Space!

Preezy wrote:I love how stuff like this makes us anthropomorphise these robots

Brave little thing

New photos by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show Pluto in tantalizing detail, whetting researchers' appetite for the probe's highly anticipated flyby of the dwarf planet next week.

The images reveal a great deal of variation and complexity across Pluto's surface — including the four large dark patches near the equator first spotted by New Horizons late last month.

The origin and composition of the dark blotches remain mysterious, adding to the intrigue building ahead of the July 14 flyby.



"This object is unlike any other that we have observed," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said during a news briefing today (July 6). "Both Pluto and Charon [its largest moon] are already surprising us."

New Horizons captured the new photos last Wednesday (July 1) and Friday (July 3), shortly before suffering a glitch that sent it into a precautionary "safe mode" on Saturday (July 4).

The problem arose because New Horizons was trying to do two things at once on Saturday — compressing lots of science data and burning into the primary computer the "command load" for the spacecraft's nine days of flyby operations, mission officials said.

"The two were more than the processor could handle at one time, so the processor says, 'I'm overloaded,'" said New Horizons project manager Glen Fountain, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The team lost contact with New Horizons for more than an hour on Saturday, but once communications were restored, it quickly became clear what the problem was, Fountain said.

The spacecraft's handlers shepherded it out of safe mode on Sunday (July 5). New Horizons is healthy and ready to execute the nine-day flyby sequence, which begins on Tuesday (July 7), Fountain added.

Team members decided to focus on recovery and getting New Horizons ready for flyby operations, so the probe hasn't gathered any science data since entering safe mode on Saturday. As a result, New Horizons won't make 30 or so of the 496 observations planned from July 4 through July 16 — but the impact on the mission's science return will be negligible, Stern said.

"We can say that there is zero impact to the Group 1 — or highest-priority — science [objectives for the mission]," Stern said, adding that there will likely be minor gaps in several Group 2 and Group 3 objectives. "This is a speed bump in terms of the total return that we expect from this flyby."

The team isn't worried that the anomaly will recur during the close approach, because New Horizons won't be performing the two procedures involved concurrently again, Fountain said.

Further, the probe has already been in "encounter mode" multiple times during its long flight to Pluto, for preparation purposes. In fact, New Horizons rehearsed the full nine days of close-approach operations back in 2013, Stern said.

"So there's not a new operation tomorrow," he said. "I'm not worried at all about going into encounter mode tomorrow."

The $700 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006. During the July 14 flyby, the probe will zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto, capturing the first-ever up-close looks at the dwarf planet.

Dr Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and Principal Investigator on Nasa's New Horizons Pluto mission, made the exciting announcement whilst speaking at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Whilst speaking about the latest images of Pluto captured by the New Horizons probe, Stern said: "Nasa won't let me tell you what we're going to tell you on Thursday. It's amazing."

Last week, Nasa unveiled new images of the surfce of Pluto, which show a landscape of mountains, craters and gorges.

As reported by The Guardian, Stern said: "This world is alive."

"It has weather, it has hazes in the atmosphere, active geology... Every week I am floored."

There is no word yet on what the announcement could be, with Nasa taking the same line of secrecy as they did at their last big event - the announcement of the discovery of water on Mars.

However, a number of unknowns remain. Pluto has vast mountainous dune fields, a multicoloured surface, and a number of other mysterious features that have not been explained by science.

Thursday's announcement could relate to any one of these.

Nasa has had a year of big discoveries. From the discovery of flowing water on Mars, to the identification of 'Earth 2.0' - Kepler 452b, the most Earth-like planet every discovered - the leading space agency has been holding momentous announcements fairly regularly over the last few months.

As Stern said, "2015 will be a year in textbooks forever," as the year in which mankind discovered so much about its solar system.

Moggy wrote:They've found aliens.

Ad7 wrote:Moggy thought they said illegal alien and signed right up.

Astronomers Have Spotted Something Very, Very Strange Surrounding A Distant Star

Since its first light in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning the cosmos in search of habitable worlds beyond our Solar System. During its routine observations, the telescope observed something very unusual. Nestled between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, sits a strange and intriguing star.

Kepler is designed to observe stars and look for tiny dips in their brightness. These dips, especially if they repeat, can be a sign the star has one or more planets orbiting it. By measuring the timing and the size of the dips, scientists can learn a great deal about the transiting planet. The data is then processed automatically by computers with algorithms designed to look for repeating patterns – a sign that something is orbiting the star.

Kepler focused on this one region for four years, observing as many as 150,000 stars simultaneously. Due to the massive amounts of data collected, Kepler scientists rely on “citizen scientists” through a website called Planet Hunters to help them scour the data for anything unusual. In 2011, one star in particular was flagged as unusual.

Kepler observed the star KIC 8462852 for four years starting in 2009. Typically, orbiting planets only dim the light of their host star for a period of a few hours to a few days depending on their orbit. A group of citizen scientists noticed that this star appeared to have two small dips in 2009, followed by a large dip lasting almost a week in 2011, and finally a series of multiple dips significantly dimming the star’s light in 2013.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

The pattern of dips indicates that the star is orbited by a large, irregular-shaped mass. If it were orbiting a young star, this mass might be a protoplanetary disc, but KIC 8462852 is not a young star. We would also expect to see the presence of dust emitting infrared light, which hasn’t been observed. So what is this orbiting mass? Scientists predict that whatever it is, it had to have formed recently as it would have been pulled in by the star’s gravity and consumed.

Boyajian recently published a paper offering several possible explanations for the bizarre transits. The leading theory is that a family of exocomets passed too close to the star, and were shredded into pieces by the star’s massive gravity. The remaining dust and debris could be left to orbit the star.

But researchers from UC Berkeley’s SETI Institute think it could be something else entirely: They think this could be a sign of alien technology. Boyajian is working with SETI and Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, to develop a proposal to observe the star with NRAO’s Green Bank Telescope to search for radio waves. If they detect anything intriguing, they then have plans to use the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to listen for what could be the sounds of alien technology.

The first observations are estimated to take place in January, with a potential follow-up planned for next fall. Of course, if they stumble upon something incredible, the researchers could expect to follow-up with the VLA straight away. Kepler also plans to observe KIC 8462852 in May 2017, when the mass is expected to transit the star again.