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Tag: NASA

  • 2012 the Ninth Warmest Year on Record, Says NASA

    2012 the Ninth Warmest Year on Record, Says NASA

    NASA announced this week that 2012 was the ninth warmest year since 1880, the earliest date to which global temperatures can be tracked. 2005 and 2010 rank as the hottest years on record, while all 10 of the warmest years have occurred since 1998.

    The news comes from an analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which monitors global surface temperatures. The average global temperature in 2012 was 14.6 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit), which is .6 degrees C (1.0 degrees F) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline average.

    The researchers emphasized that, though weather patterns cause fluctuations in average temperature from one year to the next, long-term trends show a warming planet.

    “One more year of numbers isn’t in itself significant,” said Gavin Schmidt, a GISS climatologist. “What matters is this decade is warmer than the last decade, and that decade was warmer than the decade before. The planet is warming. The reason it’s warming is because we are pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

    Scientists have also shown that carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere have been rising for decades. In 1880 the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 285 parts per million. The levels now sit at over 390 parts per million.

    While the worldwide temperature was only the ninth hottest on record, the continental U.S. had its warmest year on record during 2012.

    “The U.S. temperatures in the summer of 2012 are an example of a new trend of outlying seasonal extremes that are warmer than the hottest seasonal temperatures of the mid-20th century,” said James E. Hansen, GISS director. “The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.”

    The visualization seen in the video below depicts the Earth’s yearly temperatures when compared to the baseline averages from 1951 to 1980.

    (Image courtesy NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Drilling Rock Chosen

    For more than a month now, Mars Rover Curiosity has been preparing to test its hammering drill on a Martian rock. The rover team took great pains to scan a low-lying area called “Yellowknife Bay” for the perfect rock specimen.

    Today, researchers have announced that the a flat rock with pale veins has been chosen as the target. Curiosity is currently on-route to the rock, which NASA has named “John Klein” in tribute to the former Mars Science Laboratory deputy manager of the same name who died in 2011. If the rock still looks interesting to researchers when the rover gets a closer view, it will become the first Martian rock to be drilled for a sample.

    “Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission’s most challenging activity since the landing,” said Richard Cook, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “It has never been done on Mars. The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don’t control. We won’t be surprised if some steps in the process don’t go exactly as planned the first time through.”

    The rover team is hoping to find evidence of Mars’ watery past inside John Klein. The rock was chosen because of the light-toned veins that were detected using Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam), indicating elevated levels of calcium, sulfur, and hydrogen.

    “These veins are likely composed of hydrated calcium sulfate, such as bassinite or gypsum,” said Nicolas Mangold, ChemCam team member at the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes. “On Earth, forming veins like these requires water circulating in fractures.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

  • NASA Shows Off Its 4K Sun Images

    NASA Shows Off Its 4K Sun Images

    There’s a cost associated with being an early adopter, and it’s not just the higher prices. New media formats consistently outpace the rate at which content creators can adapt to the new formats. As a result, early adopters pay exorbitant sums for tech to display boring demo footage for months before ESPN finally updates its broadcast technology, which happens coincide with the release of the second, better generation of devices.

    With HDTV, customers were often left watching nature footage and landscapes. With the 4K TV revolution just starting, TV manufacturers are going to need some content that shows customers what they’re missing with their crappy 1080p displays. Luckily, NASA has a suggestion.

    Astronomers at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) for some time have been using an Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) to take ultra high-definition images twice as large as anything seen on the displays at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Every second.

    As of last month, the SDO had taken 100 million images. NASA bragged that if they were watched at 30 frame sper second there would be enough footage to watch eight hours a day for nearly four months. That’s a lot of staring at the sun.

    It’s unclear whether NASA is actually promising 4K content for showrooms or whether the agency just used the excuse of CES to show off its SDO photos. Either way, more SDO images and video, mostly of solar eruptions and flares, can be found on NASA’s SDO website.

    (Image courtesy NASA/GSFC/SDO)

  • Rogue Planet Orbit Spotted by NASA’s Hubble

    Rogue Planet Orbit Spotted by NASA’s Hubble

    New images of the Fomalhaut star system could show evidence of a “titanic planetary disruption.” Astronomers have found that the debris belt in the system is wider than was thought, and that a “rogue” planet has a precarious orbit that takes it straight through the dust ring. The debris belt spans a huge section of space from 14 to around 20 billion miles from Fomalhaut. The planet, Fomalhaut b, comes as close as 4.6 billion miles from its star before swinging out 27 billion miles away from it.

