NASA scientists have proposed a bold plan that could give Mars its atmosphere back and make the Red Planet habitable for future generations of human colonists.

By launching a giant magnetic shield into space to protect Mars from solar winds, the space agency says we could restore the Red Planet's atmosphere, and terraform the Martian environment so that liquid water flows on the surface once again.

Mars may seem like a cold, arid wasteland these days, but the Red Planet is thought to have once had a thick atmosphere that could have maintained deep oceans filled with liquid water, and a warmer, potentially habitable climate.

Scientists think Mars lost all of this when its protective magnetic field collapsed billions of years ago, and solar wind high-energy particles projected from the Sun has been stripping the Red Planet's atmosphere away ever since.

Now, new simulations by NASA suggest there could be a way to naturally give Mars its thick atmosphere back and it doesn't require nuking the Red Planet into submission, as Elon Musk once proposed.

Instead, the space agency thinks a powerful-enough magnetic shield launched into space could serve as a replacement for Mars's own lost magnetosphere, giving the planet a chance to naturally restore its own atmosphere.

In new findings presented at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop last week, NASA's Planetary Science Division director, Jim Green, said launching an "artificial magnetosphere" into space between Mars and the Sun could hypothetically shield the Red Planet in the extended magnetotail that trails behind the protective field.

"This situation then eliminates many of the solar wind erosion processes that occur with the planet's ionosphere and upper atmosphere allowing the Martian atmosphere to grow in pressure and temperature over time," the researchers explain in an accompanying paper.

While the team acknowledges that the concept might sound "fanciful", they point to existing miniature magnetosphere research being conducted to protect astronauts and spacecraft from cosmic radiation, and think that the same technology on a larger scale could be used to shield Mars.

"It may be feasible that we can get up to these higher field strengths that are necessary to provide that shielding," Green said in his presentation.

"We need to be able then to also modify that direction of the magnetic field so that it always pushes the solar wind away."

In the team's simulations, if the solar wind were counteracted by the magnetic shield, Mars's atmospheric losses would stop, and the atmosphere would regain as much as half the atmospheric pressure of Earth in a matter of years.

As the atmosphere becomes thicker, the team estimates Mars's climate would become around 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, which would be enough to melt carbon dioxide ice over the Red Planet's northern polar cap.

If this happened, the carbon in the atmosphere would help to trap heat like it does on Earth, triggering a greenhouse effect that could melt Mars's water ice, giving the Red Planet back its liquid water in the form of flowing rivers and oceans.

If all of this were to occur as the team anticipates and admittedly, that's a pretty fantastical if it's possible that, within the space of a couple of generations, Mars could regain some of its lost Earth-like habitability.

"This is not terraforming as you may think of it where we actually artificially change the climate, but we let nature do it, and we do that based on the physics we know today," Green said.

The team acknowledges that the plan is largely hypothetical at this point, but it's a pretty amazing vision for what might be possible in the years ahead. The researchers intend to keep studying the possibilities to get a more accurate estimate of how long the climate-altering effects would take.

If the concept does prove workable, there's no telling just how much it would alter the prospects of colonising Mars in the future.

"Much like Earth, an enhanced atmosphere would: allow larger landed mass of equipment to the surface, shield against most cosmic and solar particle radiation, extend the ability for oxygen extraction, and provide 'open air' green-houses to exist for plant production, just to name a few," the researchers explain.

"If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonisation of Mars would not be far away."

The findings were presented at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop.

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NASA Wants to Launch a Giant Magnetic Field to Make Mars Habitable - ScienceAlert

SpaceX, the upstart company, and NASA, the government agency, both have plans to venture to Mars and orbit the moon. But that doesnt mean theyve launched a new space race.

In fact, NASA has long been SpaceXs most important customer, providing contracts to deliver cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. And the Hawthorne company will need NASAs technical support to achieve the first of its grand ambitions in deep space.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk acknowledged as much last week, shortly after announcing that SpaceX would launch two private, paying individuals on a weeklong lunar flyby in 2018.

SpaceX could not do this without NASA, Musk tweeted. Cant express enough appreciation.

NASA, on the other hand, has come to rely on SpaceX and other companies for transport to the space station as its funding has tightened. In todays dollars, the agencys budget is about half what it was at the peak of the 1960s, and down from the 1990s.

In the wake of the SpaceX news, NASA issued a statement that said it is changing the way it does business through its commercial partnerships, in part to free the agency to focus on rockets and spacecraft to go beyond the moon into deep space.

The whole idea is that NASA is at the point of a spear, said Howard McCurdy, professor in the school of public affairs at American University. Its like exploration of any terrestrial realm. This is the way the model is supposed to work.

Indeed, the rapid ascent of Musk and other space industry pioneers is validation of the public-private partnership envisioned when Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984.

By the mid-2000s, NASA was signing contracts with the private sector to fill in for its own funding constraints and the impending retirement of the space shuttle program.

In 2006, SpaceX won its first NASA award for $278 million to help develop the companys now-workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule. It later received an additional $118 million, and SpaceX contributed a total of about $454 million of its own funds to finish development, according to a NASA report.

Two years later, SpaceX won a $1.6-billion NASA contract to transport cargo to the space station. The deal came as the fledgling company of about 400 employees was starting to successfully launch the Falcon 1 from an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

It was not just NASAs financial resources and technical support that helped SpaceX, said company President Gwynne Shotwell, but also the agencys trust.

We would not be the company that we are today without that early support from NASA, Shotwell said. We would have made it, but it would have been more of a struggle, it would have taken us longer.

A major milestone for the partnership came in 2012 when SpaceX launched its first NASA cargo load, making it the first private company to send a spacecraft to the space station.

Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at the Teal Group, said the NASA supply missions gave SpaceX almost instant credibility."

"Having NASA as an anchor client allowed them to have enough revenue flow so that they could establish themselves and eventually diversify and get some commercial contracts and eventually to be able to get into the military establishment, he said.

Today, SpaceX and Boeing Co. are developing separate crew capsules as part of NASA contracts to transport astronauts to the space station.

SpaceX noted that this NASA program provided most of the funding to develop the Dragon 2 spacecraft, which will make the moon trip. It is planning to conduct the first test flight of the Dragon crew capsule in November, followed by a flight test with humans in May 2018.

Once operational crewed flights to the space station are underway, the company said it would launch its Dragon capsule atop the Falcon Heavy rocket, which was developed with SpaceX funds, for the lunar mission in late 2018.

Other well-known, newer space companies have also recently been awarded NASA contracts, including Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos Blue Origin and British billionaire Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic.

