Voyager-1 has left the solar system, but what message is it carrying to the stars?

By JAMES VINCENT  13th September 2013.    Find Full Article Videos and Photos Here:-

The Golden Record is a gold-plated copper phonograph carrying images and audio recording of humanity and the animal life of Earth.

Launched 36 years ago in September 1977, the Voyager-1 spacecraft (alongside its twin, Voyager-2) was built to carry out a Planetary Grand Tour.

Now, after travelling almost 19 billion kilometres (12bn miles) from Earth, Voyager-1 has become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. But it’s not just sending back signals to Earth, Voyager-1 is also carrying a present for anyone who finds it: the Voyager Golden Record.

American astronomer Carl Sagan described the inclusion of the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft as launching a message in a bottle “into the cosmic ocean”: “[it] says something very hopeful about life on this planet”.

Encoded on the disc is a compilation of sounds and images intended to encapsulate the diversity of life on Earth, as well as outline humanity’s basic knowledge of physics, chemistry and astronomy.

Although the Golden Record is not a serious attempt to contact extraterrestrial life, the contents of the disc were still a subject of great debate. Which music and which images would be chosen to best represent the human species? The choices were made by a committee headed by Sagan, with contributions from Rolling Stone contributing editor Timothy Ferris, author Ann Druyan, and artist Jon Lomberg.

Interstellar Winds Buffeting Our Solar System Have Shifted Direction.

From Science Daily September 5th 2013.     Find Article Here:-

Scientists, including University of New Hampshire astrophysicists involved in NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, have discovered that the particles streaming into the solar system from interstellar space have likely changed direction over the last 40 years.

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The finding helps scientists map our location within the Milky Way galaxy and is crucial for understanding our place in the cosmos through the vast sweep of time — where we’ve come from, where we’re currently located, and where we’re going in our journey through the galaxy.

Additionally, scientists now gain deeper insight into the dynamic nature of the interstellar winds, which has major implications on the size, structure, and nature of our sun’s heliosphere — the gigantic bubble that surrounds our solar system and helps shield us from dangerous incoming galactic radiation.

The results, based on data spanning four decades from 11 different spacecraft, including IBEX, were published in the journal Science September 5, 2013.

“It was very surprising to find that changes in the interstellar flow show up on such short time scales because interstellar clouds are astronomically large,” says Eberhard Möbius, UNH principal scientist for the IBEX mission and co-author on the Science paper. Adds Möbius, “However, this finding may teach us about the dynamics at the edges of these clouds — while clouds in the sky may drift along slowly, the edges often are quite fuzzy and dynamic. What we see could be the expression of such behavior.”

The data from the IBEX spacecraft show that neutral interstellar atoms are flowing into the solar system from a different direction than previously observed. Interstellar atoms flow past Earth as the interstellar cloud surrounding the solar system passes the sun at 23 kilometers per second (50,000 miles per hour).

The latest IBEX measurements of the interstellar wind direction differed from those made by the Ulysses spacecraft in the 1990s. That difference led the IBEX team to compare the IBEX measurements to data gathered by 11 spacecraft between 1972 and 2011. The scientists wanted to gather as much evidence from as many sources as possible to determine whether the newer instruments simply provided more accurate results, or whether the wind direction itself changed over the years.

The various sets of observations relied on three different methods to measure the incoming interstellar wind. IBEX and Ulysses directly measured neutral helium atoms as they coursed through the inner solar system. IBEX’s measurements are close to Earth, while Ulysses’ measurements were taken between 1.3 and 2 times further from the sun.

In the final analysis, the direction of the wind obtained most recently by IBEX data differs from the direction obtained from the earlier measurements, which strongly suggests the wind itself has changed over time.

“Prior to this study, we were struggling to understand why our current measurements from IBEX differed from those of the past,” says co-author Nathan Schwadron, lead scientist for the IBEX Science Operations Center at UNH. “We are finally able to resolve why these fundamental measurements have been changing with time: we are moving through a changing interstellar medium.”

A month in space-images captured by telescopes, probes and astronauts over the past month.

