Harimedia Forum

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.BBC: In pictures: Total lunar eclipse

On 21 December, skywatchers were treated to the first total lunar eclipse in three years. The event occurs when the Moon passes behind the Earth and our planet casts its shadow on to the lunar surface.




The reddish colour during eclipse totality occurs because some sunlight is able to pass through the Earth's atmosphere. This picture shows the Moon behind the monument of The Saviour of The World in El Salvador.

Lacanadaonline.com

Home movies from space
By Joe Piasecki, Dec. 27


...2010: A Year in Pictures from JPL/NASA

This fast-paced video highlights some of the colorful and intriguing images from Earth and space, courtesy of NASA's JPLabor. > Martian Sunset > Martian Eclipse


For a space traveler's view of remarkable events that unfolded this past year in and around the solar system, look no further than the JPL website, where a series of digital videos offers spectacular images of Earth, Mars and the far corners of our solar system. "2010: A Year in Pictures from JPL/NASA" is a fast-moving collection of stills and video clips ranging from space observations of Haiti's devastating earthquake to an electrical storm over the surface of Saturn to colorful infrared images of star formation at the edge of the Milky Way.

The website also features a short time-elapsed video of the blue-hued Martian sunset, captured in early November by the panoramic cameras of the JPL Mars rover Opportunity. It's the closest thing to standing on the surface of the Red Planet. "If you were standing right there it would look about the same, with the exception that we had to dim the sun. It's so bright you [otherwise] couldn't look at it without squinting," said Mark Lemmon, a Mars rover science team member who works out of Texas A&M University.

Unlike a sunset seen from Earth, where light reacts with the atmosphere to produce a reddening effect, sunsets on Mars take on hues of blue. On Mars the atmosphere is thin and large airborne dust particles plentiful, so light from the setting sun is diffracted off blowing dust rather than atmospheric molecules to create a visibly blue sunset. "If you've ever stood downwind of a big forest fire and were looking at a sunset through the forest fire smoke, it sometimes has similar characteristics and you can see a bluish glow around the sun," said Lemmon.

And while cloudy skies meant there wasn't much to see from Southern California of Earth's moon's recent eclipse, JPL has also posted a video of a Martian eclipse. In that footage, also compiled from images captured by Opportunity's cameras in early November, the Martian moon Phobos passes in front of the sun — due to the moon's small size, taking on an appearance more like a dime passing in front of a flashlight than the full-on eclipses we earthlings are used to seeing. Though Phobos is actually several times closer to the surface of Mars than our moon is to earth, "if you set it down on Earth it wouldn't fill the L.A. basin," Lemmon said.

IBT

NASA to Announce New Planetary Discoveries on February 2
By Staff Reporter, Jan. 28, 2011

,Dpa:Distant solar system with six planets discovered

- NASA will host a news briefing on Feb.2 at 10 a.m. PST 2 to announce the Kepler mission's latest findings about planets outside our solar system that may support life


The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The findings will throw light on hundreds of possible Exoplanets, which refers to planets outside our solar system and orbiting stars other than our Sun. Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in March 2009, is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy. Kepler-10b is the first rocky planet the spacecraft has picked up. On Jan. 10, astronomers have discovered Kepler-10b, the smallest planet outside our solar system. It is about 560 light-years away, and has a surface temperature hotter than molten iron. On Aug. 27, Kepler spacecraft has discovered first confirmed planetary system with two giant, distinct planets crossing in front of the same star.


.Photo: NASA

NASA will host a news briefing on Feb.2 at 10 a.m. PST 2 to announce the Kepler mission's latest findings about planets outside our solar system that may support life.


Key Facts About Kepler Mission

-- The Kepler Mission is a NASA space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. The mission is named in honor of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
-- The spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009 aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The mission's planned lifetime is least 3.5 years.
-- The mission's life-cycle cost is estimated at $600 million, including funding for 3.5 years of operation.
-- Kepler is a mission under NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, focused science missions.

-- Ames Research Center manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California managed Kepler mission development.
-- Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. was responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
-- The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data.