Both of those companies intend to target the suborbital space tourism markets, though Blue Origin has also unveiled plans for a launch vehicle called the New Glenn, which the company has said could lift astronauts to low-Earth orbit or even beyond.

Blue Origin is interested in developing a lunar spacecraft and lander, and eventually, a delivery service for the moon, according to a white paper obtained by the Washington Post that the company sent to NASA officials and President Trumps transition team.

Virgin Orbit, which recently split from Virgin Galactic, is focused on launching small satellites.

NASAs role as a development catalyst has been part of the agencys objectives since its earliest days, said Sean OKeefe, a former NASA administrator and current university professor at Syracuse University.

The idea was to spin that into opportunities for commercial market potential for other discoveries, for those who would build on the knowledge base of what was determined, discovered or invented as a means to overcome obstacles and take it to another level, he said.

Phil McAlister, division director for commercial spaceflight development at NASA, called the recent advances of the space companies really positive.

"Moving human presence deeper into space is going to require the best of NASA and the private sector," he said. Over the last 10 years, he added, NASAs private partners have become more technologically mature and capable.

Its unclear whether NASA will provide any further assistance for the SpaceX moon shot, though Musk emphasized that the agency would have first priority if it wanted to work with SpaceX on a lunar orbit mission.

NASA also has its own plans to fly around the moon with a crew in tow.

Last month, NASA said it would look into the feasibility of putting a crew on the first flight test of its Orion spacecraft and heavy-lift rocket, Space Launch System, in 2019. That mission is set to go around the moon to test maneuvers that would be necessary to eventually go farther into deep space.

While both SLS and Falcon Heavy will have heavy-launch capabilities, they may not necessarily be redundant, said Dava Newman, former NASA deputy administrator and Apollo program professor of astronautics at MIT.

If in the next two years theres two capabilities for heavy-lift, thatd be awesome, she said. Having one system leaves you vulnerable to system failures.

The nature of NASAs mission, and its funding, is up in the air under the new Trump administration, however. The agency is still waiting on Trump to appoint a new administrator, and there has been debate in Washington about whether NASA should go back to the moon or venture ahead toward Mars.

SpaceXs private moon mission could influence that debate, McCurdy said. It certainly complicates the argument that the moon-firsters would like to make.

Both SpaceX and NASA plan flights to Mars. Last year, Musk unveiled plans to colonize the Red Planet, sending up to a million people on more than 1,000 spaceships, stretched over decades. He called for a public-private partnership, but the nature of any collaboration was unclear.

The two entities will team up on at least one launch SpaceXs first Red Dragon uncrewed mission to Mars, now aimed at 2020, two years behind Musks original timeline.

NASA has more than 50 years of experience with Mars exploration and will provide SpaceX with technical support during the mission, which could include help with data transmission from deep space, flight systems and engineering, and mission design and navigation.

In exchange, NASA is interested in the entry, descent and landing data from the capsule.

SpaceX has started testing some of that supersonic retro-propulsion technology by landing its first-stage rocket booster on floating platforms and on land, a technique that could be important for future Mars landings, said Ellen Stofan, former NASA chief scientist.

NASA has successfully landed rovers on Mars weighing up to almost a ton. The robots have dropped to the planets surface in air bags, using rockets, and with the assistance of cables extended from a sky crane all methods that are problematic for landing humans.

A human mission would weigh considerably more, somewhere between 10 and 20 tons, Newman said.

It is an order of magnitude greater than weve ever done, she said. We all want to figure out how to get to Mars. And one of the things we need to figure out is to get humans there safely.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

@smasunaga

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Don't expect a space race. SpaceX and NASA need each other - Los Angeles Times

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between NewsweekandQuora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnershiphere.

Answerfrom Robert Frost, instructor and flight controller at NASA:

One of the most fundamental questions is are we alone? The answer to that question would shake the foundations of our understanding of the universe and our place within it. Much of our identity is framed on the presumption that we are a peculiarity. We see ourselves as the only intelligent species on the only planet that hosts life. We therefore make ourselves the center of the universe and elevate our position. The answer to are we alone? would shake the foundations of religion, philosophy and biology. Finding other planets like our own would shake the foundations of astronomy and geology.

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Imagine you are a member of a primitive tribe, living on the plains thousands of years ago. Youve led a sheltered life and your comprehension of the universe is defined only by your observations and the observations of your tribe. You strike out on your own across the plainsto see what else is there. Imagine seeing your first bird and having your worldview shaken by the realization that there are forms of life that can fly. You continue onward and reach the shore. Imagine seeing your first fish and having your worldview shaken by the realization that there are forms of life that can swim.

Illustration provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech

We are almost that primitive in our understanding. We define life itself based upon our limited observation of it on our planet, Earth. All we really know about life is based upon observations of the life that formed on the planet Earth. From those observations, we conclude that life involves carbon and life requires water. So, we extrapolate that if we can find places where water and complex carbon-based molecules exist, then life may also exist. That may well be short-sighted. There may be life that doesnt need water nor carbon. But, chemistry tells us that life is more likely to be based on carbon than on any other element. Carbon is the lightest, most abundant, element with four valence electrons in a shell capable of eight. That means a carbon atom can form four covalent bonds while nitrogen can form three and oxygen can form two. Carbon can also form double bonds, allowing strong (but not so strong the molecules can't change), complex, branching molecules. This means carbon is a light and abundant element capable of forming very complex and flexible molecules. Life is complex. Life needs to be flexible to survive. Water is also viewed as a near prerequisite for life. Water is a universal solvent. It can dissolve many substances, making it extremely valuable at transporting materials in and out of living cells.

So, we look for complex carbon molecules and we look for water and we look for temperatures at which that water can be a fluid. So far weve found no life and few places that might sustain life. ButNASA has announced the discovery of a solar system that contains seven rocky worlds, all with the potential for water on their surface. Three of those seven planets are in the habitable zone (a region around the star with an environment much like the region where our planet Earth orbits). We have found multiple places, within a single star system, where life might exist.

Not only does this give us a great specific target to direct further study, but it raises our confidence in the idea that Earth is not only not unique in its form, but that planets of similar form might actually be quite common. We have scanned an almost infinitesimally small amount of our galaxy, looking for planets similar to Earth, and yet weve found multiple planets that might be like Earth. Maybe they are more like Mars or more like Venus, further study will tell, but with each additional discovery of small rocky planets, abundant in carbon, friendly to waterand moderately irradiated by their star, confidence in their commonality exists.

An artist's depiction shows the possible surface of TRAPPIST-1f, on one of seven newly-discovered planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system that scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes have discovered, according to NASA, in this illustration released February 22. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS

Astronomer Frank Drake proposed an equation that has become known as the Drake equation: N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L.

