Scientists set to find out is there life on mars

Scientists have been trying to find signs of life on the planet for decades and while some signs have been quite encouraging, they have not been able to find a definitive answer to the question.

This time, yet again, NASA has opened up the chapter in search for extraterrestrial life on Mars. "I'd be surprised if we landed on the surface (of Mars) and didn't find something that looked like it could have been a formerly habitable environment," said California Institute of Technology planetary scientist John Grotzinger, lead researcher for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory.

In the past, several missions have been launched to find life on Mars. A successful mission called the Viking program touched down on Mars in 1976 and found evidence of biological activity. However, those results couldn't be relied upon due to their contested results.

This new mission by NASA is termed Curiosity. It is not going to be a life-detection mission like its predecessors, rather, it is intended to chemically analyze the landing site known as Gale Crater for habitats that could have supported life.

Curiosity is going to be the fourth rover, the previous ones being Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity - which all probed for life and even signs of water on Mars. The findings from these previous missions provided overwhelming evidence that Mars was once a warmer and wetter place. These signs show that Mars once sported an ocean, rivers and other water bodies on its surface. The sign of water in turn points towards the sign of life on the planet.

"One of the ingredients of life is water. We're now looking to see if we can find other conditions that are necessary for life by defining habitability or what does it take in the environment to support life," said Mary Voytek, director of NASA's astrobiology program.

Curiosity will reach its destination in August, 2012.

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Does Indonesian Archipelago is The Atlantis Island

Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias. In his notes, Plato wrote that Atlantis lay "beyond the pillars of Hercules", and has a navy conquered Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately the year 9500 BC. After failing to attack the Greeks, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in just one night".

The island of Atlantis as is known is a mysterious island that has so far its existence is not known with certainty. Before we discuss why Indonesia is part of the lost island of Atlantis is missing. We must know the beginning of the Atlantis itself or the Early History At the island of Atlantis.

Atlantis is generally regarded as a myth created by Plato to illustrate political theory. Although the functions of Atlantis story clearly visible to most experts, they are debating whether and how much Plato's account was inspired by older traditions. Some experts say that Plato describes the events that have passed, such as the Thera eruption or the Trojan war, while others claim that he was inspired by contemporary events like the collapse of Helike the year 373 BC or the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415-413 BC. (Source: id. wikipedia.org)

In the classical era of the lost island of atlantis is often discussed, but most of them do not believe it and sometimes make jokes. The story of Atlantis is less known in the Middle Ages, however, in the modern era, the story of Atlantis was rediscovered. And now are busy talking that Indonesia is part of the island or the lost city of atlantis.

There are dozens - even hundreds - the proposed location of Atlantis. Several hypotheses are archaeological or scientific hypothesis, while others are based on physics or other. Many of the proposals that have similar characteristics to the Atlantis story (water, major disasters, the relevant time period), but none has been demonstrated as the true story of the history of Atlantis.


Islands in Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula that we observe today is a relic that was sunk from the Lemurian continent of Atlantis, the high peak mountains of volcanic eruptions that became the volcanic islands of this region, the site of a true paradise in all ancient traditions. The submerged part of the continental area now forming the seabed is muddy and shallow in the South China Sea. This region is surrounded by Indonesia and forms the boundary between the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean.

Then, as now, Indonesia formed the separation of the New World of the Ancient World, what the ancients (ancient / old) called Ultima Thule ("Ultimate Divide"? Separation Perfect). Thule is also related to what our parents named as the Pillars of Hercules, which according to Plato, is placed "right in front of Atlantis" (hyper ten Heraklei Nyssai).

Pillars of Hercules which is also the border who can not pass between the Old World and New World, also called East and West. Both are separated by an arc of volcanic islands in Indonesia, is really the limit of tectonic plates that make up the Old World and New World. Fortify this navigation, in the Atlantis also explicitly mentioned in the description of Plato and other ancient sources on Atlantis.

