Chris Hadfield - Astronaut Mission

Remember i told you in December 2012, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield will launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station (ISS).

In 25 days the mission  is a go

Huge 'Zombie' Alien Planet Rises from the Dead

An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests.
A new analysis of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a "zombie" world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet — known as Fomalhaut b — is actually just a giant dust cloud.
"Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we're seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud," co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.   

 source : space.com

New planet found outside solar system

WASHINGTON: European astronomers say that just outside our solar system they’ve found a planet that’s the closest you can get to Earth in location and size.

It is the type of planet they’ve been searching for across the Milky Way galaxy and they found it circling a star right next door — 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometres) away. But the Earth-like planet is so hot its surface may be like molten lava. Life cannot survive the 2,200 degree heat of the planet, so close to its star that it circles it every few days.

The astronomers who found it say it’s likely there are other planets circling the same star, a little farther away where it may be cool enough for water and life. And those planets might fit the not-too-hot, not-too-cold description sometimes call the Goldilocks Zone.

That means that in the star system Alpha Centauri B, a just-right planet could be closer than astronomers had once imagined.

It’s so close that from some southern places on Earth, you can see Alpha Centauri B in the night sky without a telescope. But it’s still so far that a trip there using current technology would take tens of thousands of years.

But the wow factor of finding such a planet so close has some astronomers already talking about how to speed up a 25 trillion-mile (40 trillion-kilometre) rocket trip there. Scientists have already started pressuring NASA and the European Space Agency to come up with missions to send something out that way to get a look at least.

The research was released online Tuesday in the journal Nature. There has been a European-U.S. competition to find the nearest and most Earthlike exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. So far scientists have found 842 of them, but think they number in the billions.

While the newly discovered planet circles Alpha Centauri B, it’s part of a system of three stars: Alpha Centauri A, B and the slightly more distant Proxima Centauri. Systems with two or more stars are more common than single stars like our sun, astronomers say.

This planet has the smallest mass — a measurement of weight that doesn’t include gravity — that has been found outside our solar system so far. With a mass of about 1.1 times the size of Earth, it is strikingly similar in size.

Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, who heads the European planet-hunting team, said this means "there’s a very good prospect of detecting a planet in the habitable zone that is very close to us."

And one of the European team’s main competitors, Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley, gushed even more about the scientific significance.

"This is an historic discovery," he wrote in an email. "There could well be an Earth-size planet in that Goldilocks sweet spot, not too cold and not too hot, making Alpha Centauri a compelling target to search for intelligent life."

Harvard planet-hunter David Charbonneau and others used the same word to describe the discovery: "Wow."

Charbonneau said when it comes to looking for interesting exoplanets "the single most important consideration is the distance from us to the star" and this one is as close as you can get. He said astronomers usually impress the public by talking about how far away things are, but this is not, at least in cosmic terms.

Alpha Centauri was the first place the private Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program looked in its decade-long hunt for radio signals that signify alien intelligent life. Nothing was found, but that doesn’t mean nothing is there, said SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak.

The European team spent four years using the European Southern Observatory in Chile to look for planets at Alpha Centauri B and its sister stars Alpha Centauri A and Proxima Centauri. They used a technique that finds other worlds by looking for subtle changes in a star’s speed as it races through the galaxy.

Part of the problem is that the star is so close and so bright — though not as bright as the sun — that it made it harder to look for planets, said study lead author Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory.

One astronomer who wasn’t part of the research team, wondered in a companion article in Nature if the team had enough evidence to back such an extraordinary claim. But other astronomers said they had no doubt and Udry said the team calculated that there was only a 1-in-1,000 chance that they were wrong about the planet and that something else was causing the signal they saw.

Finding such a planet close by required a significant stroke of good luck, said University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Greg Laughlin.

Dumusque described what it might be like on this odd and still unnamed hot planet. Its closest star is so near that it would always hang huge in the sky. And whichever side of the planet faced the star would be broiling hot, with the other side icy cold.

Because of the mass of the planet, it’s likely a rocky surface like Earth, Dumusque said. But the rocks would be "more like lava, like a lava planet."

"If there are any inhabitants there, they’re made of asbestos," joked Shostak.

