NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth.

This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about one percent as dense, and its high-speed winds are less frequent and weaker than Earth’s.

For years, researchers debated whether sand dunes observed on Mars were mostly fossil features related to past climate, rather than currently active. In the past two years, researchers using images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera have detected and reported sand movement.

CONTINUED at Science Daily.

Strange flying-saucer-shaped moons embedded in Saturn’s rings have baffled scientists studying images transmitted by the ESA’s Cassini Spacecraft. Research suggests that the oddly shaped moons, Pan and Atlas, are born largely from clumps of icy particles in the rings themselves, a discovery that could shed light on how Earth and other planets formerd from the disk of matter that once surrounded our newborn sun.

Observations by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed the moons Atlas and Pan, each roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) from pole to pole, have massive ridges bulging from their equators some 3.7 to 6.5 miles (6 to 10.5 kilometers) high, giving them the classic Earthly UFO appearance.

At first glance, one could assume that fast rates of spin might have stretched Atlas and Pan out into such unusual shapes, just as tossing a disk of pizza dough flattens it out. But astronomers discovered that each takes about 14 hours to complete a rotation — not nearly fast enough to cause the flattened, disk-like shape.

Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., and her colleagues suspected these peculiar moons could be formed mostly from Saturn’s rings, rather than just from fragments produced in collisions of larger moons. The location of the ridges lined up precisely with the rings of icy particles in which they were embedded.

After analyzing the shapes and densities of the moons from data captured by Cassini, Porco’s team found that Pan and Atlas appear to be mostly light, porous, icy bodies, just like the particles making up the rings. Computer simulations suggest one-half to two-thirds of these bizarre moons are made of ring material, piled up on massive, dense fragments of bigger moons that disintegrated billions of years ago after catastrophic collisions with one another.

Astrophysicist Sebastien Charnoz at University of Paris Diderot, the lead author of a related study suggests that the Saturnian ice-clump moons elongated and bulged out into the flying-saucer shapes in the manner of accretion disks, which “are found everywhere in the universe —around black holes, around stars, around Jupiter.”

Charnoz added that understanding how the icy particles piled up to make these shapes could shed light on how matter in the protoplanetary disks of our Solar System that formed around our newborn sun could have clumped together to make planets. …

Source: The Daily Galaxy.

NASA on Monday cleared a cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies for a test flight to the International Space Station that is scheduled to launch on April 30, NASA officials said.

The Dragon mission would be the first time a privately owned and operated vessel visits the space station, a $100 billion research laboratory owned by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada that orbits about 240 miles above Earth.

NASA is counting on Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, and a second company, Orbital Sciences Corp., to keep the space station stocked with supplies and science experiments following the retirement of the space shuttles last year. The companies’ combined contracts for cargo deliveries are worth $3.8 billion.

“In order for space station to be successful, these systems have to be there for us,” space station program manager Mike Suffredini said at news conference following a NASA review of the upcoming SpaceX mission.

“We’re really rooting for the teams to come through,” added NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.

An orbiting Nasa space telescope captured a dark, planet-sized object flying close to the sun on Monday – and extending what looks like a refueling tube into the star’s surface.

The black, Death Star-like, orb is briefly engulfed in light from the sun, then flies off into space.

A video edited from the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s photos inspired a wave of speculation on YouTube.

The imagery was captured by Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and edited together by a YouTube user, Sunsflare, who challenged experts to explain the strange ‘visitor.’

Naturally, the space agency has a rather more ordinary explanation for the strange, black orb.

It’s not a visitor from another solar system – or a planet being born out of the surface of the sun, as others had speculated.

Instead, it’s a solar ‘prominence’ or ‘filament’ – a feature extending out from the sun which forms over the course of a day, and can extend hundreds of thousands of miles into space.

Scientists are still puzzled as to why these features form. The ‘dark’ parts are material cooler than the surrounding solar matter.

C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre said, in a reply to Sunsflare’s video, ‘Filaments appear to be dark because they’re coolerin relation to what’s in the background. When you look at it from the edge of the sun, what you see is this spherical object and you’re actually looking down the tunnel.’

Nasa says, ‘A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disc) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface.

‘Prominences are anchored to the Sun’s surface and extend outwards into the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere, called the corona.

‘Scientists are still researching how and why prominences are formed.

‘An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.

Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory frequently captures the phenomenon – although often as violent eruptions, rather than the eerie sphere of this week’s activity.

‘It is not uncommon for prominence material to drain back to the surface as well as escape during an eruption,’ says Holly Gilbert a Goddard solar physicist.