Is Indonesia a former kingdom of Atlantis? That's all back to what you see and believe

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ESA - NASA on Solar Science Mission

On October 4, 2011, the European Space Agency announced it's two next science missions, including Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft geared to study the powerful influence of the sun. Solar Orbiter will be an ESA-led mission, with strong NASA contributions managed from Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The mission's launch is planned for 2017 from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a NASA-provided launch vehicle. Solar Orbiter will be placed into an elliptical orbit around the sun. Its closest approach will be near the orbit of Mercury, 75% of the distance between Earth and the sun – some 21,000,000 miles away from the sun's surface.

Solar Orbiter will venture closer to the Sun than any previous mission. The spacecraft will also carry advanced instrumentation that will help untangle how activity on the sun sends out radiation, particles and magnetic fields that can affect Earth's magnetic environment, causing aurora, or potentially damaging satellites, interfering with GPS communications or even Earth's electrical power grids.

Being so close to the sun also means that the Solar Orbiter will stay over a given area of the solar surface for a longer time, allowing the instruments to track the evolution of sunspots, active regions, coronal holes and other solar activity far longer than has been done before.

Solar Orbiter is also designed to make major breakthroughs in our understanding of how the sun generates and propels the flow of particles in which the planets are bathed, known as the solar wind. Solar activity and solar eruptions create strong perturbations in this wind, triggering spectacular auroral displays on Earth and other planets. Solar Orbiter will be close enough to the sun to both observe the details of how the solar wind is accelerated off the sun and to sample the wind shortly after it leaves the surface.

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Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula

This infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by.

But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image -- two natural satellites orbiting above WISE streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old -- infants in stellar terms -- and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These "tadpoles" appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE's infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.

The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.

Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.

WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.

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The three stars of Orion's Belt.

There are many stars in this image shining through the atmosphere. Why aren't more of them streaked? The answer is : Earth has an exponential atmosphere its density increases very rapidly as you sink into it. Orion's belt stars are the lowest of the bright stars in today's image, hence they are refracted most. A few other stars are at about the same low altitude, but they are too dim to display the faint tails.

They look like meteors flying in formation three stars with upward-pointing tails shining through Earth's airglow layer.What are they?

They are The three stars of Orion's Belt.

NASA scientist Rob Suggs explains: "Orion was setting behind Earth's limb when Don took this picture. His camera was locked on Orion, so Earth's atmosphere moved upward during the exposure. As the Belt stars were covered, they were also deflected upward by atmospheric refraction -- hence the illusion of three meteors in this long exposure. We know that the descent of the setting Sun can be slowed by refraction; this is the same effect."

"The atmosphere acts like a giant lens," agrees expert Les Cowley. "Here on Earth, when we see the setting Sun with its center on the horizon, the uppermost limb of the Sun has, in fact, already set. In such cases, refraction has lifted the upper part of the Sun by 0.25º -- half its apparent diameter. From orbit, light rays enter the Earth's atmosphere and then have an equally tortuous journey out again. Refraction is almost doubled. The setting Sun and setting stars are lifted twice as much."

In a Picture of the Day last week we saw the same thing: Orion's foot, the bright star Rigel, posing as a meteor as it set behind Earth's limb. "A magnified image of Rigel reveals a streak dimming and reddening in the upward direction," notes Cowley. "The reddening is caused by the atmosphere scattering more blue light than it does red."

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The sea ice is not only declining, it is becoming more drastic

The sea ice is not only declining, the pace of the decline is becoming more drastic, The older, thicker ice is declining faster than the rest, making for a more vulnerable perennial ice cover. the continued low minimum sea ice levels fits into the large-scale decline pattern that scientists have watched unfold over the past three decades" said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Last month the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder showed that the summertime sea ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low.

The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and shrinks each summer as the sun rises higher in the northern sky. Each year the Arctic sea ice reaches its annual minimum extent in September. It hit a record low in 2007.

While the sea ice extent did not dip below the 2007 record, the sea ice area as measured by the microwave radiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite did drop slightly lower than 2007 levels for about 10 days in early September, Comiso said. Sea ice "area" differs from extent in that it equals the actual surface area covered by ice, while extent includes any area where ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean.