Source from  The News International

Skydiving daredevil Felix Baumgartner is more than halfway to his goal of setting a world record for the highest jump after a successful test leap from 13.6 miles above the ground.  enjoy this video

Newfound 'Super Earth' seen as a top contender to host life

 Scientists looking for characteristics similar to our world like looks of this alien planet.

A newly discovered alien planet may be one of the top contenders to support life beyond Earth, researchers say.

The newfound world, a "super Earth" called Gliese 163c, lies at the edge of its star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist.
"There are a wide range of structures and compositions that allow Gliese 163c to be a habitable planet," Xavier Bonfils, of France's Joseph Fourier University-Grenoble, told Space.com by email.
He went on to caution that several possible uninhabitable combinations exist as well. [ The Top 5 Potentially Habitable Alien Planets ]
A newfound super Earth Bonfils and an international team of astronomers studied nearly 400 red dwarf stars with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a spectograph on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Gliese 163c was one of two alien planets found orbiting the star Gliese 163, which lies about 50 light-years from Earth in the Dorado constellation The team found indications of a third planet as well but cannot confirm it at this time.
Weighing in at about seven times the mass of Earth, Gliese 163c could be a rocky planet, or it could be a dwarfed gas giant, researchers said.


"We do not know for sure that it is a terrestrial planet," Bonfils said. "Planets of that mass regime can be terrestrial, ocean or Neptune-like planets."
Orbiting at the inner edge of the habitable zone, Gliese 163c takes 26 days to zip around its parent star, which is considerably dimmer than our sun. The second planet, Gliese 163b, has an orbital period of only nine days, while the third unconfirmed planet circles from a distance.
Bonfils pointed out that there is about a 2 percent chance that Gliese 163c might pass between its star and the sun from Earth's perspective. If so, scientists may be able to glean more information about the distant planet by watching it cross the face of its host star.
The research has been submitted for review and publication.
A good candidate for life The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo keeps a catalog of the alien worlds it considers good candidates to host life. The newly discovered Gliese 163c ranks fifth on the list.
"We are finding more potentially habitable planets now than before," PHL's Abel Mendez, who was not part of the Gliese 163c discovery team, told Space.com by email.
Out of the six planets on PHL's list, four have been found in the last year alone — Kepler-22b, Gliese 667Cc, HD 85512b and, of course, Gliese 163c.
"Most of these are relatively close, so we can expect to find better and closer ones as our technological sensitivity to Earth-size planets improves," Mendez said.

 PHL (at) UPR Arecibo

Four of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory's top six potentially habitable exoplanets have been found since September 2011.

To rank habitable planets, Mendez and his colleagues at PHL compare them with the only planet known to host life. They rank the worlds according to how similarly their masses, diameters and temperatures match up with those of Earth.
Temperatures of alien planets are tough for researchers to estimate. Temperature is heavily influenced by atmospheric characteristics, and scientists don't know much about most exoplanets' atmospheres.
Mendez suggested that one scenario for Gliese 163c might include a balmy ocean with an atmosphere 10 times as dense as Earth's. The global ocean might slosh beneath a pink, cloud-covered sky. At around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), the temperature would be too hot for prolonged human exposure or complex plants or animals, but some microbes could tolerate it.
But it's also possible that Gliese 163c is too hot for even those hardy lifeforms to exist.

(source  to NBC NEW.com

Guns in space

Enjoy this video !  

New space telescope will explore violent Universe

European astronomers will be able to explore the universe with a powerful new Japanese space telescope thanks to an agreement recently signed.


Officials from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will cooperate in building and operating a satellite called Astro-H.
The orbiting observatory will watch the heavens with X-ray eyes, the latest in a number of space telescopes that can view this part of the spectrum beyond that of visible light. X-rays are emitted by extremely hot events at temperatures ranging from several million to several hundred million degrees Celsius.
Watching them will allow space scientists to observe some of the most extreme phenomena in the Universe including supernova explosions, neutron stars, black holes and the centres of active galaxies.
It will also help them to probe the large-scale structure of the Universe, including clusters of galaxies, and discover how it has evolved over billions of years. It will also help show how matter behaves in extreme gravitational fields.
The deal to work together on this exciting mission was signed last month by Professor Alvaro Giménez Cañete, ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, and Dr Junjiro Onoda, Director General of the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).

source :  http://bit.ly/HtCrFi

Largest star ever discovered, compared to our Sun

How NASA plans to reach deep space

Flying beyond low Earth orbit is something very much in focus this weekend following the news of Neil Armstrong's death. NASA's goal is to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. To achieve this the US space agency is designing a new heavy lift rocket that can transport humans to deep space.





source: http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

source:http://www.sen.com/news/

Size Of The Universe

Radiation Belt Storm Probes to Launch Saturday

NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes is now set to launch at 4:07 a.m. EDT Saturday, after Friday's launch attempt was scrubbed due to a technical issue, which engineers are now troubleshooting.

