Space, The Final Frontier

[youandwhosearmy]

First, here's an astounding image of Demios taken in High Res from the Hirse camera on the MRO. Just wanted to show it because the clarity caught my eye.

Second, and far more importantly, the Kepler mission was launched on March 6th, marking the date we began in earnest to search for habitable earth-like planets outside of our solar system.

Mission details are here.

http://kepler.nasa.gov/

This is a huge step for us. Huge. The Kepler is the first in a series of missions that will end with us trying to visually detect life on any of those planets we find within the next 20 years.

Anyway that's all I got for now.

[Cowutopia]

raaaaaad

[Daitokuji]

I wish I could do a Dr Manhattan and teleport to other planets

[Mr_B]

Not trying to cause a ruckus. I find space exploration interesting, but whats the point of trying to find if life exists on other planets?

We'll never be able to visit them. Bitches are light years away. I just think its a bit futile.

[Josh]

There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people.

[soundwave]

"We're earthlings. Let's blow up Earth things."

[youandwhosearmy]

Not trying to cause a ruckus. I find space exploration interesting, but whats the point of trying to find if life exists on other planets?

We'll never be able to visit them. Bitches are light years away. I just think its a bit futile.

1. Well honestly, we don't know how far we can push technology down the road, so that's a bit shortsighted. The light barrier may be a consistent thing, but considering the attempt to discover Tachyons, and there are ways to bend those rules without breaking them, I wouldn't jump to such a conclusion just yet.

2. I guess it depends on how important it is to know whether or not we are alone in the universe. Some people just aren't interested, for vast number of reasons. But we may as well try and find out. I've always looked at it as, if answering the question is even remotely possible, then we should at least give it a shot.

I'd say if we have nothing better to do than sit on our rock and watch the solar system collapse since we'll never achieve light speed, then we may as well look up and try to find out as much as we can about the universe. We evolved the brains to have the ability to comprehend it, we may as well use them.

[Shooting Love]

it's all pretty useless, we only have 3.75 years left

[Error]

Not trying to cause a ruckus. I find space exploration interesting, but whats the point of trying to find if life exists on other planets?

We'll never be able to visit them. Bitches are light years away. I just think its a bit futile.

I don't deny that it's highly unlikely we'll ever be able to visit anything, but if we do find something, we can prepare to defend ourselves by researching the technology required to go there and then build a massive space fleet to go exterminate/sublimate them.

[youandwhosearmy]

I gotta admit, this is pretty fucking cool.

This is time lapsed footage of Jupiter's orbit taking it behind the sun.



Notice the motion of the moon's around Jupiter.

Now, as an astronomer I have to tell you: don’t stare at the Sun.

That’s because you should let NASA do that for you. When they do it, they get to see cool stuff like this:

That’s a pretty nifty animation (direct links to better quality movies: mov, hi res mov, and mpg) from NASA’s STEREO B spacecraft, currently orbiting the Sun. It shows Jupiter, with its four big moons easily visible, as it drifts behind the Sun from the spacecraft’s viewpoint. In the animation you can actually see the motion of the moons as they orbit Jupiter, too. Plus, as a bonus, a coronal mass ejection can be seen apparently gently streaming away from the Sun. Don’t be fooled, though: that is a huge blast of energy off the Sun, propelling billions of tons of plasma away from the solar surface at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour.

The images in the animation were taken over a 30 hour time span from March 15-16. STEREO is actually a pair of spacecraft launched in 2006 in opposite directions. They have different angles on the Sun, providing solar astrophysicists a 3D view of our nearest star. You might remember the devastating image it took of Comet McNaught in 2007, and the utterly incredible solar eclipse animation that was so freaking cool I put it in my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007, too.

STEREO has an occulting disk, literally a piece of metal that blocks the bright sunlight so that it can see the fainter wispy CMEs and normal solar corona (the dotted circle represents the size of the disk of the Sun). At the end of the animation you can see Jupiter slip behind the occulter. At some point this year, Saturn will play this same game, slipping past the Sun as seen by STEREO. I hope they catch that as well. I’m still looking for Top Ten Pictures for this year, too!

Original article on Badastronomy is here.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...ehind-the-sun/