This summer's low ice extent continued the downward trend seen over the last 30 years, which scientists attribute largely to warming temperatures caused by climate change. Data show that Arctic sea ice has been declining both in extent and thickness. Since 1979, September Arctic sea ice extent has declined by 12 percent per decade.

"The oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic continues to decline, especially in the Beaufort Sea and the Canada Basin," NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve said. "This appears to be an important driver for the low sea ice conditions over the past few summers."

Climate models have suggested that the Arctic could lose almost all of its summer ice cover by 2100, but in recent years, ice extent has declined faster than the models predicted.

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Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula

This infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by.

But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image -- two natural satellites orbiting above WISE streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old -- infants in stellar terms -- and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These "tadpoles" appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE's infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.

The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.

Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.

WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.

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Origin of Dinosaur - Earth's greatest mysteries 1

Open the case on one of Earth's greatest mysteries Searching for the Origins of the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid

Scientists think that a giant asteroid, which broke up long ago in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, eventually made its way to Earth and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Data from NASA's WISE mission likely rules out the leading suspect, a member of a family of asteroids called Baptistina, so the search for the origins of the dinosaur-killing asteroid goes on. 

According to that theory, Baptistina crashed into another asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter about 160 million years ago. The collision sent shattered pieces as big as mountains flying. One of those pieces was believed to have impacted Earth, causing the dinosaurs' extinction.

While scientists are confident a large asteroid crashed into Earth approximately 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and some other life forms on our planet, they do not know exactly where the asteroid came from or how it made its way to Earth. A 2007 study using visible-light data from ground-based telescopes first suggested the remnant of a huge asteroid, known as Baptistina, as a possible suspect.

Since this scenario was first proposed, evidence developed that the so-called Baptistina family of asteroids was not the responsible party. With the new infrared observations from WISE, astronomers say Baptistina may finally be ruled out.

"As a result of the WISE science team's investigation, the demise of the dinosaurs remains in the cold case files," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The original calculations with visible light estimated the size and reflectivity of the Baptistina family members, leading to estimates of their age, but we now know those estimates were off. With infrared light, WISE was able to get a more accurate estimate, which throws the timing of the Baptistina theory into question."

WISE surveyed the entire celestial sky twice in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. The asteroid-hunting portion of the mission, called NEOWISE, used the data to catalogue more than 157,000 asteroids in the main belt and discovered more than 33,000 new ones.

How is the Truth story of the Dinosaur Extinction........?

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Ice Conditions Key To Antarctic Ice Breakup

We recently read in the news that the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March was strong enough to send waves that snapped a Manhattan-sized chunk of ice off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf some 8,100 miles away.

That’s true, but as pointed out at the end of this piece, there’s more to this story than just the strength of the earthquake. Though it’s not making it into the headlines, the condition of the ice in the region was also key. Specifically, the lack of nearby sea ice, coastal ice (also called fast or landfast ice) and pack ice made the portion of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf that broke off particularly susceptible to the incoming waves from the tsunami.

“The recent calving from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf suggests that, while the rifts provide the ice-shelf front with a zone that is weakened with respect to stress, and while tsunamis arrive episodically to cause vibrational disturbances to these rifts, some additional enabling condition must be satisfied before a given tsunami can lead to the detachment of an iceberg.

The timing of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan coincided with the typical summer sea-ice minimum . As observed in the MODIS imagery and confirmed in the ASAR imagery, the region north of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf was devoid of either fast or pack ice at the time of predicted arrival of the tsunami. Fast ice is an important factor in ice shelf stability . Additionally, the absence of sea ice meant that the energy associated with the tsunami incident on the ice-shelf front was not damped by sea-ice flexure.

