“America is faced with the near-simultaneous ending of the Shuttle program and your recent budget proposal to cancel the Constellation program. This is wrong for our country ... (and) we are stunned that, in a time of economic crisis, this move will force as many as 30,000 irreplaceable engineers and managers out of the space industry.”
- 27 former NASA Astronauts and Managers
NASA logo at Cape Kennedy, Florida.NASA Discover Shuttle launch on March 15, 2009, from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Image by NASA.
April 14, 2010 Cape Kennedy, Florida - On Thursday, April 15, President Barack Obama will visit Cape Canaveral to outline his administration's goals for NASA. Twenty-seven former NASA astronauts and managers are waiting to see what President Obama specifically says about manned flights to the moon and Mars.
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“At the very beginning of the universe in the so called Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created and yet, they didn't stay equal. We ended up with the world around us, consisting of matter and no anti-matter.”
- Carl Gagliardi, Ph.D., Prof. of Physics, Texas A&M University
Powerful computers reconstruct the sub-atomic interactions from each collision in the Solenoidal Tracker (STAR) at Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) where an international team of scientists have made a new particle called an “anti-hypertriton.” Physicists think this anti-matter particle was at the beginning of our universe's Big Bang creation 13.7 billion years ago. Illustration by Brookhaven National Lab.
March 7, 2010 Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York - The March 4, 2010, online Science Express, reported that an international team of scientists have made a new particle called an “anti-hypertriton.” This is a particle that the physicists think was at the beginning of our universe's Big Bang creation. Physicists are trying to understand why the super-hot, super-dense plasma that rapidly expanded full of both matter and anti-matter particles did not self-annihilate? Why didn't those matter and anti-matter particles blow each other to bits? Something happened to tip the scale toward matter because we live in a proton and neutron universe, not a universe of anti-protons and anti-neutrons.
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“[Recent DNA research) has shown that the Y chromosome haplotypes are ... a western European kind of haplotype.”
- Victor Mair, Ph.D., Prof. of Chinese Language and Literature, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Urumqi in Xinjiang Province of western China marks the town northeast of the Tarim River Basin that extends around the huge Taklamakan Desert to Loulan and Cherchen where hundreds of Bronze Age Europoid mummies have been found. Most recent DNA studies to be published in March 2010 indicate the male Y chromosomes are western European.Tarim River basin on the northern edge of the vast Taklamakan Desert of western China north of Tibet is the site of more than 400 light-skinned, fair-haired mummies dated in age from the Bronze Age about 4,000 years ago (1,800 B. C.) to 1,500 years ago (500 A. D.). The mystery remains: who were they, where exactly were they from and why were so many mummified and buried in the cold, dry, salty Tarim Basin? Urumqi (upper right red dot) museums in Xinjiang province have many mummy remains and tools. Map by K. Musser.Red circles mark Urumchi/Urumqi at top; Loulan (middle) site of beautiful, blond-haired woman; and Cherchen (bottom) the site of several well-preserved and fair-haired mummies that include a tall man with a yellow rayed-spiral on his face; a woman in a vivid red gown or robe; and an infant with blue stones over its eyes. The black arrows passing Cherchen mark the path of Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein in the early 20th Century.
February 25, 2010 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - At the beginning of the 20th century, European explorers who traveled to Central Asia looking for antiquities reported finding fair-skinned and fair-haired mummies that were well-preserved in the very dry, salty Tarim Basin of western China. The Tarim Basin covers 150,000 square miles on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. That vast desert is crossed at its northern and southern edges by two branches of the ancient Silk Road trade route where travelers tried to avoid crossing the barren sand dunes. In the language spoken by the local Uighur people in Xinjiang region, Taklamakan means: “You come in and never come out.”
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“640,000 years ago it's estimated that 240 cubic miles blasted
out of the Yellowstone caldera ...enough material to bury the state of Texas beneath about 5 feet of debris”
- Jacob Lowenstern, Ph.D., USGS Geologist
Old Faithful is a cone geyser located in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. The geyser erupts with a frequency that can range between 45 to 125 minutes, for 1.5 to 5 minutes and can erupt as high as 106 to 185 feet. Image by USGS.Old Faithful is a cone geyser located in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. The geyser erupts with a frequency that can range between 45 to 125 minutes, for 1.5 to 5 minutes and can erupt as high as 106 to 185 feet. Image by USGS.
February 25, 2010 Menlo Park, California - At 1 PM on January 17, 2010, a swarm of small earthquakes began shaking the ground around Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. Over the next three weeks until February 8, 2010, there would be nearly 2,000 quakes on the northwestern edge of the Yellowstone Caldera that was created 645,000 years ago when there was a gigantic magma explosion that blasted 240 cubic miles into the atmosphere, enough material to bury the state of Texas beneath 5 feet of ash and debris.
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“To our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million
years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the universe.”
- Ivo Labbe, Ph.D., Carnegie Institute of Washington
“These galaxies are only 1/20th the Milky Way's diameter.
...Yet they must be the seeds from which the great galaxies of today
were formed.”
- Pascal Oesch, Ph.D., and Marcella Carollo, Ph.D.,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
“The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage
to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they
must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing
a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.”
Section of earliest image yet taken of our universe by the Hubble Space Telescope, only 600 - 700 million years after the Big Bang that started our universe. The circled objects are light from “primordial galaxies” back 13 billion years ago of our 13.7-billion-year-old-universe in this unprecedented view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly. Hubble Center: “This is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to ‘look-back times’ of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs. These galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way galaxy and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.” Object Name: HUDF WFC3/IR. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and R. Bouwens, UC-Santa Cruz and the HUDF09 Team.Portion of earliest universe photographed so far by Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's WFC3/IR camera was able to make deep exposures to uncover new galaxies at roughly 40 times greater efficiency than its earlier infrared camera that was installed in 1997.