    “We are shocked. This is not what we expected,” said Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

    Kalas led a team that recalculated Fomalhaut b’s orbit from newer observations made last year using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. He and his colleagues say these new findings suggest that there could be other objects in the system that sent the planet on its wild trajectory. Hypotheses include an undiscovered planet that gravitationally ejected Fomalhaut b, or a dwarf planet that collided with it.

    “Hot Jupiters get tossed through scattering events, where one planet goes in and one gets thrown out,” said Mark Clampin of NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This could be the planet that gets thrown out.”

    If Fomalhaut b is in the same plane as the dust belt, it will enter the debris around 2032. Astronomers have also detected irregularities and gaps across the dust belt, suggesting that there are other planets to search for in the Fomalhaut system.

  • NASA Picture Shows Largest-Seen Spiral Galaxy

    NASA Picture Shows Largest-Seen Spiral Galaxy

    Astronomers this week unveiled a new image of the largest spiral galaxy known to exist. A larger version of the image can be seen here.

    The galaxy, named NGC 6872, was crowned with the title following an examination of archival data from NASA‘s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission. From tip-to-tip NGC 6872 measures 522,000 light-years, or around five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.

    “Without GALEX’s ability to detect the ultraviolet light of the youngest, hottest stars, we would never have recognized the full extent of this intriguing system,” said Rafael Eufrasio, lead scientist on the project and a research assistant at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

    NGC 6872’s size, astronomers say, is due to its interaction with the smaller disk galaxy named IC 4970. They found that the stars in NGC 6872 are progressively older the closer to the center they are. That interaction may also have spawned a region that could become its own small galaxy, seen in the upper left-had portion of the image above. The youngest stars can be found in that region.

    “The northeastern arm of NGC 6872 is the most disturbed and is rippling with star formation, but at its far end, visible only in the ultraviolet, is an object that appears to be a tidal dwarf galaxy similar to those seen in other interacting systems,” said Duilia de Mello, team member on the research and a professor of astronomy at Catholic University.

    In 2007 researchers developed a computer simulation that was able to reproduce the appearance of the NGC 6872 system. According to that model, IC 4970 would have made its closest approach to the giant galaxy around 130 million years ago, then toured the plane of the spiral disk in the same direction it rotates. Astronomers stated that the new observations are consistent with this scenario.

  • “Doomsday” Asteroid Won’t Hit Earth in 2036

    Earlier this week, astronomers with the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that they were collecting data on the asteroid Apophis as it made its most recent approach to Earth. The data was, among other things, meant to narrow the prediction as to whether the asteroid might impact the Earth in 2036.

    Now, NASA has announced that Apophis will not be a threat to humanity in 2036. The asteroid will still make a close flyby of Earth, but it will not be impacting the planet or otherwise heralding “doomsday.”

    “With the new data provided by the Magdalena Ridge [New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology] and the Pan-STARRS [University of Hawaii] optical observatories, along with very recent data provided by the Goldstone Solar System Radar, we have effectively ruled out the possibility of an Earth impact by Apophis in 2036,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036. Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future.”

    When Apophis was discovered in 2004 initial calculations gave it a 2.7% chance of impacting the Earth in 2029. Subsequent observations ruled out an impact in that year, and this new announcement means Apophis is harmless for the foreseeable future. In 2036 Apophis will come within 31,300 kilometers (19,400) of Earth – around one-twelfth the distance between Earth and the moon.

    “But much sooner, a closer approach by a lesser-known asteroid is going to occur in the middle of next month when a 40-meter-sized asteroid, 2012 DA14, flies safely past Earth’s surface at about 17,200 miles,” said Yeomans. “With new telescopes coming online, the upgrade of existing telescopes, and the continued refinement of our orbital determination process, there’s never a dull moment working on near-Earth objects.”

    (Image courtesy UH/IA)

  • New NASA Video Shows Massive Pulsar Jet in Action

    New NASA Video Shows Massive Pulsar Jet in Action

    NASA this week released footage that shows exactly what a jet of particles shooting out from around a pulsar looks like. Astronomers say the new research could provide new insight into these super-dense objects.

