Posts

No Buzz: Aldrin Trashes Obama Asteroid Mission

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: US NewsThe second man to set foot on the moon wants to see NASA send people further into space than he ever traveled. Buzz Aldrin trashed NASA’s plan to bring an asteroid into lunar orbit in a speech, advocating for a Mars colony.

Aldrin, who recently published the book “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration,” said at the Washington, D.C. Humans to Mars summit Wednesday that President Barack Obama’s asteroid mining plan is merely a distraction.

“Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What’s that have to do with space exploration?” he asked. “If we were moving outward from there and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it’s turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.”

The Apollo-era astronaut, now 83, has devised a plan to “cycle” spacecraft to Mars, continually launching humans to the red planet to expand on its colony. Aldrin advocates using Phobos, a moon of Mars, as a sort of home base for landing on the planet.

“Going to Mars means permanence, we’d become a two planet species. In Mars, we’ve been given a wonderful set of moons … where we can send continuous numbers of people,” he said. The trips would be one-way.

Read more from this story HERE.

NASA Chief Confident that Manned Mars Mission will Happen Soon

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters If the prospect of spending a thousand days up to 140 million miles away from the Earth was not enough of a deterrent, killer radiation levels and enforced radio silence would surely deter most volunteers from travelling to Mars. Nasa, however, has revealed that near-record numbers are applying for its astronaut training programme, as renewed enthusiasm for space travel is fueled by growing hopes of a manned Mars mission.

Since the successful landing of the Curiosity rover in August, the scientific community has begun to take more seriously a promise from President Obama, made in 2010, to land humans on the surface of Mars within 20 years or so. Some privately-backed rival ventures are even forecasting that they will get to Mars orbit as early as 2018; Nasa plans a deep-space practice mission, to rendezvous with a captured asteroid, by 2025.

“Interest in sending humans to Mars has never been higher,” Nasa’s chief administrator, the former astronaut Charles Bolden, told a conference in Washington on Monday. “‘We now stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to press forward with what I think is man’s destiny, and that is to go forward to another planet.”

Within the next few weeks, Nasa plans to announce which 20 trainee astronauts it has chosen from 6,300 recent candidates – its second-highest application total since the agency was established, in 1958. “These astronauts will be among the first trained specifically for long-duration space flights,” said Bolden.

Despite sweeping US budget cuts under the sequestration, Nasa still hopes for an annual budget of $17.7bn – which will be increasingly targeted on the Mars mission. The agency is seeking congressional approval to outsource to private contractors all future rocket missions to low earth orbit, so it can concentrate on deep space instead.

Read more from this story HERE.

Wow! Monster Hurricane on Saturn Spied by NASA Spacecraft

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: NASASpectacular new images from a NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn have captured the most detailed views ever of an enormous hurricane churning around the ringed planet’s north pole.

The stunning new images and video of the Saturn hurricane, which were taken by NASA’s Cassini probe, show that the storm’s eye is 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide — about 20 times bigger than typical hurricane eyes on Earth. And the Saturn maelstrom is more powerful than its Earth counterparts, with winds at its outer edge whipping around at 330 mph (530 km/h).

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” Cassini imaging team member Andrew Ingersoll, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

Saturn’s hurricane swirls inside a mysterious, six-sided vortex. Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which tend to drift northward as our planet rotates, the Saturn storm and its hexagonal vortex have been camped out at the north pole for a while.

“The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., said in a statement.

Read more from this story HERE.

A One-Way Ticket to Mars, Apply Now (+video)

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Step right up and prove why you should get a one-way ticket to Mars! Well, wait — you might want to know a little more about the venture first.

A Dutch company called Mars One began looking Monday for volunteer astronauts to fly to Mars. Departure for the Red Planet is scheduled for 2022, landing seven months later in 2023.

The space travelers will return … never. They will finish out their lives on Mars, representatives from the nonprofit said.

“It’s likely that there will be a crematorium,” said CEO Bas Lansdorp. “It’s up to the people on Mars to decide what to do with their dead.”

Still, the company said it has received more than 10,000 e-mails from interested would-be spacefarers.

Watch video here:

Read more from this story HERE.

Hubble Telescope Takes Stunning New Nebula Photo for 23rd Birthday

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: AURA/STSCI

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular new image of an iconic nebula to celebrate its 23 years of peering deep into the heavens.

The Hubble observatory, which launched on April 24, 1990, captured the Horsehead Nebula in infrared light, peering through obscuring veils of dust to reveal the object’s hidden features.

“The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light,” mission officials wrote in an image description today (April 19). The new observations allowed astronomers to create a dazzling video of the Horsehead Nebula based on Hubble’s photos.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion (The Hunter). The Horsehead is a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust, like other nebulae, and the light from a nearby star gives it a beautiful glow.

