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

Ancient Water Streambed Discovered On Mars

A NASA rover's discovery of an ancient streambed on Mars is exciting, but it’s far from the first solid evidence that the Red Planet was once a warmer and wetter place. On Thursday (Sept. 27), scientists announced that the Curiosity rover had found rocky outcrops containing large and rounded stones cemented in a conglomerate matrix. The discovery suggests that water had flowed fast and relatively deep — perhaps hip-deep, in fact — through the area billions of years ago.

But Curiosity's find didn't exactly surprise mission scientists. They chose to set the $2.5 billion robot down in the Red Planet's huge Gale Crater, after all, because Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs there of long-ago water activity — from channels and alluvial fans to minerals that form in the presence of liquid water.And these more recent observations build on evidence for a wet ancient Mars that goes back four decades and has been accumulating ever since. 

Curiosity's mission may also shed light on when and why Mars dried out long ago. Scientists plan to drive the 1-ton robot partway up Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Red Planet sky from Gale's center. They're keen to explore Mount Sharp's base, which harbors clays and sulfates, orbital observations have shown. About 2,300 feet (700 meters) up, however, these deposits peter out. If Curiosity climbs high enough to cross this threshold, it could help scientists piece together a history of wet Mars, dry Mars and the transition between the two, researchers have said. 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

Parts of Mars Interior as Wet as Earth's

The interior of Mars holds vast reservoirs of water, with some spots apparently as wet as Earth's innards, scientists say. The finding upends previous studies, which had estimated that the Red Planet's internal water stores were scanty at best — something of a surprise, given that liquid water apparently flowed on the Martian surface long ago. The scientists examined two Martian meteorites that formed in the planet's mantle, the layer under the crust. These rocks landed on Earth about 2.5 million years ago, after being blasted off the Red Planet by a violent impact. Using a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry, the team determined that the mantle from which the meteorites derived contained between 70 and 300 parts per million (ppm) of water. Earth's mantle, for comparison, holds roughly 50-300 ppm water, researchers said.

"The results suggest that water was incorporated during the formation of Mars and that the planet was able to store water in its interior during the planet’s differentiation."  Some of this water apparently made its made to the surface in the ancient past. NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, have found plenty of evidence that Mars was far warmer and wetter billions of years ago than it is today. The two golf-cart-size robots have even spotted signs of ancient hydrothermal systems, suggesting that some places on the Red Planet once had both water and an energy source — two key ingredients for the existence of life as we know it.

While the new results should help scientists better understand Mars and its history, they could also shed light on the evolution of large, rocky bodies in a more general sense, researchers said.

"Not only does this study explain how Mars got its water, it provides a mechanism for hydrogen storage in all the terrestrial planets at the time of their formation," lead author Francis McCubbin, of the University of New Mexico, said in a statement. Space.com / MadOne

SpaceX Successfully Launches the First Privately Built Spacecraft to the International Space Station

After a handful of delays and one abort on the launch pad, SpaceX began its historic journey toward the International Space Station just before 4:00 a.m. eastern time this morning as its Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in a spectacular nighttime launch. MadOne

100-Year Starship Project Forges Ahead With First Round of Funding

An ambitious effort for an interstellar travel planning organization officially kicked off this week, after DARPA awarded $500,000 to form the 100-Year Starship initiative. Former astronaut Mae Jemison, whose proposal was selected earlier this year, will lead the new independent organization. The goal is to ensure that the capability for human interstellar travel exists within the next 100 years. It may not look like the starship Enterprise, but a real interstellar vessel is possible within that timeframe, Jemison said. “Yes, it can be done. Our current technology arc is sufficient,” she said in a statement.

