This is very, very exciting. 

Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space!

Last week, the company issued a somewhat cryptic announcement saying they “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. I predicted this meant they wanted to mine asteroids, and yes, I will toot my own horn: I was right. They’re holding a press conference Tuesday morning to officially announce they’re going asteroid hunting.

The company had a pretty fierce amount of credibility right off the bat, with several ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, and planetary scientists involved, as well as the backing of not one but several billionaires, including a few from Google… not to mention James Cameron. The co-founders of Planetary Resources are Peter Diamandis — he created the highly-successful X-Prize Foundation, to give cash awards to incremental accomplishments that will help achieve technological breakthroughs, including those for space travel — and Eric Anderson, X-Prize board member and Chairman of the Board of the Space Spaceflight Federation.

These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around.

(via Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it) 

 (via A MESSENGER to Mercury reveals a strange little planet)

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars.

All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth but orbit close to their star, making them too hot to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700 planets confirmed to orbit other stars, called exoplanets, only a handful are known to be rocky.

“Astronomers are just beginning to confirm the thousands of planet candidates uncovered by Kepler so far,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all around us.”

Kepler searches for planets by continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars, looking for telltale dips in their brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a planet. Follow-up observations from ground-based telescopes also are needed to confirm the discoveries.

The latest discovery comes from a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The team used data publicly released by the Kepler mission, along with follow-up observations from the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their measurements dramatically revised the sizes of the planets from what was originally estimated, revealing their small nature.

The three planets are very close to their star, taking less than two days to orbit around it.The KOI-961 star is a red dwarf with a diameter one-sixth that of our sun, making it just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter. (via NASA’s Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

NASA’s space probe Juno, outward bound for Jupiter, has sent pack a pic of the Earth-Moon system from 6 million miles away.

Via

Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater

This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. 

These images come from observations of Newton crater, at 41.6 degrees south latitude, 202.3 degrees east longitude, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In time, the series spans from early spring of one Mars year to mid-summer of the following year. The images have been adjusted to correct those taken from oblique angles to show how the scene would look from directly overhead. 

(via NASA - Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater)

GeekDad Exclusive: Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space

Juno, a space probe that is being sent to Jupiter to study the fifth planet from the Sun, will carry a few unique stowaways. Thanks to a joint mission between NASA and Lego, there will be three very special Lego minifigs affixed to the spacecraft.

The figures, milled from aluminum, will accompany Juno on its five-year trip to Jupiter. When Juno arrives in 2016, the Lego likeness of the Roman god, Jupiter, his sister, Juno, and the Italian astronomer, Galileo, will be there to take in all the sights and bask in the immensity of the largest planet.

This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.

The brick company even underwrote the project, at a cost of $5,000 for each of the minifigs, which will soon become the farthest flying toys ever. The manufacture of the figures was a deliberate process to ensure the figures would not interfere with NASA’s sensitive measurements.

(via GeekDad | Wired.com)

NASA’s WISE Mission Finds First Trojan Asteroid Sharing Earth’s Orbit

This artist’s concept illustrates the first known Earth Trojan asteroid, discovered by WISE. The asteroid is gray and its extreme orbit is shown in green. Image credit: Paul Wiegert, University of Western Ontario, Canada 

PASADENA, Calif. – Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known “Trojan” asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn’s moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth’s point of view.

“These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see,” said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. “But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth’s surface.”

The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth’s path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.

The team’s hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth’s orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid’s orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers). An animation showing the orbit is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=103550791 .

(via NASA - Earth’s New Trojan Friend)

Lunar orbiters find most recent volcanos on dark side of the Moon

The Earth’s moon was formed by a collision between two separate bodies early in the history of the solar system. That collision left the Moon completely molten, and provided it with both a large reservoir of heat and an interior that produced huge outpourings of basaltic rock, which formed the dark maria that can easily be seen on the body’s surface. These features are also associated with volcanic domes that indicate a more familiar and subdued form of volcanism also occurred on the Moon, albeit rarely. Now, researchers think they’ve spotted the most recently formed volcanoes on the Moon, hidden on the dark side and far away from any maria.

(via Ars Technica)

crookedindifference:

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, a clock that’s traveling fast will appear to run slowly from the perspective of someone standing still. Satellites move at about 9,000 mph—enough to make their onboard clocks slow down by 8 microseconds per day from the perspective of a GPS gadget and totally screw up the location data. To counter this effect, the GPS system adjusts the time it gets from the satellites by using the equation here.