    The video features the Vela pulsar, which is a neutron star that formed after the collapse of a massive star. The star is around 1,000 light-years from earth, is only 12 miles in diameter, and makes a rotation every 89 milliseconds. As the object spins faster than a helicopter roter, charged particles swirl around its rotation axis at around 70% the speed of light. The images seen in the video come from observations made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

    “We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler – except with the water blasting out at over half the speed of light,” said Martin Durant of the University of Toronto, the lead author of a new paper on the Vela pulsar published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

    Durant and his colleagues observed that the pulsar could be precessing, or wobbling (like a top) as it spins. If confirmed, it would be the first time such a neutron star has been found. The precession, say researchers, could be related to minor distortions in the shape of the star, which might no longer be a perfect sphere due to its fast rotation and the interaction of its superfluid core with its crust.

    “The deviation from a perfect sphere may only be equivalent to about one part in 100 million,” said Oleg Kargaltsev co-author of the research and an astronomer at George Washington University. “Neutron stars are so dense that even a tiny distortion like this would have a big effect.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al/DSS/Davide De Martin)

  • Vega Asteroid Belt Suggests Multiple Planets

    Astronomers this week announced that they have discovered what could be an asteroid belt around the star Vega. NASA‘s Spitzer space telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory were used to observe the star, which is the second brightest in the northern sky.

    Vega was found to have an astroid belt-like band of debris in both a warm inner band and cool outer band. This is similar to our own solar system, which features an asteroid belt and an outer kuiper belt where dwarf planets such as Pluto and Makemake are located. This could suggest that the gap between Vega’s belts is inhabited by multiple planets.

    “Overall, the large gap between the warm and the cold belts is a signpost that points to multiple planets likely orbiting around Vega and Fomalhaut,” said Kate Su, an astronomer at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona and the lead author of a paper describing the new findings, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

    Vega is similar to another star with an asteroid belt, named Fomalhaut. Both are only 25 light-years away from Earth, but burn brighter and hotter than our sun, with around double its mass and a bluer tinge. The space telescopes were able to detect the infrared light emitted by the warm and cold dust in Vega’s bands, where comets and collisions replenish the dust.

    “Our findings echo recent results showing multiple-planet systems are common beyond our sun,” said Su.

    Su and her colleagues predict that the planets orbiting Veta and Fomalhaut, if they exist, will be spotted by future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2018.

  • NASA Spots Weather Patterns on Brown Dwarf

    NASA Spots Weather Patterns on Brown Dwarf

    Astronomers this week announced that they have produced a “weather map” for a brown dwarf that shows planet-sized clouds driven by wind.

    Brown dwarfs are objects at the edge of becoming a star. They lack the mass to begin hydrogen fusion, and in some ways are similar to gas giant planets. The new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, will provide researchers with a better understanding of brown dwarfs and the atmospheres of the billions of planets outside our solar system.

    “With Hubble and Spitzer, we were able to look at different atmospheric layers of a brown dwarf, similar to the way doctors use medical imaging techniques to study the different tissues in your body,” said Daniel Apai, principal investigator on the research at the University of Arizona.

    Apai refers to the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, which were used simultaneously to observe a brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026. He and his colleauges found that its light varied every 90 minutes as the object rotated, depending in what wavelength of infrared light it was observed. These variations were discovered to be the different layers of the brown dwarf’s clouds, which swirl around the its atmosphere.

    “Unlike the water clouds of Earth or the ammonia clouds of Jupiter, clouds on brown dwarfs are composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds,” said Mark Marley, co-author of the study and a research scientist at NASA‘s Ames Research Center. “So this large atmospheric disturbance found by Spitzer and Hubble gives a new meaning to the concept of extreme weather.”

    This was the first time astronomers were able to study the variability of a brown dwarf’s atmosphere at different altitudes at the same time. Researchers are planning to do the same with other nearby brown dwarfs.

    “What we see here is evidence for massive, organized cloud systems, perhaps akin to giant versions of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter,” said Adam Showman, a theorist at the University of Arizona. “These out-of-sync light variations provide a fingerprint of how the brown dwarf’s weather systems stack up vertically. The data suggest regions on the brown dwarf where the weather is cloudy and rich in silicate vapor deep in the atmosphere coincide with balmier, drier conditions at higher altitudes – and vice versa.”