The object is a popular observing target, and Hubble has taken numerous Horsehead photos over the years — including in 2001, to celebrate the telescope’s 11-year anniversary.

Read more from this story HERE.

Activist Head of US Goddard Space Institute Quits So He Can Sue Government Over Global Warming

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: ALICE OLLSTEIN

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

NASA’s James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a controversial and highly vocal voice of alarm about the planet’s changing climate, will retire as the director of the space institute, NASA announced Tuesday — and plans to immediately sue his former employer.

Hansen will step down from his $180,000 a year position to join a number of lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments for their failure to police industry over man’s effect on the climate, the New York Times reported.
Hansen was clearly aware of the irony.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he told the Times. Hansen is a central figure in the battle against climate change; on Feb. 13, he was arrested alongside of actress Daryl Hannah, activist Bill McKibben and a small group of activists protesting the planned Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

That was at least the fourth arrest for the climate scientist — and his high profile was raising eyebrows at NASA headquarters.
“It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Hansen told the Times.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Investigating Multiple NASA Centers To Counter Growing Space Espionage Threat

/0 Comments/in /by

Photo Credit: AP

Federal law enforcement officials are mounting anti-espionage investigations at multiple NASA facilities to counter what FBI Director Robert Mueller believes is a growing threat against U.S. space technology.

“If anything, I would say that the threat is – is more substantial than perhaps it was 10, 15 years ago,” Mueller said yesterday during a hearing of a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that oversees both NASA and the FBI.

The subcommittee’s chairman if Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA. Mueller told Wolf’s panel that foreign nationals targeting NASA for espionage purposes are a “significant threat,” and disclosed for the first time that the bureau has “a number of investigations ongoing” at several facilities within the space agency.

He declined to identify the NASA facilities involved or to say how many investigations are being conducted. Mueller’s comments followed the weekend arrest by FBI agents at Dulles Airport of Bo Jiang, a Chinese National who was trying to board a one-way flight to China.

Jiang was employed as a scientist by the National Institute for Aerospace, a contractor at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Jiang was arraigned Tuesday in federal court.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Arrests NASA Contractor Employee Trying To Flee To China

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Bo Jiang, the Chinese national scientist employed by a NASA contractor for work at the space agency’s Langley Research Center, was arrested Sunday by the FBI at Dulles International Airport as he tried to flee to China, according to Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA.

Wolf said during a Capitol Hill news conference today that Jiang’s work at the NASA facility had given him access to information that “would be of the greatest interest to foreign spies, including China.”

Wolf is chairman of a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee that has budget oversight authority for NASA.

He made Jiang’s name public for the first time last week during a subcommittee hearing where he also charged that Jiang had taken “voluminous sensitive” NASA documents back to China on a trip in 2012.

Jiang was employed by the National Institute of Aerospace, a Hampton, VA-based NASA contractor. The position afforded Jiang virtually unlimited, unescorted access to the NASA Langley facility, which is the location for classified research programs related to U.S. space defense technologies.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Calm Before The Solar Storm? NASA Warns ‘Something Unexpected Is Happening To The Sun’

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: NASA‘Something unexpected’ is happening on the Sun, Nasa has warned. This year was supposed to be the year of ‘solar maximum,’ the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low.

‘Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,’ the space agency says.

The image above shows the Earth-facing surface of the Sun on February 28, 2013, as observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It observed just a few small sunspots on an otherwise clean face, which is usually riddled with many spots during peak solar activity.
Experts have been baffled by the apparent lack of activity – with many wondering if NASA simply got it wrong.

However, Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center believes he has a different explanation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Wolf Says NASA Prompted Hiring Of Person Linked To Chinese Espionage; May Be Dozens More In Agency

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APOfficials at NASA’s Langley Research Center permitted a contractor to hire a Chinese national affiliated with an organization designated by U.S. national security agencies as an “entity of concern,” and then allowed the individual access to classified information, according to Rep. Frank Wolf.

The as-yet unidentified individual was permitted to take that information back home to China, according to Wolf, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA.

Wolf said during a Capitol Hill news conference today that “at least several dozen other Chinese nationals,” are employed at Langley, and he charged that they are employed in a manner to “circumvent” congressional bans on Chinese involvement at NASA facilities.

Wolf said he has talked with FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Neil H. MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia about the alleged national security violations at Langley, which is located in Hampton, Virginia.

He said he first heard the allegations from numerous whistleblowers who were career NASA employes and met with them about two weeks ago. He said he turned over information and documents to the FBI.

Read more from this story HERE.