‘Prominences are large structures, so once the magnetic fields supporting the mass are stretched out so that they are more vertical, it allows an easy path for some of the mass to drain back down.’

Source: The Daily Mail.

A Nasa spacecraft has detected oxygen around one of Saturn’s icy moons, Dione.

The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them.

Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants.

The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

According to co-author Andrew Coates of University College London, Dione has no liquid water and so does not have the conditions to support life. But it is possible that other moons of Jupiter and Saturn do.

“Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life,” Prof Coates said.

The discovery was made using the Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Dione nearly two years ago. Instruments on board the unmanned probe detected a thin layer of oxygen around the moon, so thin that scientists prefer to call it an “exosphere” rather than an atmosphere.

But the discovery is important because it suggests there is a process at work around the solar system’s gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, in which oxygen is released from their icy satellites.

It seems that highly charged particles from the planets’ powerful radiation belts split the water in the ice into hydrogen and oxygen.

Dione’s sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter. …

CONTINUED at BBC News.

NASA’s inspector general revealed in congressional testimony that a space agency computer was stolen last year with the command codes to control the International Space Station.

In a statement given to a House committee on the security challenges facing NASA, Paul K. Martin said that an unencrypted NASA computer stolen last year was one of 48 taken between April 2009 and April 2011.

“The March 2011 theft of an unencrypted NASA notebook computer resulted in the loss of algorithms used to command and control the International Space Station,” Martin said in his written testimony. “Other lost or stolen notebooks contained Social Security numbers and sensitive data on NASA’s Constellation and Orion programs.”

CONTINUED at CBS DC.

The Milky Way may be teeming with more than 100,000 free-flying planets for every star — these are worlds that unlike our orderly solar system are not orbiting parent stars.

This is the finding from a study that extrapolates from observations of a dozen so-called “nomad” planets, which were detected when their gravity briefly contorted light of passing stars — a phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing.

To derive the estimate, astrophysicist Louis Strigari, with Stanford University’s Kavli Institute, and colleagues factored in the gravitational pull of the Milky Way, how much material it contains and how that material might be divided up among bodies ranging from Jupiter-sized objects down to tiny worlds like Pluto.

Among the study’s most interesting conclusions is that that there are not enough solar systems in the galaxy to account for all the nomad planets, which means that not all the free-flying worlds are orphan planets ejected from their birthplace.

The study raises new questions about how planets form and whether there are different processes for making planet-sized bodies. It also adds another twist to the discussion of habitable worlds beyond Earth.

“If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist,” said Strigari.

A headcount of the objects will be among the tasks for the next-generation of large telescopes, including NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, both of which are scheduled to begin operating in the early 2020s. …

Source: Discovery News.

A Nasa satellite has provided jaw-dropping pictures of a huge ‘storm’ brewing under the sea.

The swirling mass of water – which measures a whopping 93 miles wide – has been spotted off the coast of South Africa by the Terra satellite on December 26.

But there’s no need to alert international shipping, or worry about the poor fish that might find themselves in an endless washing cycle – the body of water poses no threat.

Indeed, it is more likely to create life by sucking nutrients from the bed and bringing them to the surface.

The sea storms – which are better known as eddies – form bizarre whirl shaped shapes deep beneath the ocean’s surface.

This counter-clockwise eddy is thought to have peeled off from the Agulhas Current, which flows along the southeastern coast of Africa and around the tip of South Africa.

Agulhas eddies – also called ‘current rings’ – tend to be among the largest in the world, transporting warm, salty water from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic.

Agulhas eddies can remove juvenile fish from the continental shelf, reducing catch sizes if one passes through a fishing region.

The bizarre phenomenon was spotted when the Terra satellite was conducting a routine natural-colour image of the Earth. …

Source: The Daily Mail.

If approved, Obama will sever NASA’s partnership with European Space Agency to send probes to Mars.

The budget coming Monday from the Obama administration will send the NASA division that launches rovers to Mars and probes to Jupiter crashing back to Earth.

Scientists briefed on the proposed budget said that the president’s plan drops funding for planetary science at NASA from $1.5 billion this year to $1.2 billion next year, with further cuts continuing through 2017.

It would eat at NASA’s Mars exploration program, which, after two high-profile failures in 1999, has successfully sent three probes into Martian orbit and landed three more on the planet’s surface.

“We’re doing all this great science and taking the public along with us,” said Jim Bell, an Arizona State University scientist and president of the Planetary Society who works on NASA’s Mars roverOpportunity. “Pulling the rug out from under it is going to be really devastating.”

CONTINUED at The Washington Post.