Next month, NASA will begin training a team of astronauts for a manned landing on an asteroid, the Telegraph reports.

The mission, which could take place within the next decade, would take humans farther from Earth than ever before -- up to 3 million miles away. Mission objectives include collecting mineral samples and -- no joke -- determining how to destroy an asteroid in the unlikely event that it becomes a threat to the Earth.

"Asteroids are interesting on a number of different levels. NASA is focused on the science you can achieve as asteroids are essentially a historical record of billions of years of our universe where we can take samples from," said Major Tim Peake, a British astronaut with the European Space Agency who is part of the asteroid team.

Peake says current technology could support a mission of up to a year, with 30 days actually spent on the asteroid's surface.

NASA plans to release more details about the mission at a conference in Japan later this month.

[boingboing.]

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is currently readying a new satellite to investigate Mars' atmosphere -- or, more to the point, lack of atmosphere -- in a mission slated to launch next year.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter will attempt to discover how Mars went from a planet with an atmosphere full of CO2, nitrogen dioxide, water vapor and more to a planet without much of an atmosphere at all.

NASA:

The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. Where did the atmosphere – and the water – go?

MAVEN is currently on time and on budget (a NASA rarity) and scheduled to launch in November 2013 and reach Mars in September 2014.

[dvice.]

NASA has invested in a proof-of-concept study about the possibility of launching satellites that would gather energy using solar cells and beam it to Earth via low-intensity microwaves.

SPS-ALPHA (Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large Phased Array) would consist of thousands of curved mirrors, which could be assembled piece by piece into a giant orbital platform. The satellite's bio-mimetic design is based on the shape of a flower.

If successful, the satellite could deliver 10s to 1000s of megawatts to Earth markets and space missions using wireless power transmission. The one-year feasibility study of the concept is still in progress.

[popsci.]

Last month, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a half-mile high dust devil towering over the surface of Mars. As impressive as that was, we hadn't seen anything yet.

New images from the MRO's high-resolution camera show a dust devil 12 and a half miles high.

OK, now that's towering.

[badastronomy]

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has announced that he wants to recover at least one of the five F-1 engines that launched the historic Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969, which are now sitting 14,000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

Bezos recently funded an undersea expedition which he says used sonar to location the engines, and he revealed today that he's drawing up plans to bring them up from their watery resting place.

"We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in," he wrote. "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."

Of course, the engines remain the property of NASA, so it's up to them to decide what to do with them if and when they're recovered.

NASA hasn't been formally contacted by Bezos, but spokesman Bob Jacobs said the space agency is excited about Bezos's plan.

"There has always been great interest in artifacts from the early days of space exploration and his announcement only adds to the enthusiasm of those interested in NASA's history," he said in a statement.

[ap]

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio -- the same team that recently brought us an animation of the moon as it will appear from Earth for each hour of 2012 -- has also released a stunning video called "Perpetual Ocean," a time lapse of the world's ocean currents as calculated by the ECCO2 computational model.

The editors at the Visualization Studio write:

ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization.

Perpetual Ocean was submitted at the last minute to the SIGGRAPH 2011 conference and didn't make the cut, but it's now online for all of us to be mesmerized by.

[flowingdata]

Researchers working on NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft have announced major new findings about Mercury, including the discovery that the planet's iron core is much larger than previously thought, and that the surface of the planet is swelling from the inside out, a process that scientists haven't yet explained.

According to data collected by MESSENGER, the core of the planet includes a previously undiscovered solid layer of iron sulfide buried under the mantle. The revelation means that Mercury's core makes up about 85% of the planet, leaving room for only a thin mantle and crust.

And that surface is being shaped by something other than volcanic activity and impact craters. The MESSENGER team noted that, among other rising and tilting areas of the planet's surface, the center of the largest crater on the planet has swelled so much that it is now taller than the crater's walls.

"One of the things this has told us is that there are some unusual dynamics in the interior of Mercury going on that we haven't thought about before and that we don't understand," said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.

The research was unveiled Wednesday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston and will appear in this week's issue of Science.

[slashdot]