NASA Spacecraft Snaps 1st Photo of Mercury from Orbit

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AP – This image provided by NASA is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's …

SPACE.com Staff,
Space.com Space.com Staff,
space.com – Tue Mar 29, 5:45 pm ET

This story was updated at 5:32 p.m. ET.
The first spacecraft ever to circle Mercury has beamed home the first-ever photo taken of the small rocky planet from orbit, showing a stark landscape peppered with craters.
NASA's Messenger spacecraft snapped the new Mercury photo today (March 29) at 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT). The photo shows the stark gray landscape of southern Mercury, a view that is dominated by a huge impact crater. [See the first photo of Mercury from orbit]
"This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system's innermost planet," Messenger mission scientists explained in a statement.
The new Mercury photo shows a region around the south pole of Mercury. A 53-mile (85-kilometer) wide crater called Debussy clearly stands out in the upper right of the image, with bright rays emanating from its center. [More photos of Mercury from Messenger]
A smaller crater called Matabei, which is 15 miles (24 km) wide and is known for its "unusual dark rays," is also visible in the image to the west of the Debussy crater, mission managers explained.
The new Mercury photo was posted to the Messenger mission website managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is overseeing the flight for NASA.
The photo is the first of 363 snapshots Messenger took during six hours of observations around Mercury. The images are expected to cover previously unseen areas of Mercury, terrain that was missed by Messenger during three previous flybys before it entered orbit.
Messenger arrived at Mercury on March 17, more than 6 1/2 years after its launch from Earth.
The spacecraft paused in its Mercury photo reconnaissance work just long enough to beam the new images back to Earth, mission managers said.
"The Messenger team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down," Messenger mission scientists said.
NASA plans to hold a teleconference with reporters on Wednesday to review the latest Mercury discoveries by the Messenger probe. The spacecraft's name is short for the bulky moniker MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging.
The $446 million Messenger probe is expected to spend at least one Earth year studying Mercury from orbit. The spacecraft is in an extremely elliptical orbit that brings it within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of Mercury at the closest point and retreats to more than 9,300 miles (15,000 km) away at the farthest point.
The primary science mission phase will begin on April 4, when Messenger will start mapping the entire surface of Mercury, a process that is expected to require around 75,000 images. Scientists hope the spacecraft will help answer longstanding mysteries over the planet's geology, formation and history.
While Messenger is the first mission ever to orbit around Mercury, it is not the first spacecraft to visit the planet. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet three times in the mid-1970s.
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• Video: Messenger's Mercury Orbit Arrival
• New Views of Mercury From NASA's Messenger Probe
• Most Enduring Mysteries of Mercury

Scientists’ Research Warns Humanity May be Facing ‘Vortex of Death’

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Solar Cycle 24 has begun. NASA and other space agencies worldwide have been warning about it.

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 them on length and severity.
He then correlated the impressive data he’d amassed with the 11-year sunspot cycle.
The results were revealing…and horrifying.
When the 11-year solar cycle peaked, so did human unrest, uprisings, rebellions, revolutions and all-out wars between nations. It was almost as if the intense magnetic upswing directly affected the human brain and drove Mankind into deadly emotional tantrums and frenzied killing sprees.
Assaults skyrocket. Murders increase. And bloody wars and rebellions erupt with a fury across the face of the globe.
Wheeler’s research revealed the pattern spanned human history as far back as 2,500 years.

Solar cycle 22

During 1990 the solar maximum fever pitch initiated skirmishes around the world culminating with Iraq invading Kuwait and the U.S. battling back against Saddam Hussein’s army.
Then, 11 years later, the 9-11 attacks against New York and Washington, D.C were followed by two wars in quick succession: Afghanistan and again Iraq.
According to the 11-year solar cycle, as the sun entered its next active peak during late 2010 the disruptions in the earth’s magnetic field could be predicted to cause unrest, instability, uprisings, outbreaks of war, destruction and mass death once again.
Like clockwork it occurred.
Suddenly the news was filled with rising dissent rearing up in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. It spread to Syria, Libya, Iran and China. Europe was not immune: general unrest arose in the UK and France, Greece had extended riots, Spain felt under pressure, and even the U.S. saw angry mobs rise up in the state of Wisconsin.