The Drake equation proposes that if we multiply the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent lifeby the fraction of those stars with planetary systems by the number of planets, per system, with an environment suitable for life by the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears, by the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life exists, by the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence, into space, by the length of time such civilizations would continue to broadcast, we would arrive at the number of civilizations in the galaxy that could possibly be detected.

Much of that equation is, today, guesswork. We have no concrete ways to determine the numerical values. We have to speculate, and speculation is qualified by our observations. This discovery, announced today, gives us better confidence in putting a more optimistic number into that middle term ne.

In our own solar system, we know of one planet that certainly is suitable for life and two planets that at one time may have been suitable for life. Today, a discovery of another solar system with between three and seven planets that may well be suitable for life.

We need to continue to make similar discoveries to become more and more confident. Someday, soon, we may actually reach the point where we are comfortable saying that a star that could potentially support life is more likely than not to also have planets that could support life. Such an revelation would dramatically change the value of N in the Drake equation, giving us more and more confidence in the idea that we are not alone. We need to develop ways to better study this system (TRAPPIST-1). In one location in the sky, we have three to seven targets that could reveal information that would radically affect multiple branches of science and possibly the way we see ourselves in the universe.

This is pretty fricking cool. With an admitted slight bit of hyperbole, this is kind of like Darwin first seeing the Galapagos. Weve found a place to turn our sights upon. We may determine that we can find no signs of life in that system. That would be disappointing, but still immensely valuable because it is more information to enhance our understanding.

What is the significance of NASA's Feb 22, 2017 announcement? originally appeared on Quorathe place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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Quora Question: Has NASA Discovered Life on Other Planets? - Newsweek

Science Daily

Probing seven worlds with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Science Daily "If these planets have atmospheres, the James Webb Space Telescope will be the key to unlocking their secrets," said Doug Hudgins, Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "In the meantime, NASA's missions like Spitzer, Hubble, ... NASA to Launch a New Search for Earth-like ExoplanetsKQED Science, Art Unite For Exhibit Inspired By NASA TelescopeCBS Baltimore / WJZ At Goddard Space Flight Center, Scouts get a look at the future of NASAScouting Magazine (blog) The Indian Express -3DPrint.com all 51 news articles »

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Probing seven worlds with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - Science Daily

NASA launched two sounding rockets almost simultaneously from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska at 12:41 a.m. EST (0541 GMT) on March 2. The rockets carried instruments to study the northern lights as part of the Neutral Jets in Auroral Arcs mission.

NASA launched three rockets into the aurora borealis Thursday (March 2) to study what happens to Earth's upper atmosphere when it's bombarded with solar wind, or energetic particles that flow from the sun.

All three Black IX sounding rockets blasted off within a 2-hour time span from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. These were the last three launches of NASA's Poker Flat Sounding Rocket Campaign, which has sent a total of fiveBlack Brant IX sounding rockets soaring into active auroras since January.

The five missions carried three different types of instruments for studying various aspects of auroras, which can hold clues about Earth's magnetic field and the ionosphere, a region in Earth's upper atmosphere where atoms and molecules are ionized by solar radiation, creating a shell of electrically charged particles around the planet. [Aurora Photos: Amazing Northern Lights Displays]

A NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket blasted off on Feb. 22 at 5:14 a.m. EST (1014 GMT) from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. The rocket carried an Ionospheric Structuring: In Situ and Ground-based Low Altitude Studies (ISINGLASS) instrument payload examining the structure of an aurora.

On Jan. 19, NASA kicked off the campaign by launching the Polar Night Nitric Oxide (PolarNOx) experiment. "The aurora creates nitric oxide, but in the polar night, there is no significant process for destroying the nitric oxide," principal mission investigator Scott Bailey, of Virginia Tech, said in a statement. "We believe it builds up to large concentrations."

Because nitric oxide can destroy the ozone, Bailey said, this suspected buildup is concerning to scientists; the purpose of PolarNOx is to measure how much nitric oxide is in the atmosphere and where most of it tends to linger.

The last of three sounding rockets aimed at studying auroras blasted off March 2 at 2:50 a.m. EST (0750 GMT) from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska.

On Feb. 22, a second rocket blasted off, carrying an instrument called Ionospheric Structuring: In Situ and Ground-based Low Altitude Studies (ISINGLASS). This instrument looks at the visible structure of auroras.

"The visible light produced in the atmosphere as aurora is the last step of a chain of processes connecting the solar wind to the atmosphere," Kristina Lynch, ISINGLASS principal investigator, said in a statement. "We are seeking to understand what structure in these visible signatures can tell us about the electrodynamics of processes higher up."

The fifth and final mission that blasted off Thursday also carried the ISINGLASS instrument. Both rockets that launched almost simultaneously 2 hours before that carried payloads for the Neutral Jets in Auroral Arcs mission, which seeks to explain how Earth's magnetic field creates "jets" in the structure of auroras.

Photographer Aaron Priest captured this stunning crown-shaped aurora borealis shining over Maine on Sept.1, 2016.

So far, the mission teams have reported that their instruments successfully collected and transmitted data. Now they're working to review that data, with the aim of unveiling some of the mysteries of this beautiful phenomenon in our northern skies.

"The ability to successfully launch these [final] three rockets is a testament to the capabilities of the range, science and sounding-rocket teams," Phil Eberspeaker, chief of the Sounding Rockets Program Office, said in a statement. "Great coordination is required to institute the complex countdown required to prepare and launch three rockets in a short period. The team did a fantastic job executing these launches."

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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NASA Rockets Launch to Unveil Mysteries of the Northern Lights - Space.com

SpaceX says two people have paid to take a lunar trip on a Falcon Heavy by the end of 2018. Video provided by Newsy Newslook

Concept image of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon capsule launching from Kennedy Space Center.(Photo: SpaceX)

It's late 2018 and a large rocket stands on a Kennedy Space Center pad ready to launch humans around the moon, nearly 50 years after NASA first accomplished thatfeat.

But this time, therocket belongs not to NASA but to SpaceX, and the astronauts are not elite government test pilots but private citizens buying the ride.

The scenario SpaceX outlined last week has created a buzz about a public versus private race to send people back to the moon, with the private sector now appearing to be in the lead.

NASAs more powerful and expensive Space Launch System rocket isnt expected to launch astronauts on a similar loop around the moon before 2019 a schedule whose feasibility is now being studied and possibly not until 2023.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, has invited the space agency to bump the private passengers and fly aboard the companys first deep space mission. Should NASA accept the offer?

