Here’s something fun (and educational for the kids) on this upcoming Sunday, the 26th:  Look to the west in the evening twilight after sunset and you’ll see the triple conjunction of three planets:  Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.  You’ll need an unobstructed view of the western sky, as the planets will be just above the horizon.  Click here for an excellent article and animation from NASA Science News.  Image courtesy of NASA.

(LA Times)  “Drilling into the Martian surface in search of signs of ancient life, the Mars Curiosity rover hit the jackpot, NASA said Tuesday.  The intrepid geologist on wheels analyzed a powdered sample pulled out of the Red Planet last month and  discovered some of the basic building blocks of life — and signs of a past environment capable of hosting primitive microbes.  ‘We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and is so supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,’ mission lead scientist John Grotzinger, a Caltech geologist, said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.”   For the complete article, click here.   Image courtesy of NASA

[DVICE]  NASA reports the Curiosity rover has successfully drilled a hole, 0.63 inches wide and 2.5 inches deep into a sample of sedimentary bedrock. Ground control will now use the rover’s robotic arm to collect samples for processing in its self contained laboratory, looking for evidence Mars may have once harbored water.  The agency released a photo of the hole captured by Curiosity, and in a press release NASA’s associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld said, “The most advanced planetary robot ever designed is now a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars.”

A Ukrainian-Russian rocket carrying a US-made telecommunications satellite has plunged into the Pacific Ocean shortly after launch.

The Zenit-3SL rocket, which was being operated from a floating pad south of the Hawaiian islands, failed 40 seconds after the lift-off at 06:56 GMT.

Officials say no-one was hurt as a result of the incident.

Intelsat-27, which weighed some 6.2 tonnes at launch, was to have provided direct-to-home TV services and mobile broadband connections.

Today, the newfound comet seen [in the accompanying photo] is just a tiny dot in the sky beyond Jupiter. But in about a year, it might be one of the brightest objects in our night sky.

Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok, of the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) in Russia, discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) on 21 September via images taken with a 40-centimetre reflecting telescope. Other sky-watchers soon spotted it, and the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the find yesterday.

From the combined observations, astronomers were able to trace the comet’s recent path and find images of it dating back to late December 2011. From there they calculated a near-parabolic orbit that has comet ISON headed almost straight towards the sun.

Astronomers at the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy think that ISON will skim less than 1.4 million kilometres from the sun’s surface on 28 or 29 November.

The comet’s orbit also suggests it is a newcomer fresh from the Oort cloud, a distant halo of icy objects that surrounds the solar system. We last had a visitor direct from the cloud in 2009, when the green comet Lulin swooped in and sprouted two tails.

As with Lulin, the intense heat of ISON’s solar fly-by should vaporise the comet’s hard shell of pristine ices, releasing trapped dust that would help it grow an exceptionally bright tail. Astronomy Now magazine reports that comet ISON could even be brighter than the full moon around its closest approach to the sun.

Skirting our star means that, to viewers on Earth, the comet will appear close to the horizon and to the sun’s glare, making it difficult to see at first. ISON will fade but become easier to spot as it heads back towards the outer solar system. By 9 December it should be about as bright as Polaris, the North Star, according to Remanzacco Observatory astronomers. ISON should continue to be visible to the unaided eye until mid-January 2014.

But veteran astronomers warn that fresh comets with orbits that almost skim the sun are notoriously unpredictable. Results can range from the spectacular comet McNaught of January 2007 to the infamously fizzled comet Kohoutek of 1973.

via Short Sharp Science: Newly spotted comet may outshine the full moon.

Eight years ago, NASA’s Opportunity rover came across strange-looking spheres that were nicknamed Martian blueberries — and now the rover has sent back a picture showing a different flavor of Marsberry that has the experts scratching their heads.

“This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission,” Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the rover mission’s principal investigator, said today in a news release.

The golf-cart-sized Opportunity rover used the microscopic imager on the end of its robotic arm to take a super-close look at the spherical shapes. These particular berries, measuring as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter, cover an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of Endeavour Crater’s western rim.

“Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects,” Squyres said. “Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars.”

via Spheres spark new Martian mystery – Cosmic Log.

PASADENA, Calif. AP — Thirty-five years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is reaching for the stars. Sooner or later, the workhorse spacecraft will bid adieu to the solar system and enter a new realm of space — the first time a manmade object will have escaped to the other side.

When NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 first rocketed out of Earth’s grip in 1977, no one knew how long they would live. Now, they are the longest-operating spacecraft in history and the most distant, at billions of miles from Earth but in different directions.

They’re still ticking despite being relics of the early Space Age. Each only has 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective, the smallest iPod — an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano — is 100,000 times more powerful. Each also has an eight-track tape recorder. Today’s spacecraft use digital memory.

Wednesday marks the 35th anniversary of Voyager 1′s launch to Jupiter and Saturn. It is now flitting around the fringes of the solar system, which is enveloped in a giant plasma bubble. This hot and turbulent area is created by a stream of charged particles from the sun.Outside the bubble is a new frontier in the Milky Way — the space between stars. Once it plows through, scientists expect a calmer environment by comparison.

When that would happen is anyone’s guess. Voyager 1 is in uncharted celestial territory. One thing is clear: The boundary that separates the solar system and interstellar space is near, but it could take days, months or years to cross that milestone.Voyager 1 is currently more than 11 billion miles from the sun. Twin Voyager 2, which celebrated its launch anniversary two weeks ago, trails behind at 9 billion miles from the sun.

via 35 years later, Voyager 1 is heading for the stars – Businessweek.

The Mars rover Curiosity is indulging in a flurry of multimedia activity ahead of its science mission proper.It sent the first image from its 100mm telephoto lens, already spotting an intriguing geological “unconformity”.Nasa also released a colour panorama of Mount Sharp, the rover’s ultimate goal.On Monday, the rover relayed “the first voice recording to be sent from another planet”, and on Tuesday it will broadcast a song from artist will.i.am as part of an educational event.But alongside these show pieces, Curiosity – also known as the Mars Science Laboratory – is already warming up its instruments for a science mission of unprecedented scope on the Red Planet.Nasa said that the rover was already returning more data from Mars than all of the agency’s earlier rovers combined.

via BBC News – Curiosity rover’s intriguing geological find.

While Earthdwellers cast their eyes to Mars this week and waited for news from NASA’s Curiosity, lots of action took place closer to home, where the commercial space market has seen progress from every direction. We’ve rounded up a short summary of what happened back on the home planet.

Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft team held its Program Implementation Plan Review in Colorado this week, the first milestone in its CCiCap list.

SpaceX completed its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transport Services) agreement this week with a certification from NASA, clearing the way for SPX-1, its first standard cargo flight to the International Space Station.

Orbital Sciences was also slated to fly its Antares rocket for the first time in early October, but there’s no word yet on whether the traffic jam that’s holding up SpaceX will bump them again. Antares is Orbital’s COTS vehicle and a competitor of SpaceX’s Falcon. It has been delayed several times due to launchpad construction at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia.

XCOR Aerospace announced this week that they’ll build a new spacecraft factory in Brevard County, Florida, to build its Lynx 2-person suborbital spacecraft. Lynx takes off and lands horizontally and requires a runway, which in Florida means the Shuttle’s landing strip at Kennedy Space Center.

via As commercial space race intensifies SpaceX, Virgin find they have company | Ars Technica.

This movie from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows most of the high-resolution frames acquired by the Mars Descent Imager between the jettison of the heat shield and touchdown. The video, obtained on Aug. 5 PDT Aug. 6 EDT, covers the last two-and-a-half minutes before touchdown in Gale Crater. Audio recorded from mission control can be heard, counting down the critical events.

Astronomers have spotted a red giant star, some 11 times the mass of our own sun, swallowing up a planet. A similar fate awaits Earth, about five billion years from now.

via Astronomers spot humongous star devouring planet (+video) – CSMonitor.com.

The next step in NASA’s exploration of Mars is the test drive of its rover, Curiosity, on Wednesday. Curiosity’s mission on Mars is to search for signs of life. The rover’s broken wind sensor may make its exploration more challenging.

via NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity gears up for test drive – CSMonitor.com.