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Tidies Up a Rock

    Though most of Mars rover Curiosity‘s on-board tools have already been used successfully, a few specific instruments remain to be tested. One of those instruments is the rover’s hammering drill, which it is preparing to test on a rock in an area named “Yellowknife Bay.” Another is the rover’s Dust Removal Tool (DRT) (also known as a “brush”), which NASA announced has recently completed its first test on Mars.

    The DRT is a motorized, wire-bristle brush that was engineered to prepare rock surfaces for “enhanced inspection” by Curiosity’s other instruments. The brush is built into the turret end of the rover‘s arm alongside its Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, Mars Hand Lens Imager, and hammering drill.

    The Curiosity team chose a target rocked named “Ekwir_1” as the target for the first use of the DRT. The results of the test were successful, and can be seen in the photo above. Ekwir_1 sits in Yellowknife Bay alongside other rocks scientists are evaluating for use as drilling targets.

    “We wanted to be sure we had an optimal target for the first use,” said Diana Trujillo, activity lead for the DRT at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We need to place the instrument within less than half an inch of the target without putting the hardware at risk. We needed a flat target, one that wasn’t rough, one that was covered with dust. The results certainly look good.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

  • Ice May Float on Titan’s Seas, Finds New Study

    Ice May Float on Titan’s Seas, Finds New Study

    Scientists have published a new study that concludes Saturn’s moon Titan might have ice floating in its seas. The presence of hydrocarbon ice in Titan’s methane lakes and seas could explain the mixed readings NASA‘s Cassini probe has seen while recording the reflectivity of the moon’s surface.

    “One of the most intriguing questions about these lakes and seas is whether they might host an exotic form of life,” said Jonathan Lunine, co-author of the research and a Cassini interdisciplinary Titan scientist at Cornell University. “And the formation of floating hydrocarbon ice will provide an opportunity for interesting chemistry along the boundary between liquid and solid, a boundary that may have been important in the origin of terrestrial life.”

    Floating methane ice was thought to be impossible on Titan, since solid methane is more dense than liquid methane, and would sink. The new research considers the interplay between Titan’s lakes and the moon’s atmosphere. Scientists found that the types of methane and ethane ice that might exist on Titan will float if the temperature is below 90.4 kelvins (297 degrees Fahrenheit), methane’s freezing point.

    “We now know it’s possible to get methane-and-ethane-rich ice freezing over on Titan in thin blocks that congeal together as it gets colder — similar to what we see with Arctic sea ice at the onset of winter,” said Jason Hofgartner, lead author of the paper and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada scholar at Cornell. “We’ll want to take these conditions into consideration if we ever decide to explore the Titan surface some day.”

    Titan is the only other object in our solar system besides Earth known to have bodies of liquid on its surface. Its seas are composed of organic molecules that are believed to have been the building blocks for life on Earth.

  • 461 New Planet Candidates Discovered by NASA’s Kepler, Including Four Earth-Like Ones

    461 New Planet Candidates Discovered by NASA’s Kepler, Including Four Earth-Like Ones

    Astronomers last week announced that they estimate there to be 100 billion planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. This week, Astronomers announced 461 new candidates for extra-solar planets have been discovered.

    NASA‘s Kepler mission has been discovering exoplanets for years now, and the number of confirmed exoplanets is currently 105. As astronomers dig more deeply into Kepler data, smaller planet candidates and multi-planet systems are becoming less rare. The new group of candidates includes four Earth-like planets that are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit their star in a region where liquid water might exist.

    “There is no better way to kick off the start of the Kepler extended mission than to discover more possible outposts on the frontier of potentially life-bearing worlds,” said Christopher Burke, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute.

    The number of exoplanet candidates discovered in Kepler data now sits at 2,740 planets orbiting 2,046 stars – a 20% increase from February 2012. The planet candidates are discovered by Kepler when they transit in front of their star, changing its brightness. The Kepler space telescope measures the brightness of over 150,00 stars looking for changes in their brightness. Three transits are required to declare a potential planet, and candidate data is then analyzed for known errors before follow-up observations can confirm the presence of an exoplanet.

