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Space

SPACE: Is There Someone Out There?

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signals from space

An initiative set up to find signs of intelligent life in the universe has detected a series of mysterious radio signals from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away. Scientists with Breakthrough Listen say they’ve found 15 fast radio bursts, or FRBs, from a deep space “repeater” called FRB 121102. The numbers indicate when the first signal was discovered, on Nov. 2, 2012. While a few other FRBs have been detected, what makes this one unique is that it was heard again in 2015, and its location pinpointed a year later. See the Full Story at The Huffington Post

SPACE: Large Asteroid To Make Near-Earth Pass On Friday

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Asteroid - pixabay

Hold your breath: A large rock will fly past Earth on Sept. 1, 2017, at a distance of 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers). Asteroid 3122 Florence, named after modern nursing founder Florence Nightingale, is the largest object to make a close-encounter since NASA began tracking near-Earth objects (NEO) in the 1990s. “While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on Sept. 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Florence is estimated … Read more

SPACE: Best. Job. Ever.

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Planetary Protection Officer

From the NASA job website: Planetary Protection Officer This position is assigned to Office of Safety and Mission Assurance for Planetary Protection. Planetary protection is concerned with the avoidance of organic-constituent and biological contamination in human and robotic space exploration. NASA maintains policies for planetary protection applicable to all space flight missions that may intentionally or unintentionally carry Earth organisms and organic constituents to the planets or other solar system bodies, and any mission employing spacecraft, which are intended to return to Earth and its biosphere with samples from extraterrestrial targets of exploration. This policy is based on federal requirements … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Golem

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Chinese scientists broke the boundaries of human technology yet again in early July. With precision, determination and science prowess that just boggles the mind, these scientists managed to send a photon from Earth to an orbiting satellite, using quantum teleportation. Six times. It’s a feat scientists the world over have been aiming for a long time time now. A quantum scientist friend of mine is absolutely green with envy. I applaud this monumental discovery and look forward to more. Quantum teleportation, for those who have no idea what it is, is a process by which quantum information can be transmitted … Read more

SPACE: Nasa to Test Earth Defense System

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NASA scientists are excited about the upcoming close flyby of a small asteroid and plan to use its upcoming October close approach to Earth as an opportunity not only for science, but to test NASA’s network of observatories and scientists who work with planetary defense. The target of all this attention is asteroid 2012 TC4 — a small asteroid estimated to be between 30 and 100 feet (10 and 30 meters) in size. On Oct. 12, TC4 will safely fly past Earth. Even though scientists cannot yet predict exactly how close it will approach, they are certain it will come … Read more

SPACE: NASA Craft Flies Over Jupiter’s Red Spot

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Cassini Jupiter

Scientists are about to get an up-close and personal look at the planet Jupiter’s most famous landmark, the Great Red Spot. NASA’s Juno spacecraft will be directly over the spot shortly after 10 p.m. ET Monday, July 10, about 5,600 miles above the gas giant’s cloud tops. That’s closer than any spacecraft has been before. The spot is actually a giant storm that has been blowing on Jupiter for centuries. It’s huge, larger than Earth in diameter. Not only will Juno’s camera be able to capture detailed images of the spot, but the probe also carries scientific instruments that can … Read more

NASA Captures Views of Brightest Galaxies

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Hubble Galaxies

Boosted by natural magnifying lenses in space, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured unique close-up views of the universe’s brightest infrared galaxies, which are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than our Milky Way. The galaxy images, magnified through a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, reveal a tangled web of misshapen objects punctuated by exotic patterns such as rings and arcs. The odd shapes are due largely to the foreground lensing galaxies’ powerful gravity distorting the images of the background galaxies. The unusual forms also may have been produced by spectacular collisions between distant, massive galaxies in a sort of … Read more

SPACE: Mars is Made of Swiss Cheese

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Mars

Yeah, ok, so not really. But it sure seems that way in a new image from NASA, which also shows a mysterious pit: This observation from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show it is late summer in the Southern hemisphere, so the Sun is low in the sky and subtle topography is accentuated in orbital images. We see many shallow pits in the bright residual cap of carbon dioxide ice (also called “Swiss cheese terrain”). There is also a deeper, circular formation that penetrates through the ice and dust. This might be an impact crater or it could be a collapse … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers find “Styrofoam” Planet

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styrofoam planet

Fifth-graders making styrofoam solar system models may have the right idea. Researchers at Lehigh University have discovered a new planet orbiting a star 320 light years from Earth that has the density of styrofoam. This “puffy planet” outside our solar system may hold opportunities for testing atmospheres that will be useful when assessing future planets for signs of life. “It is highly inflated, so that while it’s only a fifth as massive as Jupiter, it is nearly 40 percent larger, making it about as dense as styrofoam, with an extraordinarily large atmosphere,” said Joshua Pepper, astronomer and assistant professor of … Read more