Archive
Mars Rover Curiosity Sends First Full-Color Panorama of Its New Martian Home
360 degrees of lovely Gale Crater
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 08.09.2012
After a couple days of black-and-white imagery and blurry color thumbnails, the Mars rover Curiosity has downlinked its first full-color, 360-degree view of its new home in Gale Crater. Click past the jump to enlarge the whole thing–it’s incredible.
The image was brightened during its processing, because it’s not actually this sunny on Mars. The planet is another 50-ish million miles from the sun, and it only receives half the sunlight Earth does.
Scientist Discovers Plate Tectonics On Mars
ScienceDaily (Aug. 9, 2012) — For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet’s surface, also exists on Mars.
“Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth,” said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research.
Yin made the discovery during his analysis of satellite images from a NASA spacecraft known as THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) and from the HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He analyzed about 100 satellite images — approximately a dozen were revealing of plate tectonics.
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120809155831.htm
1st Photos from New Discovery Channel Telescope Unveiled
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One of the first images captured by the Discovery Channel Telescope in Arizona shows the barred spiral galaxy M109. The privately funded observatory took its first photos in May 2012.
CREDIT: Lowell Observatory
The Discovery Channel Telescope is an observatory with a 14-foot (4.3-meter) mirror built near Happy Jack, Ariz., by the Lowell Observatory and Discovery Communications, the parent company of television’s Discovery Channel. The telescope’s opening was marked with a gala on Saturday (July 21) at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff and featured a keynote speech from Neil Armstrong, the first person ever on the moon.
“The First Light Gala is a historic event in the annals of Lowell Observatory,” Jeffrey Hall, director of Lowell Observatory, said in a statement. “It marks completion of our spectacular new research facility, initiation of superb projects that will bring our research to millions through our partnership with Discovery Communications. We are honored to be part of it and grateful to all who have helped make it a reality.”
Read more: http://www.space.com/16706-discovery-channel-telescope-first-photos.html
Gliese 581g – The most habitable exoplanet
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This artist’s conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star. The large planet in the foreground is Gliese 581g, which is in the middle of the star’s habitable zone and is only two to three times as massive as Earth. Some researchers aren’t convinced Gliese 581g exists, however.
CREDIT: Lynette Cook
The controversial exoplanet Gliese 581g is the best candidate to host life beyond our own solar system, according to a new ranking of potentially habitable alien worlds.
Gliese 581g shot to the top of the list — which was published Thursday (July 19) by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) — after a new study marshaled support for its long-debated existence.
The exoplanet was discovered in September 2010, but other astronomers began casting doubt on its existence just weeks later. Now Gliese 581g’s discoverers have rebutted their critics’ charges in a new paper, and have done so effectively enough to get the PHL onboard.
Read more: http://www.space.com/16722-top-5-habitable-alien-planets.html
Solar Corona Revealed in Super-High-Definition
ScienceDaily (July 20, 2012) — Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light. The 16-megapixel images were captured by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, which was launched on a sounding rocket on July 11th. The Hi-C telescope provides five times more detail than the next-best observations by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
These photos of the solar corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, show the improvement in resolution offered by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C (bottom), versus the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (top). Both images show a portion of the sun’s surface roughly 85,000 by 50,000 miles in size. Hi-C launched on a sounding rocket on July 11, 2012 in a flight that lasted about 10 minutes. The representative-color images were made from observations of ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 19.3 nanometers (25 times shorter than the wavelength of visible light). (Credit: NASA)
“Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” said Smithsonian astronomer Leon Golub (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), one of the lead investigators on the mission.
Understanding the Sun’s activity and its effects on Earth’s environment was the critical scientific objective of Hi-C, which provided unprecedented views of the dynamic activity and structure in the solar atmosphere.
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120720195519.htm
Hubble sees the needle galaxy, edge-on and up close
Image credit: ESA/NASA
This image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals an exquisitely detailed view of part of the disc of the spiral galaxy NGC 4565. This bright galaxy is one of the most famous examples of an edge-on spiral galaxy, oriented perpendicularly to our line of sight so that we see right into its luminous disc. NGC 4565 has been nicknamed the Needle Galaxy because, when seen in full, it appears as a very narrow streak of light on the sky.
