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NASA’s Building of the Future: a Model for Tomorrow’s Moonbases
by:Charlie Jane Anders at http://io9.com/5904872/nasas-building-of-the-future-a-model-for-tomorrows-moonbases?tag=space
Check out this gorgeous cutting-edge building, which NASA just opened in Moffett Field, CA and won the coveted Platinum LEED certification.
Ames Research Center director Pete Worden described the Sustainability Center as “the first Moon building on the planet Earth,” because of all the insane technology that’s been deployed here. A water recycling system, similar to what’s on the Space Station, will cut water use by 90 percent. The building uses geothermal wells for heating and cooling, and opening and closing windows to adapt to changing weather conditions. And solar panels and fuel cells power the building and other buildings at Ames. [Mountain View Voice]
Why Mining an Asteroid for Water and Precious Metals Isn’t as Crazy as it Sounds
Billionaire-backed space startup Planetary Resources has officially unveiled its business plan to much fanfare and with few surprises. The company’s principals–which include X-Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson, and former NASA Flight Director Chris Lewicki–today pledged that Planetary Resources would make the abundant resources of space available here on Earth, and introduced a couple of the company’s own spacecraft that will make such space prospecting possible. The rush for space resources is officially on.
GPS Satellites Could Improve Tsunami Advance Warning Time Tenfold
By Clay Dillow Posted 04.23.2012 at 5:20 pm
When the Tohoku earthquake struck Japan in March of last year, seismometer data allowed authorities to issue earthquake earnings within eight seconds of first realizing something was seismologically amiss. But their initial readings were not fully accurate, labeling the ‘quake a magnitude 7.1. It took authorities another 20 minutes to revise the magnitude to its real value of 9. Just ten minutes later, the tsunami hit.
Researchers at NASA and a group of universities think they can issue more accurate readings faster using global positioning data, thus allowing officials to more accurately assess risks and issue better-informed warnings up to ten times faster.
James Cameron, Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot, Jr. to Unveil Space Project
By Dan Nosowitz Posted 04.20.2012 at 5:30 pm
Planetary Resources, a mysterious organization whose investors include Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Microsoft alum and astronaut Charles Simonyi, director James Cameron, “space visionary” Peter Diamandis, and Ross Perot, Jr., is planning to announce more details of the project this coming Tuesday. We’ll be covering it, so we thought we’d give you a heads-up. It has something to do with space resources and exploration–its LinkedIn page says it “develops technologies and systems to enable low-cost commercial robotic exploration of the solar system,” and cofounder Peter Diamandis has hinted at asteroid mining–but we don’t know much more than that at the moment. Check in here on Tuesday (and, I mean, on Monday too, for other things) for the reveal.
Cassini Flies Right By Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, Snapping New Up-Close Pics
The Cassini spacecraft has been busy over this past week, making close flybys of both Enceladus and and Tethys, two of Saturn’s moons. And we’re not using “close” as a relative term here. Cassini skimmed Enceladus in such proximity that it was literally able to taste the plume of water ice, vapor, and other organic compounds spewing from the moon’s south polar region.
That flyby was at an altitude of just 46 miles above Enceladus’s surface, a hair’s breadth as these sorts of things go. Unfortunately for us, Baghdad Sulcus–the fracture from which said plume emanates–is in darkness for this flyover, but Cassini was able to snap various high-res surface shots of the moon as it passed back into daylight.
For its Tethys encounter, Cassini took a bit more conservative approach, passing about 5,700 miles above the moon’s surface. It was the first imaging expedition to Tethys since 2005, when Cassini captured imagery from its Saturn-facing side. This time Cassini snapped views of Tethys’s other side, which should provide researchers with enough data to start building decent digital elevation maps of Tethys’s surface.
[JPL]
First Phobos, now Mars too has a monolith.
By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com – Wed, Apr 11, 2012
http://news.yahoo.com/monolith-object-mars-could-call-214004772.html
discuss at: http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=206925
Amateur stargazers have discovered an intriguing object jutting out from the surface of Mars. The seemingly perfectly rectangular, upright structure, found in NASA images of the Red Planet, bears a striking resemblance to the monoliths planted on Earth and the moon by aliens in the classic sci-fi film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The object in question was first spotted several years ago after being photographed by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA space probe; every so often, it garners renewed interest on the Internet. But is it unnatural — a beacon erected by aliens for mysterious reasons, and even more mysteriously paralleled in the imaginations of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, creators of “2001”? Or is this rock the work of nature?
According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, who processes many of the images taken during NASA’s Mars missions, the object in question is no more than a roughly rectangular boulder.
