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NASA's probe captured never-before-seen views during second encounter
A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.
NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. The spacecraft zipped past Mercury for the second time this year and used the planet's gravity to adjust its path as it continues en route to become the first probe to orbit the planet in March 2011.
One new image shows large patterns of ray-like lines extending southward across much of the planet surface from a young, newly-imaged crater. The previously-imaged Kuiper crater and others craters also have similar webs of lines radiating outward.
Another raw picture represents the highest-resolution color image ever taken of Mercury's surface, and came just 9 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach to Mercury at 4:43 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT).
Details include a large impact basin with an 83-mile (133-km) diameter, named Polygnotus for a Greek painter from the 5th century B.C.
Image: Mercury
NASA/JHUAPL/CIW
The region in the foreground near the right side of the image is close to the border between darkness and daylight, so shadows are long and prominent.
Yet a third first-time image came from MESSENGER's approach to the crescent-shaped Mercury, and is one of 44 pictures taken as part of a mosaic. A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. ... more -
Loop - cortometraggio in 3D di fantascienza
Loop è un mini-cortometraggio di fantascienza in 3D da me realizzato nel 2003 per verificare se programmi non "professionali" come Bryce e Poser potessero darmi modo di sviluppare una breve storia animata.
Questo è ciò che è venuto fuori... :)
Programmi usati per lo sviluppo: Poser 4, Bryce 4 and 5, Adobe After Effect, Illusion, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Universe, DeBabelizer, ACDSee, Sound Forge, Cool Edit, Acid Pro.
COMMENTI E VOTI SONO BENVENUTI! :)
Loop is a mini-short sci-fi 3D movie developed by me in 2003 in order to know if Bryce and Poser "unprofessional" softwares was suitable to make a short animation.
Here is what came out :)
Programs used for developing: Poser 4, Bryce 4 and 5, Adobe After Effect, Illusion, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Universe, DeBabelizer, ACDSee, Sound Forge, Cool Edit, Acid Pro.
COMMENTS AND RATES ARE WELCOMED! :) Loop è un mini-cortometraggio di fantascienza in 3D da me realizzato nel 2003 per verificare se programmi non "professionali"... more -
Underground ‘plumbing’ spotted on Mars
A NASA probe has spotted hundreds of small surface fractures near Mars' equator that may have acted as underground natural plumbing to channel ground water billions of years ago.
Geologists compare the fractures in the sandstone rock deposits on Mars to features called deformation bands on Earth, which can arise from the influence of ground water in the underground bedrock. The bands and faults have strong influences on groundwater movement on Earth, and seem to have played the same role on Mars. Other research has examined how surface water from rain or snow shaped the planet surface, but many agree that groundwater has an equally important influence.
"Groundwater often flows along fractures such as these, and knowing that these are deformation bands helps us understand how the underground plumbing may have worked within these layered deposits," said Chris Okubo, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., who headed up a new study of the Martian fractures A NASA probe has spotted hundreds of small surface fractures near Mars' equator that may have acted as underground natural plumbi... more -
Two Planets Suffer Violent Collision
"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."
"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the ultimate extinction event," said co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State University (TSU). "A massive disk of infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to this sad fate."
Click on link for the rest of the story..... "It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy... more -
Astronomers Name New Dwarf Planet Haumea After Hawaiian Goddess
Honolulu, HI (AHN) - After years of debate over the definition of planets in the solar system, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has announced a new member in the family of dwarf planets.
USA Today reported that astronomers have changed previously known as 2003 EL61 to Haumea, after the goddess of childbirth and fertility in Hawaiian mythology.
The discovery of Haumea was announced in mid-2005, and resembles a plump shape cigar. Its diameter is approximately the same as that of the dwarf planet Pluto and contains 32 percent of Pluto's mass.
Haumea's odd shape, however, means that it is much thinner. It is also reported to be spinning very fast, making one rotation in about four hours.
Haumea joins Ceres, Pluto, Eris and Makemake as the fifth dwarf planet in our solar system.
