Moon Images Available in High-Res Soon!

Hot on the heels of the remastering of the Apollo movie footage comes the news that every photograph taken above and on the surface of the Moon is being rescanned digitally and made available to the public!

The work is being done at Arizona State University, and is headed up by Mark Robinson, who is, not-so-coincidentally, the Principal Investigator for LROC, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, the workhorse camera on the next NASA lunar probe. Over the next three years he and his team will be scanning in the original lunar photographs at high resolution (some are 1.3 Gb per picture, at 100-200 pixels per film millimeter!) and high contrast.

read more | digg story

Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)

Watch... Listen...

Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.



read more | digg story

(ESA Space Science) Hinode sees the dynamic and violent sun as sharply as never before.

Hinode, the newest solar observatory on the space scene, has obtained never-before-seen images showing that the sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known.

--[ Link ]--

Gyroscopically stabilized CD-player(s) in microgravity

Gyroscopically stabilized CD-player(s) in microgravity onboard the International Space Station.

(April 26, 2003) -- In his final episode of Saturday Morning Science, Expedition Six NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit demonstrates gyroscopic spin stabilization. Pettit floats several portable compact disc players in microgravity that are spinning and not spinning.

Fires

Fires
Originally uploaded by CoreBurn.

This is just a few of them. Fires? This is just a small sample, there's little small squares all over the place.

Google Earth screenshot with NASA MODIS AQUA overlay.

Different View

Different View
Originally uploaded by CoreBurn.

China's brown haze from a different angle.

Google Earth screenshot with NASA MODIS AQUA overlay.

Brown Cloud from China

Brown Cloud
Originally uploaded by CoreBurn.

China, what's with the giant brown cloud blowing off your coast?? yuck

Google Earth screenshot with NASA MODIS AQUA overlay.

At first it just looks like dust, but if you follow the haze west and zoom in, you start to see lots of little red squares all over the place... fires I guess...

The Apollo Missions 11 through 17 Panoramas of the moon

Experience the moon just as the astronauts did - almost as you were there. View interactive QuickTime VR Panoramas in full-screen from the 6 Apollo Missions who landed on moon.



read more | digg story

Mars Global Surveyor Still Silent

from PhysOrg.com

Two more attempts to regain contact with NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft failed this week.

The 10-year-old probe last had radio communication with Earth on Nov. 2, and NASA said earlier this week that the spacecraft's mission to map the surface of the Red Planet was likely at an end.

But efforts to find out if the orbiting spacecraft was still working continued, including transmitting commands for Mars Global Surveyor to send signals to the NASA rover Opportunity operating on the surface of Mars.[...]

New Frontiers in Astronomy: Hubble and Beyond

Google TechTalks April 11, 2006 Alberto Conti Carol Christian ABSTRACT A revolution is now underway in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The next decade will witness the completion of massive, wide-area, multicolor imaging and spectroscopic surveys of the local and distant Universe. With its strong legacy of public outreach, Hubble's Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has been responsible for how most of the world views our universe. We recognize that, given the coming flood of information, the next step of this task is to allow users to actively explore the cosmos themselves. In this talk we hope to show some of the potential explorations of this wealth of data to help us all better understand and appreciate the universe in which we live. We will explore several facets of using the Multi-mission Archive at Space Telescope's (MAST) along with other survey mission such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey can be combined with these holdings to do new and previously unattainable projects. And finally we will discuss how the current trend of data source unification, as being explored by the International Virtual Observatory Affiliation (IVOA) members will help astronomy tackle the oncoming tsunami of data.

No obvious damage after shuttle launch

AP - Space shuttle Atlantis thundered into orbit Saturday with no obvious damage from debris to worry NASA or the six-member crew as they prepared to resume construction of the international space station for the first time since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

[via Yahoo! News: Science News]

--[ Link ]--

Atlantis soars into orbit for crucial space station work (Update)

The space shuttle Atlantis blasted off Saturday after nearly two weeks of delays, heading to the International Space Station on the first NASA construction mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

[via Physics Org]

--[ Link ]--

NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

--[ Link ]--