[More: Schedule of upcoming Florida rocket launches]

[More:Panel urges caution as NASA studies flying crew on first SLS]

My answer is unequivocally yes. Either NASA gets out and gets involved with this, or the message that will be received by the American people is that NASA is irrelevant, said Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space and a commercial space advocate who served on the Trump administrations NASA transition team. SpaceX is going to the moon with or without NASA, so NASA needs to say 'yes'to this offer.

Opinions vary on the significance of SpaceXs announcement and the extent to which it could increase pressure on a NASA exploration program taking its time to produce an exciting mission.

Advisers to President Trumps campaign praised public-private partnerships and indicated a willingness to review whether NASAs giant SLS rocket is needed, or if more affordable commercial alternatives are available.

But the administration has yet to nominate a NASA administrator or show that the space program is a priority, while it is proposingsignificant cuts to non-defense spending.

Congress, meanwhile, has maintained strong support for the SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule as foundations for eventual missions to Mars.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully blasted off from Kennedy Space Center's historic pad 39A on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017. The first stage returned for a successful landing in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

After Musk announced his private lunar mission on Monday, to be flown with a Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon spacecraft, NASA said in a statement that it commends its industry partners for reaching higher.

Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot saidthe agency needs to leverage both traditional and commercial approaches, not be forced to choose one or the other.

We must work with everyone to secure our leadership in space and we will, he wrote in a memo to employees last month about NASAs decision to study putting a crew on the first SLS launch.

Some commercial space advocates echo that sentiment, calling SpaceXs lunar mission a leap forward for the industry, but not one that necessarily threatens a different NASA mission.

NASA first flew three people around the moon on Apollo 8 nearly a half-century ago, after all, and its next lunar flyby is intended as a baby step testing systems for human and robotic missions farther out in the solar system.

I dont think NASA has anything to be worried about if somebody else can do it 50 years later, said Alan Stern, a former head of NASAscience missions. NASA has much bigger plans and ambitions to explore other worlds with humans than just a figure 8 mission around themoon.

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SpaceXs proposed mission is exciting in and of itself, said Stern, who chairs the Commercial Spaceflight Federations board of directorsbut was not speaking on its behalf during an interview sharinghis personal views.

Its a phenomenal development that in the space of 50 years, more or less one career, we can go from super-power nation states mounting human lunar expeditions to individual corporations capable of doing it, he said.

AndrewAldrin, director of the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, also sees Musks moon mission as important progress for the industry.

But any government transfer of deep space missions to commercial systems, he said, should be a longer-term process based on more deliberation and results.

If they fly, if its successful, if everything about it works out well, then I think the natural progression would be toward a discussion of whether its appropriate to transition lunar crew transportation over to the commercial sector, just as we are transitioning low Earth orbit transportation over to the commercial sector, said Aldrin. We need to make a transition to more commercial participation, but lets just make it sensibly.

Speculation about SpaceX rendering NASAs program obsolete assumes the companys lunar mission flies sometime close to when Musk said it will, and that it is successful.

The company is now rebounding from a second Falcon 9 failure in just over a year, and has not yet flown the Falcon Heavy, which is expected to debut this summer four years after SpaceX initially promised.

The Dragon that is supposed to fly wealthy tourists around the moon will not fly astronauts to the International Space Station until at least next spring, mere months before the planned deep space mission.

Paul Spudis, a lunar scientist who supports a human return to the moon, has been critical both of over-hyped New Space achievements by the likes of SpaceX, and of NASAs vague plans to reach Mars in the 2030s.

Although accustomed to hearing periodic, grand pronouncements by various New Space companies, skepticism continues to grow over their follow-through, as actual accomplishment is sporadic and less certain, Spudis wrote in his Spudis Lunar Resources Blog. I suggest that as with many other New Space public relations extravaganzas, this mission should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Miller, on the other hand, believes bolder partnerships with SpaceX, Blue Origin and other entrepreneurial firms is a strategy far more likely to produce a permanent human presence on the moon sooner rather than later.

This is an obvious way for America to be great again in space, he said. There are some huge opportunities for NASA here, but it requires NASA to think differently about how it does space.

NASA has been planning to launch a first SLS test flight without a crew by late 2018. The agency will consider adding a crew on that mission if that does not delay the flight much beyond 2019.

Assuming a relatively small slip of SpaceXs moon mission into mid-2019, an optimistic outlook would still put its liftoff close to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, launched from the same KSC pad.

Whatever the flights longer-term implications might be, Aldrin, whose father was the worlds second moonwalker, said that timing would be mind-bendingly cool.

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean.

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Does SpaceX moon plan threaten NASA? - Florida Today

Forbes

Ask Ethan: What Surprises Might NASA's Future Space Telescopes Discover? Forbes When the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990, there were a slew of things we knew we were going to measure. We would see individual stars in more distant galaxies than ever before; we would measure the deep, distant Universe in ways that had ...

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Ask Ethan: What Surprises Might NASA's Future Space Telescopes Discover? - Forbes

Almost 40 years after the Voyager mission began, 81-year-old Dr. Ed Stone is still in his role at NASA as chief scientist; we sat down to talk space travel then and now.

On August 20, 1977, at Cape Canaveral, Dr. Edward C. Stone, in his role as chief scientist on the NASA Voyager mission, carried out final checks on Voyager 2 before the Titan-Centaur rocket blast it into space. Days later, on Sept. 5, Voyager 1 joined its twin spacecraft and headed out into the dark beyond.

Almost 40 years later, after its flyby of Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space, 20.6 billion kilometers, or 137 Astronomical Units (AU), from Earth. Some 17 billion kilometers from Earth, Voyager 2 took a slightly different route, going past Uranus and Neptune, and is currently in the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the heliosphere where solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. Simply put, both spacecraft have traveled further than any spacecraft has boldly gone before.

Remarkably, Dr. Stone is still in his role as chief scientist, despite having just celebrated his 81st birthday. He has been principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft missions, co-investigator on five other NASA missions, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) itself from 1991 to 2001, and received many honors, including the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and National Medal of Science. He's also a full-time professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which manages JPL for NASA.

After a brief stop at NASA JPL Mission Control, where all signals from missions are monitored 24/7 by the Deep Space Networka geek's thrill indeedPCMag met up with Dr. Stone, who talked us through a full-size replica of Voyager 1.

Before sitting down to talk, he pointed out the instruments onboard, which include a Magnetic field instrument, Low energy charged particle instrument, Cosmic ray instrument, Plasma instrument, and Plasma wave instrument (Voyager 1 also has an Ultraviolet spectrometer subsystem). They directly support the five scientific investigation teams participating in the Interstellar Mission: Magnetic field investigation, Low energy charged particle investigation, Plasma Investigation (Voyager 2 only), Plasma wave investigation, and Cosmic ray investigation.

