nasa

NASA has a special treat for us this Halloween: Narrowly escaping the destruction of the planet!

Well, sort of. Through the use of their new computer program called Scout, NASA has determined that a potentially-dangerous asteroid will be breezing past Earth by a mere 310,000 miles. Rejoice! We’re going to be ok!

via GIPHY

Scout is part of a new detection system that alerts us when a giant piece of space rock is on its way, hurdling towards Earth at thousands of miles per hour. Think of it like Domino's Pizza Tracker, but for things that could potentially destroy our entire planet and not just your body.

The new program seems to be working great. According to NPR, astronomer Paul Chodas said, “The NASA surveys are finding something like at least five Asteroids a night.”

“Objects can come close to the Earth shortly after discovery,” he continued. “The main goal of Scout is to speed up the confirmation process... Our goal right now is to find 90 percent of the 140-meter asteroids and larger.”

Now, what would we do if an asteroid were to hit Earth? Well, scientists are still working on that. In the meantime, here’s a clip from the Ben Affleck’s commentary track for the Criterion Collection DVD of Armageddon, in which mercilessly makes fun of the movie and its director, Michael Bay. More reason to not put “landing a spaceship on an asteroid, drilling a hole in it, and blowing it up” on the list of “Possible Solutions for Asteroid Hitting Earth.”

It's pretty safe to say this new addition is kind of a troll by NASA on believers in astrology. That doesn't mean this is a FAKE prank. NASA doesn't believe in astrology, they just pointed out a correction. 


via @NASA

For some people, it's a very confusing development! (Although some are still very secure in knowing their star sign)



via @dsweintraub_, @camerawhitt, @DanielleMNorman, @alishasaith, @PetitePasserine 

And here's a list of the new signs, if you want to have your world rocked. 


via @FantasyMinds

The European Space Agency (ESA) just released their satellite Gaia's "First Sky Map" showing our entire Milky Way Galaxy in one single image, the first of it's kind, from long-awaited space science technology.

According to Digg, "when Gaia completes its mission, humanity will have the most accurate and complete catalog of celestial bodies in the Milky Way."

For the first recorded time, on the morning of Sept. 1, 2016, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), caught both Earth and the moon crossing in front of the sun, creating a double eclipse.

Check out the deets here:

I wonder if they could see this in Sweden too...

What are these glorious golden space swirls? According to NASA, who captured this video with the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), this happened when a dark solar filament erupted and caused a chain reaction.They call these cascading magnetic arches because what you see here is a lot of particles spinning around the sun's magnetic field lines. 

Here's a video where you can see what a dark solar filament looks like. The darker area, almost in the shape of a circle is it. Filaments are plasma held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces. 

What you're seeing is a bloom of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic Ocean.  These microscopic organisms are very important to the environment and might even influence clouds and the climate. 

This image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite. Data from chlorophyll in the phytoplankton was combined with red, green and blue bands from the satellite's imaging system to make this picture. The mission of the satellite is to keep track of climate change and weather.  

It's also pretty good at taking amazing pictures of Earth.



Some images taken from the satellite look a lot more like weather forecasts than gorgeous water colors but the phytoplankton blooms are actually a pretty normal occurrence. 

Scientists believe that comets are the leftovers of the beginning of our solar system. They look at comets to see if they can find any clues to how it was made. This comet, named Lovejoy, is unique because it is carrying ethyl alcohol (the kind you can drink), a simple sugar and 19 other organic types of molecules.

There's enough alcohol on that comet to fuel a giant party but scientists are excited for another reason. This comet seems to support a theory that some of the molecules on earth came from comets crashing on the surface. Scientists are hoping to find a comet with the same kind of organic molecules that allowed life to start on Earth.

The final frontier, now in full color.

NASA did a real solid the other day, when they uploaded thousands of pictures from the Apollo missions to Flickr. The beautiful collections show the breathtaking awe that exists in some of humankind's greatest technological achievements.

But one Redditor didn't think they looked quite right. I mean, the photos were taken 50 some odd years ago.

So jdreier decided to take a crack at color correcting a few of them. And the results are just stunning.

Well, the pictures are stunning anyway, but now they're more stunning.

He posted them to his Imgur page, where he described his efforts as such:

I took the liberty to color correct a few. Note, i've never been to space, so I don't know exactly how things look like out there. These are corrected purely on aesthetics.

And then later on his Reddit post, he made sure the astronauts got as much credit as possible.

The astronauts at NASA deserve all the credit for taking such amazing photos. I merely retouched a few photos while staying up late at night.

Thank you, sir. Your efforts are very appreciated.

Drink it up, you guys.

Though we've long known that Mars has ice, it was not yet strongly believed that liquid water could exist on the surface of the red planet. Well the newest evidence, released Sept. 28, points strongly to that possibility.

As reported by the New York Times:

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. McEwen and other scientists identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates — in readings from orbit.

"That's a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts," Dr. McEwen said. "There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt."

Though young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago, the modern moisture is modest. Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps. There have been fleeting hints of recent liquid water, like fresh-looking gullies, but none have proved convincing.

Liquid water on Mars has been theorized for a while, with many scientists pointing to dark streaks on the surface that would appear seasonally. This most recent evidence is validation for the theory that those streaks are rivers and streams of water.

So what does this mean?

Many things.

It might ease the burden when considering Martian colonization, helping to grow plants and and food on the surface. With that it could also mean possibly helping to oxidize the atmosphere, which is currently mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

And The Verge sees it as a promise for extraterrestrial life:

[T]hat strengthens the possibility of finding microbial life on the Red Planet. The presence of liquid water on Earth is intimately linked with the formation of life, so the odds are better than ever that extraterrestrial organisms are nearby in our Solar System.

