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NASA live stream cuts out after alien UFO sighting, claims blogger – Video

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NASA live stream cuts out after alien UFO sighting, claims blogger
NASA live stream cuts out after alien UFO sighting, claims blogger UFO watchers are looking for anyone who might have been tracking NASA #39;s live feed of the International Space Station on Jan....

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NASA live stream cuts out after alien UFO sighting, claims blogger - Video

Amazing Statues Depicting Life On Mars Revealed By NASA’s Curiosity Rover – Video

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Amazing Statues Depicting Life On Mars Revealed By NASA #39;s Curiosity Rover
NASA has released this picture that looks to have crystal clear images of evidence of prior civilizations on the planet Mars. Take a walk through this image with me and please comment and...

By: WhatsUpInTheSky37

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Amazing Statues Depicting Life On Mars Revealed By NASA's Curiosity Rover - Video

Approaching Titan a Billion Times Closer – Fantastic NASA Video looking at Saturns Moon – Video

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Approaching Titan a Billion Times Closer - Fantastic NASA Video looking at Saturns Moon
Remember the Titan (Landing): Ten years ago today, Jan. 14, 2005, the Huygens probe touched down on Saturn #39;s largest moon, Titan. This new, narrated movie was created with data collected...

By: Amazing Space - Astounding Images and Videos

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Approaching Titan a Billion Times Closer - Fantastic NASA Video looking at Saturns Moon - Video

NASA Observatories Take an Unprecedented Look into …

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Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth, is known for its surprising behavior, erupting twice in the 19th century for reasons scientists still don't understand. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, used NASA satellites, ground-based telescopes and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars' interactions.

"We are coming to understand the present state and complex environment of this remarkable object, but we have a long way to go to explain Eta Carinae's past eruptions or to predict its future behavior," said Goddard astrophysicist Ted Gull, who coordinates a research group that has monitored the star for more than a decade.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae comprises two massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them unusually close every 5.5 years. Both produce powerful gaseous outflows called stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties. Astronomers have established that the brighter, cooler primary star has about 90 times the mass of the sun and outshines it by 5 million times. While the properties of its smaller, hotter companion are more contested, Gull and his colleagues think the star has about 30 solar masses and emits a million times the sun's light.

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Speaking at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on Wednesday, the Goddard researchers discussed recent observations of Eta Carinae and how they fit with the group's current understanding of the system.

At closest approach, or periastron, the stars are 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) apart, or about the average distance between Mars and the sun. Astronomers observe dramatic changes in the system during the months before and after periastron. These include X-ray flares, followed by a sudden decline and eventual recovery of X-ray emission; the disappearance and re-emergence of structures near the stars detected at specific wavelengths of visible light; and even a play of light and shadow as the smaller star swings around the primary.

During the past 11 years, spanning three periastron passages, the Goddard group has developed a model based on routine observations of the stars using ground-based telescopes and multiple NASA satellites. "We used past observations to construct a computer simulation, which helped us predict what we would see during the next cycle, and then we feed new observations back into the model to further refine it," said Thomas Madura, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard and a theorist on the Eta Carinae team.

[image-141][image-69][image-123]

According to this model, the interaction of the two stellar winds accounts for many of the periodic changes observed in the system. The winds from each star have markedly different properties: thick and slow for the primary, lean and fast for the hotter companion. The primary's wind blows at nearly 1 million mph and is especially dense, carrying away the equivalent mass of our sun every thousand years. By contrast, the companion's wind carries off about 100 times less material than the primary's, but it races outward as much as six times faster.

Madura's simulations, which were performed on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, reveal the complexity of the wind interaction. When the companion star rapidly swings around the primary, its faster wind carves out a spiral cavity in the dense outflow of the larger star. To better visualize this interaction, Madura converted the computer simulations to 3-D digital models and made solid versions using a consumer-grade 3-D printer. This process revealed lengthy spine-like protrusions in the gas flow along the edges of the cavity, features that hadn't been noticed before.

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NASA's Pluto Probe Ramps Up for Rendezvous With History

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Our first-ever close-up look at Pluto is still six months away, but this week marks the official kickoff of observations for NASA's New Horizons mission and sets the stage for a steady drumbeat of revelations about a little-known planetary frontier.

"It won't be much to write home about at the beginning here," project scientist Hal Weaver told NBC News from the mission's headquarters at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. "But it'll be neat to watch the Pluto system expand as we get closer and closer."

New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral nine years ago and during that time, the piano-sized spacecraft has traveled nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) at the fastest clip ever recorded for an interplanetary probe. Also during that time, the International Astronomical Union put Pluto in a new pigeonhole reserved for "dwarf planets."

The $728 million mission is the first to study any of the icy dwarfs on the edge of the solar system's edge, and arguably the last one in the foreseeable future to visit a previously unexplored planetary realm. New Horizons' closest precedent is NASA's twin Voyager missions, which gave scientists their first up-close look at Uranus and Neptune.

"The last time anybody did anything like this was in 1989, with Voyager," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from the Southwest Research Institute who leads the New Horizons mission as principal investigator. "If you weren't at least 6 years old in 1989, you probably don't remember Voyager. So it turns out that about half the country has no recollection of a first-time planetary encounter like this."

Thursday marks T-minus-180 days on the countdown to the close encounter with Pluto on July 14, and the official start of the observational campaign for the approach.

New Horizons is still more than 133 million miles (215 million kilometers) away, and Pluto still looks like a mere speck. Nevertheless, the mission team plans to start using the spacecraft's pictures of Pluto to guide the spacecraft rather than relying on radio tracking.

The spacecraft was roused from hibernation on Dec. 6, and since then the team has been checking out its systems and the seven scientific instruments on board. The parameters for one of those instruments, the Alice ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, had to be tweaked to adjust for a slower-than-expected warmup, but those adjustments were completed on Tuesday.

"Everything looks like it's working great," Weaver said.

The New Horizons spacecraft is equipped with seven scientific instruments, including two spectrometers named Alice and Ralph (as a tribute to the characters played by Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason on "The Honeymooners"). The craft's plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator sticks out at right.

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NASA's Pluto Probe Ramps Up for Rendezvous With History


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