Tags: space tweet, tweet, twitter
Tweeting is no longer only an earthly phenomenon.
A NASA astronaut made Twitter history on Friday by sending the first tweet from outer space. Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer broadcast the following message directly from the International Space Station:
“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! 
More soon, send your ?s”
Tags: commercial travel, space tourist, space travel, spacecraft
Five years ago, with the winning of the Ansari XPrize, hopes for commercial space travel seemed to soar as high as the space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, that had flown the series of sub orbital flights in the summer and autumn of 2004. Now, with the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, hope has taken another step toward reality.
SpaceShipTwo, which has been under development the past few years by Scaled Composites, will take two pilots and six paying passengers on sub orbital barn storming flights. For two hundred thousand dollars, anyone can experience micro gravity and witness the curvature of the Earth, experiences hitherto only reserved for astronauts flying on government space craft.
The first commercial flights past the one hundred kilometer mark will likely take place in 2011, after an extensive testing regime. As with SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo will be taken to a height of about fifty thousand feet by a mother ship, the White Knight Two, and then released as it fires its rocket engines.
Read the full article at Examiner.com
Tags: another star planets, Earth-like, Gliese 581, nearest star, planet
European astronomers said Tuesday that they had discovered the smallest planet yet found orbiting another star. The planet could be as little as only 1.9 times as massive as the Earth and belongs to a dim red star known as Gliese 581, which lies about 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra.
The star was already know to harbor at least three more massive planets. The new planet, known as Gliese 581e, is probably rocky like the Earth, but it lies in such a close orbit — only three million miles from its star — that it is surely blasted with too much radiation and heat to be livable.
More at NYTimes
Tags: alien civilization, earthlike worlds, extraterrestrial light, laser signal, radio signal, super-civilization
Over a decade ago SETI pioneer Jill Tarter and I had a dinner discussion about the protocol procedures for announcing to the world the first detection of a signal broadcast from an extraterrestrial civilization.
I expressed relief that I would never have to worry about publicizing such a discovery from Hubble Space Telescope. “Hold on Ray,” Jill said, “you never know, Hubble might conceivably pick up a signal that other telescopes can’t detect.”
Oh, my worst nightmare! Imagine keeping that information under a news release embargo!
Now, some readers will scratch their heads at this because SETI has been popularized in the 1997 movie Contact where actress Jodie Foster “listens” for radio signals from E.T. with the huge radio telescope array near Socorro, New Mexico.
Interested? Read more at Discovery.com
Tags: galaxy, lifeform, stars, top 10, universe, weird things
The more we look among the stars and galaxies, the weirder things seem to get.
Even space itself is puzzling, for example. Recent studies suggest that the fabric of the universe stretches more than 150 billion light-years across — in spite of the fact that the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old.
From super-fast stars to the nature of matter, here we cover other strange and mysterious elements of the universe.
10. Hypervelocity Stars
If you’ve ever gazed at the night sky, you’ve probably wished upon a shooting star (which are really meteors).
But shooting stars do exist, and they’re as rare as one in 100 million.
In 2005, astronomers discovered the first “hypervelocity” star careening out of a galaxy at nearly 530 miles per second (10 times faster than ordinary star movement).
We have ideas about what flings these rare stars into deep space, but aren’t certain; anything from off-kilter supernova explosions to supermassive black holes might be responsible.
Caption: Artist’s rendition of a hypervelocity star leaving a galaxy. Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Tags: crescent moon, jupiter, moon, planets, smiling sky, venus
Astronomers and stargazers have been watching a rare astronomical phenomenon.
Jupiter and Venus are in conjunction and lie just two degrees apart, so lucky skygazers will be able to see the two planets getting closer.
At the same time, the crescent Moon will eclipse Venus and, if you watch the Moon at sunset through binoculars, you will see an occultation of Venus by the Moon. The planet will seem to disappear as the dark limb of the Moon passes over it.
More on BBC News
Tags: mars mission, mars weather, martian clouds, phoenix, snow on mars
TORONTO — A Canadian-built weather station on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds.
“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway of York University in Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian Meteorological Station on Phoenix.
“That is snow falling from the clouds.”
“We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground,” he said.
Data collected show the snow vaporizing before reaching the surface.
A laser instrument, the lidar, designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars, detected snow from clouds about four kilometres above the spacecraft’s landing site.
The lidar shoots pulses of laser light into the Martian sky, measuring components of the atmosphere such as dust, ground fog and clouds, from the surface up to a range of 20 kilometres.
Read more @ ctv.ca
Tags: alien planet, astronomy, planet, space science, stars
Discovering a planet around another star is no big deal these days — dozens of them have been reported in 2008 alone, and the total count now stands at more than 300.
Of course, the burgeoning exoplanet population hasn’t stopped astronomers from looking for more of them. Big gaps remain in the sampling statistics, because the most successful techniques (radial-velocity monitoring, microlensing events, and periodic transits) favor finding large bodies close to their parent stars. Far-out planets are rarely discovered this way because they have long orbital periods and even longer odds of crossing directly in front of their stars.
But it should be possible to spot alien worlds directly by imaging very young nearby stars. This game plan assumes that any outlying gas-giant planets are still glowing warmly from their recent formation, making them relatively easy pickings at infrared wavelengths. One of these came to light in 2004, though it orbits a feebly glowing brown dwarf rather than a proper star.
Full article at skyandtelescope.com
Tags: lunar, moon, moon owner, outer space treaty, space
Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?
A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: Who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs.
But ownership is different from property rights. People who rent apartments, for example, don’t own where they live, but they still hold rights. So with all of the upcoming missions to visit the moon and beyond, space industry thought leaders are seriously asking themselves how to deal with a potential land rush, cowboy-style.
Full article at tech.msn.com.