Can you take us back and describe the atmosphere at Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1977? It was a very intense period. Thousands of things have to happen at the right time. You've invested five years in the project, and now, on that day, it's all sitting on top of a large Titan-Centaur rocket. Both of the twin spacecraft were built here, at NASA JPL, then trucked to Florida, roughly three months before launch. That's when I went down there too, and where we put it all back together.

That's also where the team installed the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that convert the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft, instruments, radio and on-board computers. The spacecraft fly too far from the sun to use solar panels. So, during that period, the entire team moved to Florida, some stayed here at JPL in Operations, but most of us were there in the summer of 1977. It was an amazing time.

What inspired you to study astrophysics and space science in the first place? I went to the University of Chicago in 1956, in the graduate program for physics. I wanted to study nuclear physics as that was the frontier back then. One year later, Sputnik was launched and heralded a new era of explorationand the first major discovery of the Space Agethe Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth. It became apparent there was a lot to learn, if you could build the instruments and get them into space. As part of my work, I had the opportunity to launch scientific instruments looking at cosmic rays on a polar orbiting spacecraft.

So, after your Ph.D., you came to join Caltech in early 1960s, became chief scientist on the Voyager and then director. Did you always know you wanted to return to Voyager after finishing your time as director? I never left the Voyager mission, continued on right through, as chief scientist, while I was director. It was several years later that Voyager 1 reached the first milestone in the Voyager Interstellar Mission: the termination shock of the supersonic wind. Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in December 2004 at about 94 AU from the Sun while Voyager 2 crossed it in August 2007 at about 84 AU. Then in August 2012, Voyager 1 finally entered Interstellar space.

And they're still out there. It's a long journey. Yes, they're still sending back signals. When Voyager launched, the Space Age was only 20 years old and there was no empirical evidence that spacecraft could last more than a few years. Voyager 1 and 2 have been up there for 40 years now, and we expect they'll deliver us valuable data until ~2030 when their nuclear power sources will no longer supply enough electrical energy to power critical subsystems.

What are the two main questions about the universe that the mission has answered thus far? Before Voyager, we thought the only active volcanoes were on Earth. Suddenly, on Jupiter's moon Io, we found 10 times more volcanic activity, and that's just on a moon. We're no longer as "terracentric" in our view of the bodies in the solar system. Time after time we were surprised by what we discovered. On Triton, a moon of Neptune, where the nitrogen is frozen, we found geysers eruptingat 40 degrees above absolute zero! We know that on Earth, water is present in three different statesfrozen, liquid, and gasand we've now found moons where other substances, like nitrogen and methane, possess similar states. Suddenly, because of Voyager, we realize how complex and interesting the planetary system is.

Is Voyager 2 still on course to go interstellar soon? We don't know exactly when, but the number I keep using is "a few years." But this is space explorationit could be another surprise.

Talking of surprises, both Voyager spacecraft carry the 12-inch gold-plated copper disk which Carl Sagan and his committee put together as a greeting for other life forms. It was actually astrophysicist Frank Drake, on Carl Sagan's committee, that suggested the phonograph record for the Voyager mission, instead of a plaque which was onboard earlier missions: Pioneer 10 and 11.

Have you been disappointed that Voyager hasn't received a response from other interplanetary spacecraft? (Pauses) You mean Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?

Yes It will be 40,000 years before the Voyagers pass by other stars, so it was never expected there would be a response to the golden record during their operational lifetimes.

Perhaps we've been a bit dull as a prospect to anyone/thing out there? (Laughs) Maybe! [But] intelligent life is really very rare. There are now searches for microbial life, and that's to find the beginning of life. If a planetor exoplanethas the right thermal and geophysical conditions, with the development of scientific instruments it will be possible to study planets and exoplanets for evidence of microbial life, which is the initial step leading to intelligent life.

Back on firmer scientific footing for the final question: The Voyager spacecraft won't ever return to Earth, will they? No, in fact both spacecraft are escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.6 AU per year. They'll continue communicating to Earth until the power runs out. The radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) have a radiation half-life of 88 years, and the spacecraft could keep going until ~2030.

What will happen then? Then Voyager 1 and 2 will both speed in their orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy every 225 million yearsuntil the Milky Way collides with another galaxy.

Sophia Stuart is an award-winning digital strategist and technology columnist. Voted one of the "Top 21 Social Media Superstars" by Min Online in 2009, Sophia was an executive at Hearst from 2006 - 2013, winning a Webby Award for Cosmo Mobile and an MVA for Cosmo International Digital Strategy. Sophia now lives in Los Angeles and runs TheDigitalCheckUp.com consultancy. She was a judge for both the SheSays global awards (2014) and the Bookmarks, South Africa (2013). She has written for many publications including Esquire Mexico, Harpers... More

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40 Years of Voyager: A Q&A With Dr. Ed Stone at NASA JPL - PC Magazine

Universe Today

NASA's Plans to Explore Europa and Other "Ocean Worlds ... Universe Today At the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop this week, NASA made a series of presentations outlining plants to explore Europa and other places in the Solar ... and more »

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NASA's Plans to Explore Europa and Other "Ocean Worlds ... - Universe Today

If you've ever wanted to get your hands on the codes that run the Mars rover Curiosity, New Horizons Pluto probe or other NASA spacecraft, here's your (latest) chance.

The space agency has released its 2017-2018 software catalog to the public, allowing anyone to access NASA codes free of charge.

"The software catalog is our way of supporting the innovation economy by granting access to tools used by today's top aerospace professionals to entrepreneurs, small businesses, academia and industry," Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

"Access to these software codes has the potential to generate tangible benefits that create American jobs, earn revenue and save lives," Jurczyk added.

"Access restrictions" do apply to some of the software packages, however, NASA officials wrote in the same statement.

You can search the 2017-2018 NASA software catalog, and download the 154-page PDF version, here: https://software.nasa.gov

NASA first released its software catalog in April 2014. The latest edition marks the third such public release for the space agency.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter@michaeldwallandGoogle+.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published onSpace.com.

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NASA Releases Latest Software Catalog to Public to Spur Tech Innovation - Space.com

Nancy Lee Carlson has been getting 400 to 500 emails a day, she says, from people who want to see or buy her rare bag of moon dust.

Awarded the bag from NASA after a yearlong court fight, Carlson, from northwest suburban Inverness, says strangers have even come knocking at her door to see the bag, which was used to store moon rocks collected by Apollo 11 astronauts.

She hasn't decided what she's going to do with it, she said, but she certainly doesn't have it at home. The bag is now kept by a security firm in a remote location she says is unknown even to her.

