, researchers said.

Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 known moons, is considered one of the leading candidates to host life beyond Earth. Space.com

NASA Shortlists 3 Ambitious Planetary Missions for 2016 Launch

Three ambitious space missions have made NASA's shortlist for a planned robotic planetary expedition to launch in 2016. The candidates include a mission to glimpse Mars' interior, a voyage to the extraterrestrial sea of Saturn's moon Titan, and a probe to take an unprecedented look at the surface of a comet's core. Ultimately, only one mission will win the coveted rocket launch, NASA officials said. The investigation team for each mission proposal will receive $3 million for a preliminary design stage, they added.

After NASA reviews these concept studies, the space agency will choose one to continue development leading up to launch as part of NASA's Discovery Program, whose missions have included the Messenger probe to Mercury, the asteroid-chasing Dawn spacecraft, as well as the agency's Stardust, Deep Impact and Genesis probes. The final mission will have a fixed budget of $425 million, not including the cost of its launch vehicle. Space.com

Alien Bacteria Could Breed in Extreme 'Hypergravity'

If alien life is out there, it may be able to exploit more-extreme environments than scientists think, because huge gravitational forces don't seem to pose much of a problem for microbes.

Several different species of bacteria can survive and reproduce in "hypergravity" more than 400,000 times stronger than that of the Earth, a new study reports. The find suggests that alien life could take root in a wide range of conditions -- and that it could survive the high G-forces imposed by meteorite impacts and ejections, making the exchange of life between planets a distinct possibility. "The number and types of environments that we now think life can inhabit in the universe has expanded. The results also suggest that the transport of viable lifeforms between worlds is a real possibility, researchers said.


Over the ages, Earth has been showered with perhaps 1 billion tons of Mars rocks, which were liberated from the Red Planet via meteorite strikes. Such interplanetary exchanges, in our solar system or others, could theoretically transfer microbes as well -- an aspect of the "panspermia" hypothesis, which posits that the seeds of life are everywhere and hopscotch from world to world. Space.com

Dry ice find hints Mars was a wetter place

 WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA has discovered that the south pole of Mars is home to 30 times more dry ice than previously believed, suggesting that the red planet was once a much wetter place, said a study on Thursday.

Taking data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers found "large quantities of ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide may be trapped in the solid chunks of dry ice," said the study published in the journal Science. "The results add to a growing pile of evidence suggesting that long ago, ancient Mars had a thicker, carbon dioxide-filled atmosphere and flowing bodies of water," said the study.

The dry ice reservoir is nearly 3,000 cubic miles, similar in volume to Lake Superior, the largest of the Five Great Lakes of North America, NASA said in a statement. The red planet's atmosphere is about 95 percent carbon dioxide, compared to Earth's which is about .04 percent carbon dioxide.

Vortex on Venus Changes Shape Every Day

 

A giant vortex at the south pole of Venus is actually a shape-shifter that changes form at least once a day, at times bizarrely taking on the appearance of a giant letter "S" or the number "8," a new study reveals.

Venus, the second closest planet to the sun, possesses giant, hot and essentially permanent vortexes of clouds whirling fast at its poles. These result from how Venus' atmosphere circulates much faster than any other rocky planet's in the solar system — the cloud-level atmosphere of Venus on average spins 60 times faster than the planet's surface. 

This image shows the polar region of Venus, at a wavelength of 3.8 microns. The arrows denote the motion of the atmosphere around a center of rotation (marked with a white dot). The center of rotation is found to be displaced on average by about 300 km from the geographic south pole.

Past images suggested the roughly 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer) southern polar vortex was only a spinning oval shape. However, new infrared pictures from the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission revealed far more detail than past images, showing that the vortex's internal structure changes shape at least every 24 hours. Space.com