Kentucky Space

Biological past for Mars rock?

Features of Martian meteorite ALH 84001 could be of biological origin, according to NewScientist.

Wayne

Kentucky Space, Space

Plume diving on Enceladus

A spectacular raw image from the November 21 Cassini flyby of Enceladus clearly shows the venting happening from the Saturn moon.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Resurrected Cubesat solar sailer to fly next year

Dennis Overbye wrote Monday about the plans by the Planetary Society to build and fly a series of solar sails, dubbed "LightSails," over the next three years, first in orbit around Earth and then into deeper space, saying that

About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.

The project, interestingly enough, is the successor of the fated NanoSail effort, which failed to reach space when the stages on the Falcon-1 rocket taking it orbit did not separate. Overbye:

And so LightSail was born. Its sail, adapted from the Nanosail project, is made of aluminized Mylar about one-quarter the thickness of a trash bag. The body of the spacecraft will consist of three miniature satellites known as CubeSats, four inches on a side, which were first developed by students at Stanford and now can be bought on the Web, among other places. One of the cubes will hold electronics and the other two will carry folded-up sails, Dr. Friedman said.

Video of NanoSail may be seen below.

Wayne

Titan haze

Described as an organic chemical factory, Titan has become less mysterious over the last few years thanks to Cassini, but many more mysteries remain.

This image, a combination of images taken with red, green and blue filters, was acquired on Oct. 12 and clearly shows the moon's atmosphere.

Wayne

Flooding on Mercury

A picture returned from the last Mercury flyby by MESSENGER appears to show a crater, lower left in the image, flooded by lava. The extent to which volcanism has affected the innermost planet is becoming clearer.

Wayne

New Mercury image

MESSENGER acquired this image of Mercury 78 minutes prior to closest approach, capturing the stark division between the sun-facing and the dark side of the planet referred to as the "terminator."

Wayne

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Mars' "Shelter Island"

Less than three weeks following the discovery of a similar meteorite, Discovery has come upon another - this one dubbed "Shelter Island." 

Related, Scientific American is running a series of stories of the robotic exploration of the solar system and its future that might interest you.

Wayne

Images being posted from MESSENGER'S third Mercury flyby

Swooping by at an altitude of just 141.7 miles, images from MESSENGER'S third flyby of Mercury this week are now being posted. The surface in the lower right corner of this image is near Mercury's terminator, the line between the day and night side of the planet.

The craft will settle into orbit around Mercury beginning on March 18, 2011.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Peter Diamandis: Moon water "petroleum of space flight"

Chairman and CEO of the X-PRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis, writes that finding water on the Moon could be a turning point in human history. 

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It's what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

Wayne

Our ever-changing solar system

While the number of planets orbiting other stars stands at 373, it's easy to forget that the estimate of the number of significant bodies in our own solar system is constantly changing. Thought to be covered in water ice, Haumea is the fourth largest dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, following Eris, Pluto and Makemake. And in the just last ten years many more trans-Neptunian objects with a diameter of at least 500 km have been added to the catalog, according to Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams. That total now numbers seventy.

Wayne

Kentucky Space, Space