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Titan Has Rivers and Lakes
Images shot last summer by the Cassini spacecraft provide the strongest evidence yet that Saturn’s moon Titan, one of the most Earth-like bodies in the solar system, is dotted with a multitude of liquid lakes, probably of methane or a similar substance.Link
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The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006
The #1 picture just left me speechless. It’s now my desktop :-)Link
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Space Yogurt Made with Astro-Bacteria
Yogurt made from strains of bacteria that were sent into space to be bombarded by cosmic radiation is now available commercially. Himawari Dairy, a Kochi-area dairy manufacturer, reserved a seat aboard a Soyuz rocket that took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome this spring. The “passengers” were two strains of bacteria: lactic acid bacteria used in ordinary…
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Russia Studies Space-Elevator Clusters For Moon
Russia has entered the space tether slingshot race – a ‘space railway’ that will reduce the cost of boosting payloads to the Moon.Link
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Mars Still Has Water?
Recent photographs seem to suggest that water could have been present on the surface of Mars as little as five years ago. The discovery resulted from images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor which first recorded gullies and trenches that could have been made by fast-flowing water coursing down cliffs and crater walls. Scientists in…
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NASA Plans Permanent Moon Base by 2020
I may take this with a grain of salt given their recent efforts, but NASA has announced plans to establish a permanently-occupied lunar base with manned missions starting in 2020. The project is a joint effort amongst 14 of the world’s space agencies, and would send humans back to the lunar surface for the first…
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Milky Way Shaped Life On Earth
Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2400 million years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. Harvests of bacteria in the sea soared and crashed in a succession of booms and busts, with an instability not seen before or since. According to new results published by Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the…
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Models in Spaaace!
The University of Tokyo recently hosted a spacewear fashion show with couture designed for weightless environments. Similar to the way that some coats are reversible, allowing you to look good in dry or wet weather, these clothes are directionally reversible, looking good “up” or “down.” Interestingly, none of them looked much like Starfleet uniforms….Link (via…
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Historic “All Sky” Map
This historic all-sky map is based on the first two years of data from NASA’s COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in November of 1989. The map shows minute temperature variations (red is hotter) imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation by structures in the early Universe. Link (via Neatorama)
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We’ve Got Lots of Company
As our ability to detect smaller extrasolar planets gets better, we’re finding that our galaxy “teems” with Earthlike planets. The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a trove of fast-moving “candidate” planets in a narrow region near the very center of the Milky Way, and astronomers say there must be billions more of them — including…