Friday 6th September 2013.       Find Photo Gallery Here:-

The Guardian’s  pick of the month’s best space-related imagery includes the birth of a star that will one day be 100 times the mass of the sun, lava flows from the largest volcano in the solar system, a picture of Earth from 1.44bn kilometres away and plans for the next Mars rover.

Photograph: JPL-Caltech/Nasa

No, that little blue dot is not dropped pixels on your screen, it’s a picture of Earth taken from some 1.44bn kilometres away on 19 July by the wide-angle camera on the international Cassini spacecraft. It also captures Saturn’s F, G and E rings. If your screen is good, you may be able to make out our moon.

Saturn Moon Titan Sports Thick Icy Shell & Bizarre Interior.

By Charles Q. Choi  28th August 2013.    Find Full Article and Photos Here:-

This artist’s illustration shows the likely interior structure of Saturn’s moon Titan deduced from gravity field data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The investigation by Cassini’s radio science team suggests that Titan’s interior is a cool mix of ice studded with rock. Credit: NASA/JPL

The tough icy shell of Saturn’s largest moon Titan is apparently far stronger than previously thought, researchers say.

These surprising new findings add to hints Titan possesses an extraordinarily bizarre interior, scientists added.

Past research suggested Titan has an ocean hidden under its outer icy shell 30 to 120 miles (50 to 200 kilometers) thick. Investigators aim to explore this underground ocean in the hopes of finding alien life on Titan, since virtually wherever there is water on Earth, there is life.

To learn more about Titan’s icy shell, planetary scientist Doug Hemingway at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed the Cassini probe’s scans of Titan’s gravity field. The strength of the gravitational pull any point on a surface exerts depends on the amount of mass underneath it. The stronger the pull, the more the mass.

The researchers then compared these gravity results with the structure of Titan’s surface. They expected that regions of high elevation would have the strongest gravitational pull, since one might suppose they had extra matter underneath them. Conversely, they expected regions of low elevation would have the weakest gravitational pull.

What the investigators discovered shocked them. The regions of high elevation on Titan had the weakest gravitational pull.

“It was very surprising to see that,” Hemingway told SPACE.com. “We assumed at first that we got things wrong, that we were seeing the data backwards, but after we ran out of options to make that finding go away, we came up with a model that explains these observations.”

Life on Earth ‘began on Mars’

• Press Association  29th August 2013.       Find Article Here:-

Geochemist argues that seeds of life originated on Mars and were blasted to Earth by meteorites or volcanoes.

Sunrise over the Gale crater on Mars. Was this where life began? Photograph: Stocktrek Images, Inc/Alamy

Evidence is mounting that life on Earth may have started on Mars. A leading scientist has claimed that one particular element believed to be crucial to the origin of life would only have been available on the surface of the red planet.

Professor Steven Benner, a geochemist, has argued that the “seeds” of life probably arrived on Earth in meteorites blasted off Mars by impacts or volcanic eruptions. As evidence, he points to the oxidised mineral form of the element molybdenum, thought to be a catalyst that helped organic molecules develop into the first living structures.

“It’s only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidised that it is able to influence how early life formed,” said Benner, of the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the US. “This form of molybdenum couldn’t have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did.

“It’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely that life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet.”

All living things are made from organic matter, but simply adding energy to organic molecules will not create life. Instead, left to themselves, organic molecules become something more like tar or asphalt, said Prof Benner.

He added: “Certain elements seem able to control the propensity of organic materials to turn to tar, particularly boron and molybdenum, so we believe that minerals containing both were fundamental to life first starting.

“Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidised form of molybdenum was there too.”

Another reason why life would have struggled to start on early Earth was that it was likely to have been covered by water, said Benner. Water would have prevented sufficient concentrations of boron forming and is also corrosive to RNA, a DNA cousin believed to be the first genetic molecule to have appeared.

Although there was water on early Mars, it covered much less of the planet. “The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock,” said Benner, speaking at the Goldschmidt 2013 conference in Florence, Italy. “It’s lucky that we ended up here nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell.”

