Archive
NASA’s Cassini Finds Saturn’s Moon Phoebe Has Planet-Like Qualities
April 27, 2012 12:58 PM EDT
Data from NASA‘s Cassini mission reveal Saturn’s moon Phoebe has more planet-like qualities than previously thought.
Scientists had their first close-up look at Phoebe when Cassini began exploring the Saturn system in 2004. Using data from multiple spacecraft instruments and a computer model of the moon’s chemistry, geophysics and geology, scientists found Phoebe was a so-called planetesimal, or remnant planetary building block. The findings appear in the April issue of the Journal Icarus.
“Unlike primitive bodies such as comets, Phoebe appears to have actively evolved for a time before it stalled out,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Objects like Phoebe are thought to have condensed very quickly. Hence, they represent building blocks of planets. They give scientists clues about what conditions were like around the time of the birth of giant planets and their moons”
Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event
ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012)
On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun’s surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.
In this month’s Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus’s transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.
Read full story: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120501085556.htm
New Study Finds Vast Galactic Network, No Sign of Dark Matter
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 04.25.2012 at 12:37 pm
Is dark matter in danger? A few days after scientists said there’s no dark matter near our sun, a team of researchers in Germany now says there’s no dark matter in our galactic neighborhood. The team found a vast structure of globular clusters and satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way in a smooth, evenly distributed pattern. Most models of galactic distribution and evolution require the gravitational effects of dark matter, but in this model, it doesn’t seem to exist.
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.
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]
Mysteriously dark Mars regions are made of glass
15 April 2012
Hearts of glass (Image: NASA/University of Arizona)
THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes.
The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn’t clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt.
Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. They found absorption bands characteristic of the iron in volcanic glass, a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallise (Geology, DOI: 10.1130/G32755.1).
The glass likely takes the form of sand-sized grains, as it does in glass-rich fields in Iceland. The spectra suggest the grains are coated with silica-rich “rinds”.
On Earth, such rinds coat volcanic glass weathered by water. How the glassy grains formed on Mars is unknown, but Horgan says magma from Martian volcanoes interacting with water ice and snow is a possibility. That would make these regions (pictured right) potential hotspots for alien life because they would have held chemical-rich water – a key ingredient for life.
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.
MAR. 12: Massive triangle shaped hole in the Sun’s corona recorded by NASA
Don`t know what to say about this, it seems to have happened at the same time with the other solar event, posted here 2 posts back. You can see the other event at 1:20 in the lower left corner and pictures of this huge triangle on the SDO site http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/about.php
http://solen.info/solar/images/AR_CH_20120312.jpg
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sxi/goes15/latest.html
http://solen.info/solar/
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/37955/Earth_sized_Ufo_s_using_the_sun…
Black spherical anomaly on the sun / march 11, 2012
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MARCH 15 UPDATE 2:
NASA`s explanation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82l46fpd-ic
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MARCH 15 UPDATE 1:
new footage extracted from SDO archives from march 10 11 and 12 . http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dailymov.php
March 10:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2012/03/10/20120310_1024_0193.mpg
March 11:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2012/03/11/20120311_1024_0193.mpg
March 12:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/dailymov/2012/03/12/20120312_1024_0193.mpg
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MARCH 14 UPDATE:
Apparently the NASA footage no longer displays march 11 and 12 so there is nothing to see there anymore. Check it out http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/kiosk.php
And the news hit daily mail
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MARCH 13 UPDATE: It appears that “the object” was stationed there for many days and after a quick google search i came up with this picture of the sun from march 10, 2012:
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ORIGINAL POST – MARCH 13
Straight from NASA.
Watch the lower left corner of the screen:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/kiosk.php
Youtube version:
Believe nothing 