This is mind-blowing, eye-popping news.

Surely you remember earlier this summer, when the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Pluto taking lots of pictures and showing us the cute little heart it wears.

Well, because those high resolution pictures aren't small, while the distance between us and that spacecraft is quite large, NASA only started releasing some of the first real close up shots Sept. 10.

And boy, are they breathtaking.





These are composite photos, pieced together from many smaller shots. And they show a staggering amount of geographical variety as NASA says in their accompanying press release:

New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto's surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto's surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

"The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum."

And look at its dark side.



Additionally, if you want to see a really neat composite video of New Horizons journey through the end of our solar system, watch it here.

Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, has not been quiet about his desire to colonize Mars.

He has talked about it every chance he gets and pretty much only wears the one t-shirt.



Well, he has taken up with the Florida Institute of Technology to make colonization a reality. He signed off with the school on a 'master plan' Aug. 27, which he and the institute hope will provide a clear pathway for the country to get their asses to the red planet sometime in the next few decades.

According to The Guardian:

The 85-year-old Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon's surface on 20 July 1969, will serve as a research professor of aeronautics as well as a senior faculty adviser for the institute.

He said he hopes his "master plan" is accepted by NASA and the country, with international input. NASA already is working on the spacecraft and rockets to get astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.

Aldrin is pushing for a Mars settlement by approximately 2040. More specifically, he's shooting for 2039, the 70th anniversary of his own Apollo 11 moon landing, although he admits the schedule is "adjustable".

One thing's for sure, he's definitely done with that crummy old moon.

Remember a month ago when we saw Pluto up close? The photographer New Horizons kept going and sending back beautiful pictures to Earth, but one person wanted to see it in motion.

Vimeo user Bjorn Jonsson went through the pain-staking effort of stitching together many photos sent back to us and released by NASA to create this sunning video of the view as the spacecraft flew past the edge of our solar system.

As Jonsson details in the video description:

he time covered is 09:35 to 13:35 (closest approach occurred near 11:50). Pluto's atmosphere is included and should be fairly realistic from about 10 seconds into the animation and to the end. Earlier it is largely just guesswork that can be improved in the future once all data has been downlinked from the spacecraft. Light from Pluto's satellite Charon illuminates Pluto's night side but is exaggerated here, in reality it would be only barely visible or not visible at all. The field of view is 12.5 degrees.

Just check out this beautiful experience.

With something like that, who cares if it's labeled as a full planet or not?

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took their first big bite out into the future of space habitation Aug. 10.

Crew members harvested some of the red romaine lettuce that had been growing in the in the Veggie laboratory and ate it with a celebratory flair. This marked the first time astronauts ate food completely grown in space.

The evolution of this first bite for humans, giant feast for humankind, could pave the way towards longer term space exploration, longer term habitation and even helps move us forward to colonization.

But growin' ain't easy, as NASA told Daily Dot:

There are significant challenges to growing vegetables in space. Without gravity, plants rely on other signals to know which direction to grow, like the presence of light and water. NASA project manager Trent Smith, who's part of the team that designed Veggie, explained how ISS's plant-growth system works to the Daily Dot: "[T]he LED lights in Veggie signal the shoots to grow towards the light and roots towards the water and darkness of the plant pillows. ... Roots need both water and air at the same time, and getting that mix right is extremely challenging."

Since NASA hasn't figured out how to get astronauts to cook in space yet, what with the completely closed off, entirely regulated environment, they'll just keep having to grow fresh veggies in their search for sustenance. Future experiments will try to grow leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, radishes, and herbs.

Onwards and upwards while trying to fill the cupboards!

One of NASA's newest photographic satellite, with the express mission to continually monitor Earth, has come online and given us the first complete photo of our home planet in over 40 years

It's called Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR, and NASA boasted about the new stunning picture it provided.

On February 11, 2015, DSCOVR was finally lofted into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After journey of about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) to the L1 Lagrange Point, the satellite and its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth. At L1—four times farther than the orbit of the Moon—the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth cancel out, providing a stable orbit and a continuous view of Earth. The image above was made by combining information from EPIC's red, green, and blue bands. (Bands are narrow regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to which a remote sensing instrument responds. When EPIC collects data, it takes a series of 10 images at different bands—from ultraviolet to near infrared.)

Now surely, you're thinking, "But I've seen many pictures of Earth that have been taken since 1972." Well, that's rude of you to interrupt, but NASA explained away your thoughts:

While NASA has released other blue marble images over the years, these have mostly been mosaics stitched together with image processing software—not a single view of Earth taken at one moment in time.

Yep, that's us! Right there! If you live in North, Central or the northern part of South America, you can probably see your house from there.

In case you were curious, here is what an alien sees before he/she/it goes to sleep.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured the above image on April 15, and it’s being described as the first sunset observed in color by the spacecraft.

The photos were taken last month, but they were just sent back to Earth last week.

While Mars may appear red, the sunset is actually blue, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains why this is possible:

Dust in the Martian atmosphere has fine particles that permit blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than longer-wavelength colors. That causes the blue colors in the mixed light coming from the sun to stay closer to sun’s part of the sky, compared to the wider scattering of yellow and red colors. The effect is most pronounced near sunset, when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day.

Curiosity first landed on Mars’s Gale Crater in August 2012 with a mission of determining whether or not Mars is or ever was habitable by life forms.

Here’s an animated GIF of the sunset, which uses a series of photos takes over a period of about 6 minutes, 51 seconds. The sight apprently inspired the rover to recite some lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on its Twitter account.