NASA Releases Images of Earth by Two Interplanetary Spacecraft.

July 22nd, 2013      Find Full Article Here:-

Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.

In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects.

It also marked the first time people on Earth had advance notice their planet’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. More than 20,000 people around the world participated.

Biggest camera in solar system to create 3D map of Milky Way.

By Richard Gray  30th June 2013.      Find Article and Video Here:-

The biggest digital camera in the world is to be launched into space later this year to produce the most detailed map of our galaxy ever created.

The £630 million Gaia Space Telescope will take three dimensional pictures of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way in an attempt to help astronomers pinpoint our location in the galaxy for the first time.

Scientists claim the spacecraft, which is due to be launched in October, will allow them to study the stars around us in more detail than ever before and will reveal just how far these distant suns are from our own solar system.

The telescope will help astronomers determine the age, size and movement of the stars like never before while also provide details about what they are made of.

They also hope to discover more than 5,000 new planets outside our own solar system along with other objects that lie outside our galaxy.

“Gaia is an astronomers dream,” said Alvaro Gimenez, director of science at the European Space Agency, which has funded the mission.

“It is designed to answer many of the questions we have about the stars around us.

“It is easy to see stars at night be we know little about exactly how far they are, who they move, what they are made of and how old they are. Gaia is gong to tell us this.

“By looking at the dynamic structure of our galaxy we will be able to learn about its formation and something about its future.”

The car-sized spacecraft, which has been built by space company Astrium, is expected to launch in October from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket.

It will take a month to travel nearly one million miles from Earth towards the sun to the location where it will begin taking pictures.

Once there it will unfurl a 30 feet wide “skirt” that will help to shield the spacecraft from the sun’s rays that could damage it and impair the quality of any pictures.

Solar panels on the back of the sun shield will also help to provide power for Gaia during its five year mission to photograph the galaxy.

Its “eyes” consist of two mirror telescopes that will give Gaia stereoscopic vision much like human eyesight and allow it to see in 3D.

A camera sensor with more than a billion pixels will record the images captured by the telescopes. The average camera on a mobile phone has around 10 million pixels and is just a fraction of an inch in size.

Gaias camera sensor measures one and a quarter square feet and is made up from 106 light sensitive electronic chips.

Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has been the most successful ever launched, has a camera sensor of just 16 megapixels.

With such a high resolution camera, Gaia will be able to peer more than 150,000 light years away, or 900,000 trillion miles into space. The camera is powerful enough to be able to distinguish a single hair more than 430 miles away.

Professor Gerald Gilmore, UK principal investigator on the Gaia mission based at the University of Cambridge, said: “The 3D aspect of this telescope is vital.

“Embarrassing we only have accurate distances for 719 stars out of the billions in our sky after 1,500 years of astronomy.

“Until now it has only been possible to determine the location of the stars on a flat plain. Gaia is going to be able to tell us about how far away those stars are and how they are moving.

“It is something we will never be able to do on earth because the atmosphere blurs everything and introduces colours.

“Gaia is going to open our eyes to layers of information that we can only dream of.”

It is estimated that there are more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and our solar system sits on one of the arms of the spiral of stars that form the galaxy.

Although Gaia will only be able to image around one per cent of the stars in our galaxy, it will take pictures of each around 70 times to build up a picture of how they are moving with its stereoscopic vision.

By looking at how the stars move over time, astronomers hope to pinpoint the exact position of our own solar system while also building up a picture of how our galaxy is growing.

The pictures beamed back to Earth are expected to produce enough data to fill 1.5 million CDs.

Scientists also hope to detect supernova – enormous exploding stars – and quasars, the supermassive black holes that are thought to sit at the centre of galaxies.

Professor Gilmore added: “It will be the first time we have explored distant space in this way so there are a lot of things that we will be able to do.

“As the information comes in we should be able to spot new supernova as they happen, planet transits and there will probably be new things that we don’t even know about yet that will be discovered.

“Giai will provide information on entirely new classes of objects that haven’t been discovered yet as it will allow us to tell the difference between stars and other things.

“We should also be able to trace the evolution of our galaxy from the Big Bang to today by looking for the very oldest stars in our galaxy and those that have come from other smaller galaxies that merged with our own in the past.”

Due to the accuracy needed to achieve such pin-sharp pictures, engineers as space company Astrium have had to develop new technology to ensure the spacecraft does not change shape in the extremes of space.

Gaia is to be flown into an area of space where the gravitational pull from the sun and the Earth are equal so it will stay in the same exact position.

The spacecraft itself has been built from a recently developed material called silicon carbide as it is light, strong and will protect the camera from the extremes of space.

They have also developed a special thrusters that will use minute jets of nitrogen gas to precisely control the Gaia in space and to keep it steady.

More than 400 engineers have spent the past three years carefully putting the spacecraft together, often training using virtual reality simulators to ensure they get the precision alignments needed to obtain such high resolution pictures.

Global warming debunked: NASA report verifies carbon dioxide actually cools atmosphere.

By Ethan A. Huff  May 22nd 2013.         Find Article Here:-

Practically everything you have been told by the mainstream scientific community and the media about the alleged detriments of greenhouse gases, and particularly carbon dioxide, appears to be false, according to new data compiled by NASA’s Langley Research Center. As it turns out, all those atmospheric greenhouse gases that Al Gore and all the other global warming hoaxers have long claimed are overheating and destroying our planet are actually cooling it, based on the latest evidence.

As reported by Principia Scientific International (PSI), Martin Mlynczak and his colleagues over at NASA tracked infrared emissions from the earth’s upper atmosphere during and following a recent solar storm that took place between March 8-10. What they found was that the vast majority of energy released from the sun during this immense coronal mass ejection (CME) was reflected back up into space rather than deposited into earth’s lower atmosphere.

The result was an overall cooling effect that completely contradicts claims made by NASA’s own climatology division that greenhouse gases are a cause of global warming. As illustrated by data collected using Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER), both carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), which are abundant in the earth’s upper atmosphere, greenhouse gases reflect heating energy rather than absorb it.

“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” says James Russell from Hampton University, who was one of the lead investigators for the groundbreaking SABER study. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”

Almost all ‘heating’ radiation generated by sun is blocked from entering lower atmosphere by CO2

According to the data, up to 95 percent of solar radiation is literally bounced back into space by both CO2 and NO in the upper atmosphere. Without these necessary elements, in other words, the earth would be capable of absorbing potentially devastating amounts of solar energy that would truly melt the polar ice caps and destroy the planet.

“The shock revelation starkly contradicts the core proposition of the so-called greenhouse gas theory which claims that more CO2 means more warming for our planet,” write H. Schreuder and J. O’Sullivan for PSI. “[T]his compelling new NASA data disproves that notion and is a huge embarrassment for NASA’s chief climatologist, Dr. James Hansen and his team over at NASA’s GISS.”

Dr. Hansen, of course, is an outspoken global warming activist who helped spark man-made climate change hysteria in the U.S. back in 1988. Just after the release of the new SABER study, however, Dr. Hansen conveniently retired from his career as a climatologist at NASA, and reportedly now plans to spend his time “on science,” and on “drawing attention to [its] implications for young people.”

You can read more details of the new NASA SABER study by visiting:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/

You can also check out a informative, four-minute video report on the solar storm here:
http://youtu.be/EEFQHDSYP1I

Sources for this article include:

http://principia-scientific.org

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/

http://youtu.be/EEFQHDSYP1I

Failure of Nasa’s Kepler telescope puts search for another Earth in peril.

By Associated Press 16th May 2013.                  Find Article Here:-

Telescope orbiting the Sun has lost part of its stabilising system, making it too inaccurate to hunt for another Earth.

Nasa artist’s impression of Kepler-22b, one of the planets spotted by the telescope that may be able to support life. Photograph: Nasa/Rex features

Nasa‘s hunt for other planets that could harbour life faces a setback: its Kepler space telescope is broken and, since it is in orbit around the Sun, may prove impossible to fix.

