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Cassini spacecraft is ready for its grand finale!!!

The Cassini Spacecraft is about to fly through the undiscovered space between Saturn’s rings and the planet. For the first time in history Cassini will be taking pictures and collecting data about Saturn’s interior, its mysterious storms, the age of its rings and the length of its day. Cassini launched into space on October 15th, 1997, entered Saturn’s orbit on July 1st, 2004, and has been orbiting the planet for last 13 years.

The Cassini’s grand finale started earlier this week when it flew past Saturn’s moon, Titan, for the very last time. The trajectory that the spacecraft is on will lead to it’s demise when it hits Saturn’s atmosphere.

Check out some of the images captured by Cassini during its orbit of Saturn here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cassini-spacecraft-saturn-orbit-rings-images-pictures-photos-nasa-unmanned-mission-a7703496.html#gallery

Check out NASA’s video to visualize Cassini in action!

Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Evidence of Ancient Stream!

The NASA rover Curiosity has beamed back pictures of bedrock that suggest a fast-moving stream, possibly waist-deep, once flowed on Mars — a find that the mission’s chief scientist called exciting. There have been previous signs that water existed on the red planet long ago, but the images released Thursday showing pebbles rounded off, likely by water, offered the most convincing evidence so far of an ancient stream bed.

From a NASA/JPL news release:

NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence — images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels — is the first of its kind.

Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream’s flow.

“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”

The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.

The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.

The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called “Hottah” and “Link,” with the telephoto capability of Curiosity’s mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project’s rover, touched down.

“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded. “The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn’t be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow,” said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.

The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover’s main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.

“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” said Grotzinger. “It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”

During the two-year prime mission of the Mars Science Laboratory,esearchers will use Curiosity’s 10 instruments to investigate whether areas in Gale Crater have ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, built Curiosity and manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

First Man to Walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, Dies

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins came into orbit around the Moon. Before long, the command module Columbia separated from the Lunar Module Eagle, and Aldrin and Armstrong headed for a historic achievement. Soon, Neil Armstrong was taking mankind’s first steps onto the moon. This transformed the engineer into a world-wide hero, won the space race for the United States, and won Armstrong immortality as one of the nation’s true heroes. Neil Armstrong has died at age 82. His family put the cause of death on complications from recent cardiovascular procedures; he had been living in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, at the time of his death.

The importance of the Apollo 11 mission cannot be overstated. It is a historic achievement for all mankind, and the Apollo 11 astronauts are living treasures, memorials of one of human kind’s greatest success stories. There’s a reason Jeff Bezos wants to get the Apollo 11 rocket boosters. These guys were real heroes, and it’s a shame to see one of them go.

Click here to read more about the life of Neil Armstrong & how he made an American Dream tangible for people across the globe.

Amazon Founder To Recover Apollo 11 Rocket Boosters!

apollo

Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos to recover Apollo 11 parts for fun.

It’s been over 40 years since man first walked on the moon thanks to the brave astronauts of Apollo 11. Now, an important artifact of the race for space has been discovered some 14,000 feet below the surface of the earth. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is planning to find and recover the F-1 rocket engines that powered Apollo 11′s Saturn V rocket into space, with the hopes that the Apollo 11 equipment will find a good home in a museum.

“We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in,” wrote Bezos, who watched the moon landing when he was 5 years old. ”They hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”

Bezos has stayed quiet about just how he found the Apollo 11 rocket booster parts, and he’s doubly quiet about who will be paying to bring the 19-foot rocket parts to the surface, only saying that private funds (probably his own private funds) will be bringing them to the surface and that he will be using sonar to find the pieces he’s looking for among the hundreds of NASA artifacts littering the ocean floor near Florida. The equipment is technically NASA property, but odds are NASA will allow the pieces to go to a museum rather than force Bezos to turn them over to Cape Canaveral staff.

Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011

From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species.

Here are some of our favorites.

The world’s lowest density material

With a density of less than one milligram per cubic centimeter (that’s about 1000 times less dense than water), this surprisingly squishy material is so light-weight, it can rest on the seed heads of a dandelion, and is lighter than even the lowest-density aerogels. The secret — to both its negligible weight and its resiliency — is the material’s lattice-like structural organization, one that the researchers who created it liken to that of the Eiffel Tower.

“Feeling” objects with a brain implant

It could be the first step towards truly immersive virtual reality, one where you can actually feel the computer-generated world around you. An international team of neuroengineers has developed a brain-machine interface that’s bi-directional — that means you could soon use a brain implant not only to control a virtual hand, but to receive feedback that tricks your brain into “feeling” the texture of a virtual object.

