Nasa reveals Mission to 'Touch the Sun' for Groundbreaking Parker Solar in 2018

Nasa reveals historic 2018 mission to 'touch the sun' in an attempt to predict devastating solar storms Nasa is set to announce its ambitious plans to launch a probe mission directly into the atmosphere of the sun in a world first. Dubbed the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), the mission will launch a spacecraft from Earth in the summer of 2018. It will reach an orbit within four million miles (6.5 million km) of the sun and will measure activity at its outer surface, known as the 'corona'. The craft will collect vital information about the life of stars and their weather events, and will help scientists improve how we predict dangerous solar flares. The spacecraft, dubbed the Parker Solar Probe, will see a spacecraft launched from Earth in the...

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NASA Launching Satellite Thursday to Track Earth's Dirt from Space

NASA's next Earth-observing satellite is ready to launch Thursday (Jan. 29), and it could vastly improve the way scientists monitor droughts around the world. © NASA/Randy Beaudoin The space agency's Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite (SMAP) is scheduled to launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force base atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket at 9:20 a.m. EST (1420 GMT) on Jan. 29, and at the moment, weather is looking good ahead of liftoff. Officials are predicting an 80 percent chance of good conditions during the 3-minute launch window Thursday. The SMAP satellite is designed to measure the moisture of Earth's dirt more accurately than ever before, according to NASA. The probe will make a global map of the planet's...

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New Planet Found

A Super-Earth plus Triple Stars Equal Life An artist depiction of the planet GJ667Cc and the three stars it orbits The search for exoplanets, or worlds orbiting other stars, is evolving so fast that discoveries that seemed exotic just a few months ago have become commonplace. Multiple-planet solar systems? Astronomers expected to find just a handful; now we know of more than 200. Planets orbiting double or even triple stars? It was big news when just one was announced back in September; we've already got several more examples in hand. In short, the unexpected is something planet hunters have learned to expect — and in most cases, these surprises have tended to expand the possibilities for finding worlds where life might thrive. It's...

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NASA Probe Circling Moon on 2012 Eve

(PASADENA, Calif.) — As planet Earth rang in the new year, a different kind of countdown was happening at the moon. After a 3 ½-month journey, a NASA spacecraft flew over the moon's south pole, fired its engine and dropped into orbit Saturday in the first of two back-to-back arrivals over the New Year's weekend. NASA probe circling the moon on New Year's Eve Mission control at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers and applause after receiving confirmation that the probe was healthy and circling the moon. An engineer was seen on closed-circuit television blowing a noisemaker to herald the New Year's Eve arrival. "Everything went just as we hoped. The burn was spot-on," chief scientist Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts...

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Spacecraft Twins Arrive at the Moon

The Moon is like an aging boxer, its face scarred and distorted by a lifetime of powerful blows. In the boxer's case, those blows are delivered over the course of a few decades. In the case of the Moon, the punishment has been going on for billions of years, courtesy of comets and asteroids that carved out craters and piled up mountains all over the lunar surface. The very birth of the moon was violent: planetary scientists are pretty sure our companion world was created when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and ripped off a Moon-size chunk. Artist concept of GRAIL mission. Much of our understanding of that violent history comes from rocks hauled back by the Apollo missions four decades ago. But the astronauts who gathered that...

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NASA finds alien planet in 'habitable zone'

NASA finds alien planet in 'habitable zone' Closed captioning of: Planet found in 'habitable zone' story of course has to do with our current earth but we learned today there may be another one out there. astronomers report the discovery of what they are calling an earth-like planet 600 light years away from here. while it is very big it looks like us and they believe it has a temperate climate, perhaps in the 70s all the time. now imagine what we could do with this new place. it could be our chance to start fresh. a place where the chicago cubs always win, where there is always free parking, productive lawmakers and uninterrupted cell phone service. it's called kepler 22-b. while we can work on the name it doesn't hurt to dream. A...

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Calling All Astronauts: NASA Has a Job Opening For You

Astronauts! They’re just like us. Well, at least while they’re job hunting. The International Space Station could be your new office. The National Aeronautics & Space Administration has an opening for an astronaut based in the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. They’ve also gone the contemporary route for job recruitment by posting the position on the job website USAJobs. Folded in with ads for positions such as IT specialist and medical technologist, the open call posting is seeking candidates who have a “sense of daring” and a “probing mind” for a position that, unsurprisingly, could require “[f]requent travel.” Of course, there are more concrete requirements as well, including U.S. citizenship, a bachelor’s degree in engineering,...

