NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular new image of an iconic nebula to celebrate its 23 years of peering deep into the heavens.
The Hubble observatory, which launched on April 24, 1990, captured the Horsehead Nebula in infrared light, peering through obscuring veils of dust to reveal the object's hidden features.
"The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas -- very different to the nebula's appearance in visible light," mission officials wrote in an image description today (April 19). The new observations allowed astronomers to create a dazzling video of the Horsehead Nebula based on Hubble's photos.
The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion (The Hunter). The Horsehead is a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust, like other nebulae, and the light from a nearby star gives it a beautiful glow.
The object is a popular observing target, and Hubble has taken numerous Horsehead photos over the years -- including in 2001, to celebrate the telescope's 11-year anniversary.
The Horsehead's dramatic pillar is made of sterner stuff than the clouds surrouding the nebula, which have already dissipated. But the pillar will disintegrate as well in another 5 million years or so, astronomers say, and the Horsehead will go the way of the dodo.
A Dutch company aims to land humans on Mars by 2023 as the first step toward establishing a permanent colony on the Red Planet.
The project, called Mars One, plans to drop four astronauts on Mars in April 2023. New members of the nascent colony will arive every two years after that, and none of the Red Planet pioneers will ever return to Earth.
To pay for all of this, Mars One says it will stage a media spectacle the likes of which the world has never seen — a sort of interplanetary reality show a la "Big Brother."
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/16300-mars-one-reality-show-colony.html
When NASA's mighty Saturn V rocket launched the historic Apollo 11 mission to land the first men on the moon in 1969, the five powerful engines that powered the booster's first stage dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and were lost forever.
Lost, that is, until now.
A private expedition financed by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has discovered the five F-1 rocket engines used to launch Apollo 11 into space on July 16, 1969 and is drawing up plans to retrieve one or more so they can be publicly displayed.
"I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor," Bezos wrote in a statement posted to the Bezos Expeditions website. "We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in - they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see."
NASA's Saturn V remains today, more than 40 years later, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It used a cluster of five 12.2-foot (3.7-meter) wide F-1 engines as its foundation, with each 18.5-foot (5.6-meter) tall engine capable of generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust — about 32 million horsepower — as it burned about 6,000 pounds of rocket fuel every second.
Read the entire article: http://www.space.com/15075-apollo-11-moon-rocket-engines-discovered.html
The Obama administration is preparing for a space tourism industry that is expected to be worth $1 billion in 10 years, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration's commercial space office said on Tuesday.
Rocket planes and spaceships to carry passengers beyond the atmosphere, similar to the suborbital hops taken by Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil "Gus" Grissom in 1961, are being built and tested, with commercial flight services targeted to begin in 2013 or 2014.
"Based on market studies, we expect to see this type of activity result in a $1 billion industry within the next 10 years," George Nield, associate administrator for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.
"This is a new and growing industry. If you look at the last 25 years, almost all the launches were for the same basic purposes - to launch a satellite, such as a telecommunications satellite, to orbit - and that level of business for that part of the industry is continuing today. But there are several new segments that we see just on the horizon," Nield said.
The boom in launch business is expected to begin this year, he said in the hearing, which was carried via webcast. NASA has hired two companies, privately owned Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences Corp., to fly cargo to the International Space Station, a $100 billion research complex orbiting 240 miles above Earth. The contracts are worth a combined $3.5 billion.
"We know that's going to start soon, probably this year," Nield said.
Read the entire article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/us-usa-space-tourism-idUSBRE82J0W720120320
Foul play may be responsible for the failure of Russia's Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, as well as a string of other embarrassing setbacks that plagued the country's space agency last year, the agency's chief suggested.
The 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, and Russian officials predict it will crash back into the atmosphere this Sunday (Jan. 15). Shadowy unnamed actors may have brought the probe down and caused four other Russian space failures in 2011, hinted Vladimir Popovkin, chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).
"It is unclear why our setbacks often occur when the vessels are travelling through what for Russia is the 'dark' side of the Earth — in areas where we do not see the craft and do not receive its telemetry readings," Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper, according to Agence-France Presse.
"I do not want to blame anyone, but today there are some very powerful countermeasures that can be used against spacecraft whose use we cannot exclude," he added.
Read the entire article: http://www.space.com/14193-russia-phobos-grunt-space-failures-foul-play.html
