“NASA will make a major announcement today at 4 p.m. EST regarding the future of commercial resupply launches to the International Space Station (ISS). The announcement will be made during a news conference from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency’s website at: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv.”
“Instead of buying photos of our solar system, artist Michael Benson decided to create his own—and to do it better. The longtime space aficionado learned to piece together mosaics by combining hundreds of NASA images into one planetary landscape. Spacecraft typically record in various color filters to see different elements of the same view. By overlaying them, Benson creates a detailed, true-color picture of the cosmos.”
“If going to Mars sounds fun, apply within.” (Applications accepted December 2015 through February 2016.)
“After Chile’s heaviest rain in 20 years, the Atacama Desert has been transformed into a 600-mile-long bed of flowers.”
“Wolf went for a walk over the world from the Mir Space Station in the late 1990s and saw the Earth seemingly vanish. His recollection so moved New York-based artist Rachel Rose when she heard it on NPR that she went to considerable lengths to track him down for a personal retelling.”
Photographs taken by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station are beautiful – but could a robot do better?
“A California startup called Made In Space wants to make 3D for use in orbit. The idea is to give consumers the opportunity to allow their own satellites to be built right there, several hundred miles above Earth’s surface. Plans are in motion to send up a printer capable of accepting printing instructions from the public and building whatever someone on the ground has in mind.”
One thing you don’t expect when planning a nine-year mission to the most distant planet in our solar system is the eventuality that Pluto might not be a planet once you got there.
Yet that’s exactly what went down in 2006. That January, NASA launched its unmanned New Horizons probe, a baby grand piano-sized, 1,054-pound spacecraft, on the first-ever route to Pluto. Then, in August 2006, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to the diminutive status of “dwarf planet.”
[from Engadget]
Black holes are, by definition, impossible to see by conventional methods and are often further obscured by thick blankets of dust or gas. But that’s not an issue for NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). It can peek through the obscuring layers and monitor the black holes via the high-energy X-rays that they emit. And, after a recent survey that spotted five previously unknown supermassive black holes in the centers of various galaxies, NASA researchers now think there could be millions of of them dotting the Universe like the holes of an intergalactic colander.
“Thanks to NuSTAR, for the first time, we have been able to clearly identify these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive because of their surrounding cocoons of material,” said George Lansbury of Durham University in a statement. “Although we have only detected five of these hidden supermassive black holes, when we extrapolate our results across the whole universe, then the predicted numbers are huge and in agreement with what we would expect to see.” The team’s research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.