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With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the Sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space. Interplanetary spacecraft often use a maneuver called a gravity assist in order to reach their targets. Voyager 2 famously used gravity assists to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the late 1970s and 1980s. Cassini used two assists at Venus and one each at Earth and...

Nobody knows how the universe’s biggest black holes grow so large. Now one astrophysicist says it’s because they feed on the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime One of the more fascinating astrophysical discoveries in recent years is that almost all galaxies hide supermassive black holes at their cores. Indeed, astronomers believe that galaxies and black holes have a kind of symbiotic relationship so that one cannot form or grow without the other. The evidence comes from observations of galaxies both near and far—almost all contain huge black holes. But that raises an interesting question. We see...

A massive rocket carrying a spy satellite for the US government launched from the California coast on Wednesday. The Delta IV Heavy rocket left the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base and sped towards low-Earth orbit, officials said. The rocket carried a satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees the USA's constellation of intelligence-gathering satellites. At 23 stories, the Delta IV Heavy is the largest rocket in the country. The last time it launched from Vandenberg - in 2011, the roar of the engines shook the nearby city of Lompoc. Some people reported hearing the engine roar from...

Bear with me, LI readers – I’m a little bit of a geek, so I find stories like these exciting. It might not be of interest to everyone, but I do think there’s one point about it that will resonate with all of you. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos started Bezos Expeditions (as well as the space exploration venture Blue Origin) out of his “passions for science, engineering, and exploration.” Bezos, like so many others, watched Apollo 11′s launch from his television as a child in 1969. Days prior, the mission began when five F-1 rocket engines fired together in a...

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

Hoping to take the commercialization of space to a higher level, a second company has jumped into what the founders hope will be a lucrative emerging market, prospecting for raw materials among near-Earth asteroids using fleets of low-cost robotic spacecraft, senior executives said Tuesday. The long-range goal is to develop an in situ manufacturing capability, harvesting raw materials and building components in space using high-tech mini foundries built around sophisticated 3D printers. "This is about the future. This is about making something happen," company chairman Rick Tumlinson told reporters during a news conference in Santa Monica, Calif. "Deep Space Industries...

Particles do not retain "information", don't have "knowledge". It is not that the act of observation that alters reality. In fact the physical nature of the "observation" small though it may be is sufficient to alter the metrics of sub atomic particles.

On March 25, 2010, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on their blog that ESA’s study of the mass of Phobos had been accepted for publication in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. The announcement excerpted startling conclusions of ESA’s findings: “We conclude that the interior of Phobos likely contains large voids. When applied to various hypotheses bearing on the origin of Phobos, these results are inconsistent with the proposition that Phobos is a captured asteroid.” (1,2) Since that time, a number of prominent ancient astronaut blogs have had plenty to say about the findings. The ESA findings were most...

At a news conference Friday, NASA scientists said the object that exploded over Russia was a “tiny asteroid” that measured roughly 45 feet across, weighed about 10,000 tons and traveled about 40,000 mph. The object vaporized roughly 15 miles above the surface of the Earth, causing a shock wave that triggered the global network of listening devices that was established to detect nuclear test explosions. The force of the explosion measured between 300 and 500 kilotons, equivalent to a modern nuclear bomb, according to Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,...

ATTN MODERATOR: This article is NOT copied, but authored 100% by myself (and x-posted at Reaganite Republican) with the exception of one small quote from Russia Today near the bottom (duly noted and linked) All orginal Russian info/data sources noted and linked at the bottom, as always... _________________________________________________________ Some pretty serious damage was delivered upon six Russian towns -and hundreds injured- when a hefty meteorite streaked across the sky, approached the Earth's surface in Chelyabisk Oblast (region) of the southern Ural Mountains near the border with Kazakhstan, then exploded early this morning, cca 9:30-10AM local time. Fragments fell and windows shattered as many...