Magnetic madness

As the flares increase and the sun becomes more violent, expect greater violence on earth as some go mad.
The pattern is unmistakable. At key points during the solar cycle—from minimum to maximum activity—the geomagnetic field begins to intensify as it comes under bombardment. The triggers are when the activity is accelerating towards the peak, or dropping down towards the minimum.
Much research during the following 70 years has shown that the magnetic field interaction with human’s electrochemically driven brains also affects deep-rooted psychological mechanisms including creating anomalous hormonal swings and even significantly mutated brain wave activity.
The magnetic monster initiates a general mass hysteria and a degree of uncontrollable psychosis.
In other words, the world goes mad.

Solar cycle number 24: Worst possible

Solar Cycle 24 has begun. NASA and other space agencies worldwide have been warning about it. The cycle is predicted to be violent, unpredictable, and may even affect the fragile 21st earth technology.
Expected to surge as much as 50 more than the record-breaking solar cycle 23—that saw X-flares larger than ever witnesses by humans—this monster cycle is calculated to reach maximum intensity from 2011 through 2012.
It’s the worst possible solar cycle at the worst possible time. Expect more wars, more deaths, more countries toppled and populations displaced.
Ad to that grim scenario that fact that much research also has revealed that increased magnetic storms couples with the magnetic pole shift and changing core of the earth will likely lead to natural disasters such as the catastrophe that hit Japan during March 2011, and it’s a veritable witches’ brew of madness, mayhem and mass death.

The disturbing findings of Becker and Freedman

The year was 1963 when another piece of the terrifying puzzle snapped snugly into place. The picture that was forming might as well have been from the depths of hell.
Dr. Robert Becker and his colleague, Dr. Freedman, made an important—if unsettling—discovery. They determined that intense solar activity leads directly to psychotic outbreaks and mass insanity.
Who is Becker? Some far out crackpot?
No.
Dr. Robert Becker was a pioneering researcher and leading expert in the field of biological electricity. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Becker was also a full professor at the State University of New York, and a noted author.
Becker died in 2008 with a warning to the world about the approaching years of 2010 to 2012.
Few listened.
This article was originally published by: helium.

NASA Ringmakers of Saturn UFOs 2010

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I just found this interesting so i thought i would share :)

NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy

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Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy. This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below our galaxy's center. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall and the whole structure may be only a few million years old. (Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

 

From end to end, the newly discovered gamma-ray bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way's diameter, as shown in this illustration. Hints of the bubbles' edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a Germany-led mission operating in the 1990s. The gamma rays mapped by Fermi (magenta) extend much farther from the galaxy's plane. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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A giant gamma-ray structure was discovered by processing Fermi all-sky data at energies from 1 to 10 billion electron volts, shown here. The dumbbell-shaped feature (center) emerges from the galactic center and extends 50 degrees north and south from the plane of the Milky Way, spanning the sky from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al.
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› Video showing processing steps

 

When an electron moving near the speed of light strikes a low-energy photon, the collision slightly slows the electron and boosts the photon's energy to the gamma-ray regime. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
› View video

 

The bubbles display a spectrum with higher peak energies than the diffuse gamma-ray glow seen throughout the sky. In addition, the bubbles display sharp edges in Fermi LAT data. Both of these qualities suggest that the structure arose in a sudden, impulsive event. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al.
› Larger image WASHINGTON -- NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.

Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn't detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.

Scientists now are conducting more analyses to better understand how the never-before-seen structure was formed. The bubble emissions are much more energetic than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in the Milky Way. The bubbles also appear to have well-defined edges. The structure's shape and emissions suggest it was formed as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery.

One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.

"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."

Hints of the bubbles appear in earlier spacecraft data. X-ray observations from the German-led Roentgen Satellite suggested subtle evidence for bubble edges close to the galactic center, or in the same orientation as the Milky Way. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe detected an excess of radio signals at the position of the gamma-ray bubbles.

The Fermi LAT team also revealed Tuesday the instrument's best picture of the gamma-ray sky, the result of two years of data collection.

"Fermi scans the entire sky every three hours, and as the mission continues and our exposure deepens, we see the extreme universe in progressively greater detail," said Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

"Since its launch in June 2008, Fermi repeatedly has proven itself to be a frontier facility, giving us new insights ranging from the nature of space-time to the first observations of a gamma-ray nova," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These latest discoveries continue to demonstrate Fermi's outstanding performance.”

For more information about Fermi, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

Trent Perrotto
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0321
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

Lynn Chandler
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-2806
lynn.chandler-1@nasa.gov

Up telescope! Search begins for giant new planet

Tyche may be bigger than Jupiter and orbit at the outer edge of the solar system

By Paul Rodgers

Sunday, 13 February 2011

If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth's, and 375 times farther than Pluto's, which is why it hasn't been seen so far.

