Post by Mike Shupp.
(If you click through to the Facebook photo, be sure to open the photo viewer to see it. And of course also click through to the Forbes and NASA links for the full images and story.)
Tag: NASA
“The much-anticipated launch of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to the International Space Station has seen some delays due to the need for additional testing, but now things are looking good…”
“Finding brown dwarfs near our sun is like discovering there’s a hidden house on your block that you didn’t know about,” Cushing said. “It’s thrilling to me to know we’ve got neighbors out there yet to be discovered. With WISE, we may even find a brown dwarf closer to us than our closest known star.” Scientists using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body.
The Y dwarfs are in our sun’s neighborhood, from approximately nine to 40 light-years away. The Y dwarf approximately nine light-years away, WISE 1541-2250, may become the seventh closest star system, bumping Ross 154 back to eighth. By comparison, the star closest to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is about four light-years away…
Herschel has found the first robust evidence of molecular oxygen in the Orion Nebula. The observed abundance is ten times larger than indicated by previous observations of other molecular clouds, but is still well below theoretical expectations. The results suggest that, in special circumstances, the heat from newborn stars can liberate oxygen frozen out on dust grains, thus increasing the amount of molecular oxygen able to form in warm, dense gas clouds…
ESA Science & Technology: Herschel uncovers ‘hidden’ oxygen in Orion
“The crew of NASA’s final space shuttle mission closed the hatch to the International Space Station for the final time on Monday in preparation for the shuttle’s last flight back to Earth.” Beautiful slideshow:
Space shuttle prepares to depart station for last time | Reuters
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Tweetup! Sun-Earth Day 2011
My brothers Bill and David are there today:
“100 lucky twitter attendees have been selected to be part of the first ever Sun Earth Day – Goddard/Smithsonian joint tweetup! Participants will start their day with a trip to the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington DC for a personalized tour focusing on the “Ancient Mysteries” Sun Earth Day theme. Then they will travel back to Goddard Space Flight Center for an afternoon VIP tour of the Integration and Test Facility and other Goddard facilities, getting a first hand view of the “New Discoveries” here at NASA.”