RBSP will help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the Earth's radiation belts on various scales of space and time.






source:http://1.usa.gov/18X0au

NASA is Tracking Electron Beams from the Sun

NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) observes a wide array of particles that flow toward Earth from the sun to better understand the great space weather system that connects the sun to our planet. Credit: NASA/H. Zell

In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the great space weather system that links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill up the solar system.

"People think of the sun as giving out light and heat," says Ruth Skoug, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. "But it is also always losing particles, losing mass."

For example, the sun sends out a steady outflow of solar particles called the solar wind and additionally giant, sudden explosions of material called coronal mass ejections or CMEs erupt out into space. Skoug studies a third kind of particle flow: jets of high-energy electrons streaming from the sun known as electron strahl. Through a new five-year study of observations of the strahl, Skoug and her colleagues have researched another piece of this giant space weather puzzle around Earth.


source: http://1.usa.gov/18X0au

Spacewalk Preps and Robotics for Station Crew

The Expedition 32 crew members living and working aboard the International Space Station Thursday continued preparations for an upcoming spacewalk and worked with the orbiting laboratory’s non-human resident.

Flight Engineer Suni Williams performed maintenance on U.S spacesuit batteries and prepared equipment that will be used on her upcoming spacewalk set for Aug. 30.

During the 6.5-hour excursion, Williams and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide are slated to replace a faulty power relay unit on the station’s truss, route power cables for the Russian multipurpose module replacing Pirs and replace a failing camera on the Canadarm2 robotic arm.




source: http://1.usa.gov/18X0au

Curiosity Begins Driving at Bradbury Landing

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has begun driving from its landing site, which scientists have named for the late author Ray Bradbury.

Today's drive confirmed the health of Curiosity's mobility system and produced the rover's first wheel tracks on Mars, seen at left.




source: http://1.usa.gov/18X0au

How many moons are in our solar system?

There is 240 moons but 169 are orbiting our planets.
Here is the breakdown of where those moons orbit:
Mercury and Venus-0.
Earth-1.
Mars-2.
Jupiter-63.
Saturn-60.
Uranus-27.
Neptune-13.

What is the "Big Bang Theory" ?

source: National Geographic

41 New Transiting Planets in Kepler Field of View

Two newly submitted studies verify 41 new transiting planets in 20 star systems                                                          Two newly submitted studies verify 41 new transiting planets in 20 star systems. These results may increase the number of Kepler’s confirmed planets by more than 50 percent: to 116 planets hosted in 67 systems, over half of which contain more than one planet. The papers are currently under scientific peer-review.

Nineteen of the newly validated planetary systems have two closely spaced transiting planets and one system has three. Five of the systems are common to both of these independent studies.


 source: http://1.usa.gov/15DS5

Is there another planet in the universe?

The astronomers spent years making sure the signals they detected really were from planets.

A second planet in the same system, Kepler-20e, is only slightly bigger  than Earth and even hotter.

Both worlds circle their parent star closely with 'years' that last just nine and sixteen days respectively.

Dr Francois Fressin, one of the astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US, said: ‘It is the first time humanity has been able to discover an object similar to the Earth around a star, so maybe we will be able to find others.

‘This could be an important milestone. I think 10 years or maybe even 100 years from now people will look back and ask when was the first Earth-sized planet found. It is very exciting.

source : http://bit.ly/vvTKSj

Curiosity to Take First Test Drive

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been investigating the Martian weather around it and the soil beneath it, as its controllers prepare for the car-size vehicle's first drive on Mars.

This set of images shows the movement of the rear right wheel of NASA's Curiosity as rover drivers turned the wheels in place at the landing site on mars. credit from NASA!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Mission STS-52 and Mission STS-42

Dr. Roberta Bondar became Canada's second astronaut in space when she participated in the first International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-I) mission on board Space Shuttle Discovery.

