Good call Buzz. From The Tech Herald:
Legendary Moon walker and NASA spaceman Buzz Aldrin has said the race to establish a permanent Moon base should be the result of international cooperation with the real focus on a manned mission to Mars.
Speaking in a lengthy interview with Popular Mechanics magazine, Aldrin said the next race to be the first to host a manned presence on the Moon should not be a financially damaging “space race” but an international effort combining the resources of China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia.
“By renouncing our goal of being first on the Moon (again), we would call off Space Race II with the Chinese and encourage them to channel their ambitious lunar efforts into the consortium,” Aldrin said.
He added that the Mark II mission to the Moon is, in fact, a “damaging” detour from what should be NASA’s principal objective — namely, the preparation for a manned mission to Mars.
“The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020 — a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago,” he said. “Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour.”
Approaching his 80th birthday, Aldrin was in no mood to hold back on criticism of the American space administration’s plan. In its place, Aldrin proposed a radical program he named the “Unified Space Vision,” which, controversially, calls for a permanently manned presence on Mars by 2035.
“Here’s my plan, which I call the Unified Space Vision,” he told the magazine. “It’s a blueprint that will maintain U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, avoid a counterproductive space race with China to be second back to the moon, and lead to a permanent American-led presence on Mars by 2035 at the latest.”
“That date happens to be 66 years after Neil Armstrong and I first landed on the moon — just as our landing was 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight,” Aldrin said.
It’s not enough we have to worry about extreme weather, we now have to worry about extreme solar space storms. There is historical proof that this type of storm could happen, and it would affect our electricity, cell phones and even our water supply. In 1859, a solar eruption caused telegraph lines to burn up. As we are nearing a period of active solar storms, it is possible this type of thing could happen again. Read more…
The findings of a planet outside the solar system, orbiting a dying, puffed-up star, could help researchers better understand the fate of our solar system.
Astronomers were able to capture, for the first time ever, planets that were outside the solar system.
San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, the new $20 million dollar facility that’s a part of the recently reopened California Academy of Sciences, is a technological marvel.
The Morrison Planetarium allows “astronomers not only to show traditional star charts, but to guide visitors through an immersive fly-through of our universe – realistically rendered in real-time. ”
Here are some links to the stars for while you’re at home.
A white arrow points to a faint object detected by chance in 2006 as astronomers scanned the skies for distant supernovae.
The object, which resembles a tailless comet, traces a long, elliptical orbit that takes it as much as 150 billion miles (241 billion kilometers) from Earth, astronomers announced in August 2008.
The object, dubbed 2006 SQ372, is a kind of tailless comet that’s currently some two billion miles (three billion kilometers) from Earth, a bit closer to the sun than Neptune.
But the lump of ice and rock is moving on a long, elliptical orbit that will take it on a round-trip journey lasting about 22,500 years. Read more…
According to Brian Handwerk
An image of Titan’s surface shows what scientists believe are bodies of liquid, shown in blue.
PASADENA, California (AP) — At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.
Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.
Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.
Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world. Read more…
According to NASA
EV Lacertae seemed like an unremarkable star. A teenager in star time – just a few hundred million years old – it shines with one percent of our sun’s light and contains only a third of the sun’s mass.
Suddenly, a flare with the power of thousands of solar flares erupted from this red dwarf. It was the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than the sun. NASA’s Swift satellite detected the flare on April 25, the agency just announced.
“Our sun was maybe as active as this for the first few to 10 million years,” said Stephen Drake, senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The sun “probably hasn’t done anything like this in the last billion years.” Read more…
The familiar eyeball shape of the Helix Nebula shows only two dimensions of this complex celestial body. But new observations suggest it may actually be composed of two gaseous disks nearly perpendicular to each other.
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