She had previously kept the bag in her bedroom closet and said she intended to show it at schools and bequeath it to her grandchildren, but she says with the publicity over the case that's not practical now.

"I'm thrilled we won," she said. "This is like the Holy Grail." But, she added, "I'm trying to be as anonymous as possible."

The bag in question is the size of a dinner plate, made of cloth similar to that used in astronaut suits, has a zipper and a rip in the fabric, and contains dark dust that NASA verified is from the moon.

Carlson, a corporate and real estate attorney and a former board member at Community Consolidated School District 15 in Palatine, bought the bag for $995 in 2015 on a government website, http://www.forfeiture.gov. She sent it to NASA to verify its authenticity, and when tests showed it was legitimate, officials refused to return it, saying it was rightfully the space agency's property, since they had originally obtained it and weren't aware of its sale.

Previously, the bag had been in the possession of Max Ary, who ran the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchison, Kan., and was convicted of theft in 2006 for taking and selling items from the museum, some of which were on loan from NASA.

Federal government attorneys obtained a court order to sell some of the items recovered from Ary to pay restitution. The bag was confused with another bag that had been flown to the moon on Apollo 17 and was mistakenly sold to Carlson by auction, government attorneys said.

Carlson said she has gotten complaints that she shouldn't keep to herself a national treasure for which astronauts risked their lives. She believes she obtained the bag fairly and legally, but she was open to the idea of sharing it publicly.

"Like all children born in the '50s and '60s or '70s, I've always been interested in space, since I was a kid," she said. "This (moon landing) is what we watched on TV. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world when man finally left Earth."

She said it will take a couple of weeks for her to decide what to do with the bag.

"Hopefully it will be for the greater good of everyone," she said.

Officials at the Adler Planetarium and Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago said they would be open to taking the bag, but they would have to consider how it would fit into their collections. The planetarium already has a moon rock on display, and lunar meteorites, from chunks of the moon that fell to Earth, as well as meteorite dust.

The museum's Henry Crown Space Center displays the Apollo 8 module and the Aurora 7 capsule, among many other exhibits.

Michelle Nichols, the master educator at Adler, said she wasn't sure how unique the bag was, since bags were commonly used for storing samples, but said, "I find it pretty fascinating, because it gives you a sense of the scientific process. By itself it doesn't tell the whole story, but with other things, it becomes part of a science and engineering story."

rmccoppin@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @RobertMcCoppin

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After winning fight with NASA, Inverness woman ponders what to do with a bag of moon dust - Chicago Tribune

NASA saw the Northern Lights and seized their chance in the wee hours of Thursday morning, launching three science rockets into active auroras within a couple hours of one another.

Kristina Lynch, principal investigator on the mission, said, The visible light produced in the atmosphere as aurora is the last step of a chain of processes connecting the solar wind to the atmosphere. We are seeking to understand what structure in these visible signatures can tell us about the electrodynamics of processes higher up.

The instruments flew on Black IX sounding rockets, launched from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. The third rocket was part of the Ionospheric Structuring: In Situ and Groundbased Low Altitude StudieS, or ISINGLASS, mission. ISINGLASS. Because we have to give something a head-scratching acronym, or else it wouldnt really be NASA, now would it?

SpaceX is either broke enough, or stoked enough on their fleet, that theyve accepted a significant deposit from two people naturally, two unnamed people toward a moon mission in 2018. The as-yet-anonymous astronauts will be in the Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, launching from Pad 39A. In SpaceXs words: This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.

In the official teaser, SpaceX tips a hat to NASA, whose Commercial Crew Program enabled SpaceX to develop the Dragon 2 in the first place. Maybe Im a terrible person for routinely picking on flat earthers, but this makes me want to crowdfund tickets for these people.

Saturn and Enceladus, with bonus cryovolcano. Inset: Enceladus, zoomed way in. Image and inset: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ted Stryk

A scientist sifting through old Voyager 1 data found this long-ignored image of Saturn that came with a prize. Enceladus is visible in the background, in its waxing crescent phase; near its bottom, theres a visible plume coming from the surface. Turns out this was a snapshot of a cryovolcano in mid-eruption, taken by Voyager 1 a day after its closest approach to Saturn. After going through the raw data with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, amateur image processor Ted Stryk is ready to present his work to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. After combining different [raw data] subsets as well as the full set, Stryk said, I am confident in the detection of the plumes, just where they should be.

Sometimes when Im annoyed, I threaten to fire the object of my annoyance into the sun. NASA is taking this idea more literally. They are sending a spacecraft to the sun, in order to figure out some longstanding scientific questions.

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins

Scientists are conducting the Solar Probe Plus mission to figure out what gives the solar wind its speed, why the surface of the sun is so much cooler than its atmosphere, and perhaps even what causes the emission of solar energetic particles. On its last few close passes to the sun, Solar Probe+ will get within about 3.7 million miles of the sun about a tenth the distance between the sun and Mercury. Theyre planning to keep the science payload cool with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon composite heat shield.

One last thought: This anticipated finer understanding of the Sun represents a baby step toward becoming a Kardashev Type II civilization, capable of harnessing the entire energy output of our parent star.

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SpaceX, NASA, and the Northern Lights: this week in space - ExtremeTech

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon (far left), listens during a technology summit with then President-elect Trump in December, 2016.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Until the last year, Jeff Bezos has kept the plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, largely under wraps. Since then, he has talked about doing suborbital space tourismflights, building an orbital rocket, and now he has begun to open up about ambitions beyond low Earth orbit. And unlike SpaceX and its Mars ambitions, Blue Origin has its focus on the Moon.

The Washington Post first reported on the "Blue Moon" concept Thursday evening, which Bezos has articulated in a seven-page white paper sent to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition officials over the last two months. The proposal outlines a plan to build a lunar spacecraft and lander to deliver supplies to the South Pole of the Moon, where scientists believe there are abundant ice resources and almost continuous solar energy.

Later Thursday night, during an awards event hosted by Aviation Week, Bezos explained the philosophy behind this idea. "We are hoping to partner with NASA on a program called Blue Moon where we would provide a cargo-delivery service to the surface of the Moon, with the intent over time of building a permanently inhabited human settlement on the Moon," he said. "Its time for America to go back to the Moon and this time to stay. We can do it. Its a difficult but worthy objective."

In the document, Bezos said this enterprise could only be done in concert with NASA and that his company would help establish cost-effective tools to carry out the development of a lunar settlement. The spacecraft could launch on an Atlas 551 rocket built by United Launch Alliance.Alternatively, it could go up on NASA's under-development Space Launch System, which could deliver considerably more payload, more quickly. Significantly, Bezos said he was also ready to put his own skin into the game. "Im excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen," the white paper states.

