Tag: NASA

 

credit NASA

Maybe it is a rose by any other name, but at some point something smacked into our only natural satellite and ended up blowing dust and rock for about 1.4 miles (2.2 km), leaving in its wake a lovely flower pattern. The image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Moon since 2009.

Such impacts on the Moon do not erode as fast as they would on an atmosphere bearing body, but in time they do fade due to solar wind activity, thermal movement, and impacts from other meteorites. So that puts this Lunar display relatively new – but still think in terms of eons, not years. 

 

 

 

NASA's STEREO spacecraft was going about is business, capturing a video of Mecury being blasted by a coronal mass ejection from the sun. While this is in itself a fascinating piece of video, YouTube user siniXster discovered something more than meets the eye – a giant "UFO" was captured when the waves washed over it. The video follows:

The video definitely seems to show something that reacts to the plasma burst, illuminating it from seemingly invisibility. According to siniXster,

It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked… What object in space cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?

The question was put to scientists at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the group that analyses the data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 that took the picture. According to them, the images are simply an artifact from the way they process the data. The planet's position from the previous day is used to mask the image, and any background light from other sources must be removed to make it a visible image. The mysterious image is simply a negative artifact from that process.

 

 

The problem with that explanation is that the image is not round, but instead has sharp images like you would expect from something mnufactured. However, researchers point out that this would be the effect from artifacts over the course of several days. Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer at NRL, sums it up,

The pixels which form the two parallel lines are where the circle from the planet and the bleeding pixels (cross-like features) overlap as it progresses across the field

So, the shape does make sense, and there is a plausible explanation for it. You can weigh the evidence for yourself, but it does point out one thing – having extra eyes on the huge amount of data we receive almost daily from outer space may help in catching something that would otherwise be missed. This makes even the most casual space enthusiast a very important part of our search for intelligent life in the universe.

via Space.com
 

 

 

Artist's Conception of Kepler-22b credit NASA

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered and confirmed planet in the so called Habitable Zone around a star very similar to our own Sun. The zone is so named because that is the region around a star that liquid water could exist, so a planet in that zone is a great candidate for life similar to our own.

 

 

The planet, dubbed Kepler-22b, should have a surface temperature around a nice 72 degrees. Unlike discovered potential planets in other solar systems that are many times the size of Earth, Kepler-22b is much closer at only roughly 2.4 times our planet's size. In other words, the possibility of Kepler-22b having life similar to Earth's is the strongest we have discovered yet.

 

 

NASA news conference on Dec 5, 2011 credit NASA

The Kepler Space Telescope, launched in March 2009, has also identified more than 1,000 explained candidates as of December 5, 2011. In total, 2,326 potential planets have been found by the space telescope. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, sums it up nicely,

We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called Goldilocks planet

Even though Kepler-22b is about 600 light years away from Earth, identifying other Earth-like planets in similar solar systems will allow us to understand our own, and possibility shed light on its origin and eventual destruction. But if we can discover life on those foreign planets, then it just might change the future of man altogether.

 

 

Is there water flowing on our closest planetary neighbor, Mars? While this is debatable, a couple images released from NASA may convince you that there is indeed flowing water on the Red Planet, albeit a highly seasonal one. Let's look at the evidence.

The first image shows what appears to be a fresh deposit in a crater in the Centauri Montes Region. The deposit appeared somewhere between August 1999 and September 2005. The new feature is several hundred meters long, and could be evidence of a gully flow.

click for full size image

The next image shows fresh evidence of a potential gully flow that deposited residue on the surface between 2001 and 2005. Interesting to note that the location in 2001 appears to show evidence of previous flow activity, and the later image clearly shows the result of something happening in the area exactly as you would expect. This was in a crater in the Terra Sirenum area.

 

click for full size image

Hopefully one day we we know the answer to the mystery of ground flowing water on Mars. In the meanwhile, it is entertaining to explore the latest public images from NASA and look for evidence to prove or disprove the theory. Personally I think that any certain proof of flowing water that NASA had acquired would be quickly released to the public in order to get the funding flowing to NASA for a manned mission. Well, we can hope, anyway – that manned mission is way overdue.