But scientists now believe the proof of its existence has already been gathered by a Nasa space telescope, Wise, and is just waiting to be analysed. 

The first tranche of data is to be released in April, and astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette think it will reveal Tyche within two years. "If it does, John and I will be doing cartwheels," Professor Whitmire said. "And that's not easy at our age."

Once Tyche has been located, other telescopes could be pointed at it to confirm the discovery.

Whether it would become the new ninth planet would be decided by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The main argument against is that Tyche probably formed around another star and was later captured by the Sun's gravitational field. The IAU may choose to create a whole new category for Tyche, Professor Matese said.

The IAU would also have the final say about the gas giant's name. To the Greeks, Tyche was the goddess responsible for the destiny of cities. Her name was provisionally chosen in reference to an earlier hypothesis, now largely abandoned, that the Sun might be part of a binary star system with a dim companion, tentatively called Nemesis, that was thought responsible for mass extinctions on Earth. In myth, Tyche was the good sister of Nemesis.

Tyche will almost certainly be made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and will probably have an atmosphere much like Jupiter's, with colourful spots and bands and clouds, Professor Whitmire said. "You'd also expect it to have moons. All the outer planets have them," he added.

What will make it stand out in the Wise data is its temperature, predicted to be around -73C, four or five times warmer than Pluto. "The heat is left over from its formation," Professor Whitmire said. "It takes an object this size a long time to cool off."

Most of the billions of objects in the Oort Cloud – a sphere one light year in radius stretching a quarter of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in the southern constellation – are lumps of dirty ice at temperatures much closer to absolute zero (-273C).

A few of these are dislodged from their orbits by the galactic tide – the combined gravitational pull from the billions of stars towards the centre of the Milky Way – and start the long fall into the inner solar system.

As these long-period comets get closer to the Sun, some of the ice boils off, forming the characteristic tails that make them visible.

Professors Matese and Whitmire first proposed the existence of Tyche to explain why many of these long-period comets were coming from the wrong direction. In their latest paper, published in the February issue of Icarus, the international journal of solar system studies, they report that more than 20 per cent too many of the long-period comets observed since 1898 arrive from a band circling the sky at a higher angle than predicted by the galactic-tide theory.

No other proposal has been put forward to explain this anomaly since it was first suggested 12 years ago. But the Tyche hypothesis does have one flaw. Conventional theory holds that the gas giant should also dislodge comets from the inner Oort Cloud, but these have not been observed.

Professor Matese suggests this may be because these comets have already been tugged out of their orbits and, after several passes through the inner solar system, have faded to the point that they are much harder to detect.

So if it is real, Tyche may not only be disrupting the orbits of comets, it may also overturn an established scientific theory.

You can download a PDF showing the position of Tyche by clicking here

Huge solar flare jams radio, satellite signals: NASA

 

AFP/NASA/Ho – A NASA image of an erupting solar flare. A powerful solar eruption that has already disturbed radio communications …

– Thu Feb 17, 4:59 am ET

 

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A powerful solar eruption that has already disturbed radio communications in China could disrupt electrical power grids and satellites used on Earth in the next days, NASA said.
The massive sunspot, which astronomers say is the size of Jupiter, is the strongest solar flare in four years, NASA said Wednesday.
 

The Class X flash -- the largest such category -- erupted at 0156 GMT Tuesday, according to the US space agency.

"X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events that can trigger radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms," disturbing telecommunications and electric grids, NASA said.


NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory saw a large coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with the flash that is blasting toward Earth at about 560 miles per second (900 kilometers per second), it said.

The charged plasma particles were expected to reach the planet's orbit at 0300 GMT Thursday.
The flare spread from Active Region 1158 in the sun's southern hemisphere, which had so far lagged behind the northern hemisphere in flash activity. It followed several smaller flares in recent days.
"The calm before the storm," read a statement on the US National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Service.

"Three CMEs are enroute, all a part of the Radio Blackout events on February 13, 14, and 15 (UTC). The last of the three seems to be the fastest and may catch both of the forerunners about mid to late ... February 17."

Geomagnetic storms usually last 24 to 48 hours, "but some may last for many days," read a separate NWS statement.

"Ground to air, ship to shore, shortwave broadcast and amateur radio are vulnerable to disruption during geomagnetic storms. Navigation systems like GPS can also be adversely affected."
The China Meteorological Administration reported that the solar flare had jammed shortwave radio communications in southern China.

