Rosetta's Philae Probe lands on Comet 67P

Another amazing milestone for Science and Technology.



From BBC:
Rosetta space mission  makes historic landing
A European robot probe has made the first, historic landing on a comet, but its status is uncertain after harpoons failed to anchor it to the surface.
Officials said the craft may have lifted off the comet after touchdown before returning to the surface.
The "first" landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was confirmed at about 1605 GMT......

Another triumph for science and technology .... India becomes first nation to enter Mars' orbit

on its very first try and that too on a low, low budget of just $73 M.  Congratulations to India .... the country that likes to keep a low profile while aiming high.
Wait for the Western MSM and others to start showing horrible, degrading stuff related to India to make it look that that's what India is all about ... dirt, disease, death, because doncha know only the West is squeaky clean and can achieve wonders on planet Earth.

From RTNews:
India's low-cost space mission reaches Mars orbit

India has become the first nation to reach Mars on its maiden attempt after its Mars Orbiter Mission completed its 10-month journey and successfully entered the Red Planet’s orbit.

The spacecraft was executing the arrival sequence autonomously with engineers receiving the telemetry with 12-and-a-half minute delay at ISRO's control center in Bangalore due to the 139 million miles separating Earth and Mars.

On the orbit, the unnamed probe is set to study Mars’ surface and scan its atmosphere for evidence of some sort of life. The probe is expected to circle Mars for six months, about 500 kilometres (310 miles) from its surface. Its five scientific instruments will collect data and send it back to Earth.....

.......The Mars Orbiter Mission, a low-cost $72 million project, blasted off from Earth on November 5, 2013, aboard an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. At its initial stage, the rocket booster placed the probe into Earth's orbit before the craft fired the engines to break free of Earth's gravity en route to Mars.....

Laniakea Supercluster

Stuff to make one feel that our Earth is just like the tiniest speck of dancing dust in the overall scheme of things in the Universe. 

From VICE:
Our Galaxy Is a Lot Less Alone in Space Than We Thought 

The Milky Way isn't as lonely a galaxy as you might have thought. In fact, our home galaxy is actually part of a gigantic supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea, according to new data gathered using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT). 



The largest structures in the universe form a massive network of clusters, filaments, and superclusters of galaxies that break up the cosmic void. But for everything we know about these large cosmic objects, astronomers have been unable to create a detailed map of the structure in which our own galaxy resides, until now. 

According to the new work, it turns out our galaxy resides in the outskirts of the Laniakea Supercluster. Laniakea, which means “immense heaven” in Hawaiian, is a supercluster 500 million light-years in diameter that contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies. 

In short, our galaxy is just one part of a massive whole. But the finding goes deeper than that: the discovery that has helped clarify the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood to establish previously unrecognized links between galaxy clusters in our local part of the universe.

“We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home,” said Brent Tully, lead researcher and astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in a release. “This is not unlike finding out for the first time that .......

Rosetta makes contact with Comet 67P

Fascinating!



Ian Sample writing at TheGuardian:
Rosetta spacecraft makes historic rendezvous with rubber-duck comet 67P/CG
European Space Agency probe brought to within 100km of comet travelling at 55,000km per hour, where it will begin analysis.

A European spacecraft has become the first in history to rendezvous with a comet after a seven-minute burn of the probe’s thrusters brought it within 100km (62 miles) of the hurtling lump of dust and ice.

The European Space Agency’s billion-euro Rosetta spacecraft caught up with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko more than 400m km from Earth as it streaked towards the sun at around 55,000km per hour.

The manoeuvre that brought the spacecraft alongside the comet marks the end of the beginning of a mission that lifted off from French Guiana 10 years, five months and four days ago. Rosetta now begins its scientific mission, employing a suite of instruments to analyse the comet’s nucleus.

Inventions .... what a boring world we would have without them

Are we just a few short years from "walking" in space like we do right now with Google maps?  I hope so.

From VICE:
....Supernovas and black holes are hard enough to track for NASA—and for space buffs with weaker telescopes, it’s even harder. But thanks to a little-known Canadian designed app called SkyWatch, cosmic events are being virtually mapped for your average astronomer.

Using raw telemetric information from NASA, SkyWatch displays space data on a Google Maps interface. It visually highlights cosmic events as they occur in real time across the universe. The SkyWatch team came up with the app during NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge, and were the first Canadian team ever to win first prize in a category. Right now the app is a working prototype, and there's a new, slicker version in the works.