    “The analysis of increasingly longer time periods of Kepler data uncovers smaller planets in longer period orbits– orbital periods similar to Earth’s,” said Steve Howell, Kepler mission project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It is no longer a question of will we find a true Earth analogue, but a question of when.”

    (Image courtesy NASA Ames Research Center/W. Stenzel)

  • Solar Eruption Rang in the New Year, Shows NASA Video

    While people across the world were celebrating or preparing to celebrate the arrival of the year 2013, the sun was putting on a New Year’s show of its own.

    On December 31, a massive solar eruption twisted up from the surface of the sun, propelled by swirling magnetic forces. The eruption extended around 160,000 miles out from the surface of the sun, or 20 times the diameter of the Earth. It lasted from 10:20 am to 2:20 pm EST.

    Luckily for fans of space images, NASA‘s Solar Dynamic Observatory was not on holiday. The observatory caught the event in ultraviolet light. The video below shows the event from its explosive beginning to its serene finale, when wisps of plasma “gently” fell back to the sun’s surface. Every image in the video is 36 seconds apart.

    (Image and video courtesy NASA/SDO/Steele Hill)

  • Giant Asteroid “Speckles” Analyzed by NASA’s Dawn

    New images released by NASA have provided scientists their best view yet of the black spots seen on the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. The new research suggests that the protoplanet may have received the carbon-rich material through large impacts with other objects.

    The new study, published in the journal Icarus, is the most complete analysis of the material yet. Researchers observed that the dark material appears around the edges of giant impact basins on the asteroid’s southern hemisphere, suggesting that the material was deposited by the impact that created the older of the two basins.

    “First, we created a map showing the distribution of dark material on Vesta using the framing camera data and found something remarkable,” said Lucille Le Corre, co-author of the study at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

    The map showed that the material had been spread by a slow impacting asteroid that created the Veneneia basin some 2 to 3 billion years ago. The material was then covered by a subsequent impact that created the younger basin.

    The images were taken by NASA’s Dawn mission, which completed its investigations of Vesta in September 2012 and is currently on-route to the dwarf planet Ceres. In the past few months, research based on Dawn mission data has uncovered strange gullies along the walls of Vesta craters and the fact that Vesta’s surface is constantly “stirring” and presenting a young sppearance.

    “The aim of our efforts was not only to reconstruct Vesta’s history, but also to understand the conditions in the early solar system,” said Holger Sierks, co-investigator on the Dawn mission at the Max Planck Institute.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

  • 100 Billion Planets Populate the Milky Way Galaxy, Say Astronomers

    For years now, NASA‘s Kepler mission has been confirming the existence of planets outside our solar system. Now, a new review of Kepler data suggests that there are billions upon billions of planets just in the Milky Way galaxy.

    “There are at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy, just our galaxy,” said John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the new study. “That’s mind-boggling.”

    The new study, set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, looked at the planets orbiting a star named Kepler-32, then compared the system to others discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Astronomers stated that the Kepler-32 planets are representative of a majority of planets in the Milky Way, and serve as a case study for how planets form. Systems similar to Kepler-32 comprise around three-quarters of all the stars in our galaxy, leading researchers to their 100 billion-planet estimate.

    “I usually try not to call things ‘Rosetta stones,’ but this is as close to a Rosetta stone as anything I’ve seen,” said Johnson. “It’s like unlocking a language that we’re trying to understand—the language of planet formation.”

    The prevalence of Kepler-32-type stars, however, suggests that our own solar system may be quite rare. “It’s just a weirdo,” said Johnson.

    Kepler-32 is an M dwarf star that is much cooler than our sun, with around half its mass and radius. The five planets orbiting Kepler-32 also orbit much closer to the star than the planets in our solar system. All of the Kepler-32 planets orbit their star within one-tenth of the distance from the Earth to the sun, or just one-third the distance from Mercury to the sun.

    That doesn’t mean Kepler-32’s planets are inhospitable, though. The star’s small size also means its habitable zone, where liquid water can exist, is smaller, and the outermost Kepler-32 planet lies within that zone.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Gyroscope Failure Signals the End For Landsat 5 Satellite

    In case you missed it during the end-of-the-year holiday madness, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have announced the end of the longest-running Earth observing satellite mission in history.