-- The Kepler mission's first main result announced on January 4, 2010. Among the notable results are one of the least dense planets yet found, and two low-mass white dwarf stars that were initially reported as being members of a new class of stellar objects.
-- Kepler uses a photometer developed by NASA to continuously monitor the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.
-- Most of the extrasolar planets, exoplanets, detected so far by other projects are giant planets, mostly the size of Jupiter and bigger. Kepler is designed to look for planets 30 to 600 times less massive, closer to the order of Earth's mass (Jupiter is 318 times more massive than Earth).
-- Kepler is not in an Earth orbit but in an Earth-trailing solar orbit so that Earth does not occlude the stars which are observed continuously and the photometer is not influenced by stray light from Earth

IBT

NASA Finds Six-Planet Solar System
By IBT Staff Reporter, Feb. 3, 2011

A NASA team has found multiple planets in a distant solar system - dubbed Kepler-11 - transiting a sun-like star located about 2,000 light years away from Earth. "This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system," NASA said. With temperatures hotter than Venus - likely more than 400 to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, the six planets range in size from twice to four and a half times Earth’s diameter, astronomers said.


.Kepler Mission News


The five confirmed planets are larger in mass but less dense than Earth, and closely packed, taking from 10 to 47 days to orbit the star. Astonomers said there is almost certainly a sixth planet orbiting nearly twice as far away, but its distance from the star makes its confirmation more difficult. According to NASA, all of the planets orbiting Kepler-11 are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune. The innermost planet, Kepler-11b, is ten times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. Moving outward, the other planets are Kepler-11c, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, Kepler-11f, and the outermost planet, Kepler-11g, which is half as far from its star as Earth is from the sun.

The planets Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e and Kepler-11f have a significant amount of light gas, which indicates that they formed within a few million years of the system's formation, NASA said. These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water. The new planets were found by tracking the dimming of a star’s light when planets pass between the star and the telescope, astronomers said.

The astronomers said the next step will be to determine mass and orbits of the planets more precisely, providing clues to how the planets formed. "Much of the scientific community thought that multiple planets transiting the same star would be unlikely," said Eric Ford of NASA team and University of Florida associate professor. "That idea has been completely overturned by this new discovery. Without the transit-timing method, these planets might have gone unconfirmed for years." The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. (more)
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Related reading:

.Kepler.gov: NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in Habitable Zone, Six Planet System

Moffett Field, Calif. -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.

"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA's science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos." The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009, of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler's field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky. "The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission's science principal investigator. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water."

Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates. Kepler-11, located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth, is the most tightly packed planetary system yet discovered. All six of its confirmed planets have orbits smaller than Venus, and five of the six have orbits smaller than Mercury's. The only other star with more than one confirmed transiting planet is Kepler-9, which has three. The Kepler-11 findings will be published in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature. Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them. This is known as a transit. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars. (more)

.
.BBC: When Apollo 14 landed on the Moon

When Apollo 14 landed on the Moon, 40 years ago this week, mission commander Alan Shepard was the oldest astronaut to have ever flown in space.
Some were surprised when Shepard was announced as commander of Apollo 14. > Watch Video: Alan Shepard plays golf on the moon

NASA's search for habitable planets

NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone
by NASA, 02.02.11


.Kepler Images and Video

.PDF: NASA's Kepler Mission


Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."

Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. "We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that’s more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."




Kepler's planet candidates as of Feb. 1, 2011. Image credit: NASA/Wendy Stenzel



The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter. The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009 of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler’s field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.