The app is powered with data from NASA's Gamma-ray Coordinates Network. “It’s basically a bunch of servers that’s housed in one of their facilities. Scientists input the data they want to share with other scientists around the world into the network, and the servers send out the data to other telescopes in various locations," said Dexter Jagula, the team project leader. 

Without an astrophysicist on board, Jagula and his team spent a large chunk of time deciphering the telemetric data they collected from NASA.

“The telemetric data is collected by scientists and transmitted for other scientists,” he said. “But for someone like myself or anyone who hasn’t delved into astrophysics, it’s a bit of a mystery.”.............

Meteor shower from Camelopardalids tonight

This is happening for the very first time. You will be able to view the shower, or at least a part of it, from anywhere in North America.  Just look upwards at the sky between 2 and 4 am.



John Newsome at CNN:
.....The cosmos has aligned, quite literally, for families, space geeks and insomniacs alike, as the Earth is set to intercept a new meteor shower late Friday into Saturday.
The scientists who discovered the cosmic debris say the Camelopardalid shower could be "significant."
Some forecasts show 200 to 1,000 meteors an hour between 2 and 4 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday.
 Capturing the Orionid meteor shower Capturing the Orionid meteor shower
NASA says North America is in the best position to get a glimpse because the peak of the shower will appear during our nighttime, and the debris will "radiate" from a position favorable for viewing.......

Planet Earth is ripe for "flipping" of Magnetic Poles

Very, very interesting.

Mission Possible .... Journey to Jupiter's Europa

Bet the Europa orbiting around Jupiter will be far better than the one in existence here on Earth.
Instead of putting mankind's resources in a collective format to explore and conquer outer worlds, we want wars on this our home planet.  How destructive and disgusting are human beings the warmongering politicians!

Seth Borenstein writing at YahooNews:
....NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life.

The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said Tuesday that it would be launched in the mid-2020s.
)
Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When NASA sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be "a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system."

Past NASA probes have flown by Europa, especially Galileo, but none have concentrated on the moon, one of dozens orbiting Jupiter. Astronomers have long lobbied for a mission to Europa, but proposals would have cost billions of dollars.

Last year, scientists discovered liquid plumes of water shooting up through Europa's ice. Flying through those watery jets could make Europa cheaper to explore than just circling it or landing on the ice, said NASA Europa scientist Robert Pappalardo..........

If there's water on Mars, then there must be some sort of life there too ....

otherwise our entire Evolution  theory that without water, or at least water vapor,  life could not have spurted on Earth is shot to hell. If there is indeed water, or water vapor on Mars but no life ... then back the atheists will have to retrace their steps  to God and the Adam & Eve theory.  Right?

Would dry ice give rise to organisms?  Let's wait and see what Curiosity has to show us as it travels further and further into Mars' unknown terrority.  Vid below tries to explain the recent "finger shaped" pic making scientists go a bit gaga.  If it's dry ice making those indentations, would the vapors from the dry ice start some kind of organisms or not?  So many questions and the answers are not coming fast enough from Curiosity for all us curious folks.



From CNN:
...The presence of water on Mars is often talked about in the past tense -- as in, billions of years in the past. But researchers have found clues that water could be flowing in the present, at least during warm seasons.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology are looking at dark features on Martian slopes that are finger-shaped. They appear and disappear seasonally.

These flows represent the best suggestion we know of that Mars has water right now, scientists say. The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In 2011, Lujendra Ojha and his colleagues announced the evidence for possible saltwater flows on Mars. They published a study in the journal Science based on data from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter....

Curiosity's Progress

To Curiosity, Earth  looks like a  little dot in the Martian sky.   That's what we really are, our home the Earth is just a tiny little dot in the big scheme of things and yet we dare to think we control the Universe and the weather along with it. Sheesh !!!

Greg Botelho writing at CNN:
...Curiosity rover takes snapshot of Earth -- from 100 million miles away on Mars.
It's a dot in the sky.

The 2,000-pound rover Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, 2012, and has been sending back fascinating images and data ever since. Curiosity recently began a trek toward Mount Sharp after spending more than six months in the "Glenelg" area. This image was taken on July 16, after the rover passed the 1 kilometer mark for the total distance covered since the start of the mission. It still has over 8 kilometers (5 miles) to cover before reaching Mount Sharp, which will take several months.

But not just any dot. For the Curiosity rover, it's home.
NASA tweeted a photo Thursday taken by Curiosity from the Mars surface six days earlier. The image shows a speck above the horizon that a pointer identifies as Earth.