Two years ago, Pluto was re-classified from planet to dwarf planet, sparking controversies and countless debate among astronomers. Honolulu, HI (AHN) - After years of debate over the definition of planets in the solar system, the International Astronomical Union (I... more -
Dwarf planet given Hawaiian name "Haumea"
A newly discovered dwarf planet in the solar system is being given a Hawaiian name: Haumea, the goddess of earth and fertility.
Haumea's name was approved Wednesday by the International Astronomical Union in Paris. It is the solar system's fifth dwarf planet, in the same category and region as Pluto.
Unlike other round planets, Haumea is shaped like a fat cigar or an elongated egg. Astronomers think its shape comes from its rapid rotation, which could have been caused by a collision with another object billions of years ago.
Haumea is orbited by two moons, Hiiaka and Namaka, named after two children of the goddess. The discovery of Haumea was announced in mid-2005, and it was previously known as 2003 EL61. A newly discovered dwarf planet in the solar system is being given a Hawaiian name: Haumea, the goddess of earth and fertility. ... more -
NASA Planetary Photo Gallery
Look at incredible pictures from all the planets and the moon! Includes pictures from the surface taken by probes and fly-bys.
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Russia to help Cuba build space center - World news- msnbc.com
MOSCOW - Moscow is ready to help Cuba develop its own space center, Russia's space agency chief said on Wednesday after talks in Caracas with Venezuelan and Cuban officials, Itar-Tass news agency reported MOSCOW - Moscow is ready to help Cuba develop its own space center, Russia's space agency chief said on Wednesday after talks in ... more
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Was Mars wet for a billion years longer? - Mars- msnbc.com
"Parts of ancient Mars may have been wet for a billion years longer than scientists previously thought, a new study of images of the red planet's surface suggests.
Along with Earth and the other inner planets of our solar system, Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists have long known that flowing water formed many of the features seen on Mars today, but previous studies suggested that water runoff from precipitation had ceased after the first billion years of Mars' history, called the Noachian Epoch.
But one team of scientists thinks these rains and floods persisted into more recent — geologically speaking — periods in Mars' history "Parts of ancient Mars may have been wet for a billion years longer than scientists previously thought, a new study of images of ... more -
Breaking Down The LRO
Discovery-News.com: Before NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter heads to the moon in February, Discovery Channel's Dave Mosher learns more about the instruments that will scout the lunar surface. Jorge Ribas produces. Discovery-News.com: Before NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter heads to the moon in February, Discovery Channel's Dave Moshe... more
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European space probe completes asteroid fly by
The European Space Agency obtained on Saturday the first images of an asteroid 360 million km (224 million miles) from earth, part of a space mission which scientists hope will help them understand the origins of the planets.
The images were transmitted to the control team in Darmstadt, Germany, by Europe's Rosetta spacecraft which completed its flyby of the Steins asteroid, in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, late on Friday. The European Space Agency obtained on Saturday the first images of an asteroid 360 million km (224 million miles) from earth, part of ... more -
Astronomers Find a New "Minor Planet" near Neptune
Astronomers announced today that a new "minor planet" with an unusual orbit has been found just two billion miles from Earth, closer than Neptune. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers detected a small, comet-like object called 2006 SQ372, which is likely made of rock and ice. However, its orbit never brings it close enough to the sun for it to develop a tail. Its unusual orbit is an ellipse that is four times longer than it is wide, said University of Washington astronomer Andrew Becker, who led the discovery team. The only known object with a comparable orbit is Sedna — the distant, Pluto-like dwarf planet discovered in 2003. But 2006 SQ372's orbit takes it more than one-and-a-half times further from the Sun, and its orbital period is nearly twice as long.
2006 SQ372 is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Scientists believe the object is only 50-100 kilometers (30-60 miles) across.
Click here for an animation showing the detection of SQ372 by SDSS.
Becker's team was actually using the SDSS to look for supernova explosions billions of light-years away to measure the expansion of the universe. "If you can find things that explode, you can also find things that move, but you need different tools to look for them," said team member Lynne Jones, also of the University of Washington. The only objects close enough to change position noticeably from one night to the next are in our own solar system, Jones explained.