It said the flare caused "sudden ionospheric disturbances" in the atmosphere above China, and warned there was a high probability that large solar flares would appear over the next three days, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

In previous major disturbance of the Earth's electric grid from a solar incident, in 1973, a magnetic storm caused by a solar eruption plunged six million people into darkness in Canada's eastern-central Quebec province.
The British Geological Survey (BGS) said meanwhile that the solar storm would result in spectacular Northern Lights displays starting Thursday.

One coronal mass ejection (CME) arrived on February 14, "sparking Valentine's Day displays of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) further south than usual."

"Two CMEs are expected to arrive in the next 24-48 hours and further... displays are possible some time over the next two nights if skies are clear," it said.

The office published geomagnetic records dating back to the Victorian era which it hopes will help in planning for future storms.

"Life increasingly depends on technologies that didn't exist when the magnetic recordings began," said Alan Thomson, BGS head of geomagnetism.

"Studying the records will tell us what we have to plan and prepare for to make sure systems can resist solar storms," he said.

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Entire Sun Surface Pictured For First Time

 

NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe

 

 

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NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe

01.26.11

 

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Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.

The tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way. The new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object's color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away. (Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team)
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"NASA continues to reach for new heights, and this latest Hubble discovery will deepen our understanding of the universe and benefit generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was the pilot of the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. “We could only dream when we launched Hubble more than 20 years ago that it would have the ability to make these types of groundbreaking discoveries and rewrite textbooks.”

Astronomers don't know exactly when the first stars appeared in the universe, but every step farther from Earth takes them deeper into the early formative years when stars and galaxies began to emerge in the aftermath of the big bang.

"These observations provide us with our best insights yet into the earlier primeval objects that have yet to be found," said Rychard Bouwens of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Bouwens and Illingworth report the discovery in the Jan. 27 issue of the British science journal Nature.

This observation was made with the Wide Field Camera 3 starting just a few months after it was installed in the observatory in May 2009, during the last NASA space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. After more than a year of detailed observations and analysis, the object was positively identified in the camera's Hubble Ultra Deep Field-Infrared data taken in the late summers of 2009 and 2010.

The object appears as a faint dot of starlight in the Hubble exposures. It is too young and too small to have the familiar spiral shape that is characteristic of galaxies in the local universe. Although its individual stars can't be resolved by Hubble, the evidence suggests this is a compact galaxy of hot stars formed more than 100-to-200 million years earlier from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter.

This video is a zoom into the Hubble Space Telescope infrared Ultra Deep Field, first taken in 2009. It is a very small patch of sky in the southern constellation Fornax. The zoom centers on the farthest identified object in the field. The object, possibly a galaxy, looks red because its light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon, STScI

"We're peering into an era where big changes are afoot," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "The rapid rate at which the star birth is changing tells us if we go a little further back in time we're going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form."

The proto-galaxy is only visible at the farthest infrared wavelengths observable by Hubble. Observations of earlier times, when the first stars and galaxies were forming, will require Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The hypothesized hierarchical growth of galaxies -- from stellar clumps to majestic spirals and ellipticals -- didn't become evident until the Hubble deep field exposures. The first 500 million years of the universe's existence, from a z of 1000 to 10, is the missing chapter in the hierarchical growth of galaxies. It's not clear how the universe assembled structure out of a darkening, cooling fireball of the big bang. As with a developing embryo, astronomers know there must have been an early period of rapid changes that would set the initial conditions to make the universe of galaxies what it is today.

"After 20 years of opening our eyes to the universe around us, Hubble continues to awe and surprise astronomers," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "It now offers a tantalizing look at the very edge of the known universe -- a frontier NASA strives to explore."

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.

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Related Briefing Materials

Presenters

• Eric Smith (NASA)
• Garth Illingworth (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz)
• Rychard Bouwens (Leiden Univ.; Univ. of California, Santa Cruz)
• Rachel Somerville (Space Telescope Science Inst.)

Multimedia

	Hubble Ultra Deep Field, WFC3/IR › Larger image
	Closeup of HUDF WFC3/IR image surrounding Object UDFj-39546284, with separate detail images. › Image 1 › Image 2 › Image 3
	Probing the universe with Hubble › Larger image
	Star-birth rate › Larger image
	Constellation view of HUDF location; zoom-in to UDFj-39546284 › View video