Amazon Spaceship fails on test flight

An unmanned spacecraft bankrolled by Amazon.com supremo Jeff Bezos has failed during a test flight.

The vehicle became unstable at 45,000 feet and ground controllers had to terminate it as a precaution. Additional details about what went wrong were not released.

"Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard," Amazon chief executive Mr Bezos wrote in a blog post.

Mr Bezos founded Blue Origin to develop a vertical take-off and landing rocketship that would fly passengers to suborbital space. It recently won money from Nasa to compete to go into orbit as a space taxi now that the space shuttle fleet is retired.

The mishap occurred during a test flight last week from Blue Origin's West Texas spaceport. The ultra-secretive company notified the Federal Aviation Administration about the launch and only acknowledged the accident publicly yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the failure, said the test did not use government funds and was not part of the development agreement with Nasa.

Blue Origin's failure shines a spotlight on the risks of commercial space ventures.

SpaceX, which has a Nasa contract to develop a commercial vehicle to haul supplies and astronauts, suffered three rocket failures before it found success. Later this year, the company, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, will launch a capsule on a cargo test run to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic, founded by the UK hedonist Richard Branson, lost three workers in 2007 after an explosion rocked a California airport during testing of a propellant system for its space tourism vehicle.

The company is currently conducting flight tests in the Mojave Desert and has not yet been able to set a potential date for the first passenger flights.

NASA Landsat Program - Etosha Pan, Namibia

In north Namibia, the Etosha pan—a 75-mile long dry lakebed—makes up part of the Namib Desert.

The Etosha salt pan is mostly made up of dry mud and salt.

The Ekuma River is the salt pan’s sole source of water.

In this image the Etosha pan is blue, violet, cyan and white.

Vegetation is green and bare ground appears brown, pink and red. Clouds are white.

This Landsat 7 image was acquired April 22, 2000.

It is a false colour image using ETM+ bands 7,4, and 2.

The Etosha pan falls on Landsat WRS-2 Path 179 Row 73.

References
Wikipedia. Etosha pan.
More feature images.

NASA Landsat Program - Chesapeake Bay

USGS has released a new mosaic of the Chesapeake Bay.

Using six Landsat 5 images collected in July 2009 and 2011 a beautiful, seamless mosaic of the Chesapeake Bay region was created by the USGS Landsat team.

The Washington D.C.-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York City corridor can be clearly seen (look for silvery purple) as can the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and the coastal Atlantic barrier islands from Fishermans Island, Virginia to Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

NASA Video: Hurricane Katia

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NASA JPL Sept News: Details of GRAIL Mission to Moon

For more information visit: Grail.nasa.gov

NASA Hubble Movies: Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets From Young Stars

The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are the signposts of star birth. Called Herbig-Haro or HH objects, these outflows speed along at over 440,000 miles an hour.

When they "rear-end" slower gas, bow shocks (the blue features) arise as the material heats up.

In HH 2 (lower right) several bow shocks (the compact blue and white features) occur where fast-moving clumps bunch up. In HH 34 (lower left) a grouping of merged bow shocks reveals regions that brighten and fade over time as the heated material cools, shown in red, where the shocks intersect.

In HH 47 (top) a long jet of material has burst out of a dark cloud of gas and dust that hides the newly forming star. Credit: NASA/ESA/P. Hartigan (Rice University)

New movies created from years of still images collected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provide new details about the stellar birthing process, showing energetic jets of glowing gas ejected from young stars in unprecedented detail.

The jets are a byproduct of gas accretion around newly forming stars and shoot off at supersonic speeds of about 100 miles per second in opposite directions through space.

These phenomena are providing clues about the final stages of a star's birth, offering a peek at how our Sun came into existence 4.5 billion years ago.

Hubble's unique sharpness allows astronomers to see changes in the jets over just a few years' time. Most astronomical processes change over timescales that are much longer than a human lifetime.

A team of scientists led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University in Houston, Texas, collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of the jets ejected from three young stars

NASA Hubble story

NASA Mars: Rover Opportunity at Work Examining 'Tisdale 2'

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its front hazard-avoidance camera to take this picture showing the rover's arm extended toward a light-toned rock, "Tisdale 2"

This was done during the 2,695th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Aug. 23, 2011). Tisdale 2 is about 12 inches (30 centimeters) tall.

The rover used two instruments on the robotic arm, the microscopic imager and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, to examine Tisdale 2. In this image, the turret at the end of the arm is positioned so that the microscopic imager is facing the rock.

Tisdale 2 and other rocks on the ground beyond it were apparently ejected by the impact that excavated a 66-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) crater, called "Odyssey," which is nearby to the left (north) of this scene.

Odyssey and these rocks are on a low ridge called "Cape York," which is a segment of the western rim of Endeavour crater. Endeavour is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Portions of the interior and eastern rim of Endeavour are visible near the top of this image.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech