We will be hitchhiking into space with the Russians for a long time

NASA image via Wikimedia Commons.

We could be without a human lift vehicle for up to a decade.

(PHYSORG)- Once the US space shuttle program closes, it will be about a decade before America can make a new vehicle for sending astronauts to space, NASA's chief technologist predicts.

When the longtime centerpiece of US spaceflight shutters later this year, NASA will focus on experiments at the International Space Station (ISS) and on partnerships with private industry to build new spacecraft, Robert Braun told AFP in an interview this week.

But with spending squeezed and NASA at odds with lawmakers over a 2016 timeframe for building a new heavy-lift rocket and crew vehicle to replace the 30-year-old shuttle program, Braun said that developing the future mode of travel could take longer than Congress, or the US public, may want to hear.

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Giant ring of black holes

This is a stunning stellar image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue).

(NASA)- Just in time for Valentine's Day comes a new image of a ring -- not of jewels -- but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.

Stardust spacecraft will rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 on Valentine's Day

(NASA/JPL/Cornell)

A match made in the heavens...

(PhysOrg.com) -- There was the Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999, and her cometary fiancée, Wild 2. Betrothed from afar, the two headed blissfully toward a 2004 rendezvous.

Meanwhile, the comet Tempel 1, making her own solitary way around the sun in 2005, was heading toward a more explosive relationship with the Deep Impact spacecraft.

But alas, heavenly though the matches were -- and fruitful, with each yielding valuable information about the evolution of the solar system -- neither lasted. In 2006, Stardust tossed her dusty tokens of Wild 2 down to Earth for analysis and vowed to start anew. She was a little older now; but with all her parts in good working order and adequate fuel, she was ready for a second mission. And Tempel 1, scarred by her violent encounter with Deep Impact, was looking for a kinder, gentler match.

On Valentine's Day, the two will meet...

Read more here.

NASA's 360-Degree Image of Sun (video)

NASA has a new 360-Degree image of the sun. The science behind this is fascinating.

NASA Discovers Remarkable Six Planet Solar System

The star is sun-like. Five of the planets are smaller and orbit close to the star. The other planet is larger and orbits farther out.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it.

"Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it also validates a powerful new method to measure the masses of planets," said Daniel Fabrycky, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, who led the orbital dynamics analysis. Fabrycky and Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, are the lead authors of a paper on Kepler-11 published in the February 3 issue of Nature.

The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of the Earth. Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days, so they orbit within a region that would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system. The sixth planet is larger and farther out, with an orbital period of 118 days and an undetermined mass.

NASA Doubles Count of Exoplanets

nasa.gov

There are now more than a thousand possibilities.

(AP) -- NASA's planet-hunting telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life. An early report from a cosmic census indicates that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful than previous searches showed.

NASA released new data Wednesday from its Kepler telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system - more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets. They haven't been confirmed as planets yet, but some astronomers estimate that 90 percent of what Kepler has found will eventually be verified.

Video: NASA Launches Soyuz Spacecraft

Via FOX News:

Russia's Soyuz spacecraft blasted off on its latest mission, to deliver Russia, European, American and Japanese astronauts to the International

Space Station.

Ice Volcanoes on Titan?

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/University of Arizona)

It is hard to imagine an Earth-style volcano that spews ice instead of molten lava, but that is what scientists think NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found on Saturn's moon Titan.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 14, 2010) — NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found possible ice volcanoes on Saturn's moon Titan that are similar in shape to those on Earth that spew molten rock.

Topography and surface composition data have enabled scientists to make the best case yet in the outer solar system for an Earth-like volcano landform that erupts in ice. The results were presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"When we look at our new 3-D map of Sotra Facula on Titan, we are struck by its resemblance to volcanoes like Mt. Etna in Italy, Laki in Iceland and even some small volcanic cones and flows near my hometown of Flagstaff," said Randolph Kirk, who led the 3-D mapping work, and is a Cassini radar team member and geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Nanosatellite ejected from a free-flying microsatellite

Artist concept of a solar sail in space. (Credit: NASA)

This is a first for NASA. The NanoSail-D nanosatellite is about the size of a loaf of bread.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2010) — On Dec. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EST, NASA for the first time successfully ejected a nanosatellite from a free-flying microsatellite. NanoSail-D ejected from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT, demonstrating the capability to deploy a small cubesat payload from an autonomous microsatellite in space.

Nanosatellites or cubesats are typically launched and deployed from a mechanism called a Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD) mounted directly on a launch vehicle. This is the first time NASA has mounted a P-POD on a microsatellite to eject a cubesat.

FASTSAT, equipped with six science and technology demonstration payloads, including NanoSail-D, launched Friday, Nov. 19 at 8:25 p.m. EST from Kodiak Island, Alaska. During launch, the NanoSail-D flight unit, about the size of a loaf of bread, was stowed inside FASTSAT in a P-POD.

Closest Comet Picture Ever

NASA snaps a pic of Comet Hartley 2 from only 435 miles away.

ABC News reported:
Thirteen million miles out in space, a NASA probe called Deep Impact has flown within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2, and the early pictures are a sight to behold.

NASA Ponders One Way Missions

And they will be manned...

NASA: Billion gallons of water ice in the floor of one crator

The moon has water and plenty of it. Sadly, President Obama canceled all plans for NASA to return to the moon.


ABC News reported:

But after a year of analysis NASA today announced that its LCROSS lunar-impact probe mission found up to a billion gallons of water ice in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater near the moon's south pole.

That's enough, said researchers, to fill 1,500 Olympic-size swimming pools, all from one crater.

Did NASA Cover Up Aliens Hiding Near Saturn?

Some are claiming NASA photoshoped a Cassini orbiter image of Saturn's moon Dione. The image can be seen clearly in the video embedded below. It does appear to be obviously altered, but why?

Alien conspiracy theorists are confident they've caught NASA in the act of covering up the fact that we are not alone in the universe.

A video posted on YouTube yesterday showed how an image of Saturn's moons Dione and Titan, taken by NASA's Cassini orbiter, had been digitally altered before being added to the space agency's Picture of the Day website.

In the video, "DominatorPS3" turned up the brightness levels on the photo to show that a "huge" object can be seen behind the smaller moon, Dione. Clearly visible are brush strokes that show how the rainbow aura of the object has been blacked out.

Video: NASA 'RATS' Simulate Space Exploration In Arizona Desert

Simulating planetary exploration missions in the Arizona desert.

Video: NASA Mission to Unlock Sun's Biggest Mysteries

NASA is sending a car-sized spacecraft on the closest mission to the Sun ever.

NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite finds black holes gas jets

XTE J1550-564 is a binary system in which an evolved star orbits -- and donates matter to -- a black hole estimated at 10 times the sun's mass. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

Is President Obama Leading NASA to Nowhere? (video)

President Obama is retiring the shuttle fleet, canceling the Constellation program, leaving the US dependent on private space launch programs and hitchhiking with the Russians, canceling the return to the moon and setting NASA's sights on what may be an unrealistic landing on an asteroid by 2025. Is President Obama Leading NASA to Nowhere?

NASA Team Still Thinks Mars Meteorite Contains Fossils

Could it be true?

NASA team cites new evidence that meteorites from Mars contain ancient fossils

LEAGUE CITY, TEX. -- NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars.

In addition to presenting research that they said disproved some of their critics...