NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
my gf likes this nasty drink.
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Oh and thanks for the segway on this by the way.
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Pocari Sweat ON THE MOON!
Huston Tranquility base here... The sports drink has landed
 

Miragedriver

Brigadier
Why we haven't discovered life on other planets - yet
The Night Sky in September: If other planets share Earth's history of ice ages, why would aliens have found us?

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The Nasa
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shows columns of ice driven by wind into giant towers in Finnish Lapland, and indicates what Earth might have been like before the great ice epochs ended:

A huge surprise to those who see “climate change” as merely an event of the last half century will be that the extent of domination by ice vastly exceed the period of balmy climate we now enjoy.

This is a new and plausible reason why we have not discovered ET, nor vice versa. It is even more convincing than the perils of
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, which I will call the “slam-bang” theory of the extinction of life. For 90 per cent of its existence Earth was uninhabitable, not from cosmic violence, but from age-long ice epochs. A great majority of Earth-like planets must therefore have been equally so, making huge stretches of the galaxy lifeless.

These catastrophic events, occurring when Earth’s atmosphere was still unformed, were “ice epochs”, as distinct from mere ice ages. One of them, known as “Snowball Earth”, lasted a full 300 million years — 3,000 times longer than the average ice age.


And much deeper too. A skier crosses several feet of snow. The last Ice Age involved depths of a mile. But Snowball Earth would have covered the whole planet with depths of up to 60 miles. Everywhere one travelled, geologists believe, whether on land or sea, there would have been unbroken whiteness without end.

We have found hundreds of Earth-type planets with suns like ours — yet no trace of animals or plant life. Should we despair? Most certainly not, for this is the time to start assessing their suitability for colonisation.

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Whatever Enrico Fermi and his colleagues felt in 1950, there is nothing surprising about the absence — or extreme rarity — of intelligent aliens. No one then knew about age-long ice epochs. And so every planet we have found so far is probably uninhabited.

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Stardust close to the border of the constellation Aries - prominent this month - and the plane of our Milky Way galaxy Photo: Alessandro Falesiedi/Nasa

A typical collection of such planets lies in the prominent — this month — constellation of Aries the Ram that rescued the stepchildren of the wicked Queen of Thebes. Its brightest star Hamal has a giant planet the size of Jupiter and doubtless many smaller ones. (Hamal’s name was adopted as a destroyer support ship in the US Navy in World War II and in Korea.)

The pearly white star Sheraton that forms the Ram’s left horn, is just as prominent as Hamal. It is known to have planets, and since this is a stable stellar region, it is highly likely to have Earth-type planets.

A another pure-white star in the Ram’s head is Mesarthim. It is in fact far brighter than Sheraton, but does not appear so because it so much further away. It is 200 light-years distant, three times further than Sheraton.

From Daily Telegraph, UK


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bd popeye

The Last Jedi
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Aug. 19, 2015) The U.S. Navy's fourth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite, encapsulated in a 5-meter payload fairing, is mated to an Atlas V booster inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex-41. The launch is scheduled for Aug. 31, 2015. MUOS is a next-generation narrow band tactical satellite communications system designed to significantly improve beyond-line-of-sight communications for U.S. forces on the move. (Photos courtesy United Launch Alliance/Released)

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bd popeye

The Last Jedi
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CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. (Aug. 31, 2015) A ULA Atlas V rocket with the Navy's fourth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS-4), is rolled from the Vertical Integration Facility to the pad at Space Launch Complex-41. (U.S. Navy photos by Ben Cooper/Released)

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bd popeye

The Last Jedi
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USA....NASA & the US Navy

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Sept. 2, 2015) The U.S. Navy's fourth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) communications satellite, encapsulated in a 5-meter payload fairing lifts off from Space Launch Complex-41. The MUOS 4 satellite will bring advanced, new global communications capabilities to mobile military forces. (Photos courtesy United Launch Alliance/Released)

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Miragedriver

Brigadier
Pluto Probe Starts Beaming Home 'Treasure Trove' of Flyby Data


NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has begun beaming home the best
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from its epic July Pluto flyby.

On July 14, New Horizons became the first probe ever to fly by
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, zooming within 7,800 miles (12,550 kilometers) of the dwarf planet's enigmatic surface. New Horizons sent some images and measurements back to its handlers immediately after the encounter, but stored the vast majority onboard for later transmission.

That transmission — which involves tens of gigabits of information — began in earnest on Saturday (Sept. 5) and should take about a year to complete, mission team members said.

"This is what we came for — these images, spectra and other
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that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado,
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.

"And what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft — it’s the best
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, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric data sets and more," Stern added. "It’s a treasure trove."

New Horizons is beaming its data back with the help of NASA's Deep Space Network, a system of big radio dishes in California, Spain and Australia that serves a variety of agency spacecraft.

The typical downlink rate is between 1 and 4 kilobits per second, NASA officials said. And
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is far from instantaneous; New Horizons is about 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth, so it takes signals from the craft, which are traveling at the speed of light, about 4.5 hours to get here.

The images that New Horizons has already beamed home revealed towering ice mountains and vast, geologically young plains on Pluto, as well as giant canyons on the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon. Mission team members therefore have high hopes about the probe's complete flyby
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.

"The New Horizons mission has required patience for many years, but from the small amount of data we saw around the Pluto flyby, we know the results to come will be well worth the wait," said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, of the the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

New Horizons is probably not done gathering data. The probe's handlers will soon begin steering it toward a small
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, which lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto. If NASA approves a proposed extended mission for New Horizons, the spacecraft will fly by 2014 MU69 in early 2019.


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Miragedriver

Brigadier
Russia successfully launches satellite with Proton rocket

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Moscow (AFP) - Russia on Monday successfully launched a Proton rocket, carrying a Russian telecoms satellite, from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the second successful launch since the disastrous loss of a Mexican satellite in May.

The Proton-M took off at 10:10 pm local time (19:10 GMT) from the desert launch site.

"The launch of the rocket was normal," the Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a statement.

Russia had also successfully launched a Proton rocket, carrying a British satellite, in late August.

In May, a Mexican satellite was lost after a Proton-M rocket crashed shortly after the launch.

The state-run Khrunichev Centre spacecraft manufacturer said that failure was due to a construction flaw in one of the engines.

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Based on a Soviet-era design, the Proton-M is viewed as a veteran workhorse of the space industry and Russia is developing a new generation of rockets to succeed it.

Russia was forced to put all space travel on hold after an unmanned Progress freighter taking cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) crashed back to Earth in late April.

The doomed ship lost contact with Earth and burned up in the atmosphere. The failure, which Russia has blamed on a problem in a Soyuz rocket, also forced a group of astronauts to spend an extra month aboard the ISS.

But last month astronauts from Russia, Japan and the United States travelled successfully to the ISS after a two-month delay caused by the rocket failure.


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