"Look Back in Wonder," reads the accompanying text from the Curiosity Rover's official Twitter feed. "My 1st picture of Earth from the surface of Mars."

An illustration depicts the possible extent of an ancient lake inside Gale Crater, where the Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in August 2012. The $2.5 billion NASA mission set out to explore Gale Crater, which was thought to have once hosted flowing water. Curiosity found evidence of clay formations, or "mudstone," in the crater's Yellowknife Bay, scientists said in 2013. This clay may have held the key ingredients for life billions of years ago. It means a lake must have existed in the area.

If it's possible for a 1-ton, roughly SUV-size vehicle to get homesick, it's had plenty of reason to shed a tear. The last time Curiosity was on Earth was November 26, 2011, when it set off aboard a NASA spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Eight and a half months and some 352 million miles later, the rover landed safely on Mars with its 17 cameras and other assorted scientific instruments all intact. And almost as quickly, the Curiosity -- the centerpiece of a $2.6 billion project -- began transmitting images back to Earth.

This view of the twilight sky and Martian horizon, taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, includes Earth as the brightest point of light in the night sky. Earth is a little left of center in the image, and our moon is just below Earth. A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright "evening stars."

But until now, none of those pictures actually showed Earth itself.
The one released by NASA, which was "processed to remove effects of cosmic rays," was taken about 80 minutes after Mars' sunset with what researchers call Curiosity's "left eye camera" on its "Mastcam." It show not just Earth but another dot that NASA says is our moon. (Earth was about 99 million miles away at that point, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Curiosity traveled a much longer distance to get to Mars because both planets are constantly in motion.)

Any Martian or Earthling who happened to be visiting wouldn't need such a special camera to see the same thing.
According to NASA, "A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright 'evening stars.'".........

Asteroids and comets that thankfully burn out and not burn us .... as yet

First day of 2014 starts off with a car-sized asteroid hurtling to Earth and thankfully disintegrating once it hit our atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean.  

And, when you look at the big picture,  don't you feel like wringing the necks of dumbfucks who endlessly insist on declaring that humans are responsible for climate change?

 Becky Pallack writing at ArizonaStar:
.....For the second time ever, an astronomer saw an asteroid headed for Earth before it got here.

And for the second time, the discoverer was Tucson astronomer Rich Kowalski, using the 60-inch telescope on Mount Lemmon. 

The asteroid named 2014 AA was about the size of a car, and it likely burned up in the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean off the West Coast of Africa on New Year’s Day. 



In comparison, the one that lit up Tucson skies last month was about the size of a basketball.

Kowalski works at the Catalina Sky Survey, a division of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. 

“This is a group that has found more than half the near-Earth asteroids known to mankind at the moment,” said Professor Timothy Swindle, who heads the laboratory. 
The Catalina Sky Survey has dedicated telescope time, two good telescopes and software that helps detect objects in real time, he said.
“These two they’ve found are little ones, but their real job is to find ones that may be dangerous,” Swindle said. “The trick is to find them before they find us, which is what they’re trying to do.”

Kowalski was working alone on a routine night on New Year’s Eve when he spotted asteroid 2014 AA, said Sky Survey director Eric Christensen. 
Right away he reported his observations to the Minor Planet Center — a clearinghouse for information about the locations of minor planets, comets, asteroids and other space objects — and then he made follow-up observations.
The impact trajectory was later calculated by three other groups of scientists, Christensen said.

“It’s yet another reminder that near-Earth space is a busy place,” he said.....

Paul Hellyer, staunch Liberal, former Minister of Defence, staunch believer that aliens from outer worlds are residing here on Earth

Whether you want to believe it or not,  this man used to be the Defence Minister of Canada during the reign of  Pierre Trudeau's Prime Ministership. It's more than probable that many of his brothers and sisters in the Liberal party believed in the same nonsense he does.  

The part that scares me the most about this sordid tale is the fact that this man was  not only the Defence Minister of Canada he was also one of the topmost Liberal politicians at that time and almost beat Trudeau to the party's leadership. What does that say about the other Liberal members ?   

Go to the link to watch the interview  with RT's Sophie Shevardnadze which aired last night. Below is part of the transcript:

"If we down at least one UFO we'll   be facing an interstellar war"  - Former Defense Minister of Canada

He was Canadian minister of Defense in 1960s, ruling over the country’s armed forces during the time of the Cold War – and when he retired he publicly stated that we are not alone in the universe, and some guests from outer space actually live here, on planet Earth. Is this fantasy? Is someone actually watching us? Today we ask the man who says UFOs are a serious business – Paul Hellyer.