The failure of stabilising systems on the spacecraft could mean an end to the $600m mission’s search, although Kepler has already outlived official expectations and the space agency is not yet ready to call it quits. The telescope has discovered scores of planets but only two so far that show strong signs of being habitable.

“I wouldn’t call Kepler down and out just yet,” said Nasa sciences chief John Grunsfeld.

Nasa said Kepler had lost two out of four wheels that control its orientation in space, meaning it can’t point at stars with the same precision.

In orbit around the sun, 40m miles (65m kilometres) from Earth, Kepler is too far away to send astronauts on a repair mission like Nasa did to the Hubble telescope. Engineers on the ground are trying to restart one of Kepler’s faulty wheels or find a workaround. The telescope could be used for other purposes if it can no longer track down planets.

Kepler was launched in 2009 in search of Earth-like planets. So far it has confirmed 132 planets and spotted more than 2,700 potential ones. Its mission was supposed to be over by now but in 2012 Nasa agreed to keep it running through 2016 at a cost of about $20m a year.

In April Kepler scientists announced the discovery of a distant duo that seems ideal for some sort of life to flourish. The other planets found by Kepler haven’t fitted all the criteria that would make them right for life of any kind, from microbes to humanoids.

While ground telescopes can hunt for planets outside our solar system, Kepler is much more advanced and is the first space mission dedicated to that goal.

For the past four years Kepler has focused its telescope on a faraway patch of the Milky Way where there are more than 150,000 suns, recording slight dips in brightness that give away a planet passing in front of a star.

Now “we can’t point where we need to point. We can’t gather data,” deputy project manager Charles Sobeck said.

Scientists said there was a backlog of data they still needed to analyse even if Kepler stopped looking for planets. “I think the most interesting, exciting discoveries are coming in the next two years. The mission is not over,” said chief scientist William Borucki at the Nasa Ames research centre in northern California, which manages the mission.

Scientists who have no role in Kepler mourned the news, saying the spacecraft may not be able to determine how many Earth-size planets are in the “Goldilocks zone” where it’s not too hot or too cold for water to exist in liquid form on the surface. They praised the data collected by Kepler so far but said several more years of observations were needed to analyse it all.

“This is one of the saddest days in my life. A crippled Kepler may be able to do other things but it cannot do the one thing it was designed to do,” said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

In 2017 Nasa plans to launch Tess – the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – designed to search for planets around nearby stars.

International Space Station to boldly go with Linux over Windows.

By Joel Gunter  10th May 2013.    Find Article Here:-

Computers aboard the International Space Station are to be switched from Windows XP to the Linux operating system in an attempt to improve stability and reliability.

The International Space Station, which has sprung a ‘very serious’ leak of ammonia Photo: Nasa/AP

Dozens of laptops on the ISS’s ‘opsLAN’ network – which provides the ship’s crew with vital capabilities for day-to-day operations, from telling the astronauts where they are to interfacing with onboard cameras – will be switched, removing Windows entirely from the ISS.

“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could,” said Keith Chuvala of the United Space Alliance, which runs opsLAN for NASA.

Astronauts using the system were trained on specific courses tailored by the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Linux is already used to run various systems aboard the ISS, including the world’s first ‘Robonaut‘, sent to the Space Station in 2011. ‘R2’ can be manipulated by astronauts as well as ground controllers and is designed to carry out tasks “too dangerous or mundane” for astronauts in microgravity, according to the Linux Foundation.

Tailored versions of Linux are widely used in scientific projects, including CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

“Linux Foundation had it all, and provided the trainer on-site at our headquarters, which was a huge plus,” said Chuvala. “On top of that, the cost was very good, so it was overall a great value.”

The ISS computers were previously infected by a virus while running Windows. In 2008 the W32.Gammima.AG worm was found aboard, having reportedly been carried on a Russian astronaut’s laptop. The Windows-based worm was classed as low risk by anti-virus software manufacturer Symantec.

Reports from Russian officials today reveal that the ISS is suffering a “very serious” ammonia leak that may require astronauts to perform an emergency spacewalk.