Looks like Ken Ham
wonder what news NASA is gonna drop ?
Water on Mars?
Worsfold to coach?
wonder what news NASA is gonna drop ?Water on Mars?
Worsfold to coach?
Flowing water, I reckon.
Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse.
Live feed: http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets-asteroids-webcasts.html
32 minutes until total eclipse.
wonder what news NASA is gonna drop ?Water on Mars?
Worsfold to coach?
Flowing water, I reckon.
Life, I reckon, probably bacteria
Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse.Live feed: http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets-asteroids-webcasts.html
32 minutes until total eclipse.
There’s nothing I can do
I just can’t see us finding life on Mars, yet. Not with what tools we have there. I was under the impression it was to do with the development of Mars, which could mean anything to its (brief) water-covered past or how its core pretty much died.
I think NASA has conceded that Mars Needs Guitars!
“Briny water flows” is what’s all over the news and reddit, apparently.
Can nougat die??
Can nougat die??If it lives, you'd hope so, considering the path a mars bar has to travel once it passes the lower oesophageal sphincter.
I just can't see us finding life on Mars, yet. Not with what tools we have there. I was under the impression it was to do with the development of Mars, which could mean anything to its (brief) water-covered past or how its core pretty much died.
Unless they are the type that wave at the camera…
wonder what news NASA is gonna drop ?Water on Mars?
Worsfold to coach?
Flowing water, I reckon.
Life, I reckon, probably bacteria
Sheeds told us about bacteria from Mars years ago 
Quaid, Start the reactor
o p e n … y o u r … m i n d !
Quaid, Start the reactor
Quaid, Start the reactoro p e n … y o u r … m i n d !
Get your ■■■ to Mars.
Something ‘big’ about Pluto being dropped by NASA tomozza.
“[Pluto] is alive. It has weather, it has hazes in the atmosphere, active geology…NASA won’t let me tell you what we’re going to tell you on Thursday. It’s amazing…2015 will be a year in textbooks forever.”
Something 'big' about Pluto being dropped by NASA tomozza.“[Pluto] is alive. It has weather, it has hazes in the atmosphere, active geology…NASA won’t let me tell you what we’re going to tell you on Thursday. It’s amazing…2015 will be a year in textbooks forever.”
Water on Pluto too, which is very positive for when we wreck this planet.
New Horizons images show Pluto has blue skies and red water ice First spacecraft ever sent to the dwarf planet continues to transmit data after sending the first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes last weekPluto has blue skies and exposed, bright red water ice, Nasa announced on Thursday, as the first spacecraft ever sent to the dwarf planet continues to send data from the edge of the solar system.
Nasa’s New Horizons probe sent the first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes to Earth last week, revealing that the mysterious mix of particles scatter blue light when sunlight reaches them.
“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper belt? It’s gorgeous,” Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator said in a statement. New Horizons is now venturing farther into the Kuiper belt, a region of dwarf planets and ancient debris that rings the solar system’s farthest edge.
Pluto’s haze consists of particles called tholins, solid, unusual molecules that are sometimes compared to tar or soot for the way they react and recombine with other molecules. In this case, Nasa researchers believe the tholins form high above the surface, where sunlight ionizes the nitrogen and methane that makes up most of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere.
“All those haze layers are actual layers in pluto’s atmosphere stretching up literally more than 100 miles,” Stern told the University of Alberta on Monday.
On Earth, the sky looks blue because sunlight scatters when it strikes the tiny nitrogen molecules that dominate the atmosphere. “On Pluto they appear to be larger, but still relatively small,” said science team researcher Carly Howett in the statement. The researchers noted that the molecules – each likely red or grey – condense and fall down to Pluto’s surface, gathering ice frost on the descent and eventually adding to the world’s reddish tint.