After driving all around Mars with four rovers, NASA wants to look deep into the guts of the red planet.The space agency decided Monday to launch a relatively low-cost robotic lander in 2016 to check out what makes the Martian core so different from Earth’s.

via NASA to launch another Mars exploration flight | Fox News.

Satellites, like the people who make them, come in all shapes and sizes. Their parts do as well. And while some thrusters are large and impressive, some satellites need smaller ones. So Paulo Lozano at MIT decided to build a rocket thruster the size of a penny.

The thruster, which looks like anything but, is similar in shape and size to a computer chip. It’s “covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward,” according to Lozano.

The size allows for several thrusters to be put on a single satellite, which could allow it to change orbit and even roll. Though it may not sound it, this is exciting in the world of satellites. Nanosatellites have had trouble with traditional propulsion systems, which allow little space on the them for electronics and communications equipment.

But the microthruster barely adds any weight, allowing for fully-loaded nanosatellites to not only be launched into orbit but to be able to navigate once there.

On Earth, these thrusters are essentially useless. But zero-gravity space presents a very different story. And with the size and flexibility of these thrusters, this could open a new range of possibilities for satellite technology.

via A penny-sized rocket thruster invented at MIT | DVICE.

A rock-zapping laser and telescopic combination called ChemCam is getting a lot of attention with NASA’s rover Curiosity landing on Mars.

But what is it?

Here’s an explainer, as well as more details about the mission.

ChemCam can look at rocks and soils from a distance, fire a laser to vaporize the materials and analyze them with an on-board spectrograph that measures the composition of the resulting plasma. NASA says ChemCam can also use the laser to do less destructive things, such as clear away dust from Martian rocks as well as use a remote camera to acquire extremely detailed images.

Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a tutorial on how the instrument works at a recent news conference.

“Curiosity’s remote sensing instrument [is] designed to make a large number of rapid measurements in some sense to help guide the rover to the most interesting samples,” he said.

He also talked about ChemCam’s imaging capability and said in routine operation the team plans to take images either before or after the laser operation or both, but not during the laser operation.

“The camera is very high resolution. It’s sensitive enough to image a human hair quite easily by 7 feet away,” he said.

After nearly two weeks on the dusty red planet, Curiosity is doing warm-up exercises and getting ready to take off for its first drilling for a rock sample — to a place 1,300 feet away scientists have named Glenelg, a spot where three kinds of terrain intersect.

In the next few days, the one-ton, six-wheeled mobile Mars laboratory will exercise each of its four steerable wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. Curiosity will continue warming up by driving forward about 10 feet, turning 90 degrees and then reversing about 7 feet.

Tonight the rover will zap its first rock — one which scientists have dubbed “Rock N165,” a three-inch wide Mars rock that sits about 10 feet away from Curiosity.

“It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too,” Wiens said.

via Mars Rock-Zapping Laser Explained | PCWorld.

In the most complex rocket-landing ever attempted, NASA will literally drop its latest Mar rover onto the Mars surface by a crane from a hovering mother ship. Really!

A year ago (July 12, 2011), I gave you a heads up on NASA’s marvel of planetary-exploration technology in my blog post:  “Take a peek at NASA’s next Mars rover. It’s the size of a Mini Cooper!”

Well, the rover’s 354-million-mile, eight-and-half-month journey is just about over.   “Curiosity” — the nickname for this out-of-this-world vehicle — is poised to land on the Red Planet.

Check out a superb article by UK’s DailyMail — with photos, illustrations, and spine-tingling landing animation — here:  http://bit.ly/NVBY32

Get ready for a wild ride on August 5th.  Buckle up!

Illustration courtesy of NASA

(UPI) — The Summer Olympics could be crippled by a solar storm far more potent than the one currently wearing away at Earth’s magnetic field, a British physicist said.

“We have the potential this year to see what planners call a Black Swan event — one that is unlikely but if it happens will have an extraordinary impact on our lives,” Alan Woodward, a physicist and computer scientist at England’s University of Surrey, told the British newspaper The Guardian.

