A schematic of an iconic celestial object. To see what it is, and a couple of other amazing nebula cousins, in full visible wavelength glory, go below the fold.
Cassini-Solstice is the mission that keeps on giving. Fair to say, though, the plucky little spacecraft does have the solar system’s most gorgeous celebrity to work with. Images below, each link to a Cassini homepage with descriptions. [Read more…]
Russians recovered a furry crew that spent a month in microgravity this week, only to confirm most arrived back on earth dead. Sad, but not as bad as it sounds:
Arstechnica — A Russian spacecraft containing 45 mice, 8 gerbils, and 15 newts returned to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft, a modified Bion-M life sciences satellite, was launched in April 2013 and was intended to study the biological effects of long-term weightlessness. However, due to a combination of equipment failure and what scientists referred to as “the stresses of space,” fewer than half the mice (and none of the gerbils) remained alive after their month in space. The newts were fine, though.
That most organisms, including humans, undergo physical changes in prolonged microgravity is already well-understood; the United States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) have been conducting long-duration manned space flights as far back as the early 1960s, and there is a plethora of data on the subject. However, conducting detailed experiments on the biological deficits incurred through long exposure to microgravity—including skeletal and muscular deterioration—is ethically difficult because at least some amount of the damage could be irreversible.
NASA has announced the prime candidate for an ambitious unmanned mission that will visit a Near Earth Asteroid and return a sample of it to earth. The winner is 101955 Bennu, a member of the Apollo group of asteroids roughly half a klick in diameter: [Read more…]
Recorded on the ISS … And I thought Tebowie was good?
Both gloves have fingers and thumb, a right-hand will fit only one
Space has a lot of resources, technically it has all the resources. Some of them are obvious, some serendipitous. Aside from the mountains of platinum group metals or nickel-iron and oxygen floating around free for the taking, in addition to the nearly inexhaustible energy sources, micro-gravity is a new and to date poorly utilized resource in itself. Back in the 90s, research into drug production helped inform our friends in molecular biology about making pure isomers. Today similar experiments may yield kickass space whiskey. There are many other examples but there’s one big international obstacle, the Russkis. If politics makes strange bedfellows, and we can strain that metaphor to the breaking point, this deal has the GOP rolling in the hay with some strange denizens indeed. [Read more…]
It’s a volcano. Click image for more info. Oh, and if you think neat things aren’t happening in space, especially on the ISS, how abut some space whiskey neat? [Read more…]
Kepler, the probe that keeps on ticking, has found a well populated exo solar system of a type that could one day be the subject of a focused search by SETI — because there’s another interesting feature here: this star is very similar to our sun, it’s just a little smaller. Oh, and much, much older: [Read more…]
Maybe Mars Inspiration should hold off on their proposed flyby launching in 2018. A new grant by NASA will reportedly develop a revolutionary engine that could reduce time travel to the Red Planet and other celestial destinations to a few weeks within a decade: [Read more…]
Not no that Neo, Near Earth Objects., i.e., dino killers, city busters, Siberian dynamite. The House and Senate finally had a hearing on the danger posed by NEOs. THey weren’t half bad, a round of bipartisan agreement almost broke out, and there were some quality comments mixed in with the noise and a plan in the works: [Read more…]