In its first year, the organization will seek new investors and develop new ideas for interstellar exploration, the new 100YSS website says. A public symposium is planned for September in Houston, where anyone from engineers to philosophers will be able to present papers and host talks about the challenges of such a project. The 100-Year Starship is not necessarily a ship per se, but an organization that can last 100 years and potentially carry out the vision of a real starship. It will look for input from scientists, engineers, doctors, sociologists, writers (!), ethicists and public policy experts. The 100-Year Starship project also has a new scientific research partner called The Way, an awesomely named spinoff that will focus on “speculative, long-term science and technology,” according to the project. We can't wait to see what they come up with. Popsci

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

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

NASA Spacecraft Arrives at Asteroid Next Week

NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image on its approach to the protoplanet Vesta, the second-most massive object in the main asteroid belt. The image was obtained on June 20, 2011.

 
A NASA spacecraft is just 11 days away from a historic rendezvous with an asteroid the size of Arizona. NASA's Dawn probe should enter into orbit around Vesta on July 16, becoming the first spacecraft to visit the 330-mile-wide (530-kilometer) space rock — the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn is expected to spend a year studying the space rock from above, marking the first time a spacecraft has ever made an extended visit to a large asteroid.

Vesta is so large that many scientists classify it as a protoplanet. The object was well on its way to becoming a full-fledged rocky planet long ago, scientists said, but circumstances intervened. So Vesta is a sort of time capsule, preserving some record of how the solar system came together 4.5 billion years ago.

Scientists hope Dawn's mission will help them learn about the early days of the solar system and the processes that formed and shaped rocky planets like Earth and Mars. 

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 

Satellite 'helps find 17 Egypt pyramids'

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Archaeologists have uncovered as many as 17 buried pyramids in Egypt with the help of NASA satellite imagery, according to a documentary to be aired by the BBC on Monday. Led by US researcher Sarah Parcak at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the team has already confirmed two of the suspected pyramids through excavation work.


The BBC, which funded the research, released the findings this week ahead of a broadcast describing the technique and what was uncovered. The team also found more than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements, according to the report. Infrared images, which were taken by satellites orbiting 700 kilometers (435 miles) above the Earth, revealed the below-ground structures. The satellites used powerful cameras that can "pinpoint objects less than one meter (three feet) in diameter on the Earth's surface," the report said. 

The documentary, "Egypt's Lost Cities," airs Monday on BBC One and will also be shown on the Discovery channel in the United States.

NASA Unveils New Spaceship for Deep Space Exploration

Artist's rendering of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a deep space mission.

NASA on Tuesday announced a plan to develop a new deep space vehicle, one based on an earlier capsule concept, in order to send astronauts on expeditions to an asteroid, and then on to Mars. The spaceship, known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion spacecraft, NASA officials announced today (May 24). Orion was part of NASA's now-cancelled Constellation program, which aimed to return astronauts to the moon by the 2020s. 

Lockheed Martin Corp., NASA's prime contractor for Orion, will continue work to develop the MPCV spacecraft, agency officials said. The spacecraft will carry four astronauts for three-week missions. The flights will end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. The MPCV will have a pressurized volume of 690 cubic feet (20 cubic meters), with 316 cubic feet (9 cubic m) of habitable space, according to an official description.

The MPCV will launch aboard a new heavy-lift rocket that NASA is also developing, agency officials said. Last year, Congress instructed the agency to have the spaceship and the launch vehicle ready to go by 2016, though NASA has said recently that it will probably need more time.

"We are committed to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and look forward to developing the next generation of systems to take us there," NASA adminstrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement. Space.com

Space Shuttle Endeavour Does A 'Backflip' To Dock With ISS

The space shuttle Endeavour, which blasted off on Monday for its final mission, docked with the International Space Station on Wednesday. NASA has released a video of the Endeavour performing the "rendez pitch maneuver" (which NASA dubs a "backflip") as it arrived at the ISS for the last time. 

As the AP noted, the shuttle is carrying, "the most expensive payload ever carried by a shuttle, a $2 billion magnetic device that scientists hope will unravel the mysteries of the cosmos." The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will be attached to the ISS on Thursday. Space.com