The edgewise view into the Needle Galaxy shown here looks very similar to the view we have from our Solar System into the core of the Milky Way. In both cases ribbons of dust block some of the light coming from the galactic disc. To the lower right, the dust stands in even starker contrast against the copious yellow light from the star-filled central regions. NGC 4565’s core is off camera to the lower right.
Read more : http://phys.org/news/2012-07-hubble-needle-galaxy-edge-on.html
Astronomers in Chile spot evidence of dark galaxies
AAP July 12, 2012
A photo released on July 9, 2012, of the Cats Paw Nebula revisited in a combination of exposures from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile with 60 hours of exposures on a 0.4-metre telescope taken by amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Ryan M. Hannaho. Source: AFP
ASTRONOMERS in Chile using a powerful telescope have observed what appears to be evidence of the existence of dark galaxies, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) says.
Dark galaxies are small, gas-rich galaxies from the early universe that are believed to be the building blocks of today’s bright, star-filled galaxies, said the ESO, an intergovernmental organisation supported by 15 countries.
“For the first time, dark galaxies – an early phase of galaxy formation, predicted by theory but unobserved until now – may have been spotted,” the observatory said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, an international team thinks they have detected these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar,” the statement said.
Hubble Discovers a Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto
ScienceDaily (July 11, 2012) — A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.
The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.
“The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls,” said team lead Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
The discovery increases the number of known moons orbiting Pluto to five.
The Pluto team is intrigued that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites. The new discovery provides additional clues for unraveling how the Pluto system formed and evolved. The favored theory is that all the moons are relics of a collision between Pluto and another large Kuiper belt object billions of years ago.
Read more : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711123038.htm
Belching Black Hole Proves a Biggie: First Known ‘Middleweight’ Black Hole
July 10, 2012
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ScienceDaily (July 9, 2012) — Observations with CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array have confirmed that astronomers have found the first known “middleweight” black hole.
Outbursts of super-hot gas observed with a CSIRO radio telescope have clinched the identity of the first known “middleweight” black hole, Science Express reports.
Called HLX-1 (“hyper-luminous X-ray source 1”), the black hole lies in a galaxy called ESO 243-49, about 300 million light-years away.
Before it was found, astronomers had good evidence for only supermassive black holes — ones a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun — and “stellar mass” ones, three to thirty times the mass of the Sun.
“This is the first object that we’re really sure is an intermediate-mass black hole,” said Dr Sean Farrell, an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney and a member of the research team, which included astronomers from France, Australia, the UK and the USA.
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120709102720.htm
The real Mars
July 6, 2012
Written by : Joseph P. Skipper
http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com
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Verify M0902042 at MSSS and USGS.
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Verify E0801033 at MSSS and USGS
(22 more images at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2012/221/real-mars.htm)
The visual evidence is presented here in two sampling blocks representing the better of the discoveries. In the first block you’ll see quite a few different bodies of water in a liquid state with some of these surrounded by the bonus of very conventional looking forests. The second block is all about samples of large form forest life Mars style none of which are by official consensus suppose to exist at all on this world.
Remember that the Mars surface is officially suppose to be completely dry and devoid of life. Further, the atmosphere is suppose to be 95.35% carbon dioxide (CO2) with only a very tiny .03% of water vapor and super hard frozen to the tune of as much as –220º Fahrenheit or –140º Celsius. In other words it would be a race as to whether an unprotected Earth human out in the open there would be speedily killed by too much poisonous CO2 gas by many times over or quickly frozen to death.
Note that, even though all of the following evidence is in the official science data and available there for verification, you have never heard a peep out of NASA or JPL as to its existence. So this amounts to the hidden Mars that it appears someone in control does not wish you and I to know about or at least also ignore. Also note that I have added a slight bit of false color to these online images to increase clarity and the viewing comfort level. In any case, the high drama visual evidence is as follows.
Read more : http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2012/221/real-mars.htm
Believe nothing 