Radiation from the superfast bombardment of highly charged clouds of solar energy would likely pose little or no health risk. But it could disable computers and other electronics critical to the Olympic Games, which take place in London July 27 through Aug. 12, Woodward said.

“As the 2012 Olympics approach, we have a convergence of an event that is the most connected, computer-intensive event ever with a record level of sunspot activity, which typically leads to solar flares,” he said.

Solar flares are colossal releases of energy rocketed out into space that have been measured to be the equivalent of as much as 160 billion megatons of TNT.

To read the complete article, visit http://bit.ly/GNPrnL

Image courtesy UPI

Doomsday prognosticators are touting the impending apocalypse on December 21, 2012.  Most base their prophecies on the supposed “end” of the Mayan calendar.

NASA scientists reviewed the top five earth-destruction scenarios — including a collision with yet-to-be-discovered planet “Nibiru” and the sudden flipping of Earth’s magnetic poles — and have offered their opinions on each.  Check out http://on.msnbc.com/ywIXon

Photo courtesy of gilderm / sxc.hu

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered an Earth-like planet with balmy 70-degree temperatures: “Kepler-22b”.  The plant is 2.4 times the diameter of Earth, and orbits its sun in 290 days.

But we won’t be visiting anytime soon, as the planet is 600 light years away.  How far is 600 light years?  Well, consider that light travels 186,287 miles each second.  Now multiply 186,287 miles times the number of seconds in 600 years.  Whew!

Scientists have pointed the 42 dish antennas that comprise California’s Allen Telescope Array on Kepler-22b to see if it can detect any radio waves — to perhaps catch a Keplerian broadcast of “Dancing with the Stars” (sorry — couldn’t resist that).

Something to think about:  If scientists on Kepler-22b were scanning Earth for radio or TV broadcasts, they wouldn’t hear anything.  Radio waves travel at the speed of light.  So, they’d be examining Earth as it was 600 years ago — and radio was invented here less than 150 years ago.

For additional details about this planetary discovery, including a video of the mission managers discussing their find, check out the following article in the San Jose Mercury News:  http://bit.ly/smOSZF

Artist’s conception courtesy of NASA / Ames/ JPL-Caltech

As I reported in an earlier post, NASA’s Curiosity rover is about twice as long and about five times heavier than the most recent Opportunity and Spirit rovers.  But what’s really unique is that it’s powered by a radioisotope power system instead of solar panels.  The result:  Curiosity should be able to operate continuously through sandstorms and Martian winters for years.

If you’d like to read more about NASA’s Curiosity rover and its innovative power plant, check out a CNET article at this link:  http://cnet.co/rs8Xlz

Image courtesy of NASA

NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is expected to fall to earth by Friday. Much of the satellite will burn up during its blazing flight through the atmosphere, but large components will likely survive to impact land or water. Because of the satellite’s orbital path, northern Canada and southern South America are most at risk from any incoming debris.

For more information, visit the following Reuters report:  http://reut.rs/n0IMAo

NASA is also posting regular updates here:  www.nasa.gov/uars

Photo courtesy of Space.com and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

If you can locate the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), and you have a good pair of binoculars or small telescope, you’ll be able to observe a supernova along with amateur and professional astronomers all over the world.

The best time for viewing is right after sunset, before the moon comes up and washes out the sky with its reflected light.

Here’s a link to an excellent one-and-a-half-minute YouTube video by Berkeley Lab scientist Peter Nugent that will help you spot and view the supernova:   http://bit.ly/qilPZ9

For additional information and images, visit the USA TODAY article at http://usat.ly/okjuOS.  (Click on the “BEFORE” and “AFTER” buttons in the USA TODAY interactive image.)

Image of The Pinwheel Galaxy (where the supernova is occurring) courtesy of Reuters and The Guardian.

Less than a month into its five-year journey to Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this nifty picture of the Earth and moon, as part of the vehicle’s “JunoCam” checkout procedures.  The Earth is the larger bright spot on the left, and the moon is the dot on the right.