Sophie Shevardnadze: Our guest today is the Honorable Paul Hellyer, former minister of Defense of Canada, and he believes that life forms from space are present on Earth. It’s great to have you on our show. Why do you say that UFOs are as real as airplanes flying over our heads?

Paul Hellyer: Because I know that they are. As a matter of fact, they’ve been visiting our planet for thousands of years and one of the cases that would interest you most if you give me two or three minutes to answer is that during the Cold War, 1961, there were about 50 UFOs in formation flying south from Russia across Europe, and Supreme Allied Command was very concerned and about ready to press the “Panic” button when they turned around and went back over the North Pole. They decided to do an investigation and they investigated for 3 years and they decided that, with absolute certainty, four species - at least – had been visiting this planet for thousands of years. We have a long history of UFOs and of course there has been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb and they are very concerned about that and the fact that we might use it again, and because the Cosmos is a unity and it affects not just us but other people in the Cosmos, they are very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again, and this would be very bad for us and for them as well.

SS: No serious scientist has ever publicly confirmed evidence of an encounter with extra-terrestrials – why would scientists not confirm the facts if they exist?

PH: I’m afraid they must go out of their way not to find out. Even if they do 10 percent of the amount of research I’ve done in the last 8 years they would be as convinced as I am. I mean, they could do it even faster. Might take it a little longer, when they didn’t have military background, but there are so many wonderful books that tell these stories and they’ve been authenticated; the sightings have been authenticated by more than one witness and also by radar, and they have landed in various places around the world, including Russia. There’s famous case there, I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was widely reported at the time, a man wrote a book about it and then the French bought the book rights so it wouldn’t be circulated around….....

Docu-Movie: Hawking

Very interesting .... especially the part where Hawking discovers how radiation escapes via particles from a dead planet or star or mass known as  "black holes" thus erasing themselves out or ceasing to exist even as black holes.  Of course, there are many other scientists who are fiercely disputing his theory.  If you don't want to invest in the time it will take to watch the whole documentary,  just watch  the explanation  here.

Growing plant life on Mars and the Moon

Scientists are experimenting on Earth with soil, the kind found on Mars and our Moon,  to grow plants, herbs and vegetables for eventually setting up plant life farms in outer space.  

New Frontiers for humans on the Red Planet

Wanna go to the moon or Mars and never come back to Earth.  Yup ... that high can be achieved by people other than astronauts in about a decade or much less.



Rachel Martin at NPR:
Gardens on the moon. It sounds like a particularly whimsical children's book. But if NASA has its way, it might become more than a fantasy story. The space agency revealed plans this past week to grow a series of plants on the moon: basil, turnips and a little white flowered planet called Arabidopsis.....

Tanya Lewis writing at Space:
....Tens of thousands of people are prepared    to leave their families, jobs and lives behind for a one-way trip to Mars.
The Mars One mission aims to send humans on a one-way trip to the Red Planet. The mission aims to land the first Mars colonists on the planet by 2023. Applicants over the age of 18 from any country are eligible to apply, and Mars One has received more than 165,000 applications already. But what sort of person would go?
A few dozen of the aspiring Martians convened in Washington, D.C., in August for the "Million Martian Meeting." A panel of four applicants answered questions from the audience about their reasons for wanting to go to Mars without a return ticket.....

Did comet ISON escape the wrath of our Sun ?

According to some, the comet is no longer  its original self but a part of it might have survived its sojourn near the Sun.  Scientists need more time to tell us how much of its mass ISON has lost  or if the remaining mass is disintegrating or has already disintegrated completely and whether our universe has already lost or is in the process of losing one beautiful comet. 

While most agree that #ISON was destroyed, we're searching for what's left of the #comet. http://t.co/VpeECTUyok  pic.twitter.com/eMn0R7wZDj
— NASA (@NASA) December 5, 2013

From MyScienceAcademy:
Could Comet ISON possibly still be alive? The latest high-resolution images available from the STEREO spacecraft are still showing some remains of the comet, although each day seems to show less and less activity. “If anything of ISON’s nucleus is left, it’s an inactive husk of a nucleus now,” Karl Battams from the Comet ISON Observing Campaign told Universe Today. “The comet remnant is fading fast in the STEREO data.”.........



More here andhere

The Kessler Syndrome

The collisions you see in the new blockbuster "Gravity" have been happening and will continue to happen.  

