NASAs Amazing High Definition images of Stars, Nebulas, Galaxys, and Black Holes taken by NASA!
NASA #39;s Amazing High Definition images of Stars, Nebula #39;s, Galaxy s, and Black Holes -- SUBSCRIBE NOW! - Daily Space Global News and Events!!

By: Otherstuffman

Here is the original post:

NASAs Amazing High Definition images of Stars, Nebulas, Galaxys, and Black Holes taken by NASA! - Video

Photos of UFO deleted by NASA #39;s Website! (2013 Images)
What do you think?

By: ParanormalCentral44

Here is the original post:

Photos of UFO deleted by NASA's Website! (2013 Images) - Video

A daring, "Angry Birds"-like NASA mission could bombard a Martian moon with robotic "hedgehog" probes in the next few decades, scientists say.

The space hedgehogs are actually small, spiky, spherical rovers that form part of a novel mission idea called Phobos Surveyor. The rovers would take advantage of the low gravity on the Mars moon Phobos, its sister moon Deimos, or asteroids in the solar system. Engineers have designed the devices to work in concert with a nearby mother ship.

The hedgehogs would work well in the low gravity of the 16-mile-wide (27 kilometers) Phobos, a force 1,000 times weaker than the gravity on Mars itself, where NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers currently explore, said researcher Marco Pavone of Stanford University. Gravity on Mars is about one-third that of the Earth.

"The problem with [conventional] rovers is, in low gravity, you don't have any traction. That means your wheels spin and you do not move," said Pavone, who developed the hedgehog mission concept. [Boldest Mars Missions in History]

Robot hedgehogs in space

Instead of using wheels to move across a planetary surface, however, the hedgehogs would use internal, rotating discs. Plans call for three discs encased in each hedgehog. Each spacecraft would measure about 2 feet (0.6 meters) in diameter, and NASA has already built a prototype version, researchers said.

The three discs inside a hedgehog point in different directions, giving controllers the ability to move the devices with precision, Pavone said. Slightly speeding up the discs can send the hedgehogs tumbling, and a quick spin can make the hedgehog hop to a nearby location, he added.

To get to Phobos, the hedgehogs will potentially hitch a ride inside the proposed Phobos Surveyor, which could be a Discovery-class NASA mission with a cost of about $250 million and a streamlined development schedule to meet its science goals. At best, the Phobos mission could launch in 10 to 20 years, but that assumes the concept is approved and funded.

The exploitation of inertial motion is not entirely new to space exploration, as the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa spacecraft pursued a similar idea. That craft released a small lander while above the asteroid Itokawa.

Dubbed MINERVA (for MIcro/Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid), Hayabusa's tiny lander was supposed to bounce on the asteroid using rotating actuators. But it never made it to the surface.

Go here to see the original:

NASA Eyes 'Hedgehog' Invasion of Mars Moon Phobos

January 19, 2013

Image Caption: The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a clean room at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Sunnyvale, Calif. facility. The solar arrays are deployed in the configuration they will assume when in orbit. Credit: Lockheed Martin

NASA

NASAs next Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to study the little-understood lower levels of the suns atmosphere has been fully integrated and final testing is underway.

Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will make use of high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how matter, light, and energy move from the suns 6,000 K (10,240 F / 5,727 C) surface to its million K (1.8 million F / 999,700 C) outer atmosphere, the corona. Such movement ultimately heats the suns atmosphere to temperatures much hotter than the surface, and also powers solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can have societal and economic impacts on Earth.

This is the first time well be directly observing this region since the 1970s, says Joe Davila, IRIS project scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Were excited to bring this new set of observations to bear on the continued question of how the corona gets so hot.

A fundamentally mysterious region that helps drive heat into the corona, the lower levels of the atmosphere namely two layers called the chromosphere and the transition region have been notoriously hard to study. IRIS will be able to tease apart whats happening there better than ever before by providing observations to pinpoint physical forces at work near the surface of the sun.

The mission carries a single instrument: an ultraviolet telescope combined with an imaging spectrograph that will both focus on the chromosphere and the transition region. The telescope will see about one percent of the sun at a time and resolve that image to show features on the sun as small as 150 miles (241.4 km) across. The instrument will capture a new image every five to ten seconds, and spectra about every one to two seconds. Spectra will cover temperatures from 4,500 K to 10,000,000 K (7,640 F/4,227 C to 18 million F/10 million C), with images covering temperatures from 4,500 K to 65,000 K (116,500 F/64,730 C).

These unique capabilities will be coupled with state of the art 3-D numerical modeling on supercomputers, such as Pleiades, housed at NASAs Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Indeed, recent improvements in computer power to analyze the large amount of data is crucial to why IRIS will provide better information about the region than ever seen before.

The interpretation of the IRIS spectra is a major effort coordinated by the IRIS science team that will utilize the full extent of the power of the most advanced computational resources in the world. It is this new capability, along with development of state of the art codes and numerical models by the University of Oslo that captures the complexities of this region, which make the IRIS mission possible. Without these important elements we would be unable to fully interpret the IRIS spectra, said Alan Title, the IRIS principal investigator at the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.

View post:

NASA's IRIS Spacecraft Has Been Fully Integrated And Final Testing Has Begun

A NASA spacecraft that constantly stares at the sun for signs of solar storms snaps images and videos so detailed that even the latest ultra-high-definition televisions can't keep up.

The spacecraft, called the Solar Dynamics Observatory, is responsible for some of the mostamazing photos of solar flaresand other sun weather events. Its instrumentsrecord images at a whopping resolution of 4,096 by 4,096 pixels, more than four times the resolution an average HD television.

SDO sun images are even recorded in higher definition than the newly released "Ultra-HD TV" machines unveiled at the2013 Consumer Electronics Showcaseearlier this month. While Ultra-HD TVs have about four times the resolution of an average HD TV, the SDO photos are still twice as large as an Ultra-HD screen, NASA officials said in a statement.

"Such detailed pictures show features on the sun that are as small as 200 miles across, helping researchers observe such things as what causes giant eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CME) that can travel toward Earth and interfere with our satellites," they explained.

While features 200 miles (322 kilometers) across sound large, the sun itself is 864,938 miles (1.3 million km) in diameter.

NASA's SDO mission launched in February 2010 to record unprecedented views of the sun, solar flares and other space weather events. As of December 2012, the spacecraft had captured more than 100 million images of the sun, about the equivalent of eight hours of TV programming a day for four months, mission managers said.

The SDO spacecraft is one of several space observatories keeping a constant watch on the sun. NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and the NASA/ESA SOHO spacecraft also provide daily views of the Earth's closest star.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter@mirikrameror SPACE.com@Spacedotcom. We're also onFacebook&Google+.

More:

Amazing NASA Sun Photos Outshine Ultra HDTVs