Video at this LINK

"For those of you with even a small refractor telescope, the next few nights present a once in a blue moon opportunity to spot all seven planets in the same evening. Five of them are visible without even binoculars, while the other two will require you to reference the charts below. While Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will "move" faster in the sky, Uranus and Neptune will stay relatively fixed in their positions in Pisces and Aquarius for some time. The closest five planets all yield some features through a small amateur telescope, the largest, Saturn and Jupiter, even...

Mystery of the Mayan Calendar finally revealed

The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time. The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel...

Main site link: http://www.launchphotography.com/

NASA's Kepler telescope scans the skies for 'habitable worlds' - but an American chemist has suggested the whole project might be a terrible idea. Ronald Breslow suggests that life-forms based on slightly different amino acids and sugars could take the form of huge, ferocious dinosaurs that have evolved to have human-like intelligence and technologies. 'We would be better off not meeting them,' says Breslow, who claims that it was a stroke of luck that an asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on earth, leaving the field clear for mammals such as humans. On other worlds, dinosaurs could have evolved into huge, intelligent...

http://www.wimp.com/curiositydescent/

Early this morning, about 5:05 AM, my nephew saw a star explode in the constellation Ursa Major. We're not star hounds and do not know the name of the star that blew, but he did see it and he was sober. This is his first ever critical astronomy observation. It is amazing what one can see smoking a ciggie on the back deck.

NASA’s most ambitious Mars probe is set to land late today (or early tomorrow, depending where you live). NASA is one of the few government programs that actually invests in a major — and important — industry that supports high-tech jobs and science and technology advancement. However, the geniuses in Washington has been throwing NASA under the bus as of late. They’d rather bailout unsuccessful ventures. But I digress. At least NASA is finally relying more on the commercialization of space.

Sally Ride showed Generation X girls the sky’s the limit — literally. We could do anything boys could do and sometimes better. If we wanted to go into space, our gender couldn’t — and wouldn’t — stop us. If we studied hard enough and trained our brains, the glass ceiling could be shattered. Amid all the girl power that Ride taught women, one barrier the first American woman in space chose not to break was sexuality. When she died on Monday at age 61 from pancreatic cancer, it emerged that Ride had a partner. As one friend on Facebook wrote,...

I am pleased to announce the formation of Kucinich Action, a new organization dedicated to empowering individuals to engage with the political process. With this new organization, we endeavor to build a powerful grassroots movement to return the power to the people in our political system. Kucinich Action is a natural evolution of what our movement has been doing: standing up, speaking out, acting on our beliefs, and changing the outcome on behalf of the people. We will also empower individuals with the skills to participate and engage in the process of government decision making at all levels. With this...

An eyewitness says: "It was pretty freakin' real when all the dogs started barking right before it hit, then EVERYTHING shook. We were in the field just outside the barn & the barn continued to shake for a couple minutes afterward. We are about 50-60 miles or so from where it hit."

When you're building one of the world's most advanced jet fighters, there's no room for error. Engineering technology used by BAE Systems, a partner in the F-35 joint strike fighter program and the manufacturer of Typhoons, even takes the moon's gravitational pull into account. The moon causes the ground to shift by one to two millimeters every time it pulls the oceans' tides in and out. And this tiny movement can throw off the precise alignment of an aircraft's frame as pieces are put together. "That might not sound a lot, but given the tolerances we are working to on...

On March 25, 2012, millions of Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) will celebrate the “Annunciation” – which commemorates the conception of Jesus. This March 25, there will be a neat astronomical arrangement in the sky, that seems to mesh nicely. See the description below: The sky will be spectacular in the west after sunset on March 25, 2012, with the waxing crescent moon and the planet Jupiter very close to each other in the evening twilight sky. Plus Venus is nearby – the sky’s brightest planet. You’ll see Jupiter and the moon below Venus in the west after sunset. The famous...

The massive solar storms currently bombarding the earth with charged particales (@ 4 million mph!) are the largest in over five years, driven by a double solar flare. This phenomenon could bring the beauty of the Aurora Borealis to places it's rarely seen early this morning and heading-on-in to Thursday night... What we have is the Sun belching-out a cloud of gas (twice) who's strong electrical charges will temporarily warp the Earth's own magnetic field as it gets here... which is now. They also play havoc with elements like Nitrogen in our upper-atmosphere, and thus the auroras are produced. But as we wait for...