The HiRISE camera that photographed it has a resolution of approximately 1 foot (30 centimeters) per pixel — impressive considering the 180-mile (300-kilometer) altitude from which it photographs the Martian surface, but not quite sharp enough to capture the cragginess of a mid-size boulder. “When your resolution is too low to fully resolve an object, it tends to look rectangular because the pixels in the image are squares. Any curve will look like a series of straight lines if you reduce your resolution enough,” Hill told Life’s Little Mysteries.
The location of the boulder at the bottom of a cliff near many other boulders suggests it broke off the cliff and tumbled to its current spot sometime in the distant past, Hill said. Such a perilous location is itself an argument against deliberate placement by aliens: “If I was going to build a monolith somewhere, that’s the last place I would put it!” he said. “The debris falling from the cliff would cover it up pretty quickly, on geologic timescales.”
Hill added that the height of the boulder is being exaggerated in the photo by a low sun angle. Photographed when the sun was near the horizon, the boulder casts an especially long shadow.
The ufologists aren’t necessarily wrong in calling it a monolith — the word simply translates from Latin as “one stone.” But this monolith isn’t the masonry of Martians.
Top-Secret US Spy Satellite Blasts Off Amid Mystery of What it Will Do (and Why Did the US Blackout Footage of Launch?)
Thursday, 05 April 2012 
‘A rocket carrying a top-secret payload blasted off from the California coast yesterday. The Delta IV rocket lifted off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, about 130 miles north west of Los Angeles.
The rocket contained some form of spy technology – thought to be a hi-tech replacement for America’s ageing fleet of radar satellites. It’s not clear what capabilities the new generation might be armed with.’
NASA Probe Offers New View of Mercury: an Alien World Right in Our Back Yard
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
‘The overheated, underappreciated runt of the solar system is finally getting some attention. Mostly ignored since a brief fly-by in the 1970s, Mercury, our solar system’s smallest, swiftest planet, received a longer house call last March: NASA’s $450 million Messenger probe, which achieved orbit, a tricky feat never before attempted.
(NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington) – A depiction of the MESSENGER spacecraft is shown flying over Mercury’s surface displayed in enhanced color during the mission’s second Mercury flyby in 2008.
Read more: NASA Probe Offers New View of Mercury: an Alien World Right in Our Back Yard
davidicke.com/headlines
Water On Mercury: Images From Nasa’s Messenger Probe Shows ‘Ice’ At Planet’s Poles
Fresh Evidence has emerged that indicates the existence of water on Mercury.
Despite the planet’s blistering surface temperatures of more than 400 degrees, a Nasa satellite has discovered so-called “cold traps” at the planet’s poles, areas that live permanently in shadow.
The Messenger probe mapping Mercury
According to data from the space agency’s Messenger probe, radar signals are reflected from the “cold traps”, a characteristic indicative of ice.
Messenger, launched in 2004, is only on the second probe to map the sun-scorched planet, performing several flybys since 2008.
Mercury is the planet closest to the sun
According to Dr Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Messenger images “show that all the radar-bright features near Mercury’s south pole are located in areas of permanent shadow.
“Near Mercury’s north pole such deposits are also seen only in shadowed regions, results consistent with the water-ice hypothesis.”
However, the scientist added that the images were not conclusive and that further research was necessary.
The findings were announced at the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
An image of Mercury taken by Messenger in 2008
NASA Releases Atlas of the Entire Sky
Launched in 2009, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE methodically snapped an infrared picture about once every 11 seconds for ten months — totaling around 2.7 million images — in an attempt to compile an atlas of the entire sky. This past Wednesday, NASA released the final version of their all-sky atlas and catalog of objects, which should keep scientists and astronomers busy for quite some time.
Comprising 15 trillion bytes of information, the individual pictures from the WISE probe were stitched together into a collection of 18,000 mosaic images with over 560 million individual stars and galaxies, many of which have never been seen before. The image above is one such mosaic image, showing the entire 360º view of the sky in a single shot.
The hope is that this collection of images and catalog of objects will spur further discoveries, as the head of the data processing and archiving effort for WISE Roc Cutri said:
“It will be exciting and rewarding to see the innovative ways the science and educational communities will use WISE in their studies now that they have the data at their fingertips.”
Though the all sky-atlas is only just now released, preliminary data from WISE has already turned up some startling discoveries. For instance, the first “trojan asteroid” — that is, an asteroid which has the same orbital path around the sun as the Earth — was found using information from the WISE survey. A new class of stars called “Y-dwarfs,” which are the darkest and coldest stars yet seen, were also discovered using WISE data. Information from WISE was also used in a survey of near Earth asteroids that comfortingly found that NASA has already tracked over 90% of space rocks close to our planet.
With so much valuable scientific work already made by the program, it’s no surprise that NASA has high hopes now that all the information has been released. Who knows what startling new finds will come next?
(via NASA, Wikipedia, image via NASA)
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