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NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope suffered a second failure in its reaction-wheel control system, forcing a suspension of its search for alien planets while the space agency determines whether the four-year mission is truly finished.
"It's certainly not good news," Cha …
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NASA's leaked operating plan suggests that the agency is raiding money restored to the planetary program this year by Congress.
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I've been out of town for a couple of days and am overwhelmed with work and an overflowing email box. So what do I do about that? I ignore what I'm supposed to be doing and play with Cassini raw image data, of course. Here is a "mutual event" of Mimas (the bigger moon) and Pandora (the outer shepherd of the F ring).
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General Motors has successfully defended a right of publicity lawsuit over its use of the image of Albert Einstein in a 2009 advertisement. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which controls Einstein’s rights of publicity, had alleged that GM was not authorized to use his likeness. It sued General Motors for trademark infringement, unfair competition, and … Continue reading »
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NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has shut down due to an apparent problem with its positioning system, suspending indefinitely its science mission.
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Not Yet, but Things Don’t Look Good
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009 to search out worlds around other stars, has likely reached the end of its current mission due to the failure of a critical component called a reaction wheel. The spacecraft has four of these wheels which help stabilize Kepler so that it can [...]
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Last week, the Kepler spacecraft software detected an abnormal drift in the pointing of the observatory. As it was designed to do, the software sent the spacecraft into safe mode (putting the observatory to sleep, so to speak) and alerted engineers on the ground. When Kepler was restarted, Reaction Wheel 4 wouldn’t start back up. These wheels are needed to point the telescope; it needs three for normal operation. Reaction Wheel number 2 failed in 2012, so Kepler’s been running on that
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Dan Satterfield commented on the post, Circumzenithal Arc over Ocean City In Maryland On Tuesday, on the site Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal The top one is a circumzenithinal arc and the bottom one is a Circumhorizon arc. I am fairly certain that I was correct.
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A high-tech team of scientists and filmmakers shared pictures of what appears to have been a centuries-old civilization in Honduras, one year after they used laser-mapping technology to identify traces of structures in the thick jungle.
The square-shaped and rounded structures, s …
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Because the Manhattan skyline is so iconic, New York City is often the backdrop for implausible imaginary sci-fi futures -- now see an artist's fanciful renderings of NYC on 5 planets of the solar system.
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The sun has erupted with another X-class solar flare, adding a fourth huge solar explosion to the 48-hour tally. Continue reading →
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Evelyn Mervine wrote a new post, Weekly Geology Picture(s) #2: Barberton Mountainland, South Africa, on the site Georneys To make up for missing the last two Monday Geology Picture posts, here's another guest post by my husband Jackie Gauntlett. This post shares more pictures from his recent mining / exploration geology field trip in […]
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This patch of sky holds some of the youngest stars ever found. The ribbon that runs through the centre of the image is made up of dust clouds in the constellation Orion, which holds one of the busiest nearby stellar nurseries. The composite image includes both infrared light at wavelengths too long for the human [...]
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A tale from the scientific trenches: laboratory work to simulate Titan's rich atmosphere.
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I love Tolkien’s books, well most of them, but they all have great imagery, stories, plots a lessons. He wrote “The Lord of the Rings” based on his life and experiences. Although the battle of Helm’s Deep was made a major portion of the second movie, it was not a major part of the book. … Continue reading »
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This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array (pink).
This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are
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Liping Fan became a registered member
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Remember the amazing picture I posted last week of the squashed, eclipsed Sun rising into the Australian sky? That photo was part of a time-lapse video that, at the time, was being put together by photographers Colin Legg and Geoff Sims.
They finished it. Trust me: Take two minutes of your life, make this full screen, sit back, and be in awe of the show nature puts on for us.
Phenomenal.
This eclipse was from last week, May 10, when the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun. The Moon’s
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Late last year, when Congress passed a defense authorization bill with export control reform language included, advocates of such reform noted that this legislative provision was not the end of their efforts. The language in the bill simply returned to the President the authority to move satellites and related components off the US Munitions List [...]
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Podcaster: Pamela L. Gay ; Brett Denevi & Paul Schenk Title : Learning Space talk about Dawn Mission to Vesta Organization: CosmoQuest : Space App Challenge Link : You can watch the video in: http://youtu.be/R5OFqceOzUg Educational Materials from Dawn http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/DawnClassroo… Potato Light Curves! – http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/DawnClassroo… SAFELY playing with dry ice to make comets – http://www.astro.virginia.edu/dsbk/fi… Vesta with a 3D printer […]
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Here’s something I didn’t know happened: Under the right conditions, the exhaust from ships plying the ocean can form clouds, leaving tracks criss-crossing the sky.
This image, taken by NASA’s Earth-observing Terra satellite on Apr. 20, 2013, shows some of these long thin clouds (called ship tracks) in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. Actually, there’s quite a bit going on here, and the ship tracks are just one part.
The tracks themselves can be seen as the mostly linear
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Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. This orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by […]
