Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Is the Sun’s Heat Output Changing? NASA’s Glory Mission Intends to Find Out - Rocket Also Carries Tiny Student-Built Satellite -- A University of Colorado Boulder instrument for studying changes in the Sun’s brightness and its impact on Earth’s climate is one of the payloads on NASA’s Glory mission, set to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this week. A second [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
NASA Releases Images of Man-Made Crater on Comet - NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus. The spacecraft made its closest approach to Comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST at a distance of approximately 111 miles. Stardust took 72 [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
NASA Finds Earth-Size Planet Candidates In Habitable Zone, Six Planet System -- NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Sark Becomes World’s First Dark Sky Island (A Good Place for Looking Up…) The Channel Island of Sark has been recognized for the quality of its night sky by the International Dark-sky Association (IDA), which has designated it the world’s first dark sky island, the latest in a select group of dark sky places around the world. Sark has no public street lighting and there are no [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
NASA’s Stardust-NExT spacecraft is nearing a celestial date with comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14. The mission will allow scientists for the first time to look for changes on a comet’s surface that occurred following an orbit around the Sun. The Stardust-NExT, or New Exploration of Tempel, spacecraft will take high-resolution images during the encounter and attempt to measure the composition, [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
New Telescope Explores Solar System “Outback” In the outer reaches of our solar system lies a mysterious region far more remote and difficult to explore than the Australian outback. It remains the only part of our solar system not visited by spacecraft. Called the Kuiper Belt, this area beyond Neptune is home to the dwarf planets Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea. It also harbors [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
NASA Telescope Catches Thunderstorms Hurling Antimatter into Space - Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Closeups of Saturn’s Moon Rhea Show Unprecedented Detail - Newly released by NASA, images of Saturn’s second largest moon Rhea obtained by the Cassini spacecraft show dramatic views of fractures cutting through craters on the moon’s surface, revealing a history of tectonic rumbling. During a flyby In March 2010, the Cassini craft made its closest approach to Rhea’s surface so far, [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
It’s Cold and Wet at The Moon’s South Pole Frozen water just inches below the Moon’s surface has been confirmed by an international team of scientists. Based on data the group obtained with an instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, NASA chose the impact site for the LCROSS probe, which slammed into the Moon’s surface last year in October in an attempt to kick up [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Building Blocks of Life Created in “Impossible” Place NASA-funded scientists have discovered amino acids, a fundamental building block of life, in a meteorite where none were expected. “This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees [...]
