ISS Sharack NX-15

hm Just like Josh said cool..

Japanese Probe to Slam into Moon Today

The Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya has completed its main mission. But there's one final scientific endeavor: It will slam into the moon's surface at about 2:30 p.m. ET (18:30 UT) today.

The impact is expected to occur on the near-side of the moon, in the dark area close to the limb, at lunar coordinates 80°E and 64°S, said European astronomers, who have mapped out the expected impact site using images from the the European Space Agency's SMART-1 lunar orbiter, which was also purposely crashed into the moon in 2006.

SMART-1 images show that the Kaguya satellite's impact site is in an ancient cratered highland.

Among other work, Kaguya beamed back a spectacular movie earlier this year of Earth eclipsing the sun as seen from the moon. It also provided fresh data on the composition of the moon's mysterious far side.

Amateur skywatchers with telescopes and some experience might see the event from Earth. "The timing favors telescopic observers in east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, who may be able to see a brief flash of light or a plume of debris rising from the Moon's southeastern limb," according to Spaceweather.com.

Scientists hope to learn something about lunar composition by observing the debris that's kicked up.

They'll also later compare the pre-impact SMART-1 images to subsequent photographs taken by other spacecraft after the controlled crash landing.

"We hope that future data will show the elongated crater that will form due to the Kaguya impact and bouncing secondary debris," said Bernard Foing, ESA's former SMART-1 Project Scientist.

hope it don't desinagrate and they can get awesome pics and samples from the other side of the moon if they could only place a observatory or a telescope out there on the moon just think of the things we could see from there..

OCEAN HIDDEN INSIDE SATURN'S MOON



Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet for an ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn's Enceladus, suggesting it could join the exclusive club of watery moons in our solar system.

The salty water is likely feeding jets of water-ice that spurt from the moon's south polar region. Such plumes were first reported in 2005, and ever since, astronomers have suspected a liquid ocean might lie beneath the icy shell of Saturn's sixth largest moon.

The new finding, published in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature, could bump this diminutive world — measuring 310 miles (500 km) in diameter (about the width of Arizona) — into a class that includes Jupiter's Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

In addition, the water and other key life ingredients such as organic material found in the plumes, could provide a suitable environment for life precursors, said lead researcher Frank Postberg of the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.

"I would say that the evidence for an Enceladus water reservoir provided by our research is as strong as the evidence for Europa's ocean," said study scientist Sascha Kempf, Cassini scientist on the Cosmic Dust Analyzer from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics.

Nicholas Schneider of the University of Colorado, Boulder, agrees the evidence is strong for an ocean beneath the Enceladus surface. However, he added, "I want more proof these [jets] are coming directly form the oceans." Schneider is the lead author of another study on Enceladus published in the same issue of Nature.

Supersonic jets

Four years ago, an analysis of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft at Saturn revealed the water-ice jets that spurt from four fractures called tiger stripes, each extending some 75 miles (120 km) across Enceladus's south polar region. The jets shoot thousands of miles into space, with some of the ice grains and water vapor escaping the moon's gravity and ending up in Saturn's outermost ring, the E ring.

In fact, some of the authors on the new paper reported last year in Nature that the water vapor jets blast out much faster than the dust particles, with the vapor reaching speeds rivaling a supersonic jet — about 650 to 1,100 mph (300 to 500 meters per second). That finding suggested Enceladus had an ocean below its surface.

Now, evidence points precisely to such a salty body of water. The results come from data collected by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument aboard Cassini, which showed sodium salts within ice grains of Saturn's E ring.

The composition of different sodium compounds and overall salt levels correspond with what the scientists would expect if there were an ocean beneath the moon's icy shell.

"If you have liquid water in contact with a rocky core, then salts would be the most abundant dissolved compounds," Postberg told SPACE.com. "The only way to get that much salt into water is to extract it from rock."

Not the Atlantic

While Postberg and his colleagues are not sure about the size of this ocean, even if it covered the southern hemisphere, the water body would be small compared with Earth's oceans. It would also be a little less salty than, say, the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, Postberg said.

And as far as swimming, a thick wetsuit would be in order, as the water would be close to freezing, he said. (That's warmer than the moon's surface, which reflects 100 percent of the sunlight striking it and plunges to minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit — minus 201 degrees Celsius.)

In another study, led by Schneider and published in the June 25 issue of Nature, researchers report results from ground-based observations of the vapor cloud in Saturn's E ring, rather than the ice grains. These observations didn't show any sodium in the vapor. The finding, however, doesn't exclude the possibility of an Enceladan ocean.

