SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING? : May 2014

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Friday, May 30, 2014

Morpheus Completes Nighttime Flight Test

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Sunday, May 25, 2014

A CANYON GRANDER THAN THE GRAND CANYON

FROM: NASA

Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars: Explanation: The largest canyon in the Solar System cuts a wide swath across the face of Mars. Named Valles Marineris, the grand valley extends over 3,000 kilometers long, spans as much as 600 kilometers across, and delves as much as 8 kilometers deep. By comparison, the Earth's Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA is 800 kilometers long, 30 kilometers across, and 1.8 kilometers deep. The origin of the Valles Marineris remains unknown, although a leading hypothesis holds that it started as a crack billions of years ago as the planet cooled. Several geologic processes have been identified in the canyon. The above mosaic was created from over 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. Image and story credit: Viking Project, USGS, NASA.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

This Week at NASA

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Mars Weathercam Helps Find Big, New Crater (+playlist)

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Dragon Heads Home (+playlist)

Sunday, May 18, 2014

"WALK THIS WAY"

FROM: NASA
Spacewalk Training at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory

In this image taken on Nov. 7, 2012, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst (partially obscured), both Expedition 40/41 flight engineers, attired in training versions of their Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, are submerged in the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) near NASA's Johnson Space Center. Divers (out of frame) are in the water to assist Wiseman and Gerst in their rehearsal, which is intended to help prepare them for work on the exterior of the International Space Station. Wiseman, Gerst and Maxim Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will launch to the space station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on May 28, 2014, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They are scheduled to return to Earth in November. Image Credit: NASA.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Suivre la famille de lanceurs européens depuis le Gabon

Follow the family of European launchers from Gabon

Sunday, May 11, 2014

SHOWING THE DUNES OF MARS WITH HiRISE

FROM: NASA

Nili Patera is one of the most active dune fields on Mars. As such, it is continuously monitored with the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, a science instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with a new image acquired about every six weeks. By monitoring the sand dune changes, we can determine how winds vary seasonally and year-to-year. This observation is one of the more recent Nili images, acquired on March 1, 2014. Compared to an image acquired on Nov. 22, 2012, changes are obvious. The ripples on the dunes have moved, as well some of the dune boundaries, such as the one at upper left. New landslides on the central dune's lee face are apparent. Such changes, in just 16 months (and finer scale changes have been seen in just a couple of weeks), demonstrate the effectiveness of wind in modifying the Martian landscape. HiRISE is one of six instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the orbiter's HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. > More information and image products Image Credit-NASA-JPL-Caltech-Univ. of Arizona Caption: Nathan Bridges.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Exam time

Monday, May 5, 2014

Minister Kamp bij Woensdagmorgen.nl

Sunday, May 4, 2014

CENTAURUS A WITH IT'S SUPER-MASSIVE BLACK HOLE CENTER

FROM: NASA

Centaurus A is the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky -- making it an ideal target for amateur astronomers -- and is famous for the dust lane across its middle and a giant jet blasting away from the supermassive black hole at its center. Cen A is an active galaxy about 12 million light years from Earth. This image is part of a "quartet of galaxies" collaboration of professional and amateur astronomers that combines optical data from amateur telescopes with data from the archives of NASA missions. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Rolf Olsen; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Clues for a Martian Landscape

STAR FLASH

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before -- supernovas and novas expel matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter. Image Credit: NASA, ESA

THE SPIDERWEB GALAXY

Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk. At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. IC 342 belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2. IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way. New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy rate. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation. Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

JUMPING TO WARP SPEED

This cockpit view of a hypothetical spacecraft traveling at eight-tenths the speed of light shows the visual distortions that would be experienced at such high speeds. The star field is actually being wrapped toward the front of the craft in addition to being significantly blue-shifted. NASA Glenn leads the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, NASA's primary effort to produce near-term, credible, and measurable progress toward the technology breakthroughs needed to revolutionize space travel and enable interstellar voyages. NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio.