A new NASA video shows the world in a whole new way. Watch and be mesmerized. 

Spring arrived earlier this year, perhaps by nearly a month from anecdotal accounts. A NASA satellite has captured an image of the Piedmont area, between the Appalachians and the Atlantic coast, using its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that is providing more precise measurements. In an early April image, the Appalachian Mountains remain brown as the trees cover higher elevations and have not begun producing leaves yet.



Spring Greening along East Coast

(credit: NASA)

The timing...

The Viking Program sent the first Mars robots that survived landing on the planet. The goal of the dual orbiters and their landers was to photograph the planet, sample the local geology, and test for extant life using several simple lab experiments. The results of the three petri dish tests were intriguing but inconclusive and a fierce debate ensued. Now, a new analytical approach has been used with the original data and may have solved the mystery. The results are being published in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS).

By applying a mathematical methodology called complexity analysis and using the original Viking computer printouts, researchers have determined that the soil tests may have indeed detected microbial life on Mars. Carl Sagan, a strong supporter of the Viking mission and its biological experiments is shown with a model of the...

The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered a slew of extra-solar planets or exo-planets since it began focusing its powerful lens on the stars three years ago. Some of the new planets are super-weird, potentially made of solid diamond, while others may be more Earth-like in habitability around their parent stars. Now there is an application has been developed so that anyone can follow the Kepler discoveries.



Kepler Exo-planet

(credit: NASA-Ames)

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Art & Science are thought to be opposite pursuits but often they can mimic each other.

Here’s a good example where a robot and an astronaut at work caught in a famous pose in space. The photograph from the International Space Station recalls a famous panel from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel  showing the hand of God reaching out to give life to Adam. 



Man & Machine

(credit: NASA)

Michelangelo...

The massive solar storms on the Sun recently provided an excellent opportunity for theGoddard Space Center to produce spectacular photographic creations that any art gallery patron would appreciate.

Here is a short video of recent solar eruptions captured by NASA’s Solar and Heliosheric Observatory ( SOHO ). Captured in infrared by the orbiter, it demonstrates the power of solar flares.

Storms on the Sun’s surface are directly responsible for the increase in spectacular auroras that have been experienced lately in the night sky from the northern to the southern hemispheres on Earth.





Sun’s Explosive Whiplash in Infrared





(credit: NASA)

WHB

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This month, NASA researchers launched a rocket into an aurora in northern Alaska in an attempt to understand these amazing atmospheric displays better. According to the lead scientist from Cornell: "We're investigating ‘space weather’ that is caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Whatever it is called, a fish-eye image taken during the launch is certainly impressive.

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Dear Climate Morons:

If global warming isn't caused by people and the billions of fires we light every day in our engines and power plants, and it's caused instead by sun spots or solar flares or a wobbly Earth, then why is so much of the warming happening in the northern hemisphere, where all the people are?

 

Kepler is at it again.

The clever space telescope has now discovered 11 entirely new planetary systems circling alien suns. The total of confirmed planets now stands at 26 and counting.

According to NASA, the Kepler findings nearly double the number of identified worlds found outside our solar system. The alien worlds range from 1.5 times the size Earth to larger than Jupiter. All of the newly  discovered planets circle very close to their parent stars making it highly unlikely that any have habitable environments. Additional research should determine if rocky worlds like Earth circle somewhere around these new identified suns.

The Kepler engineers are also getting rather artistic in depicting the digital data gathered from these 11 new solar systems.



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Saturn’s gigantic moon, Titan, has excited people for decades. It is a place right out of a fantastic SciFi novel.

Larger than the planet Mercury, Titan has a thick atmosphere mostly consisting of nitrogen, great lakes of liquid ethane and methane, extensive river delta systems, and vast arid dune fields all resembling their geographic counter parts on Earth. However, the moon is hard to study due to high elevation clouds produced by a thick haze of hydrocarbon smog. That could change if the forward-thinking ideas of University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes come to fruition.

Barnes envisions an ultra-lite, nuclear battery powered aircraft drone that would fly over Titan’s landscapes, carry photographic sensors, and beam back data to an orbiting mother ship. The drone would fly below Titan's haze and take photos of surface features that lies largely hidden from the Cassini cameras orbiting Saturn or telescopes on Earth. Unlike a balloon, the drone...

High in the stratosphere lies the auroras realm. Ranging up to 600 miles above the Earth, these celestial light shows result from energetic light particles striking molecules in the atmosphere. When viewed from space, an aurora can appear as a circle around one of the Earth's poles.

A stunning wide angle image of a shimmering display, compressed horizontally, was seen stretching across the sky over eastern Norway recently.



Auroras from Norway  

(credit: NASA/astrofilm.com)

The...

Santa’s Tour of Mars  (credit: NASA/JPL)

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It isn’t often that you can watch the formation of an island.