"The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said Borucki. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun." “We’re about half-way through Kepler’s scheduled mission," said Roger Hunter, the Kepler project manager. "Today’s announcement is very exciting and portends many discoveries to come. It’s looking like the galaxy may be littered with many planets.” (more)
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Related News:

.BBC: Giffords' husband Kelly to lead last shuttle mission

The husband of the US congresswoman injured in an Arizona gun attack is to lead one of the final space shuttle missions in April, Nasa has said. Gabrielle Giffords' husband Mark Kelly will resume training as shuttle Endeavour's commander on Monday. Ms Giffords is having rehabilitation therapy in Houston after being shot in the head on 8 January. Mr Kelly's twin brother Scott Kelly is currently the commander of the International Space Station. (more)

BBC

.> European space prepares to make a really big decision

More than 300 of Europe's leading space scientists gathered in Paris this week to discuss how to spend more than a billion euros. The options? Well, try to choose between these three: (1) a 20m-long telescope called IXO that could see the very "edge" of a black hole; or (2) a trio of satellites collectively known as LISA which might be able to detect the ripples in space-time left by the moment of creation itself; or (3) a pair of spacecraft that would visit two of the most promising locations for life beyond Earth in our Solar System. This is called EJSM/Laplace. (more)

BBC

Stereo satellites move either side of Sun
By BBC News, 6 February 2011


.BBC: Spacecraft go to film Sun in 3D

The Stereo satellites launched in 2006 are already feeding data into space weather forecasts


Two US spacecraft have moved either side of the Sun to establish observing positions that should return remarkable new information about our star. Launched in 2006, the Stereo satellites have gradually been drifting apart - one in front of the Earth in its orbit, the other lagging behind. On Sunday, Nasa said the spacecraft had arrived at points that put the Sun directly between them. It will give solar physicists the first 360-degree view of our star. Stereo is short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory. The mission is studying the Sun's great explosive events that hurl billions of tonnes of charged particles at Earth - events that can disrupt power grids and satellites.

These Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as they are known, can also be hazardous to astronauts in space. Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, is an investigator on the project. He told BBC News: "By being away from the Sun-Earth line, you can look back at the space between the Sun and the Earth and see any of these clouds, these coronal mass ejections that are thrown out of the Sun and are coming our way - you can even see these things passing over the Earth. Those are the key to what Stereo's all about." The two spacecraft will continue to move further apart, heading toward each other on the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth; this means that the full view provided by the two craft will fade, leaving a growing region behind the Sun - on the Earth side - that they do not see.


.BBC: Visions of Sun's great 'belches' > Mission guide: Stereo

An image of the far side of the Sun based on Stereo data from Wednesday. The black line indicates a data gap that will be closed in the coming days.


"You really see it with these widely separated regions of the Sun's atmosphere that are connected magnetically, showing activity at the same time, or causing activity somewhere else," he explained. "These things stress to us that you can't really study the Sun in great detail just by looking at a bit of it, any more than you could understand the brain by looking at a bit of it or study the Earth's polar regions by looking at the equator. You need this global view to really piece the jigsaw puzzle together."

Scientists suspect that activity on the Sun can on occasions go global, with eruptions on opposite sides of the Sun triggering and feeding off of one another. With the Stereo craft in their new positions, this phenomenon can now be studied. Stereo is already being used to improve "space weather" forecasts for airlines, power companies, satellite operators, and other customers. However, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in Earth orbit a year ago, will remain fixed on the Sun, providing the missing piece of the puzzle. Achieving an all-round-view view of the Sun will be key to understanding what drives the complex processes in the Sun, believes Professor Harrison.

csmonitor.com



Bright yellow streamers of dust sweep off North Africa's Moroccan coast toward the Canary Islands in this true-color Terra MODIS image from Feb. 17, 2004. Just off the coast of Lanzarote Island, the northeastern-most of the Canaries, gravity waves caused by the high winds driving the dust storm create dark and light stripes on the water.


.> Space Photos of the Day: Earth from Above

Alaska Daylight Time on May 23, 2006, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams from International Space Station Expedition 13 contacted the Alaska Volcano Observatory to report that the Cleveland Volcano had produced a plume of ash. Shortly after the activity began, he took this photograph.

Physorg.com

..First ever whole sun view from STEREO

On Feb 6, 2011, the two NASA STEREO spacecraft will see the entire Sun! This will truly mark a milestone for solar observations. On February 6, the two STEREO spacecrafts will be 180 degrees apart and for the next 8 years the STEREO spacecrafts and SDO will be able to observe the entire 360 degrees of the Sun. Credit: NASA.