(via proofmathisbeautiful)

Fermi catalogue update shows ‘violent Universe’ changes

The catalogue that lists the most violent neighbourhoods in the Universe has been updated.

The Fermi space telescope captures gamma rays - the highest-energy light in nature, which hints at the cosmos’ most extreme conditions and processes.

The second Fermi catalogue represents a full two years of data, improving on the first edition’s 11 months.

It lists 1,873 gamma-ray sources; some 589 remain unidentified and could represent entirely new cosmic objects.

Dave Thompson, a Nasa astrophysicist who co-led the catalogue’s production, told BBC News that the effort was more than just an expanded list.

“The new catalogue is a new data set,” he said. “We’ve reanalysed all the data, reduced our background, developed new methods of analysis. We’re convinced that not only is this quantitatively a better catalogue - it’s qualitatively a better catalogue.”

It is also a snapshot from a slowly unfolding film of the Universe’s most extreme environments.

“It’s very important to understand that the gamma-ray sky is not static, it’s changing all the time,” explained Steven Ritz, deputy principal investigator for the Fermi mission’s Large-Area Telescope.

“Our great advantage with this facility is that we’re able to see the whole sky all the time; every three hours we’ve covered the whole sky, so there are interesting differences between the first year catalogue and the second and that speaks to the variability of the sky,” he told BBC News.

(via BBC News)

Interestingly, this link has a lot more great Hubble shots, and I recommend you go check it out.

scipsy:

NASA’s Great Observatories Examine the Galactic Center Region

(via apteryxrowi)

A New Dawn at Vesta

On Saturday, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena received an indication they had been waiting for from the Dawn spacecraft. Dawn had successfully entered orbit around the astroid Vesta marking the first time a spacecraft had entered orbit around an object in the Asteroid Belt.

Vesta is a very large asteroid with an average diameter of about 529 kilometers, about 330 miles. This gives surface area of about 879,100 square kilometers and a volume of 77,510,000 cubic kilometers. Although Vesta is classified as an asteroid, part of an August 2006 proposal from the International Astronomical Union would reclassify Vesta as a dwarf planet. This is the same proposal that reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet.

(via Wired.com)

adsertoris:

Sunrise on the Moon

On June 10, 2011, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter angled its orbit 65° to the west, allowing the spacecraft’s cameras to capture a dramatic sunrise view of the moon’s Tycho crater.

A very popular target with amateur astronomers, Tycho is located at 43.37°S, 348.68°E, and is about 51 miles (82 km) in diameter. The summit of the central peak is 1.24 miles (2 km) above the crater floor. The distance from Tycho’s floor to its rim is about 2.92 miles (4.7 km).

Tycho crater’s central peak complex, shown here, is about 9.3 miles (15 km) wide, left to right (southeast to northwest in this view).

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

Fermi Space Telescope Fails to See Evidence Of Dark Matter

If dark matter fills the universe, astronomers should see the gamma rays it produces. That evidence has so far failed to materialise

Among the most dramatic events in the universe are the death of stars as they collapse into black holes and the collision of black holes themselves. These events are so violent that they shake the firmament, generating gravity waves that ripple across the cosmos. They also generate huge blasts of neutrinos that can sometimes be picked up by giant neutrino telescopes on Earth.

But while these events are fascinating, not least because they almost certainly involve physics beyond our ken, they are hugely difficult to observe. That’s because neutrinos and gravity waves are notoriously shy.

Neutrinos usually pass straight through the Earth. In fact, astronomers have only once detected neutrinos from beyond the Solar System and that was almost 25 years ago during a supernova called SN1987A.

But neutrinos are veritable party animals compared to gravity waves. Physicists have never seen a gravity wave, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on machines designed to find them.

Thankfully, there is a third way to study these extreme events using gamma rays, ultra high energy photons. The mother of all gamma ray telescopes is the Fermi Space Telescope, which has been peering into the cosmos from low Earth orbit for three years now.

(via Technology Review)

Salty geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus come from liquid water

We may be able to add another item to the growing list of bodies in our solar system that contain significant amounts of liquid. Jupiter’s moon Europa has long been suspected of harboring a subsurface water ocean, but recent studies have suggested that a large part of the interior of its moon Io is also molten (although that’s molten rock). Further out, Saturn’s moon Titan appears to have a subsurface ocean that allows its surface to move somewhat independently of its core. Now, researchers have found evidence that Saturn’s moon Enceladus needs to be added to this list.

(via Ars Technica)