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Enceladus, one of Saturn's moon, appears almost completely white to human eyes. But multi-spectral images of the icy moon taken by Cassini spacecraft show different pictures.
This view is a composite of images taken using filters sensitive to ultraviolet, green and near-infrared light, and has been processed to accentuate subtle color differences. The uppermost surface of these terrains appears uniformly grey in this picture, suggesting that they are covered with materials of homogeneous composition and grain size. However, the walls of many of the fractures appear to be somewhat bluer than typical surface materials. It is possible that the difference in color identifies outcrops of solid ice on the walls of fractures, or ice with different grain-sizes, compared to powdery surface materials. It is also possible that the color identifies some compositional difference between buried ice and ice at the surface.
The prominent, complex fracture in the bottom of the frame extends over 85 kilometers (53 miles) in length across the field of view. From Cassini’s oblique vantage point, the walls of the large fracture are clearly visible. A pervasive network of narrow, parallel grooves can be seen in many places in the image, and they appear to slice the surface into parallel slabs of ice approximately 500 meters (1,600 feet) in thickness.
Source; Firstscience
Late this summer, a company called Xero AB begins offering the first zero-gravity flights from Kiruna, Sweden, 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of the Arctic Circle.
The flights will give tourists another reason to visit Kiruna besides Sami handicrafts and — depending on the season — the summer midnight sun, or dogsledding and a night in the famous sub-zero Ice Hotel.
Xero AB, founded in 2002 by Walter Allvin, will offer a series of four flights, scheduled two or three times a year, with 12 passengers on each flight.
Passengers will have a chance to defy gravity about 15 times during the 90-minute trips.
The flights will take place aboard a Russian-built Illuyshin 76MDK, used to train cosmonauts. The plane’s interior will be lined with soft, inflatable padding.
But the flights aren’t cheap. A weekend package in Kiruna, including a zero-gravity ride, dinner with the pilots and technicians, a personalized DVD of the flight, and visits to local attractions like the Ice Hotel, starts at 65,000 kronor (U.S. $9,615, euro7,180) and up, depending on amenities.
A Swedish dance theater will later this year start filming a "weightless" dance project onboard the Russian aircraft. The dance group, e=mc2, has dubbed its planned film "The Ballerina Lost in Space."
The glow of two planets outside our solar system have been spotted.
The two planets were detected in infrared light. Both are roughly Jupiter-sized and hot, orbiting very close to their stars. Each completes a "year" in less than four days.
The new technique, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, allows astronomers to probe the temperatures, atmospheres and emissions of planets.
One planet named TrES-1 and its star are about 500 light-years from Earth. The other planet, named HD 209458b, is slightly more massive than Jupiter and is about 150 light-years from Earth.
There are currently about 140 known worlds beyond our solar system. The first true photographs of extrasolar planets around normal stars are not expected for a few years, until NASA flies a new telescope devoted to the task.
When Space Shuttle Discovery is launched in a few months, a four-man rescue squad will be standing by. A second launch would have to be done hastily without all the usual tests, possibly putting the rescue shuttle — Atlantis — and its crew in harm’s way.
The astronauts on the first shuttle, Discovery, would hole up at the international space station. Designed to house three people, it would be crammed with nine. And everyone would hope the station’s often-broken oxygen generator would do its job.
NASA’s main concerns, for now, are getting Discovery ready for a mid-May launch and Atlantis ready for a possible mid-June emergency launch, and keeping the space station running without more major breakdowns.
The rescue mission might require the president’s approval.
There are plenty of reasons to go back to the world we abandoned 30 years ago—some fanciful and futuristic, others quite practical.
At the more practical end, the moon offers unique opportunities for scientific research. Going there is the only way to figure out where the moon came from, for example. Current theory says it was blasted from Earth in a collision with a planet-size object billions of years ago, but the moon rocks we have in hand from the Apollo missions don’t offer enough mineralogical clues to prove or refute the idea.
The moon would also be a terrific place to build astronomical observatories. With no atmosphere to interfere with precision optics, it offers both the clarity of outer space and a surface solid enough to support enormous structures.
Another good reason to go is the one disdained by straight-to-Mars boosters: learning how to live off the land—manufacturing some of what we need from soil that contains oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium and titanium, plus a dusting of helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon deposited by solar winds.
To some dreamers, the presence of silicon, especially, suggests a way to make a return to the moon pay—and maybe even save the environment back home. If you could set up automated lunar factories to extract the silicon and turn it into solar cells, the moon could become a solar power station, beaming clean energy via microwaves back to Earth.
Saturn’s snow-white moon, Enceladus, is shrouded by a thin water-vapour atmosphere, Cassini revealed. The atmosphere may be pumped out by erupting ice volcanoes or geysers - which could signal toeholds for life on the tiny moon.
Enceladus is too tiny to hold onto any atmosphere for long, so astronomers think that more violent processes - such as geysers or ice volcanoes - are replenishing the atmosphere.
No such geysers or volcanoes have been observed so far, but their discovery would mean liquid water exists below the moon’s surface - providing a possible habitat for life.
NASA’s Voyager spacecraft flew past Enceladus in 1981 and did not detect an atmosphere This may be because the craft passed by at a distance of 90,000 km. Cassini came about one hundred times closer during its two flybys on 17 February and 9 March 2005.
Or perhaps there was no atmosphere around for Voyager to detect. Maybe the atmosphere isn’t there all the time.
If geysers or volcanoes are the cause, the atmosphere might only be present when these are active.
China is preparing to open a new launch site and other facilities in the Hainan island province, the south-eastern-most part of the country. Its proximity to the equator - lying about 20° north of it - gives Hainan an advantage in space launches. The closer a launch site is to the equator, the more of a boost a launcher gets from the Earth’s spin.
The province may be better known to westerners as the site of a tense standoff. In 2001, a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan. Then a US Navy plane made an emergency landing in Hainan. Chinese officials detained the crew and the plane.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are usually called "gas giants". But the term is actually a misnomer. The term can lead the general readers understand they are entirely made up of gases. It is true that only their very outer layers are gases and below that outer layer, the planets become liquid due to pressure.
Rings circle Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—though only Saturn’s are obvious when viewed from Earth. They are not solid rings or disks at all. Rather they are composed of myriad bits and pieces of ice, rock and dust. In the case of Saturn they consist of more ice, which reflects sunlight effectively. The rings of the other planets contain mostly dust, which is dark and doesn’t reflect much light. Additionally, whereas Saturn's rings are wide, the other planets sport thin rings. The rings of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune probably arose as a result of meteor impacts on their tiny inner satellites. Dust and rocky debris blasted off the satellites' surfaces continues to orbit the planet for many years. Saturn's rings probably represent a moon-shattering collision that left debris from an icy moon too close to the planet to reassemble.
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
Mo'nonymous on New companion of Nep...
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