From YahooBlogs:
On February 10, 2009, at just before noon Eastern Time,  a 1-ton hunk of space debris, formerly the Russian satellite known as Kosmos 2251, slammed into the American Iridium 33 communications satellite going over 40,000 km/h. The collision destroyed both satellites, creating a debris field that continues to travel around the planet, and is considered to be the triggering event of what's known as the Kessler Syndrome.
The Kessler Syndrome, is a fairly simple concept, most recently demonstrated in the movie Gravity. Collisions between objects (both man-made and natural) in orbit of Earth will result in a cascade effect of further collisions that will eventually make it extremely dangerous to send anything else into orbit — effectively cutting off our access to space. This great short video talks about the Kessler Syndrome and shows how it progresses:

Latest shots of Mars

While many of us  Earthlings are hoping Curiosity will find some sort of life on Mars,  there are those from the neverending supply of naysayers  like Kenneth Chang of the NYTimes below saying it's not possible.  We can still hope, can't we?

....In findings that are as scientifically significant as they are crushing to the popular imagination, NASA reported Thursday that its Mars rover, Curiosity, has deflated hopes that life could be thriving on Mars today.

The conclusion, published in the journal Science, comes from the fact that Curiosity has been looking for methane, a gas that is considered a possible calling card of microbes, and has so far found none of it. While the absence of methane does not rule out the possibility of present-day life on Mars — there are plenty of microbes, on Earth at least, that do not produce methane — it does return the idea to the realm of pure speculation without any hopeful data to back it up.

The history of human fascination with the possibility of life on Mars is rich, encompassing myriad works of science fiction, Percival Lowell’s quixotic efforts to map what turned out to be imaginary canals, Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio play, and of course Bugs Bunny’s nemesis, Marvin the Martian.

But Marvin apparently did not emit enough methane for Curiosity’s sensitive instruments to find him.

“You don’t have direct evidence that there is microbial process going on,” said Sushil K. Atreya, a professor of atmospheric and space science at the University of Michigan and a member of the science team.

But NASA scientists are going strictly by their data, and they are leery about drawing broader implications to the question once posed by David Bowie, “Is there life on Mars?” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, would go only so far as to say that the lack of this gas “does diminish” the possibility of methane-exhaling creatures going about their business on Mars.

“It would have been great if we got methane,” Dr. Atreya said. “It just isn’t there.”........

Who's next in line for a trip to Mars? India. They are set  to take off on their Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) in the next few weeks but might have to do without  the additional communications hub offered by NASA because of the govt. shutdown.

More pics of Mars here.

Mysterious Mars

Fascinating!   

Lisa M.Krieger writing at MercuryNews:
 ....A small, made-in-Mountain View device is yielding new insights about the windblown geology of the Red Planet.

The bread box-sized instrument built by David Blake, of NASA´s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field -- analyzing a sheltered sand ripple on Mars -- detected a crust of large particles atop smaller particles, suggesting a history of fierce winds.

"When things like that occur, it means Mars would have windy spells and turbulence," said Blake.

He believes that gale-force winds kick up when restless Mars changes its axial tilt. Unlike Earth, the tilt of Mars has repeatedly swung from 0 to 60 degrees over its 4.5 billion-year life span. He and his colleagues report this and other findings, discovered using a suite of analytic instruments aboard NASA's $1 billion Curiosity rover, in the most recent issue of the journal Science.



The rover, more than 220 million miles from home since its harrowing touchdown a year ago, has tested more than one hundred samples of soil in a sandy patch of the Gale Crater known as Rocknest. It has also returned more than 190 gigabits of data. Among its other findings:

Hydrogen, which scientists interpret as water, bound to fine-grained particles of dirt. They calculate that this soil contains 2 percent water by weight, meaning that astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints of water out of every cubic foot of Martian dirt they dig up.

10 different minerals. These minerals were amorphous, similar to glassy substances found in some volcanic deposits on earth, rather than crystalline.

A compound with chlorine and oxygen, likely chlorate or perchlorate, which previously was known to exist on Mars only at one high-latitude site. This finding suggests the toxic material is widespread and might complicate future plans for humans to live on Mars.

A football-size igneous rock called "Jake M," named after the late NASA engineer Jacob "Jake" Matijevic, is similar to some rare lava on earth, formed by cooling molten material from beneath the planet's crust....

Are we the ones we are looking for?

The first vid is from a few hours ago.  The second is from several months ago and to my ears at least, it sounds rather kooky  ... but   I am always open to listening to different people on the origins of man.   All beliefs, guesses, facts, non-facts, lies, non-lies, true history, made-up history .... everything is fascinating.... as long as nobody advocates the  killing of other human beings.