"For the first time in the history of humankind we will be able to see the front and the far side of the sun … Simultaneously," Madhulika Guhathakurta told Universe Today. Guhathakurta is the STEREO Program Scientist at NASA HQ. Courtesy of NASA’s solar duo of STEREO spacecraft. “This will be the first time we can see the entire Sun at one time,” said Dean Pesnell, NASA Solar Astrophysicist in an interview for Universe Today. Pesnell is the Project Scientist for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, MD. This remarkable milestone will be achieved when NASA’s two STEREO spacecraft reach position 180 degrees separate on opposite sides of the Sun on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 and can observe the entire 360 degrees of the Sun. (more)


...Full Sun view by STEREO

This video, released February 6, is the first 360-panorama of the sun, recorded by NASA's twin STEREO craft recording the sun's back half and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory imaging the front. The video homes in on a solar eruption.
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Yahoo News: NASA zeigt erstes Bild der kompletten Sonne (germ)

FoxNews

NASA Discusses Launch Options for Shuttle Discovery's Final Flight
By Denise Chow, Published February 18, 2011


.Photo: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Space shuttle Discovery stands at Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 1, 2011 following its rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building. The shuttle is due to launch on its final mission on Feb. 24.


After an hours-long meeting at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's top officials unanimously cleared the space shuttle Discovery for its final launch next Thursday (Feb. 24). NASA shuttle managers made the decision today (Feb. 18) during the mission's Flight Readiness Review, where they discussed the current state of Discovery, the International Space Station, and the astronauts who will fly the orbiter on its 39th and final flight. Following the meeting, NASA officially set the shuttle's launch date and time for Feb. 24 at 4:50 p.m. EST (2150 GMT). "I can't say enough about the work the teams have done, they did a tremendous job," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said in a news briefing today.

Discovery is targeted to liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on the same day that the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle-2 (ATV-2) cargo ship is scheduled to arrive and dock at the space station. Initially, NASA officials thought the space traffic jam would force mission planners to delay Discovery's launch by one day – to Feb. 25. But, NASA officials decided early in today's meeting that changing the shuttle's launch date is not necessary. "The ATV is going to dock about six hours before we launch," said Mike Moses, NASA's shuttle integration manager. "We will have tanked the vehicle by then. If they run into a problem during docking, we still might launch that day, we might not – we'll have to talk about that one in real time." Last week, space shuttle program managers met and unanimously agreed to proceed toward the orbiter's targeted launch.

Officials also discussed the possibility of adding a bonus photo session to the flight, in which the Russian Soyuz capsule will undock from the space station and fly around to snap photographs of Discovery while the ship is docked to the fully completed orbiting lab. The unique photo opportunity was discussed during today's Flight Readiness Review (FRR), but aNASA officials confirmed today that a final decision on the matter will not be made prior to Discovery's launch. "It's okay from a flight readiness review standpoint, but it's really up to the team to see what happens," Gerstenmaier said. Discovery's STS-133 mission is an 11-day flight to deliver a humanoid robot and a new storage room to the International Space Station. The mission has already been delayed months because of fuel tank problems.

It will be the final flight of shuttle Discovery before NASA retires its three-orbiter fleet later this year. NASA is ending its space shuttle program this year after 30 years of spaceflight to make way for new exploration plans that call for sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. Once the shuttle fleet retires, NASA will rely on unmanned spacecraft built by Europe, Russia and Japan to deliver cargo to the space station until American-built commercial spacecraft become available.


* Space.com: Building Space Shuttle Discovery
* NASA's Space Shuttle -- From Top to Bottom
* NASA Replaces Injured Astronaut for Next Shuttle Mission

Telegraph

Paolo Nespoli, astronaut on the space station, sends pictures to Earth via Twitter


.> Photos from Space

- He calls this picture, taken on 19 January, Playing Ping. Picture: @astro_paolo (Paolo Nespoli) / NASA/European Space Agency


More Space Photos:
Soichi Noguchi Twitpics
Cities at night from space
Aurora Borealis from space
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Earth as Art
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