This image focuses in on a part of Pluto’s heart-shaped region where hills of water ice appear to be floating on top of a nitrogen glacier. Challenger Colles, toward the top of the inset photo, is a wide cluster of water-ice hills. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
There’s plenty of evidence that Pluto is a frozen water world, with mountains of ice that rise more than 10,000 feet in height, but here’s something even weirder: Huge chunks of frozen H2O appear to be floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, like icebergs in Earth’s polar regions.
Those are among the findings reported on Feb. 4 in this week’s update from NASA’s New Horizons mission. The piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft collected gigabytes’ worth of observations last year during its July 14 flyby, and it’s been sending back data ever since then.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s 18 mirrors are fully installed. (Credit: Chris Gunn / NASA)
NASA has put the 18th and final piece of the puzzle into place for the $8.8 billionJames Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror – marking a major milestone on the way to the observatory’s launch in 2018.
The 21.3-foot-wide mirror is so big it couldn’t be fabricated in one piece. Instead, it’s made up of 18 hexagonal segments, each spanning a little more than 4 feet and weighing about 88 pounds. The last segment was carefully laid into place using a clawlike robotic arm at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on Feb. 3.
“With the mirrors finally complete, we are one step closer to the audacious observations that will unravel the mysteries of the universe,” John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said in a news release.
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet undergoes training in a Soyuz spacecraft simulator in 2014 at Russia’s Star City cosmonaut training center. (Credit: ESA)
Moscow, we have a problem: Russia’s cosmonaut training center in Star City might need to upgrade its Soyuz spacecraft simulators to Windows 10.
Based on some snapshots tweeted by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, it looks as if Russia’s space agency has been getting by with Microsoft Windows XP. And that became the source of a little levity when Pesquet encountered a simulated spaceflight alarm.
Pluto is all smiles in NASA’s valentine. (Credit: NASA)
Say it with Pluto? After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spotted a heart-shaped region on Pluto, you had to know it was just a matter of time before the dwarf planet made its appearance on a valentine.
Sure enough, this year’s crop of printable Valentine’s Day cards from NASA’s educational Space Place website includes a stylized Pluto.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard prototype spaceship blasts off in January. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is lifting the curtain just a bit on its future plans for rocket engines and spaceflights.
One of the revelations relates to progress on its methane-fueled BE-4 rocket engine, which is on track to provide propulsion for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin tweeted out a picture of the engine’s bell, most likely taken at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash.:
An artist’s conception shows Lunar Flashlight flying above a crater on the moon. (Credit: NASA)
NASA says it’ll send 13 miniaturized satellites – including a pop-up solar sail and a “lunar flashlight” – beyond Earth orbit when it flies its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket for the first time in 2018.
The main payload for the test flight, known as Exploration Mission-1 or EM-1, is an uncrewed prototype for NASA’s Orion spaceship. The SLS will send Orion into a highly eccentric orbit that ranges beyond the moon and back.
But there’s also room inside the rocket’s adapter ring for a baker’s dozen of CubeSats, boxy spacecraft of a standard size that are becoming increasingly popular for low-cost space missions.
“They’re really on the cutting edge of technology,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said today during a news conference at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
Whether or not the truth is out there, both the FBI and the CIA have capitalized on the X-Files buzz to rehash some of their, um, more unusual cases. The FBI’s online vault features nine cases having to do with unexplained phenomena, including flying saucer reports, cattle mutilations, ESP and the purported Majestic-12 conspiracy.
The CIA took its turn just in time for this season’s “X-Files” reboot, which continues tonight with what’s said to be the best episode to date. The spooks offered up five flying-saucer surveys from 1952 that would warm the heart of Fox Mulder, the true believer on the fictional FBI’s X-Files team. Five more files, dating from 1949 to 1952, take a skeptical view that’s in keeping with the usual attitude of Mulder’s partner, Dana Scully.
Readings from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, shown in this artist’s conception, provided evidence to support a link between lunar tides and rainfall patterns. (Credit: NASA)
When the moon is high in the sky, its gravitational pull warps the atmosphere enough to reduce rainfall ever so slightly. At least that’s the conclusion that researchers from the University of Washington reached after reviewing 15 years of detailed rainfall data.
Readings from the U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, collected between 1998 and 2012, suggest that rainfall is reduced by about 1 percent if the precipitation falls when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot.
This false-color infrared image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows water ice concentrations on Pluto. The left image is the result of an initial analysis, and the right image has been reprocessed to account for mixtures with other types of ice. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
A color-coded map from NASA’s New Horizons mission shows where Pluto’s frozen water is concentrated, just in case we need to fill up our tanks on the way toAlpha Centauri or Planet Nine.
Water ice turns out to be more widespread on the dwarf planet than previously thought, the mission’s researchers reported today. They came to that conclusion after some sophisticated analysis of infrared imagery captured during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby last July 14.
Soon after the flyby, the mission team concluded that Pluto possessed mountains of water ice rising as high as 11,000 feet above the icy world’s surface. That conclusion was confirmed in follow-up studies based on the infrared data from the piano-sized probe’s Ralph/LEISA instrument.
LEISA’s survey mapped concentrations of water ice, but scientists figured out that the spectral readings could be thrown off if the frozen water was mixed in with frozen methane. When they modeled the contributions from other types of ice on Pluto’s surface, the resulting map showed wider stretches where water ice should be present.
Elon Musk flashes a smile during the StartmeupHK Festival. (Credit: InvestHK via YouTube)
SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he has his heart set on going into space himself, perhaps in the next four or five years, and organize the first flights to Mars by 2025.
Musk’s travel timetable came out this week during Musk’s chat at the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong. The 44-year-old billionaire said he’d unveil his detailed plan for sending settlers to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. That means the SpaceX fans who have been buzzing about the Mars Colonial Transporter may have to just keep buzzing for another eight months or so.
The StartmeupHK talk was as wide-ranging as Musk’s interests, which take in electric cars (as Tesla Motors’ CEO), solar power (as Solar City’s chairman) and the potentialuses and misuses of artificial intelligence (as a backer of the OpenAI foundation). That’s all in addition to his focus on spaceflight and humanity’s interplanetary future.
Musk introduced yet another theme: the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head.
