NASA’s technology chief said today that despite the specific demands Congress included in its authorization bill, NASA will make its own decision on the kind of heavy-lift rocket it wants to build.
The less well known ruins above Machu Picchu in Peru.
Global warming? Russian meteorologists are predicting one of the coldest winters in centuries.
Archeologists have uncovered a stone age dwelling site from 3500 BC, practically intact.
An evening pause: October 4, 1957, the space age began.
Seems to be a lot of this kind of genocidal thought going around: A columnist for the Independent in Great Britain admitted in an October 4th interview that she considers it a kind act to kill a suffering child. Key quote:
“[I] think that if I were a mother of a suffering child, I would be the first to want I mean a deeply suffering child I would be the first one to put a pillow over its face, as I would with any suffering thing and I think the difference is that my feeling of horror, suffering is many greater than my feeling of getting rid of a couple of cells because suffering can go on for years,” Ironside said.
The Lunar X Prize award for putting the first privately funded robot on the Moon by 2012 is now set at $30 million.
The confusion at NASA is reverberating throughout the globe. Didn’t someone predict this would happen? More than once?
Using the data gathered by Rosetta in its fly-by of the asteroid Lutetia in July, scientists have concluded that the 60 mile diameter asteroid is covered with a deep layer of dusty debris, as much as 2000 feet deep.
The Cassini image below, released today at the 42nd meeting of the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences, shows light reflecting off a lake on Titan’s northern hemisphere. According to the scientists who took the image, this is the first definitive confirmation of the presence of liquid in those lakes.
The HiRise Camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has released some wonderful new pictures, showing what are called barchan dunes on Mars.
Barchans are crescent-shaped, with the horns of the crescents pointing downwind. One barchan is visible in the upper part of the image, with the Southeast (lower right) horns longer than the other. This trend, along with the position of the steep face of the dune on the South side, indicates that the predominant winds which formed the dunes came from the North.
There are a lot more great images on the websites above.
The second Chinese probe to the Moon did more than take off on Friday. It also rained pieces of metal down on a Chinese villages in Suichuan County, Jiangxi, China.