With a distant tsunami source, over an irregular ocean bathymetry, and taking into account the dispersion of high-frequency components of the tsunami outside the shallow-water approximation, a complex pattern of dispersed waves is predicted in the wake of the leading front of the tsunami , As these waves interacted with the ice shelf over a period of hours to days, flexural modes may have been resonantly excited, each with the potential to trigger iceberg calving , in a pattern reminiscent of the delayed response of harbors documented in the far field during the 2004 Sumatra tsunami

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A Star Formations

The dwarf galaxy NGC 4214 is ablaze with young stars and gas clouds. Located around 10 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs), the galaxy's close proximity, combined with the wide variety of evolutionary stages among the stars, make it an ideal laboratory to research the triggers of star formation and evolution. .

Cepheus B, a molecular cloud located in our Milky Galaxy about 2,400 light years from the Earth, provides an excellent model to determine how stars are formed. This composite image of Cepheus B combines data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

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The Green Ring

This glowing emerald nebula seen by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is reminiscent of the glowing ring wielded by the superhero Green Lantern. In the comic books, the diminutive Guardians of the Planet "Oa" forged his power ring, but astronomers believe rings like this are actually sculpted by the powerful light of giant "O" stars, the most massive type of star known to exist.

At the center of this ring are a couple of giant stars whose intense ultraviolet light has carved out the bubble, though they blend in with other stars when viewed in infrared. This bubble is far from unique. Just as the Guardians of Oa have selected many beings to serve as Green Lanterns and patrol different sectors of space, Spitzer has found that such bubbles are common and an can be found around O stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy. The small objects at the lower right area of the image may themselves be similar regions seen at much greater distances across the galaxy.

Named RCW 120, this region of hot gas and glowing dust can be found in the murky clouds encircled by the tail of the constellation Scorpius. The ring of dust actually is glowing in infrared colors that our eyes cannot see, but show up brightly when viewed by Spitzer's infrared detectors.

Rings like this are so common in Spitzer's observations that astronomers have even enlisted the help of the public to help them find and catalog them all. Anyone interested in joining the search as a citizen scientist can visit "The Milky Way Project," part of the "Zooniverse" of public astronomy projects.  

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New Planet Discovered

Image above: These time-lapse images of a newfound planet in our solar system, called 2003UB313, were taken on Oct. 21, 2003, using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The planet, circled in white, is seen moving across a field of stars. The three images were taken about 90 minutes apart.


Scientists did not discover that the object in these pictures was a planet until Jan. 8, 2005. Image credit: Samuel Oschin Telescope, Palomar Observatory

Image above: This artist's concept shows the planet catalogued as 2003UB313 at the lonely outer fringes of our solar system. Our Sun can be seen in the distance. The new planet, which is yet to be formally named, is at least as big as Pluto and about three times farther away from the Sun than Pluto. It is very cold and dark.

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NASA's Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

Kepler-11 is a sun-like star around which six planets orbit. At times, two or more planets pass in front of the star at once, as shown in this artist's conception of a simultaneous transit of three planets observed by NASA's Kepler spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2010. 




 

This artist’s conception shows the Kepler-11 planetary system and our solar system from a tilted perspective to demonstrate that the orbits of each lie on similar planes.
Image credit: NASA/Tim Pyle Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

"The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler science team member at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "It’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star - we didn’t know such systems could even exist."

In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own.

"Few stars are known to have more than one transiting planet, and Kepler-11 is the first known star to have more than three," said Lissauer. "So we know that systems like this are not common. There’s certainly far fewer than one percent of stars that have systems like Kepler-11. But whether it’s one in a thousand, one in ten thousand or one in a million, that we don’t know, because we only have observed one of them."

All of the planets orbiting Kepler-11, a yellow dwarf star, are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune. The innermost planet, Kepler-11b, is ten times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. Moving outwards, the other planets are Kepler-11c, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, Kepler-11f, and the outermost planet, Kepler-11g, which is twice as close to its star than Earth is to the sun.

"The five inner planets are all closer to their star than any planet is to our sun and the sixth planet is still fairly close," said Lissauer.

If placed in our solar system, Kepler-11g would orbit between Mercury and Venus, and the other five planets would orbit between Mercury and our sun. The orbits of the five inner planets in the Kepler-11 planetary system are much closer together than any of

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