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Scientists have wondered about possible alien life on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and it’s looking like we’re going to get our first real look at the problem. NASA has announced that the agency has shifted its planned Europa mission, which is to conduct a detailed survey and investigate the moon’s habitability, into the so-called development phase — meaning that it’s no longer theoretical and that it’s going to happen. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California will run the mission in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.
On a hot, dusty Friday evening in May, a caravan of five cars packed with UC San Diego students rolled onto FAR site in the Mojave Desert—a 10-acre property established by the Friends of Amateur Rocketry, Inc. to safely test and launch rockets. It took three tries, but the UC San Diego chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space were able to successfully test the latest version of their 3-D-printed rocket engine.
Astronomers have successfully commissioned a new type of optic that can reveal the image of an exoplanet next to its parent star. The 'vector Apodizing Phase Plate' (vector-APP) coronagraph was installed at the 6.5-m Magellan Clay telescope in Chile in May 2015, and the first observations demonstrated an unprecedented contrast performance very close to the star, where planets are more likely to reside. These results will be presented by PhD student Gilles Otten this Monday afternoon to the scientific community at the "In the Spirit of Lyot" conference organized by the Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Québec and researchers at the University of Montreal.
The "eye" is China's newly developed third-generation rendezvous and docking CCD optical imaging sensor. It will be used on China's second orbiting space lab, Tiangong-2, the Chang'e-5 lunar probe and the permanent manned space station, according to China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).
China plans to launch Tiangong-2 in 2016, and send Chang'e-5 to collect samples from the moon and return to earth around 2017. It also aims to put a permanent manned space station into service around 2022.
Mars Orbiter spacecraft has outlived its prime mission life and is healthy and operational. The spacecraft, which had earlier entered the 'blackout phase' (due to Mars moving behind the Sun from Earth's perspective), is gradually coming out of that phase. The spacecraft health data is now being received. The current elliptical orbit of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft has a periareion (nearest point to Mars) of 474 km and an apoareion (farthest point to Mars) of 71, 132 km.
The payloads onboard the Spacecraft were last operated in May 2015, and performance of all payloads were satisfactory. Mars Colour Camera (MCC) of the spacecraft had taken 405 frames so far. Operations of all payloads will restart in a few weeks from now.
HAL has delivered ‘Orbiter Craft Module Structure’ of Chandrayaan-2 to ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC).
Chandrayaan-2 is a two module configuration spacecraft comprising of the ‘Orbiter Craft’ and the ‘Lander Craft’.
These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different "faces" of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left.
From left to right, the images were taken when Pluto's central longitude was 17, 63, 130, and 243 degrees, respectively. The date of each image, the distance of the New Horizons spacecraft from Pluto, and the number of days until Pluto closest approach are all indicated in the figure.
These images show dramatic variations in Pluto's surface features as it rotates. When a very large, dark region near Pluto’s equator appears near the limb, it gives Pluto a distinctly, but false, non-spherical appearance. Pluto is known to be almost perfectly spherical from previous data.
Mars is thought to have had a watery past, but when exactly it transitioned to its dry and dusty present is up for debate. Now, though, a team of scientists studying the marks on a young Martian crater has found signs that waterlogged debris flowed down the Red Planet's slopes surprisingly recently - within the last million years.
The prospect of finding ocean-bearing exoplanets has been boosted, thanks to a pioneering new study.
An international team of scientists, including from the University of Exeter, has discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen escaping from a Neptune-sized exoplanet.
Such a phenomena not only helps explain the formation of hot and rocky 'super-earths', but also may potentially act as a signal for detecting extrasolar oceans. Scientists also believe they can use the discovery to envisage the future of Earth's atmosphere, four billion years from today.
The ground-breaking research is presented in the respected scientific journal, Nature.
ESA's Venus Express spacecraft has found the best evidence yet of active lava flows on Venus. Earlier missions to Venus have shown that the surface bears the unmistakable scarring of fierce, ancient volcanic activity. However, prior to Venus express, no mission had been successful in directly imaging clues to contemporary volcanism. This quirk has baffled scientists for years, as it has long been assumed that Venus hosts an internal heat source, and that heat has to escape somehow.
Venus is often given the moniker "Earth's twin", owing to the fact that it possesses a similar mass and composition to our planet. In reality, the landscape of Venus is scarred and barren, cloaked in a thick, toxic atmosphere that has created a runaway greenhouse effect resulting in a surface temperature of 462° C (864° F).
Previous observations of Venus' atmosphere have obliquely hinted at the presence of active volcanism. For example, a spike in sulphur dioxide levels in Venus' upper atmosphere between 2006 and 2007 seemed to suggest a fierce but brief bout of volcanic activity, the after effects of which gradually subsided over the following five years.
ESA has announced that its Rosetta comet orbiter mission will be extended by nine months. The unmanned spacecraft that rendezvoused with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last year will carry out further observations until September 2016, by which time it will be too far from the Sun to power itself and will land on the comet.
It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it's on the way to creating organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.
The goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on.
If you look at genome annotation software today, it’s not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes]. It’s built to look for an esoteric and interesting thing I can publish an academic paper on.”
“This torrent of genomic data we’re now collecting is awesome, except they sit in databases, where they remain data, not knowledge. Very little genetic information we have is actionable"
I was looking at a pair of fresh ones taken just today, June 25, at 05:37 UTC (just after midnight, more or less, U.S. time), when New Horizons was just 22.9 million kilometers from Pluto. They’re amazing. Both Pluto and its large moon Charon show all kinds of features, as you can see at the top of this article (the only processing I did was a straight enlargement and a brightness/contrast fiddle). Overall, Charon is much darker than Pluto, but even then surface features are clearly visible.
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But that bright spot on Pluto surprised me. That’s near its north pole, and it’s been seen before in earlier images, basically as a splotch. In this image it’s quite obvious.
I wondered if perhaps this was an image artifact, like a particle hit on the detector, but in fact it’s the same in the other image taken 30 seconds earlier. Here are the two shots side by side:
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is scheduled to resupply the International Space Station on Sunday. Previously resupply missions with an Orbital Antares rocket and Russia’s Progress 59 spacecraft failed. SpaceX has quickly grown into one of the world’s premier space flight companies. And as Orbital ATK recovers from its failed launch, SpaceX is now the...
HAT-P-7b, KOI-13, 127, 183, 188, 190, 196, 225, 254, 428, 607, 609, 684, 774, 1176) probably show TTVs due to a systematic observational effect: long cadence data sampling is regularly shifted transit-by-transit, interacting with the transit light curves, introducing a periodic bias, and leading to a stroboscopic period. For other systems, the activity and rotation of the host star can modulate light curves and explain the observed TTVs. By excluding the systems that were inadequately sampled, showed TTV periods related to the stellar rotation, or turned out to be false positives or suspects, we ended up with seven systems. Three of them (KOI-186, 897, 977) show the weakest stellar rotation features, and these are our best candidates for dynamically induced TTV variations.
Conclusions. Those systems with periodic TTVs that we cannot explain with systematics from observation, stellar rotation, activity, or inadequate sampling, may be multiple systems or even exomoon hosts.