Already demonstrated successfully in primates, the interface could soon allow humans to use next-generation prosthetic limbs (or even robotic exoskeletons) to actually feel objects in the real world.

Astronomers get their first good look at giant asteroid Vesta

In July of 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered the orbit of Vesta — the second largest body in our solar system’s main asteroid belt. Just a few days later, Dawn spiraled down into orbit. Upon reaching an altitude of approximately 1700 miles, the spacecraft began snapping pictures of the protoplanet’s surface, revealing geophysical oddities like the triplet of craters on Vesta’s northern hemisphere — nicknamed “Snowman” — featured here. Dawn recently maneuvered into its closest orbit (at an altitude averaging just 130 miles). It will continue orbiting Vesta until July of 2012, when it will set a course for Ceres, the largest of the main belt asteroids.

NASA’s Kepler Mission changes how we see ourselves in the Universe

2011 was a fantastic year for NASA’s Kepler Mission, which is charged with discovering Earth-like planets in the so-called “habitable zone” of stars in the Milky Way. Kepler scientists announced the discovery of the first circumbinary planet (i.e. a planet with two suns, just like Tatooine); located the first two known Earth-sized exoplanets; quadrupled the number of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system; and spied Kepler-22b — the most Earth-like planet we’ve encountered yet. And here’s the really exciting bit: Kepler is just getting warmed up.

Heartbeat-powered nanogenerators could soon replace batteries

In a few years, you may never have to recharge your phone again — provided part of you keeps moving. Back in March, scientists announced the world’s first viable “nanogenerator” — a tiny computer chip that gets its power from body movements like snapping fingers or – eventually – your heartbeat.

The researchers can already use the technology to power a liquid crystal display and an LED, and claim that their technology could replace batteries for small devices like MP3 players and mobile phones within a few years.

Discover More Top Scientific Discoveries of 2011 on io9.com

Farmer Finds Rare Meteorite!

It wasn’t a goose that laid a golden egg for one Missouri farmer — it was an asteroid. Scientists are analyzing an extremely rare meteorite found by a farmer in a tiny Missouri town called Conception Junction (population 202)

It wasn’t a goose that laid a golden egg for one Missouri farmer — it was an asteroid.

Scientists are analyzing an extremely rare meteorite found by a farmer in a tiny Missouri town called Conception Junction (population 202), reports Washington University in St. Louis, which helped identify the rock.

An unnamed farmer had found the unusually heavy stone buried in the side of hill. He sawed off the end of the stone and realized he had something that didn’t come from Earth.

The metal rock is studded on the inside with green olivine crystals. It is one of only 20 so-called pallasite meteorites that have been found in the United States.

These types of meteorites are believed to be fragments of large asteroids that had enough internal heat to begin melting, which allowed heavy metals to sink and form a core, while lighter elements became part of the rocky surface.

Pallasites are believed to come from the area where an asteroid’s metal core transitions to olivine in its lower mantle.

Scientists believe the Conception Junction meteorite was once part of an asteroid that flew in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter until it was nudged toward the inner solar system by Jupiter’s gravity field. Sliced and polished, the stone, which is now in the hands of private collectors, is worth about $200 a gram.

SCIENCE CHANNEL: Meteorite Men: Top 10 Meteorites

Huge Asteroid Headed For Close Encounter With Earth

A huge asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the moon Tuesday, giving scientists a rare chance for study without having to go through the time and expense of launching a probe, officials said.

Earth’s close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST Tuesday, as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles from the planet.

“It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great — and rare — chance to study a near-Earth object like this,” astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon,” Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55’s approach, which will be visible from the planet’s northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States,” Yeomans said. “It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by.”

Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.

Track the asteroid, YU55, and track it’s journey as it passes by Earth on the NASA Asteroid & Comet Watch!

Get Asteroid Fun Facts Here!

Hubble Telescope Finds Most Distant Galaxy Visible From Earth

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what astronomers are claiming is the oldest galaxy in the universe. Here’s some of what NASA’s Hubble website says about the discovery

“The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object’s color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away.

The dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang, only four percent of the universe’s current age. It is tiny and considered a building block of today’s giant galaxies. Over one hundred such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way galaxy.”

Think of that – the light from this object we’re seeing now took 13.2 billion years to reach our eyes. That’s mind-boggling. We’re actually looking back in time. Anyway, the study which appears in the journal Nature, was led by Rychard Bouwens at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The tiny smudge of light will be further studied and confirmed when the infrared-optimized James Webb Space Telescope is up and running in 2014.

You can learn more about this story by clicking the link below:

http://www.space.com/10691-oldest-galaxy-discovered-hubble-space-telescope.html