In one geologic process, underwater volcanoes produce a new sea-mountain that finally breaks the surface of the waves to form land. Continental drift is the other island forming mechanism that has moved entire continental plates for billions of years. The international space station provides a prime vantage point to view these slow motion processes. An new image was captured by the ISS that shows the border between the USA and Baja California. The Salton Sea is centered with the Gulf of Cortez, Baja California, and the Colorado River appearing in the upper right. Los Angeles, Santa Catalina, and the San Clemente islands are seen on the bottom edge of the remote photograph.

However, what is most impressive in the image is the fracture zone stretching from the top of the Sea of Cortez heading north past Los Angeles---a portion of the famous San Andres Fault. The fault is...

JPL/Caltech, the Smithsonian, and NASA decided to provide a comparison of alien planets. It’s a very cool illustration of several weird exoplanets recently discovered.



Alien Worlds

(credit: JPL/NASA)

WHB

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NASA’s Kepler space telescope continues to produce amazing results and it was only launched into orbit three years ago. NASA managers have announced the first planet circling its star within the habitable zone 600 light-years distant from the Earth. It isn’t known if the planet is rocky, gaseous, or mostly liquid, but it is the first of more than a thousand exoplanets discovered by Kepler that exists directly within the so-called Goldilocks Zone where surface temperatures would allow liquid water.



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I you happened to be travelling towards the super-sized planet, CoRoT-2b, you would see a alien world of auroras. This planet located nearly 900 light-years away is slammed by solar storms 100,000 times stronger than any experienced on Earth. NASA researchers speculate that auroras would be seen everywhere on CoRoT-2b on a daily basis. However, you might not survive more than a few minutes before being fried by the intense radiation that is stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.

A NASA animation provides a good idea of the massive lightshows:





CoRoT-2b auroras   (credit: NASA)



WHB

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Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn, possesses one of the Cassini orbiter’s biggest discoveries. This ice-ball sprouts massive geysers from its southern polar regions along cracks called tiger stripes. The indicate liquid water exists somewhere below the ice. Now Cassini has beamed back radar scans to a portion of the moon’s surface that provide more surface detail.



Enceladus scanned by radar (credit: NASA/JPL/CalTech)



Perhaps on the next Enceladus radar fly-by a water spout will be captured jetting upwards from a fissure.

WHB

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NASA and JPL’s Curiosity rover launched successfully from Cape Canaveral today. The next stop will be Mars. If everything goes as planned the robot will arrive in August, 2012. The really tricky part will come when the rover attempts a landing on the Red Planet, a target that has been a graveyard for many past attempts.



Curiosity Launch

(credit: NASA/JPL)

The 1-ton mobile science laboratory will require finely coordinated...

 

Comparison of ice images from Iceland, Antarctica, and the icy moon of Jupiter, Europa, show strong similarities. They may indicate liquid water is closer to the surface than originally thought.

Europa has excited everyone since the Galileo spacecraft went into orbit around Jupiter and discovered the potential for a vast salty ocean under the moon’s ice cover. Now researchers from at the University of Texas at Austin, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and elsewhere have announced a model to explain ice features on Europa called chaos terrain. Until now the puzzling icescapes were produced by some unknown geological or mechanical process. Nature has just published the results of researchers who may have discovered a body of liquid water-- the volume of the Great Lakes --locked inside the icy shell...

The Hubble Space Telescope received much needed optical repairs in 2009 that extended the instruments operational life for another decade. One of the first images that was captured after the scientific upgrade was of the Butterfly Nebula 4,000 light years away in the constellation, Scorpius.

 



The Butterfly Nebula by Hubble

(credit: NASA/JPL)



The Hubble photograph is beautiful by any definition. 

Riled Up

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New imagery from aerial surveys of Antarctica shows the development of an enormous crack in the Pine Island Glacier. Measurements indicate that the glacier basin makes the highest contribution of ice into the ocean than any other glacier in the world. This is of particular interest since the ice sheet is so large, unstable, and a large source of uncertainty in predicting rising sea levels due to global climate change. 

You can watch the impressive NASA video here:

 





Major crack observed in Antarctic ice shelf (credit: NASA)





 

Riled Up

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Everyone seems to have had pumpkin mania this year, even NASA. A space pumpkin was carved to celebrate explorers of the cosmos.





Space pumpkin (credit: Liz Warren)

 

As the NASA carver notes, “space exploration is an extremely challenging and stressful endeavor. Hopefully, my pumpkins bring a moment of levity and a smile to the astronaut crews and the teams that support them.

It will be fun to see the what pumpkin mania looks like next...

Pumpkins continue being big news. NPR’s Science Friday got into pumpkin mania with a cool video of elite carvers:







Pumpkin carving as art (credit: Science Friday)





These folks take their pumpkin carving very seriously and into an art form.

WHB

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The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (Hi-Rise) continues returning remarkable imagery from the red planet. JPL/NASA have just released a photograph that captures sand dunes that appear like giant Martian millipedes:





(photo credit: JPL/NASA)

I wonder what other “bugs” might be lurking among the dunes? WHB



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