Instead, the team argues that if the plume vapor does come from ocean water, the evaporation must happen slowly deep underground, rather than as a violent geyser erupting into space. That's because a violent saltwater geyser would eject sodium into the vapor cloud, and the results show no such sodium.

"The original picture of the plumes as violently erupting Yellowstone-like geysers is changing. They seem more like steady jets of vapor and ice fed by a large water reservoir," Postberg said. "However, we can't decide yet if the water is currently 'trapped' within huge pockets in Enceladus' thick ice crust or still connected to a large ocean in contact with the rocky core."

Postberg and his colleagues say such steady jets are either fed directly by an ocean-like body of water or from reservoirs connected with that ocean.

Cassini flybys planned for the fall could glean more information on the ocean-geyser link, he said.

So its true life could be out there among the stars and other planets may be able to support human life ..

That's cool maybe some where out there , there could be a planet with people and cities. just like earth. might be far fetched but never know.

REAPER DINOSAUR

A giant 'reaper' dinosaur so called because it has huge claws shaped like a reaper's scythe has been unearthed by shocked scientists in the Utah Desert, who were there to dig up aquatic reptile bones. The discovery, published online today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sheds new light on the evolution of some of the most well known dinosaurs.

Terrifying, flesh-eating dinosaurs such as Velociraptor - best known for as the villain in the Jurassic Park films - could actually have evolved from plant-munching herbivores, says Lindsay Zanno from the Field Museum, Chicago, who lead the team behind the discovery. They now believe this to be true because the dinosaur they unearthed - Northronychus graffami - was a herbivore, despite belonging to the same group of 'predatory' meat eaters as carnivorous beasts T. rex and Velociraptor.

By studying the feeding habits of a selection of these predatory' dinosaur species, Zanno concluded that incorporating plants into their diet might have given them the edge over competitors by making them adaptable to a wider range of food sources.

'We were able to use the anatomy of this animal as a template for researching the fragmentary remains of other therizinosaurs and gain a better understanding of their evolutionary history' says Zanno, which suggests that predatory villains' such as Velociraptor could have evolved from 'less fearsome plant-eating ancestors.'

Dave Graffam, who discovered the first bones and after whom the species is named, was especially surprised to find the creature as he was excavating marine rocks which would have been almost 100 miles from the nearest shore line. He believes the creature must have become 'stranded at sea and struggled for a few days before drowning and sinking to the bottom.' N. graffami's burial at sea made it easier to date the specimen, due to the presence of marine shellfish fossils, says palaeontologist Alan Titus who has dated the dinosaur to almost exactly 92.5 million years ago.

great post thanks Unica..

Astronauts Remember Cronkite


Astronauts aboard the International Space Station and on the ground took time out Saturday to remember the legendary journalist Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite, a television news anchorman who chronicled American spaceflight and NASA's historic Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, died Friday at the age of 92.

"We noticed that a gentleman and a pioneer passed away," space shuttle Endeavour commander Mark Polansky radioed down from the space station Saturday. "That person of course was Walter Cronkite. We did want to salute Mr. Cronkite and offer our best wishes and condolences to his family."

Polanksy recalled being inspired by watching Cronkite interview astronauts on television.

Apollo 11 moonwalker Neil Armstrong himself saluted the former CBS anchorman Saturday.

"He had a passion for human space exploration, an enthusiasm that was contagious, and the trust of his audience," Armstrong in a statement. "He will be missed."

40TH ANNIVERSARY MOON LANDING

With the words "The Eagle has landed" Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to land on the moon 40 years ago today.

Six hours after docking their landing vessel ‘Eagle’ Armstrong took the slow step onto the moon’s surface and made history with the immortal phrase: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

ANY ONE INTERESTED IN SEEING THE APOLLO 11 MISSION FROM START TO FINISH PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW

We Choose the Moon

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xfQAsL_kk&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjd-xO9Guew[/youtube]

Wow very cool Unica

STRANGE!HUMANS GLOW IN VISIBLE LIGHT

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.



Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.



(This visible light differs from the infrared radiation - an invisible form of light - that comes from body heat.)



To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.



The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.



Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight - the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body's miniscule light production.




Since this faint light is linked with the body's metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.



"If you can see the glimmer from the body's surface, you could see the whole body condition," said researcher Masaki Kobayashi, a biomedical photonics specialist at the Tohoku Institute of Technology in Sendai, Japan.



The scientists detailed their findings online July 16 in the journal PLoS ONE.

TOOL BAG LOST IN SPACE MEETS FIERY END

A tool bag lost by a spacewalking astronaut last year met its fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere Monday after months circling ever closer to the planet.

The $100,000 tool bag plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

"Based on its size and composition, we expect the object to completely burn up before hitting the Earth," center officials said in a statement.