January 6, 2010 Baltimore, Maryland - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe. This makes Hubble a powerful “time machine” that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang that started our universe.
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“Since T Pyxidis stopped its repeated supernova explosions, the last one being in 1967, we really are puzzled about why its cycle of thermonuclear explosions has not continued.”
- Edward M. Sion, Ph.D.,
Prof. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Villanova University
January 14, 2010 Radnor, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Kansas - The January 5, 2010, issue of Scientific American, headlined an article about a “Supernova star too close for comfort” to Earth. The subject was a binary white dwarf named T Pyxidis (T denotes scale of brightness) rapidly rotating around a companion star at about 1,000 parsecs from Earth. A thousand parsecs is equal to 3,260 light-years.
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“The Allan Hills Martian meteorite suggests there is evidence
for life on ancient Mars. If that is true ... there could still be life –
particularly in the subsurface regions of Mars”
- Kathie Thomas-Keptra, Ph.D., NASA Johnson Space Center
December 24, 2009 Houston, Texas - On December 27, 1984, a team of U.S. meteorite hunters were searching in Allan Hills, Antarctica, when they discovered a 1.93 kilogram (about 4 pounds) meteorite dubbed “ALH 84001.” The rock is 3.9 billion years old and an analysis of trapped gases within ALH 84001 was an identical match to the Martian atmosphere that the 1976 Viking landers analyzed. So a new category of meteorites from Mars was confirmed.
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“We are absolutely and totally confident that the LHC machine
is perfectly safe, just as we were last year. And I'm not at all worried
about it being destroyed by its own future!”
- Lyndon Evans, Ph.D., Physicist and Manager, LHC Construction
“We’re really confident with the LHC that we’re going to find
the Higgs boson or something similar, which will help to explain what’s
going on in the universe.”
- Steven Goldfarb, Ph.D., LHC Muon Spectrometer, ATLAS Experiment
Looking straight down a segment of the 17-mile-long circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator. Image courtesy CERN LHC.In some theories, microscopic black holes may be produced in particle collisions that occur when very-high-energy cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere. These microscopic-black-holes would decay into ordinary particles in a tiny fraction of a second and would be very difficult to observe in our atmosphere. The ATLAS Experiment offers the exciting possibility to study them in the lab (if they exist). The simulated collision event shown is viewed along the beampipe. The event is one in which a microscopic-black-hole was produced in the collision of two protons (not shown). The microscopic-black-hole decayed immediately into many particles. The colors of the tracks show different types of particles emerging from the collision (at the center). Computer graphic and actual Large Hadron Collider image below courtesy CERN LHC.This computer-generated image shows the location of the 17-mile-long (27 km) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel (in blue) about 300 feet down on the Swiss-French border. The four main experiments (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) are located in underground caverns connected to the surface by 50 meter to 150 meter pits. Part of the pre-acceleration chain is shown in gray. Illustration courtesy CERN LHC.
November 19, 2009 CERN Geneva, Switzerland - Beginning Friday night, November 20, 2009, on the border between Switzerland and France, not far from Geneva, and three hundred feet underground, humans will try again to start producing subatomic energies close to those in the Big Bang. By early Saturday morning, the first beam of particles should be circulating one way around the LHC’s 17-mile-long underground ring. Then a second beam traveling in the opposite direction should start soon after. But the first low-energy collisions won't happen until about a week later.
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The icy surface of Europa is cracked like an egg from the tug and pull of Jupiter's gravitational stretching. Below the ice is a 100-miles-deep liquid water ocean and new data indicates more oxygen than expected reaches that ocean from the icy surface. Water plus oxygen could mean life there right now. Image from Galileo spacecraft, 1995 - 2003, by JPL, NASA and Ted Stryk.NASA released this image of Europa as true color of the moon's icy surface full of cracks. The slightly reddish tint of the surface cracks is still a mystery, but the hypothesis is that sulfur compounds are responsible. Image courtesy NASA/JPL.
Updated November 2, 2009, with podcast and Europa book information at end of report from Tucson, Arizona - There is a moon in our solar system that is about the size of Earth's moon, but beneath its icy surface is a liquid water ocean 100 miles deep. That moon is Europa, one of 49 known moons that orbit Jupiter, of which Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto are the largest.
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“We don’t have records prior to 1874 that give us details about the sun. Compared to the past 130 years, our sun now is unprecedented as far as how slow this Solar Cycle 24 is taking off - or not taking off!”
- David Hathaway, Ph.D., NASA Heliospheric Team Leader
NASA'S Advanced Composition Explorer satellite (ACE) launched August 1997 to study solar particles and galactic cosmic rays. It has nine instruments onboard that helps it track solar wind and galactic cosmic rays from interstellar space beyond the heliosphere. ACE serves as a space weather station while in orbit. ACE can provide a one-hour advance warning of any geomagnetic storms that are caused by coronal mass ejections. Strong solar coronal mass ejections can disrupt radio, TV and telephone communications on Earth. Logo by NASA.
October 30, 2009 Huntsville, Alabama - For twelve years, NASA has had a satellite positioned a million miles in front of Earth with the sun about 92 million miles beyond. Its mission has been to study particles that come near Earth from our sun, the solar system and the galaxy. The satellite is called Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, and some of the highly energetic particles ACE has been monitoring are cosmic rays.
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