In contrast to its Earth, Mars has smudged dawns and bleary sunsets, sometimes in a grey-green or mix of yellow and hazy blue. Its atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, and far thinner, although the Curiosity rover has from time to time photographed blue clouds drifting through the dust. In contrast the Venusian atmosphere, although also mostly carbon dioxide, churns with clouds of sulfuric acid created in part by the extreme radiation so close to the sun.
Nasa also announced the discovery of exposed regions of water ice, curiously at some of the places that appear bright red in recent color images.
Pluto water ice
Regions with exposed water ice are highlighted in blue in this composite image from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument. Photograph: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Most of the water ice on Pluto, including mountains the size of the Rockies, is covered by other kinds of frozen detritus, including nitrogen snow and methane ice, and the scientists admitted that the correlation between the red colors and water ice has them puzzled.“I’m surprised that this water ice is so red,” says Silvia Protopapa, another researcher. “We don’t yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto’s surface.”
New Horizons is now more than 3.1bn miles from Earth and hurtling toward another Kuiper belt object, this one temporarily named “potential target one”. With its systems and plutonium fuel “healthy”, as Stern put it on Monday, the spacecraft could continue to relay data back to Earth about the third ring of the solar system for more than 20 years.
I love the idea of Ion thrusters
Ion Engine Breakthrough Could Take Us To Mars At A Fraction Of The FuelOctober 28, 2015 | by Alfredo Carpineti
A group of French physicists has optimized a type of ion thruster to significantly extend its lifetime: the new development made it sturdy enough to be able withstand a long trip into deep space. Such a thruster would require 100 million times less fuel than common thrusters that use chemical reactions to propel a spacecraft forward.
Ion thrusters accelerate ions – positively charged atoms – using electrical fields. The ions are accelerated from the anode (positive electrode) to the cathode (negative electrode). Along their path, the ions are hit by a beam of electrons which make them electrically neutral. Consequently, this means they won’t interact with the cathode but simply continue on their path out of the engine. The continuous stream of atoms into space propels the spacecraft forward.
The specific model they worked on is a Hall thruster; it is very similar to other ion engines, but it has a negatively charged plasma (usually a cloud of electrons) cathode trapped in a magnetic field. Expelled ionized gas is attracted by the negatively charged plasma and accelerated. As the ions pass through the cathode, they become neutral and they continue unaffected by electric and magnetic fields moving forward at high speed, propelling the craft in the opposite direction.
Over 240 Hall thrusters have flown to space since 1971 with a 100% success rate, mostly used for satellites in geosynchronous orbit. They can accelerate the exhaust gas to a speed between 10 to 80 kilometers per second (6 to 50 miles per second). The average lifespan of a Hall thruster is 10,000 working hours as the ion flow degrades the walls of the engine significantly. To guarantee safety for a round trip to Mars, it would require at least three times as much, if not more.
As the engine’s wall was the part most affected by deterioration, the researchers at the French National Center for Scientific Research simply removed it. The first prototype didn’t work – the anode was within the magnetic field, producing interactions with the electron cloud and reducing thrust performance (pictured below, on the left).
(Left) Basic configuration of a wall-less Hall thruster: the anode is simply moved at the channel exit plane. The magnetic field lines intercept the anode. (Right) Optimized wall-less design: the magnetic field lines are parallel to the anode, by Vaudolon et al.
In the latest model, the scientists moved the anode to be outside the magnetic field line, resulting in an optimized wall-less Hall thruster that doesn’t suffer from reduced thrust or degradation.
The team is very hopeful following this breakthrough. “Despite decades of research, the physics of Hall thrusters is still far from being understood, and the device characterization methods still rely on trials and testing, leading to expensive efforts,” Julien Vaudolon, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The major difficulty in developing predictive simulations lies in modeling the interaction between plasma and wall. The wall-less design would be an effective solution, potentially making future predictive simulations feasible and reliable.”
The study was published in Applied Physics Letters
So it’s an advance on a fluorescent tube basically … just streaming the ions past the receiving end somehow … which is no mean feat. Nice.