    The Landsat 5 mission has been orbiting Earth and recording global land change for over 29 years. Though the satellite (which was only designed for a five-year life-span) has been repaired on multiple occasions, the failure of a gyroscope has ended the long-running mission.

    “This is the end of an era for a remarkable satellite, and the fact that it flew for almost three decades is a testament to the NASA engineers and the USGS team who launched it and kept it flying well beyond its expected lifetime,” said Anne Castle, assistant secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. “The Landsat program is the ‘gold standard” of satellite observation, providing an invaluable public record of our planet that helps us tackle critical land, water, and environmental issues.”

    Landsat 5 has now orbited the Earth over 150,000 times and transmitted over 2.5 million images of the planet’s surface. In its nearly three decades of service, the satellite has photographed the impact of natural disasters, climate change, land use practices, urbanization, and agricultural practices on the Earth’s surface.

    “Any major event since 1984 that left a mark on this Earth larger than a football field was likely recorded by Landsat 5, whether it was a hurricane, a tsunami, a wildfire, deforestation, or an oil spill,” said Marcia McNutt, USGS director. “We look forward to a long and productive continuation of the Landsat program, but it is unlikely there will ever be another satellite that matches the outstanding longevity of Landsat 5.”

    The Landsat program will continue with Landsat 7, which was launched in 1999 and is still in orbit. In addition, the next Landsat satellite, Landsat 8, is scheduled to be launched sometime next month, February 2013.

  • Asteroid in 2040 Will Miss the Earth, Just Barely

    An asteroid discovered just last year and given tentative 1 in 500 odds of hitting the Earth in February 2040 is now no longer a danger to the planet, according to astronomers.

    Data gathered using the Gemini North telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii has confirmed that asteroid 2011 AG5 will not be slamming into Earth. Astronomers at the University of Hawaii and NASA‘s Near-Earth Object Program (Spaceguard) were able to refine their calculations of the asteroid’s trajectory using the data.

    “These were extremely difficult observations of a very faint object,” said Richard Wainscoat, a Gemini team member. “We were surprised by how easily the Gemini telescope was able to recover such a faint asteroid so low in the sky.”

    2011 AG5 is 140 meters in diameter – around the length of two American football fields. If the asteroid were to hit the Earth, it would release around 100 megatons of energy, which is thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

    The discovery of 2011 AG5 was made by NASA’s Catalina Sky Survey. Original estimates gave the object a 0.2% chance of colliding with the Earth. A NASA contingency deflection analysis was conducted prior to the new data, showing a 95% likelihood of new data eliminating the asteroid as a threat. The agency stated that its experience studying 2011 AG5 demonstrates that it is “well situated” to predict the trajectories of asteroids that threaten the Earth.

  • NASA Releases New Cassini, Spitzer Photos For the Holidays

    Just in time for the holidays, NASA has released two new space photos filled with festive greens and reds.

    The photo seen above (a larger version of which can be seen here) was taken using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. the infrared image depicts the giant star Zeta Ophiuchi as it hurtles through space, causing a wave in the dust in its path.

    Astronomers believe Zeta Ophiuchi, which is 20 times more massive than our sun, was once a companion star to an even larger star. When the larger star’s life ended, Zeta Ophiuchi was explosively ejected from its system.

    Saturn backlit

    The above image of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Cassini probe. A larger version can be seen by clicking the photo. It shows a backlit view of the planet Saturn and its rings taken during Cassini’s 174th orbit of the giant planet. The two small objects in the bottom-left of the photo are Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Tethys.

    Cassini, which has been studying Saturn and its numerous moons since 2004, was intentionally positioned within Saturn’s shadow for the pic. It’s a perspective Cassini hasn’t had since 2006 when it took the “In Saturn’s Shadow” photo – one of the most popular Cassini images to date, according to NASA.

    “Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those taken from Saturn’s shadow,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini’s imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute.

    The Cassini spacecraft recently celebrated its 15th birthday since its launch back in 1997. In its time in orbit, the probe has launched the Huygens probe to the surface of Titan, where hydrocarbon lakes have also been discovered.

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

  • NASA tests Orion Space Capsule Parachutes

    NASA tests Orion Space Capsule Parachutes

    This week, NASA completed tests on the Orion spacecraft’s parachutes. The capsule is being designed as part of a project to send humans into deep space.