Via: On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events Key Points Probability of a Carrington event occurring over next decade is ~12% Space physics datasets often display a power-law distribution Power-law distribution can be exploited to predict extreme events By virtue of their rarity, extreme space weather events, such as the Carrington event of 1859, are difficult to study, their rates of occurrence are difficult to estimate, and prediction of a specific future event is virtually impossible. Additionally, events may be extreme relative to one parameter but normal relative to others. In this study, we analyze several measures...

My endless rants here about the hot field of multiverse studies are mainly motivated by concern about the effect this is having on particle theory. Multiverse scenarios all too often function as an excuse for not admitting that string theory/extra-dimensional ideas about unification have failed. Such an admission would encourage people to move on to more promising ideas, but instead hep-th is stuck in an endless doldrums with the high profile public face of the subject dominated by excited claims about what a wonderful discovery this region is.Independently of the string theory problem, I’m personally a skeptic that multiverse...

A blast from the past animated the blogosphere earlier this month when a buddy of famed "Fire in the Sky" UFO abductee Travis Walton accused a dead debunker of attempted bribery. Steve Pierce said he -- Pierce -- had been offered $10k to say Walton had hoaxed the whole thing back in 1975... Klass was a prolific writer who dismissed the Walton controversy as confabulation in his 1983 book UFOs: The Public Deceived... Klass' take on what became known as the Cash-Landrum incident stopped me cold. Because I'd actually done my homework on that one. And that's when I got...

The primary focus of NASA's-- manned space program-- should be the pioneering and colonization of the rest of the solar system. That means building the space transportation and habitat infrastructure that can get humans into space and settled into the rest of the solar system. That would also mean minimizing the use of terrestrial resources while maximizing the use of extraterrestrial resources in order for humans to survive in the New Frontier. But any significant deviation of our manned space program away from the primary goal of-- human colonization-- would be a waste of tax payer dollars, IMO. And it...

This is astonishing beauty. One has to believe in God when seeing such splendor! Here's another time-lapse video of the aurora borealis from tonight in Norway: Aurora Time lapse from Kattfjorden (Norway) Here is the photographer who got these beautiful shots: Helge Mortensen Tromsø, Norway arcticshooter.blogspot.com/ I mostly shoot the aurora borealis/Northern lights in the winter season. In the summer I really enjoy the midnight sun and the incredible light you get. I take all kind of pictures but my sweet spot is landscapes that includes the ocean. I do bracketed shots if it benefits the image. But I...

I need some astronomy help from the smart-guy Freepers. Short version: What can cause a satellite to suddenly glow brightly (as bright as a meteor) for a few seconds and then gradually fade? We saw it last summer on three satellites, one after another, with all 3 visible at the same time (after fading). Different areas of the sky and two different directions of travel! My first thoughts were of rotating satellites reflecting sunlight, but that didn't make sense: First time in 40 years of skywatching and I see 3 at once?? Another unlikely scenario: 3 satellites getting slagged by...

Evolution professor Lawrence Krauss is now saying that the universe, and everything in it, came from nothing. Not only that, but there are probably billions and billions of universes that have spontaneously arisen. Occasionally a universe happens to have all the right properties for life to arise spontaneously within it, and that would be us. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Krauss, a theoretical physicist and head of The Origins Project at Arizona State University, is not the first evolutionist to defy the age-old wisdom that something does not come from nothing. World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking popularized the idea...

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in England 1014 AD, on the eve of St. Michael’s day (September 28, 1014) “came the great sea-flood, which spread wide over this land, and ran so far up as it never did before, overwhelming many towns, and an innumerable multitude of people.” This is clearly a reference to a tsunami similar to the one that struck Indonesia in December 2004 which killed over 250,000 people. What could have caused this tsunami? Could a meteor or comet impact in the Atlantic Ocean have been the cause? Researcher Dallas Abbott of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory...