Ars has previously reported that the Trump administration is likely to make lunar exploration a priority over the Obama administration's previous goal of humans on Mars in the 2030s. This seems probable for several reasonscosts, the geopolitical significance of the Moon, and water resources at the lunar poles that could provide the foundation of an in-space fueling system for rockets and spacecraft.

Although the Trump administration has yet to make any announcements about its intent for space policy, the recent activities of private space companies are telling. SpaceX has begun talking about lunar space-tourism missions around the Moon. Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, has begun discussing the use of his expandable modules for habitats in cislunar space, near the Moon. And now Blue Origin is offering up lunar plans of its own.

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Jeff Bezos says NASA should return to the Moon, and he's ready to help - Ars Technica

Were all a little uncoordinated at times, but when youre a hunk of metal hurling through space, the consequences are a bit more severe. This week, NASAs Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), which has been orbiting the Red Planet for two years, had to perform a last-minute maneuver to avoid a disastrous collision with Mars moon, Phobos. NBD, though.

On February 28th, MAVEN performed a rocket motor burn in order to increase its velocity by less than a mile an hour. The correction ensured that MAVEN would miss the meatball-looking-moon just in the nick of time, by about 2.5 minutes. Had NASA not ordered the maneuver, MAVEN could have smashed into the Martian moon on March 6th.

This is the first time MAVEN has ever had to perform a maneuver of this kind to avoid Phobos. Fortunately, a team at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California meticulously monitors the spacecrafts orbit in relation to Mars two moons precisely so that cosmic smashups can be avoided.

Kudos to the JPL navigation and tracking teams for watching out for possible collisions every day of the year, and to the MAVEN spacecraft team for carrying out the maneuver flawlessly, MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky said in a press release.

MAVEN, which launched in November 2013, has been spending its days studying Mars upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with solar wind, according to NASA. Hopefully, this brave little spacecraft can continue its work without clumsily crashing into another moon.

That said, at the end of the day, Phobos is still screwed.

[NASA]

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NASA Spacecraft Avoids Very Embarrassing Collision With Mars' Moon - Gizmodo

The Intelsat 603 satellite during a 1992 shuttle repair mission. That satellite is based on a bus similar to one that an unnamed government agency, perhaps the NRO, is offering to NASA. Credit: NASA

WASHINGTON NASA is soliciting concepts for payloads that could fly on a mysterious satellite it is in discussions to inherit from another government agency.

NASA issued a request for information (RFI) Feb. 15 for a proposed spacecraft called the NASA Science/Technology Platform Satellite, or NSTP-Sat. The RFI was the first time NASA had publicly discussed such a mission.

The RFI, issued by NASAs science mission directorate, solicits ideas for payloads, including remote sensing instruments and technology demonstrations, which could fly on the spacecraft. The RFI offered few details about the proposed mission, noting NSTP-Sat could fly to low earth orbit, geostationary equatorial orbit, medium Earth orbit, Earth-Moon L1, or lunar orbit in the 2021 timeframe.

The RFI, which remains open until March 17, seeks ideas for how this spacecraft could be used to meet NASAs science and technology development goals. The RFI states that NASA will use the responses to determine whether there are science opportunities for new uses of this spacecraft and whether a solicitation for proposals is warranted to enable such opportunities.

The RFI offered few details about the spacecraft itself. The NSTP-Sat is a spacecraft platform that has become available to NASA as excess Government property through an interagency agreement, it stated. It added the spacecraft was a Boeing GEO spinner bus that could launch on an EELV-class rocket or as a secondary payload on a Space Launch System mission.

NASA and other organizations involved with NSTP-Sat have been reticent to provide additional details about how NASA gained access to the satellite bus. Alan Zide, a program executive in NASAs heliophysics division and the point of contact listed in the RFI, did not respond to email messages with questions about the satellite.

NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said March 1 that NASA is in discussions with the U.S. Air Force to obtain the bus. NASA and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) are in discussions concerning the transfer of a satellite bus that the USAF has determined does not meet current or projected Air Force mission requirements, he said.

U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Capt. AnnMarie Annicelli said March 2 she was not familiar with the satellite and was looking into it, but has not provided any additional information. When asked who the original customer was for this Boeing-built satellite, Addrian Brooks, a spokesman for Boeing Network and Space Systems, said March 2 that the company was unable to disclose this information.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who specializes in space history, notes the dimensions for the satellite provided in the RFI are consistent with two versions of satellites built by Hughes Space and Communications. One, the HS-389, was used for the Intelsat 6 series of satellites, while the HS-393 was sold to other commercial customers. Those satellites were built and launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Boeing acquired Hughes Space and Communications in 2000.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), he noted, is thought to have used the same bus for a series of data relay satellites operating under the code name QUASAR, also known as the Satellite Data System (SDS). Four such satellites launched from 1989 through 1996.

Spin-stabilized satellites have fallen out of favor, having been replaced by three-axis stabilized satellites. The last Boeing-built commercial spin-stabilized satellite, a Boeing 376 spacecraft called e-BIRD, launched in 2003.

McDowell said a later generation of QUASAR satellites, launched from 1998 to as recently as 2014, were also assumed to be three-axis stabilized. However, he noted theres little known about this series of satellites, leaving open the possibility it also used the same bus as the earlier spacecraft.

Its possible that some other NRO program also used this bus, but QUASAR/SDS is definitely the most likely, he said in a March 3 email.

If the satellite in question is indeed from the NRO, it would not be the first time NASA inherited spare hardware from that intelligence agency. In 2012, NASA announced it was taking possession of two 2.4-meter mirror assemblies from the NRO. The mirrors were reportedly built for NROs Future Imagery Architecture program, and became surplus when the NRO cancelled the optical portion of that program in the mid-2000s.

NASA, after taking possession of the mirrors, solicited ideas from the scientific community on how to use what it called Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets. NASA decided to use one of the mirrors for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which originally planned to build a much smaller mirror. WFIRST is planned for launch in the mid-2020s.

Phillip Swarts contributed to this story.

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NASA seeks payload ideas for mystery satellite - SpaceNews

Last year, MIT News editor Maya Weinstock submitted her Women of NASA minifigures design to LEGO Ideas. LEGO has just approved the idea and laster this year or early 2018 will release an official minifig set of these five inspiring women in science:

Margaret Hamilton, computer scientist: While working at MIT under contract with NASA in the 1960s, Hamilton developed the on-board flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon. She is known for popularizing the modern concept of software.

