Universe Today

The ionosphere is the final layer of atmosphere before space. This highly dynamic region is constantly exposed to the full intensity of the Sun, harsh ultraviolet radiation breaking down molecules and atoms. Highly charged ions and free electrons therefore fill the ionospheric layers. Critical to terrestrial communications, the ionosphere also plays host to the largest lightshow on Earth, the Aurora. Now NASA-funded research has developed a live "4D Ionosphere" plugin for Google Earth. Now you can fly through the atmosphere's uppermost reaches without even leaving your desk…
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Filed under: Earth, Earth Observation | 11 Comments »

Can a planet like Earth be considered a single living organism? After all, the human body is composed of hundreds of billions of bacteria, and yet we consider the human body to be a single organism. The Gaia Hypothesis (or popularly known as "Gaia Theory") goes beyond the individual organisms living on Earth, it encompasses all the living and non-living components of Earth's biosphere and proposes that the complex interacting systems regulate the environment to a very high degree. So much so, that the planet may be viewed as a single organism in its own right. What's more this hypothesis was developed by a NASA scientist who was looking for life on Mars…
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Filed under: Earth | 66 Comments »

Steve Squyres and the Mars Exploration Rover team knew from the beginning that dust could cause a problem for the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. When a thick layer of dust coats the solar panels, it blocks the sunlight that generates power for the six-wheeled robots. In the summer of 2007 a huge dust storm blanketed Mars, and deposited a fair amount of dust on solar panels of both rovers. Spirit, especially accumulated a lot of dust on its solar array. Currently, only about one-third of incoming sunlight is able to penetrate dust on Spirit’s solar panels to be converted to electricity. As a result, Spirit is experiencing the lowest energy levels to date and accumulating a backlog of data waiting to be transmitted to Earth. If only a dust devil would come along…
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Filed under: Mars, Missions | 24 Comments »

It’s fairly certain that the Mars Polar Lander and the Beagle lander crash landed on Mars, never to be heard from again. Well, what if crash landing was no problem? What if a robotic spacecraft could just reassemble and fix itself if there was a mishap on the way to another planet’s surface? That type of science fiction is getting closer to reality. A group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a robot made of separate modules that can recognize each other and reassemble itself if they crash or get kicked apart. Maybe this could solve the problems of landing on Mars!
Except we haven't figured out how to reassemble people, yet.

Take a look a the video. It's pretty remarkable, although I have to admit, I had visions of the Terminator after watching it….

Original News Source: New Scientist

Filed under: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

The past couple of weeks we've had a 'mystery' image, and asked our readers to guess what world in our solar system was featured in the image. Most everyone seemed to enjoy it, and it was fairly popular, so we've decided to make it a regular feature. I was going to call it the 'Wednesday Where in the World (and What World) Is This?' but that's just too long, not to mention too many W's in one headline. So to brief it up, and since this is "Universe Today," we've decided to call it "Where In The Universe?" Look for it every Wednesday.

Above is this week's mystery image. If you keep an eye on the images being released by the various spacecraft traveling our solar system, you may have seen this one before. Remember, you have 8 planets, 169 known moons, a handful of dwarf planets and lots of asteroids in our solar system to choose from. Don't cheat — make your guess before you click to continue…
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Filed under: Where In the Universe? | 20 Comments »

Cape Canaveral's Titan launch pad gantry was demolished on Sunday. The tower was built in the 1990's to support the US Air Force Titan 4 rocket program. The site has been used for NASA missions as well, including the launch of the Cassini-Huygens Saturn mission in 1997. Launch Complex 40 is being demolished and then refurbished to make way for the new SpaceX Falcon rocket launch facility. Now the gantry is rubble, the clean up operation can begin…
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Filed under: Space Flight | 10 Comments »

Cassini scientists know for sure their spacecraft isn't in Kansas anymore. Cassini's been keeping an eye on a powerful electrical storm that's been raging on Saturn for five months now, with lightning bolts 10,000 times more powerful than those found on Earth. But Cassini has also been busy flying by moons like Enceladus and Titan during this time, and therefore can't constantly watch the storm. So amateur astronomers have been assisting the Cassini science team by monitoring this tempest in the "Storm Alley" region of Saturn. It's no Great Red Spot, but it's the longest lasting electrical storm ever detected in our solar system.
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For the first time, the most extreme collision to occur in the cosmos has been observed. Galaxies are known to hide supermassive black holes in their cores, and should the galaxies collide, tidal forces will cause massive disruption to the stars orbiting around the galactic cores. If the cores are massive enough, the supermassive black holes may become trapped in gravitational attraction. Do the black holes merge to form a super-supermassive black hole? Do the two supermassive black holes spin, recoil and then blast away from each other? Well, it would seem both are possible, but astronomers now have observational evidence of a black hole being blasted away from its parent galaxy after colliding with a larger cousin.
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Filed under: Black Holes | 16 Comments »

I signed up for Twitter a couple of years ago, but I never got around to actually using it. Some part of my brain thinks it would be a great way to do… something. But I have no idea what that would be. I'll need you to teach me, and help me understand what you'd like to see from my Twitter feed.

Obviously, you don't want to hear about the minutia of my life, but I think there's value in great big collaborative conversations. Part of me finds it very exciting, and part of me thinks it's a time sucking black hole. What am I missing?

Here's my Twitter feed.

Filed under: Blog | 12 Comments »

It appears the Earth's climate has the ability to naturally regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Historic records extracted from ice cores show quantities of CO₂ have varied widely in the last hundreds of thousands of years. This evidence appears to support the global warming critics view that current observations of the human-induced greenhouse effect is actually naturally occurring and the effects of carbon on the climate is over-hyped. However, a new study shows that although carbon dioxide levels may have been larger in the past, the Earth's natural processes had time to react and counteract global warming. The current trend of industrial emissions has been far more accelerated than any historic natural process, natural climate "feedback loops" cannot catch up to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.
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Filed under: Environment | 53 Comments »

Astronomers looking at galaxies in the universe’s distant past were surprised to find some compact, very young galaxies that have masses similar to a mature, grown-up galaxy. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers discovered nine small galaxies, each weighing in at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. The galaxies, each only 5,000 light-years across, are a fraction of the size of today's adult galaxies but contain approximately the same number of stars. Each galaxy could fit inside the central hub of our Milky Way Galaxy.
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Filed under: Hubble | 5 Comments »

Where you want to go depends on where you are. And if you've got a GPS system in your hands, and the most accurate clock ever sent into space overhead, you'll always know exactly where you are. ESA's GIOVE-B satellite blasted into space on Sunday, taking the next step for the deployment of a European satellite navigation system.
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Filed under: Satellites | 2 Comments »

The folks over at Ars Technica report that the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, announced they are now accepting proposals for a microprobe that can hitch a ride with the Venus Climate Orbiter, Japan's upcoming robotic mission to Venus. They will provide a free ride to either a low-Earth orbit or on a trajectory toward Venus. There are just a few requirements that JAXA has specified:
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Filed under: Venus | 7 Comments »

India’s space agency sent a record 10 satellites into Earth orbit with a single launch early Monday. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket ejected all the satellites within minutes of each other after liftoff from the Sriharikota space station in southern India. Initial signals indicated all the satellites were working normally. India is seeking to compete with other space-faring nations for commercial launch services, and this mission's success demonstrates India's ability to launch multiple payloads into precise orbit. The flight breaks the previous record of eight satellites launched at once by a Russian rocket, according to Indian news reports.

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Filed under: Missions | 10 Comments »

Some of the oldest structures in the Milky Way are the globular clusters. Ancient collections of millions of stars, that have held together by mutual gravity over billions of years. But new data collected by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory casts doubt on their "ancient nature". They might be surprisingly less mature than astronomers previously believed.
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Filed under: Astronomy | 13 Comments »