A mysterious metal ball reportedly fell from space , landing in a grasslands area of the African nation of Namibia. So far experts claim the object is not of alien origin. It has two bumps on each end, appears to be hollow and weights about 13 pounds. Namibia's National Forensic Science Institute Director Paul Ludik said the sphere is 3.6 feet around and is made out of a "sophisticated" alloy that is not unknown to modern science, although it has no identifying markings to link it with a country or a company. So far that's about all we're told. But...

Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury? That's been the speculation from some corners aftera camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury. Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5). The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700. The potentially habitable alien world, a first for...

Astronaut and blogger Ron Garan is coming home after nearly six months in space. Reflecting on his preparation for his trip, he writes: “As I prepared to leave for final launch preparations, I experienced an interesting phenomenon. Realizing that leaving Houston starts me on a journey that will take me off the planet for six months, I started to take note of things that I will not experience for half a year. Whether it’s a flock of birds against the sunset or early morning mist on the water of Clear Lake, or a million other things that define the beauty...

I posted this a few days ago, but I think it's so awesome that I wanted to share it again with anyone who missed it. This is simply amazing... You Tube: A musical investigation into the nature of and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see.

This is seriously cool... You Tube: A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles

On July 7, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio spoke on the future of America’s space program. “When this final shuttle mission draws to a close, many Americans will be startled by the realization that we don't have an answer to the question: What's next for NASA?” he said. “We know that our commercial space partners are working to fill some of the gaps in our human space flight capabilities, and that is a promising development that we should encourage. But we need NASA to lead.” I follow one of those commercial space partners,Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, on Facebook....

This is pretty cool- click on pic: At the link above you see the actual cockpit of the US Space Shuttle Discovery- note insulation panels installed over windows for re-entry- guess they get a little warm. Last week's final mission -completing 30 years of manned Shuttle flights- was completed by the Atlantis... some facts about the craft: The Space Shuttle was the first orbital spacecraft designed for reuse. It carried different payloads to Low Earth Orbit, provided crew rotation for the International Space Station (ISS), and performed servicing missions- the first one went up in the early days of the Reagan Administration,...

Look Up and See!

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and "multiverses", and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides...

Professor Raymond Wheeler, from the University of Kansas, at first almost stumbled into the frightening data. The connection was initially discovered by noted Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky during 1915: solar storms trigger conflict, wars and death. A vortex of death. Chizhevsky found after intense research that the rise and fall of solar activity—interacting with the earth's magnetic field—causes mass changes in human's perspective's, moods, emotions and behavioral patterns. All are affected by sunspots and solar flares. Building upon the Russian scholar's research, Wheeler applied a numerically weighted ranking system during the 1930s to separate wars and even individual battles assessing...

Take a moment and consider your place in the bigger scheme of things~ And while that's indeed illuminating (sorry)....  it's a  big universe with plenty of other stars out there: Jupiter only one pixel on that scale. But this behemoth Arcturus -25x the Sun's size and 110x as bright-is just 5th largest here...our own sun down to a single pixel: The monster above -Anteres- is the 15th brightest star in the sky, and is over 1000 light-years away. Feeling your place yet? Now try to wrap your mind around this: the photo below was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and ultra-deep-field infrared shot of...

Around 10:30 PM tonight my son and I saw a bright green streak that appeared to be heading South to North toward Charlotte, NC. The light appeared to be going very fast, and accelerating on a downward path in the sky. I haven't heard anything on the local news about it.

People love to hype 2012 as the end of the world. It's BS, but hey, when it gets into the public consciousness, things stick. Anywho, a scientist named Brad Carter is predicting that the star Betelgeuse is expected to go super-nova very soon. If this happens, the sky that we look at could have two stars in it, even though Betelgeuse is 1,300 light years away. On the bright side, Carter assures us that we won't all die

Here in New York, anyway. Looks like a hazy sky.

Cool video of the Antikythera Mechanism rebuilt in Lego, and how it works.