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Pluto — No Longer a Planet — Has a Twin Sister

If Pluto's looking for someone — or something — to blame for being drummed out of the planetary corps back in 2006, it need look no further than Eris. The solar system's ninth planet had long had its detractors — purists who sniffed at its tiny size and irregular orbit — but it was in 2005 things came to a head. An artist's rendering of the dwarf planet ErisNASA That was when Caltech astronomer Mike Brown found a tiny, frigid world orbiting some three times further out than Pluto. Brown had been finding similar objects in the Kuiper Belt — the massive band of comet-like bodies that circles the solar system — for years. But all of them were smaller than 2,320 km (1,440 miles) across, the modest dimensions of Pluto. Eris (which Brown...

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Astronauts go deep for undersea 'asteroid' trip

'Aquanauts' will spend nearly two weeks at a depth of 60 feet, off the coast of Florida After waiting out stormy weather and rough seas, a team of astronauts successfully began a tough mission Thursday, but instead of launching into space, this crew is headed for the ocean floor on a mock asteroid trip. NASA's NEEMO 15 expedition will simulate aspects of a mission to an asteroid. In this illustration, a configured rock wall can be seen near the underwater Aquarius laboratory. The six "aquanauts" splashed down at 2:15 p.m. EDT (1815 GMT) and will spend the next 13 days living inside a small laboratory called Aquarius on the ocean floor during their undersea mission to test different ways to explore an asteroid. The expedition was originally...

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Scientist: Satellite must have crashed into Asia

BERLIN (AP) — A defunct German research satellite crashed into the Earth somewhere in Southeast Asia on Sunday, U.S. scientist said — but no one is still quite sure where. Undated artist rendering provided by EADS Astrium shows the scientific satellite ROSAT. Andreas Schuetz, a spokesman for the German Aerospace Center, said Saturday Oct. 22, 2011 the best estimate is still that the ROSAT scientific research satellite will impact sometime between late Saturday and Sunday 1200 GMT. Photo: EADS Astrium / AP Most parts of the minivan-sized ROSAT research satellite were expected to burn up as they hit the atmosphere at speeds up to 280 mph (450 kph), but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons (1.7 metric tons) could have crashed,...

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Astronauts' photographs from space flights and moon landing go on sale

They often used Hasselblad cameras from Sweden modified only by the addition of a bigger button to press, but then taking pictures when you are an astronaut in a bulky, pressurised suit is clearly tricky. Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong, the photographer, is reflected in Aldrin's visor. Photograph: Nasa/AFP/Getty Images Many of the astronauts' early space photographs have become extremely famous, more for their otherworldly beauty than their scientific value. And now some are to appear in the UK's first dedicated sale of vintage Nasa photographs. Bloomsbury Auctions in London has announced details of the first specialist sale of images showing how man came to land on the moon. "We are...

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Dead satellite tumbles to Earth — but where?

Up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons could have hit the planet, experts believe Scientists were trying to establish how and where a defunct research satellite returned to the Earth Sunday, after warning that some parts might survive re-entry and crash at up to 280 mph. There was no immediate solid evidence to determine above which continent or country the ROSAT scientific research satellite entered the atmosphere, said Andreas Schuetz, spokesman for the German Aerospace Center. Most parts of the minivan-sized German satellite were expected to burn up, but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons could have hit the planet. Citing officials, Space.com reported that ROSAT slammed into Earth's atmosphere sometime...

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Dark matter mystery deepens

Dark matter should be densely packed in the centers of galaxies. Instead, new measurements of two dwarf galaxies show that they contain a smooth distribution of dark matter. Like all galaxies, our Milky Way is home to a strange substance called dark matter. Dark matter is invisible, betraying its presence only through its gravitational pull. Without dark matter holding them together, our galaxy’s speedy stars would fly off in all directions. This artist's conception shows a dwarf galaxy seen from the surface of a hypothetical exoplanet. A new study finds that the dark matter in dwarf galaxies is distributed smoothly rather than being clumped at their centers. This contradicts simulations using the standard cosmological model known...

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VISTA finds new globular star clusters and sees right through the heart of the Milky Way

This survey has also turned up the first star cluster that is far beyond the center of the Milky Way on the other side of our galaxy. This image from VISTA is a tiny part of the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey that is systematically studying the central parts of the Milky Way in infrared light. On the right lies the globular star cluster UKS 1 and on the left lies a much less conspicuous new discovery, VVV CL001 — a previously unknown globular. The new globular appears as a faint grouping of stars about 25% of the width of the image from the left edge, and about 60% of the way from bottom to top. Credit: ESO/D. Minniti/VVV Team Two newly discovered globular clusters have been added to the total of just 158 known globular...

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Blue stragglers: Astronomers discover how mysterious stars stay so young

Scientists report that a mechanism known as mass transfer explains the origins of these old stars that still burn hot and blue. Mysterious “blue stragglers” are old stars that appear younger than they should — they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don’t show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis. An artist's conception showing a blue straggler being created by mass transfer in a binary star system. The giant star, seen in the upper left of the illustration, has lost hold of its outer envelope. This material is pulled towards its partner, forming an accretion disk, and is eventually consumed by the "proto-blue straggler."...

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