SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING? : September 2014

Monday, September 29, 2014

Craters on the edge

Sunday, September 28, 2014

FALCON 9 ROCKET HEADS INTO SPACE

FROM: NASA

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft lifts off on the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 1:52 a.m. EDT Sunday, Sept. 21, carrying about 5,000 pounds of NASA science investigations and cargo are on their way to the International Space Station.The mission is the company's fourth cargo delivery flight to the space station. One of the new Earth science investigations heading to the orbital laboratory is the International Space Station-Rapid Scatterometer. ISS-RapidScat monitors ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station. This information will be useful for weather forecasting and hurricane monitoring. Dragon also will deliver the first-ever 3-D printer in space, biomedical hardware and other biological research including a new plant study. Dragon is scheduled to be grappled at 7:04 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 23, by Expedition 41 Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, using the space station's robotic arm to take hold of the spacecraft. Dragon is scheduled to depart the space station in mid-October for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, bringing from the space station almost 3,200 pounds of science, hardware and crew supplies. Credit: NASA/Sandy Joseph and Kevin O'Connell.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

GOCE reveals gravity dip from ice loss

Friday, September 26, 2014

Week In Images

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

ESA spaceplane on its way

How to catch a Dragon

Monday, September 22, 2014

Winter in Argyre

Sunday, September 21, 2014

ScienceCasts: What Lies Inside Jupiter

Friday, September 19, 2014

Helsinki

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Rainbow aurora

Sunday, September 14, 2014

ORION CREW MODULE SITS ATOP SERVICE MODULE

FROM: NASA

Caption Credit: NASA. NASA’s first completed Orion crew module sits atop its service module at the Neal Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew and service module will be transferred together on Wednesday to another facility for fueling, before moving again for the installation of the launch abort system. At that point, the spacecraft will be complete and ready to stack on top of the Delta IV Heavy rocket that will carry it into space on its first flight in December. For that flight, Exploration Flight Test-1, Orion will travel 3,600 miles above the Earth – farther than any spacecraft built to carry people has traveled in more than 40 years – and return home at speeds of 20,000 miles per hour, while enduring temperatures near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Image Credit-NASA-Rad Sinyak

Friday, September 12, 2014

Gaia discovers its first supernova

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

European Space Agency ESA Space News Update

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

ScienceCasts: Re-thinking an Alien World

Friday, September 5, 2014

ScienceCasts: Fruit Flies on the International Space Station

Monday, September 1, 2014

Neutron stars at odds

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.

OBSERVATION FROM THE SPACE STATION

SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING?