This wide-field image of the Eagle Nebula was taken at the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak with the NOAO Mosaic CCD camera. Located in the constellation of Serpens, the Serpent, the Eagle Nebula is a very luminous open cluster of stars surrounded by dust and gas. The three pillars at the center of the image, made famous in an image by the Hubble Space Telescope, are being sculpted by the intense radiation from the hot stars in the cluster. This image was created by combining emission-line images in Hydrogen-alpha (green), Oxygen [O III] (blue) and Sulfur [S II] (red).
Image: T.A.Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF and NOAO/AURA/NSF) and B.A.Wolpa (NOAO/AURA/NSF)
The HiRISE camera is the most powerful telescope to have left Earth orbit. As such, it is capable of some interesting astronomical observations. This image of Jupiter and its major satellites was acquired to calibrate the pointing and color response of the camera. An oversight in planning this unusual observation put the focus mechanism in the wrong location, blurring the image. This does not detract from the calibration objectives, but makes the raw image less aesthetic. To compensate, the image has been "sharpened" on the ground by Dennis Gallagher, the HiRISE chief optical designer. With this sharpening, and because Mars is closer to Jupiter than Earth is, this image has comparable resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope's pictures of Jupiter. The colours are not what is seen by the human eye because HiRISE is able to detect light with a slightly longer wavelength than we can (that is, the infrared). While there is no standard observation geometry, this image was acquired on 11 January 2007, 2102 spacecraft event time to be precise. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Racial and political graffiti was sprayed on the side of the space shuttle Independence replica at Space Center Houston on Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2013.
A replica of a NASA space shuttle on display in Houston was defaced Wednesday (Nov. 27), when vandals sprayed racial and political graffiti on the side of the full-size mockup.
The offending markings were quickly covered over within hours of their being found.
"Unfortunately, someone vandalised our high-fidelity mock shuttle," said Melanie Johnson, the director of education for Space Center Houston, the visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center where the model is located. "They wrote some offensive words and political statements."
The graffiti, which included the phrase, "Houston, we are the problem," was limited to the side of the space shuttle that faced away from the center's parking lot.
A bus driver was among the first to spot the vandalism and reported it to authorities early Wednesday morning.
"To the person who did this — you really need to check yourself, because you're making it bad for all other decent people in this town," the driver told reporters.
India's Mars orbiter mission left Earth's sphere of influence early Sunday after performing a maneuver to put it on its way to orbit the red planet.
The spacecraft fired its main engine for more than 20 minutes to reach the correct velocity to leave the Earth's orbit, the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organization said.
"The Earth orbiting phase of the spacecraft ended. The spacecraft is now on a course to encounter Mars after a journey of about 10 months around the sun," the statement said.
ISRO said that all systems on board the spacecraft are performing normally.
India launched its first spacecraft bound for Mars on Nov. 5, a complex mission that it hopes will demonstrate and advance technologies for space travel.
The 1,350-kilogram (3,000-pound) orbiter Mangalyaan, which means "Mars craft" in Hindi, must travel 780 million kilometers (485 million miles) over 300 days to reach an orbit around Mars next September.
If the mission is successful, India will become only the fourth space program to visit the red planet after the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe.
Here is the idea: flying power plants in the sky as a means of providing clean, renewable energy.
Here is more of the idea: this would be a high-altitude aerial power plant that harvests energy from solar, wind and other sources, and beams it wirelessly to the ground.
Now the idea gets more interesting: The power plant would be using networks of unmanned drones.
The company is New Wave Energy UK, formed in 2012, self-described as "an upcoming energy provider within the UK currently working towards researching and constructing our own novel form of power plant." (New Wave Energy UK is not associated or affiliated with US-based New Wave Energy Corp.)
In a November 15 press release, the company announced that "A new and exciting venture into a whole new form of power plant is currently in incubation within the UK."
The company said the "patent pending technology" is a drone-based power plant for combined solar, wind, heat and emerging new forms of energy generation.
The technology is to incorporate wireless power transmission from the drones (and their wireless network) to the Earth's surface," according to the release.
Details about the drone are in a recent Gizmag article on New Wave Energy UK.
According to the article, the company's ambition is for each drone to have four rotors, multiple wind turbines and a flat base for generating solar power.
With energy harvested, the devices will power themselves and also 50 kW more that can be transmitted wirelessly to the ground.
Rectenna arrays installed inland or on offshore installations would receive electromagnetic waves and convert them into usable power.
According to New Wave Energy, "The technology is tailored to operate at 50,000 ft where wind patterns are more reliable, solar production is greater and there is little or no interference from weather patterns."
In the November 15 press release, the company said it was seeking further investment to advance the project.
New Wave Energy UK is turning to crowdfunding as one such step. "To raise such equity New Wave Energy UK Ltd are hoping to raise £300,000 through crowd funding on Kickstarter.
New Wave Energy UK Ltd also intend to acquire a total of £32 million from private investors during the crucial stages of the project to commercialise the application."
Huge electric fields in the radiation belts around Earth may help explain how electrons surrounding the planet can be accelerated to speeds near that of light, researchers have found in a new study.
These findings, detailed Dec. 2 in the journal Physical Review Letters, could help shed light on the radiation belts of planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as the behaviour of the sun during flares and of bodies beyond the solar system, such as stellar nurseries, neutron stars and incredibly energetic black holes known as quasars.
After humanity began exploring space, the first major find made there were the Van Allen radiation belts, zones of magnetically trapped, highly energetic charged particles discovered in 1958.
The Van Allen Probes aka Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) Mission, part of NASA's Living With a Star program, will provide unprecedented insight into the physical dynamics of the radiation belts. Credit: NASA
These belts generally consist of two rings:
an inner zone with both high-energy electrons and very energetic positive ions that remains stable in intensity over the course of years to decades; and
an outer zone made up mostly of high-energy electrons whose intensity swings over the course of hours to days, primarily depending on the influence from the solar wind, the deluge of radiation streaming from the sun.
Earlier this year, scientists also detected a third radiation belt temporarily surrounding Earth.
The gigantic amounts of radiation the Van Allen belts generate can pose serious risks for satellites. To learn more about them, NASA launched twin spacecraft, the Van Allen probes, in the summer of 2012.
The satellites are armed with a host of sensors to comprehensively analyze the plasma, energetic particles, magnetic fields and plasma waves in these belts with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.
Two giant swaths of radiation, known as the Van Allen Belts, surrounding Earth were discovered in 1958. In 2012, observations from the Van Allen Probes showed that a third belt can sometimes appear. The radiation is shown here in yellow, with green representing the spaces between the belts. Credit: NASA/Van Allen Probes/Goddard Space Flight Center.
Now, using the Van Allen probes, scientists have detected structures that pop in and out of existence in the outer belt that could help explain the high-energy electrons seen in that zone.
The structures in question are known as "double layers." They are each made up of a pair of parallel layers of particles with opposite electrical charge that move along Earth's magnetic field.
The probes saw huge numbers of double layers in the outer belt —7,000 in the course of a minute, each lasting on the order of seconds.
These double layers were discovered "sort of by accident as the Van Allen probes passed through this region of space, and only captured a snapshot," said study lead author Forrest Mozer, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"The spacecraft will get back to this region maybe eight months, maybe 10 months from now, and we're setting up our instruments to do what we now know they should — to collect data at that site then with a continuous view, to really get definitive information on what is going on there."
An unmanned Russian resupply spacecraft carrying an improved navigation system docked early Saturday with the International Space Station, Russian Mission Control said.
"The manual docking was carried out by cosmonaut Oleg Kotov," Mission Control said.
The Progress M-21M space freighter was loaded with almost 2.5 metric tons of food, fuel, experiment hardware and other supplies for the space station's six Expedition 38 crew members.
The craft lifted off aboard a Soyuz-U launch vehicle from the Russian-leased Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on Tuesday.
On November 28, the spacecraft conducted flybys of the orbital station and successfully tested a lighter and more efficient automated navigation and docking system, known as Kurs-NA.
The Kurs-NA boasts advanced electronics, a fully-digitized control system and increased docking precision compared to its predecessor, Kurs. The improved system will be used on all upgraded Soyuz and Progress vehicles in the future.
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