The SDSS-II supernova survey scanned the same long stripe of sky, an area 1,000 times larger than the full moon, every clear night in the fall of 2005, 2006, and 2007.
SQ372 was first discovered in a series of images taken in 2006 by the SDSS, and were verified from images taken in 2005 and 2007.
The researcher team is trying to understand how the object acquired its unusual orbit. "It could have formed, like Pluto, in the belt of icy debris beyond Neptune, then been kicked to large distance by a gravitational encounter with Neptune or Uranus," said UW graduate student Nathan Kaib. "However, we think it is more probable that SQ372 comes from the inner edge of the Oort Cloud."
Even at its most distant turning point, 2006 SQ372 will be ten times closer to the Sun than the supposed main body of the Oort Cloud, said Kaib. "The existence of an 'inner' Oort cloud has been theoretically predicted for many years, but SQ372 and perhaps Sedna are the first objects we have found that seem to originate there. It's exciting that we are beginning to verify these predictions."
Becker noted that 2006 SQ372 was bright enough to find with the SDSS only because it is near its closest approach to the Sun, and that the SDSS-II supernova survey observed less than one percent of the sky.
"There are bound to be many more objects like this waiting to be discovered by the next generation of surveys, which will search to fainter levels and cover more area," said Becker. "In a decade, we should know a lot more about this population than we do now."
"One of our goals," said Kaib, "is to understand the origin of comets, which are among the most spectacular celestial events. But the deeper goal is to look back into the early history of our solar system and piece together what was happening when the planets formed." Astronomers announced today that a new "minor planet" with an unusual orbit has been found just two billion miles from Earth... more -
Pluto planet debate ends in stalemate
The dispute in the astronomical community over how to define a planet, sparked after pluto was stripped of its status in 2006, continues after a debate yesterday failed to reach a conclusion.
The sticking point in the definition of a planet, after 1: orbiting the sun; and 2: being massive enough for gravity to make it a round shape; is that, in order to be a planet, a body must have "cleared its neighbourhood of other objects": it is this criterion at which pluto falls down. The dispute in the astronomical community over how to define a planet, sparked after pluto was stripped of its status in 2006, continu... more -
Can our TV signals be picked up on other planets?
A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a message to the nearest theoretically inhabitable planet. But can our television and radio broadcasts already be picked up in space? more ... A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a message to the nearest theoretically inhabitable planet... more
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More Planets Like Earth?
Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are more than 70 sextillion — or 70 thousand million million million stars in the cosmos, and that doesn't include uncountable moons and asteroids and comets and more. With all that, you wouldn't think you could generate much buzz by announcing that astronomers had spotted a few dozen more bodies whirling about out there. But a buzz is just what was created yesterday at a meeting in Nantes, France, when Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory reported that he and his team had discovered 45 previously unknown planets orbiting a handful of nearby stars. There's good reason for all the excitement.
There was never much doubt that planets other than the known nine (or the known eight, now that Pluto has been demoted) existed, but it wasn't until 1995 that the first of these so-called exoplanets was discovered. The vast distance between stars makes a comparatively small body like a planet invisible to even the sharpest-eyed telescopes. Instead, astronomers had to rely on a less-direct method, looking for tiny wobbles in the star itself. A star that couldn't stand still was almost certainly being tugged on by something, and that something was likely to be the gravity of an orbiting planet.
Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns. There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does — and it's delivered the goods.
Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth — tiny by exoplanet standards. One star, just 42 light-years away, is home to a trio of such worlds — which Mayor is now calling "super-Earths." The largest of the three is just 9.5 times as big as Earth, the smallest just 4.2 times. It was not only the modest size of all the new worlds that got astronomers so excited; it was the sheer number of them too. Mayor found his planets by studying a group of just 200 stars — an infinitesimal sliver of the total number out there. That has led him to estimate that at least a third of all sun-like stars may be home to Earth-like worlds.
"Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," he told the conference. "Does every single star harbor planets? We may not know the answer, but we are making progress."