Katherine Johnson, mathematician and space scientist: A longtime NASA researcher, Johnson is best known for calculating and verifying trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo programs including the Apollo 11 mission that first landed humans on the moon.

Sally Ride, astronaut, physicist, and educator: A physicist by training, Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. After retiring as a NASA astronaut, she founded an educational company focusing on encouraging children especially girls to pursue the sciences.

Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer: One of the first female executives at NASA, Roman is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. She also developed NASA's astronomy research program.

Mae Jemison, astronaut, physician, and entrepreneur: Trained as a medical doctor, Jemison became the first African-American woman in space in 1992. After retiring from NASA, Jemison established a company that develops new technologies and encourages students in the sciences.

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Psychologist Gert Storms doesnt want to review scientific papers if their authors refuse to share with him the underlying data. The American Psychological Association (APA), which publishes the journal he edits, has asked him to resign. Nature.coms Gautam Naik reports that the effort to force him out is a test of The Peer Reviewers Opennness []

In 1958 in an Illinois creek bed, an amateur fossil collector named Francis Tully discovered the fossilized remains of a bizarre creature that resembled a mollusk, insect, and worm yet was none of those things. Since then, thousands of 300 million-year-old fossilized Tully Monsters have turned up and the creature was officially named as the []

Frog tongue mechanism has been well-documented, but only recently have scientists started looking at the remarkable combo of tongue softness and frog spits chemical makeup.

St. Patricks Day is a boozy celebration of history and culture, and the ShamRockIt! Nipyata is a delightful fusion of traditions, packing ten assorted nips (or airplane bottles) and candy into a shamrock-shaped piata, eager to be bludgeonedto a recyclable mess and relinquish its pot of confectionary gold.The mental gymnastics to make sense of this []

Convenience stores and gas stations are not the only places that utilize security cameras. Security in the digital age has extended more and more to individuals, and the iON the Home HD WiFi camera is a budget-friendly option that can help you monitor your home or office for security purposes, or just to keep an []

Wireless headphones arent a mind-bending thing anymore now that Apple made them the standard thing-to-be-outraged-over-in-the-new-iPhone fare, thereby killing the cool factor. But lets be reasonable here. Wires really are a pain when youre running, trying to get off the bus, or even just standing up from your desk. Wireless headphones make sense, they just dont []

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Lego announces "Women of NASA" minifigs - Boing Boing

March 2, 2017 11:45 PM

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) NASA recently asked the publicto help name seven newly discovered planets,and the people have responded.

Social media is all abuzz about the solar system with people chiming in like crazy, using the hashtag #7NamesFor7NewPlanets.

I think thats amazing, one man told CBS2s Jessica Layton.

It started trending after NASA suggestedthe public weigh inon what to call the seven newly discovered planets near the Trappist-1 star in the Aquarius constellation.

What I would name new planets? Oh God, thats a lot of pressure, awoman said.

But outside the Forbidden Planet comic book store, nobody was too shy to share, Layton reported.

Johnny thyroids, murple, grapefruit, one man suggested.

I would name them after the seven dwarfs, another added.

Barbara? one man said.

Id name them after the women who worked at NASA who were inHidden Figures,' a woman added.

From serious to silly and sweet, its got peopletalking about science, which pleases planetarium manager Kevin Conod.

We do know that they are rocky type planets, and they are somewhat similar to the Earth in terms of size, he explained.

During a visit to the museum in Newark, Conod told Layton the unnamed planets are light years away from the Earth. With current technology, it would take 159,000 years to get there.

So lets face it the closest well get in this lifetime is having fun trying to name them.

Its a good way to engage the public, Conod said.

Especially now, science needs all the fans it can get, said Merle Milder, of North Bergen, New Jersey.

This might be a good way of tryingget people to start caring about NASA and space expedition stuffbecause I know theyre horrendously underfunded, said Peter Gritch, of Queens.

For now at least, plenty are willing to give their two cents.

Conod said its possible NASA will take the ideas into consideration, but ultimately its the International Astronomical Union that will make the final decision.

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NASA Wants Public's Help Naming 7 Newly Discovered Planets - CBS New York

Science Daily

NASA study improves forecasts of summer Arctic sea ice Science Daily However, each year, as the sea ice starts to melt in the spring following its maximum wintertime extent, scientists still struggle to estimate exactly how much ice they expect will disappear through the melt season. Now, a new NASA forecasting model ... and more »

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NASA study improves forecasts of summer Arctic sea ice - Science Daily

The Women of NASA set, submitted by Maia Weinstock, celebrates female NASA pioneers. Maia Weinstock hide caption

Five storied female NASA pioneers will soon grace toy-store shelves, in Lego form.

The Danish company announced on Tuesday that it would produce the Women of NASA set, submitted by science writer Maia Weinstock.

"Women have played critical roles throughout the history of the U.S. space program," Weinstock wrote in her project proposal. "Yet in many cases, their contributions are unknown or under-appreciated especially as women have historically struggled to gain acceptance in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics."

She said the set is meant to shed light on the rich history of women in STEM professions.

It beat out eleven other projects in the Lego Ideas competition, which each had to receive votes from 10,000 supporters to be eligible.

A Lego figure of mathematician and space scientist Katherine Johnson, whose story was featured in the recent film Hidden Figures. Maia Weinstock hide caption

The set features Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose story was featured in the recent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who is now 98 years old, appeared on stage at the Academy Awards on Sunday. She was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

Other NASA women honored in Lego form are:

"Excited to be part of such a great group of women," Jemison tweeted after the announcement, "And even more jazzed about women in STEM!"

Lego says it is particularly excited about the "inspirational value" of the set. It is still determining the final product design the photos accompanying this story were part of the proposal submitted by Weinstock.

"I hope it sets a new example for both girls and boys," Weinstock told the BBC. "Girls, in that they can and should be engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and boys, in that they internalise at an early age that these careers are for everyone, not only men."

A Lego spokesperson says Women of NASA is slated for launch later this year. Other projects that were vying for Lego production included depictions of the Addams Family Mansion and the Large Hadron Collider.

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Women Of NASA To Be Immortalized In Lego Form - NPR

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts Wall Street Journal (subscription) NASA's first big decision under President Donald Trump entails paying up to $373 million so Russia can continue flying U.S. astronauts into orbit potentially through 2019. The move reflects growing concerns that Boeing Co. and entrepreneur Elon Musk's ... NASA buys up to five more seats on future Soyuz missionsSpaceflight Now NASA buys two more seats to the International Space Station on Russia's Soyuz rocketThe Verge Boeing strikes a deal to give NASA astronauts a lift to International Space StationWashington Post SpaceNews all 26 news articles »

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NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts - Wall Street Journal (subscription)