The Juno spacecraft has 439 million miles to travel before it gets to Jupiter.  One can only imagine the other photos it may take along its celestial course.

For more information regarding the photo, check out the NASA JPL article at http://1.usa.gov/pDDjTh

For more information on the Juno mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/juno

Many people believe that the first human to step foot on Mars will be from the U.S.  Well, think again.

Discovery published today an interesting article (“Russia and Europe to Send Man to Mars?”) that challenges the common perception that an American would be first to walk on the red planet.

The article quotes Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), as saying that the ESA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) would “carry out the first flight to Mars together.”

Russia and the ESA are wrapping up a project in which six individuals simulated a year-and-a-half round-trip to Mars; the team lived the entire time in a cramped 550-cu.-ft. simulated spaceship. The experiment, which will conclude in November, has examined the effects of continuous, close-quarter working on the mind and body.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, Russia clearly leads in “heavy lift” rocket technology.  And just this week they unveiled the design of a new manned spacecraft at an international air show.  Bottom line:  Russia and Europe have “the right stuff” — and are doing the right things — to propel them to the goal of Mars.

For the thought-provoking Discovery article, check out http://bit.ly/olFmgH

Mars image courtesy of NASA

Over the last couple of months I’ve seen a flurry of doom ‘n’ gloom scenarios based on the nearing peak (in mid 2013) of the 11-year solar cycle.  For instance, a little over a week ago I read in the International Business Times, “Severe Solar Storm to Create Global Chaos and Complete Darkness” followed a week later by “Severe Solar Storms Could Disrupt Earth This Decade.”

I’m not picking on the IB Times.  I’ve seen similar reports in Popular Science, such as the June 30th article entitled, “Are We Prepared for a Catastrophic Solar Storm?”

So are we all toast?

Here’s the reality:

It’s true that with the near total dependence on computers for every aspect of our lives, we’ve never been more vulnerable to solar activity.  I described in a previous article a recent near-miss of a CME (corona mass ejection) — essentially a ball of plasma ejected by the sun.  If a large CME hits our planet, power could certainly go down for an extended period of time.

One of the biggest concerns of scientists is the “Fukushima Effect” in which the backup generators and battery systems at nuclear power plants run out power.  Such a circumstance could cascade to the point where water-cooling systems would become inoperable — and result in Fukushima-like catastrophes around the world.  The actual chances?  Hard to predict precisely.  But, by legitimate estimates, pretty low.

More likely to occur:  Gas pumps at your local service station would stop working.  (They’re essentially computerized pumps; the credit-card processing network would also likely go down.)   “Telecommuting” would not be possible, as phone and Internet would be flicked off like a switch.  Cell phone service would also go down as soon as the backup generators and / or batteries at the cell towers run out of juice.  (You won’t be able to charge your cell phones, anyway.)

If the power grid goes down, once your food runs out (or spoils) in your fridge, don’t count on restocking at the supermarket.  The 18 wheelers that are the mainstay of food delivery across the country would also quickly run out of fuel — and, as mentioned above, the services stations would be unable to refill the rigs.

The probability of a sweeping, worldwide catastrophe as outline above is low.  But CMEs can, and have, made direct Earth strikes over the centuries — and caused significant disruptions.  Do a Google search for the “Carrington Event.”  In 1859, during the peak of another solar cycle, a CME knocked out telegraph offices around the globe (and even shocked some of the telegraph operators).  Most scientists agree that — because of entrenched computerization and satellite-based communications — the same magnitude CME today would disrupt society on a widespread basis.

I’m hoping the media doesn’t escalate the risks to an astronomical level.  The last thing we need is a massive wave of hysteria.  But, hey, it can’t hurt to keep an extra candle or two around the house.  And, perhaps, a couple of cans of Spam…

For a reasonably well-proportioned (non-hyped) news report — with an exceptional piece of video from NASA of a CME — check out the following two-minute CNN video:  http://bit.ly/h7GEmn

For reference, the NASA image associated with this article shows the approximate size of the Earth as compared to a solar eruption.  (In reality, the Earth is 93 million miles away from the sun — so a flare would never envelop the Earth as in the NASA comparison.)