Even Mayor's newest, smallest planets are unlikely to be pastoral places. All of them lie so close to their suns that they complete one orbit in 50 days or less — compared to the lazy, 365-day journey Earth makes — meaning that any water or incipient life on their surfaces would simply sizzle away. But HARPS is already sensitive enough to spot planets that are 100,000 times smaller than their parent star. Refinements both in HARPS itself and in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes should make them able to spot smaller and smaller stellar wobbles. Those little wiggles would be the signature of Earth-like worlds lying at a not-too-hot, not-too-cold distance from their suns. And it's on those planets that you just might find Earth-like life. Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are ... more -
Liquid flowing on surface of Saturn moon
NASA scientists said Wednesday they had found liquid on Saturn's moon Titan, only the second body in the solar system after Earth to have fluid on its surface.
The groundbreaking discovery was made after analysis of instruments on the US-European Cassini probe, the spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 following a 3.5 billion-kilometer (2.2 billion miles) voyage.
NASA said in a statement that information from Cassini indicated that large lakes on Titan contained liquid hydrocarbons and ethane.
"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," said University of Arizona scientist Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini's visual and mapping instrument.
The visual and mapping instrument spotted a lake, Ontario Lacus, in Titan's south polar region during a flyby in December, NASA said. The lake is roughly 7,800 square miles, slightly bigger North America's Lake Ontario.
"Detection of liquid ethane confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan," said Larry Soderblom, a scientist with the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.
"The fact we could detect the ethane spectral signatures of the lake even when it was so dimly illuminated, and at a slanted viewing path through Titan's atmosphere, raises expectations for exciting future lake discoveries by our instrument."
Scientists ruled out the presence of water ice, ammonia, ammonia hydrate and carbon dioxide in Ontario Lacus.
The observations also suggest the lake is evaporating. It is ringed by a dark beach, where the black lake merges with the bright shoreline. NASA scientists said Wednesday they had found liquid on Saturn's moon Titan, only the second body in the solar system after Earth... more -
Views Of Jupiter
The biggest true color shot of Jupiter to date. This image was take in 2000, but Jupiter’s giant red spot has since swallowed the smaller one. The biggest true color shot of Jupiter to date. This image was take in 2000, but Jupiter’s giant red spot has since swallowed the smal... more
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Scientists discover Jupiter-sized planet.
cientists have discovered a new Jupiter-sized planet orbiting around a distant sun-like star.
This planet takes 9.2 days to orbit its star, the longest period for any transiting exoplanet ever found.
The planet, called CoRoT-Exo-4b, was discovered by the European Space Agency's CoRoT space telescope, which was designed to search for extrasolar planets by looking for transits, or tiny dips in the light output from a star when a planet passes in front of it. cientists have discovered a new Jupiter-sized planet orbiting around a distant sun-like star. ... more -
New planetoid added to solar system!
Last week, a star was born. Or, more accurately, a planetoid was born. Makemake is the newest member of our solar system. The International Astronomical Union recently recognized the reddish object covered with frozen methane and ethane gases as a dwarf planet and classified it as a plutoid last week.
MakeMake, pronounced "Mah-keh Mak-keh" (rhymes with wakka-wakka?), was named after the creator god of Easter Island mythology because it was discovered around Easter in 2005. The plutoid's hobbies include orbiting Neptune, not having any satellites of its own, and being the second brightest Tran-Neptunian Object in our solar system. It is our solar system's fourth plutoid, joining Pluto, Ceres, and Eris in the heavens...and in our heart.
Don't let Pluto push you around, Makemake; dude's a hater. He's still angry over being demoted. You keep on orbiting, guy. We have your back.
DigitalJournal.com: Makemake, a Pluto-size non-planet, is named, despite the Easter Bunny Last week, a star was born. Or, more accurately, a planetoid was born. Makemake is the newest member of our solar system. The Internat... more -
Floating cities on Venus
"Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"
This link was a sum up, the link to the actual article is on this site. Pretty neato. "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story abo... more
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