Space Shuttle Columbia made its thirteenth flight when it lifted off, in October 1992, on Mission STS-52. The payloads included the Italian Laser Geodynamic Satellite (LAGEOS) which was used to monitor continental drift, the Attitude Sensor Package (ASP). The United States Microgravity Payload (USMP) consisting of 3 experiments, and CANadian EXperiments (CANEX-2), consisting of seven experiment.

Chris Hadfield - Astronaut Mission

In December 2012, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield will launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station (ISS).

Length of the mission: 6 months

Objectives:

• Carry out scientific experiments
• Operate Canadarm2 and perform robotics tasks
• Oversee operations as 1st Canadian Commander of theISS as of March 2013

Mission STS-41-G

Marc Garneau conducted 10 experiments in three main categories: space technology, space science and life sciences. The space technology experiments involve two areas: important development tests for the NRCC Space Vision System experiment to be flown on a mission in early 1986 and tests to determine the effect of exposure to space on different advanced composite materials.

The space science studies deal with the physical characteristics of the space environment and of the earth's upper atmosphere. The life sciences component includes several experiments on human adaptation to space flight as preparation for the more detailed investigations on a mission in mid-1986.

Final Flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis - Mission STS-135

Mission STS-135 marked a turning point in space history as Shuttle Atlantis performed the last flight of the Space Shuttle Program. Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center with four astronauts on board.

The 13-day mission to the International Space Station delivered the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module containing supplies, logistics and spare parts. During this mission, Dextre received a payload to demonstrate the potential for refueling spacecraft robotically in flight. The TriDAR technology, the science experiment Hypersole as well as the education project Tomatosphere were also carried aboard the Shuttle.The Canadarm was retired after 30 years of service to the Space Shuttle Program upon completion of STS-135.

Curiosity rover lands on Mars

In an unparalleled technological triumph, a one-ton nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered to the surface of Mars on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle suspended from the belly of a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off an unprecedented $2.5 billion mission.  Read more at Spaceflight Now.

NASA going deeper in mars

NASA has selected a new mission, set to launch in 2016, that will take the first look into the deep interior of Mars to see why the Red Planet evolved so differently from Earth as one of our solar system's rocky planets.

The new mission, named InSight, will place instruments on the Martian surface to investigate whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid like Earth's, and why Mars' crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth's. Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists understand better how terrestrial planets form and evolve.

"The exploration of Mars is a top priority for NASA, and the selection of InSight ensures we will continue to unlock the mysteries of the Red Planet and lay the groundwork for a future human mission there," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "The recent successful landing of the Curiosity rover has galvanized public interest in space exploration and today's announcement makes clear there are more exciting Mars missions to come."(Credit to NASA)

The top 2 videos

these 2 videos are the top video of the day hope you like it (Credit to NASA)

What is the Biggest Planet in the Solar System?

The biggest  plant in the solar system is jupiter.It is the largest by mass, volume, and surface area among other statistics.The diameter at the equator of Jupiter is 140,000 kilometers. All of the planets in our solar system could nicely fit inside Jupiter twice over!

Jupiter is classified as a Gas Giant planet, meaning that it is mainly composed of gases; hydrogen with a little helium mixed in and trace amounts of other elements.


It does have a solid core, made of different materials and thought to be roughly 12 times or more the mass of the Earth.Jupiter has 63 known moons, but four are large enough to be of note; Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The Galileo spacecraft, the only space mission dedicated to Jupiter, orbited the planet for 7 years enabling us to glimpse up close and personal the Shoemaker-Levy comet’s collision with the planet and to gain some spectacular photographs of its larger moons.(Credit to NASA)

What is a solar flare ?

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of an M-class flare on August 17, 2012, at 9:01 PM EDT. The flare, seen on the left (or east) side of the sun from an active region that has not yet been named, and is just rotating into view. The image is colorized in teal, which is typical for showing light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength -- a wavelength particularly good for viewing solar flares.
A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are our solar system’s largest explosive events. They are seen as bright areas on the sun and they can last from minutes to hours. We typically see a solar flare by the photons (or light) it releases, at most every wavelength of the spectrum. The primary ways we monitor flares are in x-rays and optical light. Flares are also sites where particles (electrons, protons, and heavier particles) are accelerated.(Credit to NASA)