    The tests were conducted at the U.S. Army Yuma proving Ground in Arizona. The test was to see whether the capsule can safely land when one of its drogue parachutes fails to deploy.

    “The mockup vehicle landed safely in the desert and everything went as planned,” said Chris Johnson, a NASA project manager for Orion’s parachute assembly system. “We designed the parachute system so nothing will go wrong, but plan and test as though something will so we can make sure Orion is the safest vehicle ever to take humans to space.”

    The Orion capsule uses five parachutes to land: three 116 feet wide main parachutes and two 23 feed wide drogue parachutes. To land safely, the 21,000-pound capsule needs only two main parachutes and one drogue parachute. The capsule was dropped from 25,000 feet above the desert, with the primary drogue parachute intentionally sabotaged. The second drogue opened as planned and the capsule safely landed.

    In 2014, and unmanned Orion capsule will launch and travel 15 times farther than the International Space Station’s orbit – farther than any spacecraft designed for a crew has traveled since the Apollo missions. On the return trip, the capsule’s heat shields will be tested during its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere at over 20,000 mph.

    NASA has released footage of the Orion capsule being tossed out of the back of a cargo plane, but not, unfortunately, the landing.

    (Image courtesy NASA)

  • Cassini to Track Venus Transit, Study Exoplanets

    NASA announced today that it will begin using the Cassini probe’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) for uses other than studying Saturn and its moons.

    On Friday, from its vantage point in orbit around Saturn, the VIMS will be used to track Venus as it travels across the face of the sun. A similar Venus transit could be seen from Earth earlier this summer, but Friday’s transit will be the first time a spacecraft has tracked the transit of a planet in our solar system from beyond Earth.

    The VIMS will collect data on Venus’ atmosphere during the event. The observations are also a chance for astronomers to test the VIMS’s ability to observe planets outside the solar system, in an effort to reduce the amount of signal noise. The instrument has already been used to observe a transit by an exoplanet called HD 189733b.

    “Interest in infrared investigations of extrasolar planets has exploded in the years since Cassini launched, so we had no idea at the time that we’d ask VIMS to learn this new kind of trick,” said Phil Nicholson, the VIMS team member based at Cornell University. “But VIMS has worked so well at Saturn so far that we can start thinking about other things it can do.”

    Since Cassini’s launch in 1997, astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to identify numerous exoplanets. Scientists are hoping to use Cassini’s VIMS to investigate the atmospheres of those planets, in particular whether they contain methane or other hydrocarbons.

    The VIMS has also been used in another novel way recently. Back in April 2012, astronomers used the instrument to take thermal data from warm fissures located on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

    “For the first time, we were able to see that the jets coming from the surface of Enceladus originated in very small, very hot spots,” said Bonnie Buratti, a VIMS scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This new observation is good evidence for liquid water underneath the surface.”

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

  • NASA Releases a “Game” to Crowd-Source Cloud Classification

    NASA this week has launched a “game” that allows anyone to identify galactic clouds in a series of photos. The game, called Clouds, is part of the Milky Way Project, which helps astronomers crowd source data sorting. It can be played here on Zooniverse, where many different crowd-sourced science projects are hosted.

    The simple game asks players to state whether they believe a targeted portion of each photo is a cloud, an “empty” region of space, or something in-between. The photos were taken using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory. With enough Clouds participation, astronomers believe they could begin to discover more about the architecture of our Milky Way galaxy early in 2013.

    “We’re really excited to launch Clouds and see results back from our giant volunteer team of amateur scientists,” said Robert Simpson, principal investigator of the Milky Way Project and a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Oxford University. “We think the community can blast through all these data fairly quickly. We may even be done by the spring and that would be an amazing result for citizen science.”

    The goal of the project is to identify dense, cold cores of gas and dust known as infrared dark clouds, which collapse under their own gravity before giving birth to new stars. The “empty” regions of space can appear the same as these dark clouds, making it difficult for computers to sort out.

    “Automated routines have tried to decide which of these objects are holes and which are true infrared dark clouds, but the task is often tricky and it takes a human eye to decide,” said Simpson.

    “Citizen science through Zooniverse has been a real boon to research in fields ranging from astronomy to biology to history. We feel very fortunate to be able to send science work out to computer, tablet and smartphone screens and for people to collaborate with us in a quest to better understand our universe.”