The tool bag was lost during a Nov. 18 spacewalk at the International Space Station. In addition to the Joint Operations Space Center, amateur skywatchers also tracked the bag as it silently circled the Earth.

Center officials did not immediately have a specific time and location for the tool bag's ultimate demise, but a Sunday report by the Web site Universe Today predicted the wayward space satchel would hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 9:16 a.m. EDT (1316 GMT) over the Pacific Ocean, just west of Mexico.

Lost in space

The tool bag weighed about 30 pounds (14 kg) and was about the size of a small backpack. It contained grease guns, trash bags and a scraper tool.

Former NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost the bag during a November spacewalk to repair a balky solar array joint on the International Space Station as part of NASA's STS-126 shuttle mission. A grease gun leaked inside the bag, which apparently wasn't secured properly, and it drifted free while Stefanyshyn-Piper was trying to clean up the mess.

"There was that split second thinking that, maybe I can go jump for it and grab it. Then I realized that it would just make everything worse and then we'd have two floating objects, one of which would be me," Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a televised Nov. 19 interview from space the day after losing the bag. "So the best thing to do was just to let it go."

Stefanyshyn-Piper, an active captain in the U.S. Navy, retired from NASA's astronaut corps last month to return to her Navy duties.

A look at junk in space

Space debris, in general, has been a growing concern for NASA and other spaceflight operators due to the unprecedented crash of a Russian and American satellite earlier this year. The Feb. 10 smashup in space created two new large clouds of debris that have been continuously tracked by the Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network.

The network is currently tracking more than 19,000 pieces of space junk larger than four inches (10 cm) across, but an estimated 300,000 total objects bigger than a half-inch (1 cm) are thought to be in Earth orbit today, space debris officials have said.

Stefanyshyn-Piper's bag and other tools lost by astronauts in the past have typically posed little risk of coming back and hitting spacecraft in orbit. The tool bag, for example, circled Earth for more than eight months before finally destroying itself in Earth's atmosphere.

If a piece of space debris is expected to come close to satellites or manned spacecraft like NASA's shuttles or the International Space Station, the vehicles can be moved ahead of time given enough advanced notice.

The space station's most recent brush with a piece of space junk came on July 17, just hours after the space shuttle Endeavour arrived with a crew of seven astronauts during NASA's STS-127 mission. Astronauts fired Endeavour's thrusters to nudge the space station and move it clear of a piece of orbital debris that would have come within its safety perimeter, NASA officials said.

Endeavour's seven-astronaut crew landed in Florida Friday to end a successful 16-day mission that replaced a member of the station's crew, as well as delivered a new experiment porch and spare parts for the orbiting laboratory.

Wow thats an expensive tool bag I wouldn't want to loose that lol

NEW FOUND PLANET ORBITS BACKWARD

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.


A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.


The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.


"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery.


What's going on



A star forms when a cloud of gas and dust collapses. Whatever movement the cloud had becomes intensified as it condenses, determining the rotational direction of the star. How planets form is less certain. They are, however, known to develop out of the leftover, typically disk-shaped mass of gas and dust that swirls around a newborn star, so whatever direction that material is moving, which is the direction of the star's rotation, becomes the direction of the planet's orbit.

WASP-17 likely had a close encounter with a larger planet, and the gravitational interaction acted like a slingshot to put WASP-17 on its odd course, the astronomers figure.


"I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away," Seager told SPACE.com. "There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it."


Cosmic collisions are not uncommon. Earth's moon was made when our planet collided with a Mars-sized object, astronomers think. And earlier this week NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence of two planets colliding around a distant, young star. Some moons in our solar system are on retrograde orbits, perhaps at least in some cases because they were flying through space alone and then captured; that's thought to be the case with Neptune's large moon Triton.

The find was made by graduate students David Anderson at Keele University and Amaury Triaud of the Geneva Observatory.


Bloated world


WASP-17 is about half the mass of Jupiter but bloated to twice its size. "This planet is only as dense as expanded polystyrene, 70 times less dense than the planet we're standing on," said professor Coel Hellier of Keele University.


The bloated planet can be explained by a highly elliptical orbit, which brings it close to the star and then far away. Like exaggerated tides on Earth, the tidal effects on WASP-17 heat and stretch the planet, the researchers suggest.


The tides are not a daily affair, however. "Instead it's creating a huge amount of friction on the inside of the planet and generating a lot of energy, which might be making the planet big and puffy," Seager said.


WASP-17 is the 17th extrasolar planet found by the WASP project, which monitors hundreds of thousands of stars, watching for small dips in their light when a planet transits in front of them. NASA's Kepler space observatory is using the same technique to search for Earth-like worlds.