A mosaic showing the New Horizons probe’s view of Pluto is made up of thousands of images sent in by fans of the “Pluto Time” project. The tiny red box near the center highlights a picture of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh. (Credit: NASA / JPL)
During the buildup to the big Pluto flyby in July, the team behind NASA’s New Horizons mission launched a campaign to show regular folks what time of day during earthly twilight was as bright as high noon on the dwarf planet – and asked them to send in their “Pluto Time” selfies. Now those pictures have been assembled into mosaics that show off the shades of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.
If you look closely at the blown-up view of Pluto, you’ll find a bonus: a portrait of Clyde Tombaugh, the self-taught astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet in 1930.
The antennas of the Allen Telescope Array in California is collecting signals from a strange star known as KIC 8462852. (Credit: SETI Institute)
One of the premier telescope arrays in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is focusing its antennas on an anomalously blinking star, thanks in part to speculation that the star called KIC 8462852 could harbor a network of alien megastructures.
The Allen Telescope Array, a complex of 42 radio dishes in Northern California that was funded in part by Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, has been collecting data about the star since Thursday evening, SETI Institute researcher Doug Vakoch said.
NASA’s New Horizons probe captured this backlit image of Pluto as it flew past the dwarf planet on July 14. Scattered sunlight reveals numerous haze layers within Pluto’s thin atmosphere, while the surprisingly diverse surface landscape indicates ongoing geological activity. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
The first peer-reviewed scientific paper about the New Horizons probe’s July flyby past Pluto lays out puzzling evidence that suggests the dwarf planet isn’t frozen in time. Rather, its smooth plains, high mountains and nitrogen glaciers are leading the NASA mission’s researchers to suspect that it’s geologically active even now.
“Pluto’s still got an engine, and it’s still running,” principal investigator Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute told journalists in advance of the paper’s publication today by the journal Science.
A picture from NASA’s New Horizons probe reveals the blue color of Pluto’s atmospheric haze, as seen in a backlit view. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
The latest pictures from NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto reveal for the first time that the backlit dwarf planet is surrounded by a beautiful blue glow – and also pinpoint the location of water ice deposits exposed on the surface.
Thursday’s images were released after a hubbub that suggested an “amazing” discovery would be revealed this week. Although the hype got a bit out of control, the revelations really do raise intriguing questions about Pluto’s weather and geology.
A picture from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the area of Acidalia Planitia where the fictional Ares 3 mission landed in “The Martian.” (Credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona)
Marooned astronaut Mark Watney takes a harrowing trek from Mars’ Acidalia Planitia to Schiaparelli Crater in “The Martian,” which took the top spot on last weekend’s box-office list with $55 million. But pictures of the actual terrain from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest Watney’s trip would be even riskier in real life.
The science team behind the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, captured a series of images that correspond to scenes in the movie in response to requests from Andy Weir, who wrote the book on which “The Martian” is based.
Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver chats with Alan Boyle during the GeekWire Summit.
If we want to send astronauts to Mars, we better find a way to do it within 10 years. And if we want to discover a blue planet around an alien sun, there’s a good chance it could happen within five years.
That’s how former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver sized up the future of space travel and exploration at the GeekWire Summit on Thursday.
Today, Garver is general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association. But back in 2008, she helped set the space policy trajectory for the Obama administration, and then took the No. 2 spot at the space agency as Administrator Charles Bolden’s deputy. During her four years in that role, she played a key part in NASA’s shift from the space shuttle era to the commercial spaceflight era.
So what’s ahead? Find out what Garver had to say during Thursday’s fireside chat.
Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards shows off a model of the MX-1 lunar lander in 2013. (Credit: Moon Express via YouTube)
Moon Express says it has reserved three lunar lander launches from a startup called Rocket Lab starting in 2017, with an eye toward putting robots on the moon’s surface and winning the lion’s share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.
If the mission is successful, Moon Express could become the first privately backed venture to achieve a soft lunar landing.
“This will be the space equivalent of the four-minute mile,” Moon Express’ co-founder and CEO, Bob Richards, told GeekWire on Thursday. “This is a new era we just could have dreamed about as kids.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off in April, sending cargo to the International Space Station. The payloads included Planetary Resources’ A3R satellite, which was flown under an arrangement with Seattle-based Spaceflight. (Credit: SpaceX)
In the first deal of its kind, Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s buying a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will be set aside exclusively for launching other people’s small satellites into orbit.
The first dedicated rideshare launch is due to go into sun-synchronous low Earth orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California during the latter half of 2017, said Curt Blake, president of Spaceflight’s launch business. Sun-synchronous orbits are particularly popular for Earth imaging satellites, and Spaceflight anticipates buying a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 every year to service the market.
“By purchasing and manifesting the entire SpaceX rocket, Spaceflight is well-positioned to meet the small-sat industry’s growing demand for routine, reliable access to space,” Blake said in a statement issued Wednesday.
During her stint as NASA’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver visited Seattle’s Museum of Flight in 2011 for a NASA Future Forum. (Credit: Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight)
Former NASA official Lori Garver’s resume is filled with highlights from politics and government service – going back to John Glenn’s presidential campaign – but when it comes to America’s space program, her heart’s with commercial ventures.
“The opportunities in commercial space are endless,” she told GeekWire. “Government opportunities are not endless.”
Garver, who helped draw up the Obama administration’s space policy and served as NASA’s deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013, will lay out the opportunities for commercial space ventures – and the limitations of government space efforts – at the GeekWire Summit on Thursday.
Scientists say these dark streaks, shown flowing downhill in a false-color image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, were formed by flowing water. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona)
For years, scientists have puzzled over dark streaks that appear and disappear on the surface of Mars – and now they’re confident enough to assert that the streaks are caused by trickles of salty water.
Their findings, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, serve as the best evidence yet that liquid water still occasionally flows on the Red Planet. The research is likely to spark a new wave of speculation about life on Mars – but it’s not likely to justify the breathless reports that circulated in advance of the study’s release.
“Has NASA found life on Mars?” one headline asked over the weekend. The short answer is no. Nevertheless, NASA thought enough of the study to call it a “major science finding” and schedule a news briefing about it.
John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, said the results make it “even more imperative that we send astrobiologists and planetary scientists to Mars, to explore the question, ‘Is there current life on Mars?’” NASA’s long-range plan calls for astronauts to start visiting Mars and its moons in the 2030s.
