Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth
Earth’s close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST (2328 GMT) Tuesday, as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles from the planet.
“It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great — and rare — chance to study a near-Earth object like this,” astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.
Herschel Finds Oceans of Water in Disk of Nearby Star
Shuttle-like space taxi would call Kennedy Space Center its homeport
Dream Chaser project could eventually mean jobs in ‘low hundreds’ for area
A Colorado company wants to base a fleet of small shuttle-like spaceships at Kennedy Space Center, a move that could yield dozens of new jobs on Florida’s Space Coast.
The Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser will blast off atop United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 41.
The reusable spacecraft will be able to ferry up to seven people to and from the International Space Station, or other destinations in low Earth orbit.
The Daily Planet at Discovery Channel website has a video report about the Dream Chaser. Watch it here.
New Estimate for Alien Earths: 2 Billion in Our Galaxy Alone
Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals.
These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added.
Real life Star Wars.
Laser Towards Milky Ways Center.
The color of the laser is precisely tuned to energize a layer of sodium atoms found in one of the upper layers of the atmosphere — one can recognize the familiar color of sodium street lamps in the color of the laser.This layer of sodium atoms is thought to be a leftover from meteorites entering the Earth’s atmosphere. When excited by the light from the laser, the atoms start glowing, forming a small bright spot that can be used as an artificial reference star for the adaptive optics. Using this technique, astronomers can obtain sharper observations. For example, when looking towards the center of our Milky Way, researchers can better monitor the galactic core, where a central super massive black hole, surrounded by closely orbiting stars, is swallowing gas and dust.
Taken with a wide angle lens, this photo covers about 180° of the sky.
(via lickystickypickywe)
BLUE MARS This observation from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of a large impact crater in the southern highlands. Most of the crater floor is dark, with abundant small ripples of wind-blown material; a pit in the floor of the crater has exposed light-toned, fractured rock. (Photo: NASA)
via: Picard Horn i.e. Vuvuzela shape of the universe
Milky Way in the Desert
Photo: Babak A. Tafreshi
The plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, seems to cascade over sandstone hills in a long-exposure nighttime shot taken earlier this month in Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, in the heart of the Sahara. The bright “star” at left is the gas giant planet Jupiter. A UN World Heritage site, Tassili n’Ajjer is famous for its caves filled with thousands of drawings and engravings that date as far back as 6000 B.C. Photographer Babak Tafreshi writes on The World At Night (TWAN) astrophotography website that “prehistoric skygazers surely witnessed a similar sky.”
Jupiter has lost a belt! Over a period of a year, one of Jupiter’s two main dark belts — the dark stripes most visible in amateur telescopes — has faded completely away. The South Equatorial Belt (SEB) is gone, leaving just the north belt (NEB) viewable in small telescopes. Credit: Anthony Wesley (via The Planetary Society)
Jupiter Rising
STARDUST TO STARDUST This composite image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope shows the dusty remains of a collapsed star, the dust from which is flying past and engulfing a nearby family of stars. The white source near the center of the image is a dense, rapidly rotating neutron star, or pulsar, all that remains of a core-collapse supernova explosion. The pulsar generates a wind of high-energy particles — seen in the Chandra data — that expands into the surrounding environment, illuminating the material ejected in the supernova explosion. (Photo: NASA)
WHAT’S UP, DOCK The Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on 22 Dec 2009, carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, Soyuz commander and Expedition 22 flight engineer; along with NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, both flight engineers. (Photo: NASA)
![Space Photo of the Day:
Like a space-boss.
[via.]
On Novermber 14, 1984, NASA astronaut Dale Gardner strapped on his Manned Maneuvering Unit, stepped off the Space Shuttle Discovery, and proceeded to float fifty meters away, untethered, through the vast emptiness of space, to retrieve a wayward satellite which needed to be hauled back to earth.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kug9ufYfCg1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Space Photo of the Day:
Like a space-boss.
[via.]
On Novermber 14, 1984, NASA astronaut Dale Gardner strapped on his Manned Maneuvering Unit, stepped off the Space Shuttle Discovery, and proceeded to float fifty meters away, untethered, through the vast emptiness of space, to retrieve a wayward satellite which needed to be hauled back to earth.
“Dusk, is just an illusion, because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are; there cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel, I remember wondering to be always together, yet forever apart?”
