Order and Chaos [Full Documentary]

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For thousands of years the human species is wondering about the world around him. What has changed dramatically in this search is how to find the answers. The great novelty of Science is the discovery of how to discover. In “Sorting the Universe” we will know how the application of the scientific method has led to elaborate theories like relativity, discover the DNA or know the structure of the atom.

A Celebration of Carl Sagan

LibraryOfCongress

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington was joined by Emmy Award-winner Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan, the longtime collaborator and widow of astrobiologist Carl Sagan, to celebrate the official opening of the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive to the public at the Library of Congress. 

The Sights And Sounds Of The Solar System

TIME

'Mars rat' spied by NASA's Curiosity rover

Fox News

Is that a rat on Mars?
A photo from the mast camera on NASA’s Curiosity rover reveals the dusty orange, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet -- and what starry-eyed enthusiasts claim is a dusty orange rodent hiding among the stones.
The photo, taken Sept. 28, 2012, depicts the “Rocknest” site, where NASA’s rover took a scoopful of sand, tasted it, and determined it was full of weathered basaltic materials -- not unlike Hawaii, the space agency’s scientists said last year.

'Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach.'

- ScottCWaring on the blog UFO Sightings Daily

No word on how the rodent tasted, however.
The “creature” was identified on the UFO Sightings Daily website, where its finder, ScottCWaring, held tight to his opinion: That’s one darn cute rodent on Mars.
“Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach. Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors," he wrote. "Hey, who doesn't love squirrels, right?”
Others pointed out that the similarity in coloring and position mean it was most likely just a rock, fingering the psychology phenomenon known as pareidolia, a propensity to pick out faces from everyday objects and structures.
To take advantage of this psychological phenomenon closer to home, designers at Berlin's Onformative studio developed an algorithm that scans the surface of the earth with Google Maps, picking out geographical structures that are likely to be construed as having face-like features, science blog iO9 recently pointed out.
Their algorithm found faces in fields, mustaches in mountains, hills with actual eyes.
Perhaps the algorithm should be turned loose on Mars?

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/29/mars-rat-spied-by-nasa-curiosity-rover/#ixzz2Ui1njuYs

Giant Mars crater shows evidence of ancient lake

By Charles Q. Choi

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

This false-color view of the floor of McLaughlin Crater shows sedimentary rocks that contain spectroscopic evidence for minerals formed through interaction with water. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded the image.

New photos of a huge crater on Mars suggest water may lurk in crevices under the planet's surface, hinting that life might have once lived there, and raising the possibility that it may live there still, researchers say. 

Future research looking into the chances of life on Mars could shed light on the origins of life on Earth, scientists added.

The discovery came from a study of images by NASA's powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that revealed new evidence of a wet underground environment on the Red Planet. The images focused on the giant McLaughlin Crater, which is about 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide and so deep that underground water appears to have flowed into the crater at some point in the distant past.

Today, the crater is bone-dry but harbors clay minerals and other evidence that liquid water filled the area in the ancient past.

"Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside," study lead author Joseph Michalski, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and London's Natural History Museum, said in a statement. 

Keep reading on  Space >>

Orbiter spots an alien Nile on Titan

NASA / JPL-Caltech /ASI

This radar image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, acquired on Sept. 26, shows a vast river system on Saturn's moon Titan. Check out the full-size version from NASA or the European Space Agency.

By Alan Boyle

NASA's Cassini orbiter has spotted a river system on the Saturnian moon Titan that's reminiscent of the River Nile — except that this river is presumably filled with liquid ethane and methane instead of water.

The Titanic Nile shows up on a grainy, black-and-white picture from Cassini's radar imager, which can look through Titan's thick, smoggy atmosphere to map the surface features beneath.

The picture was taken on Sept. 26 and released today by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency. It shows a branching river valley, running more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) from its headwaters to Titan's Kraken Mare, a hydrocarbon sea that's somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean in size.

Just as Earth has a water-based hydrological cycle, Titan has a weather cycle that moves ethane and methane around its surface and through the atmosphere. That's due to Titan's surface temperature (averaging minus-290 degrees Fahrenheit, or -179 degrees Celsius) and atmospheric pressure (one and a half times that of Earth's atmosphere).

"Titan is the only place we've found besides Earth that has a liquid in continuous movement on its surface," Steve Wall, the radar deputy team lead, said in JPL's news release. "This picture gives us a snapshot of a world in motion. Rain falls, and rivers move that rain to lakes and seas, where evaporation starts the cycle all over again. On Earth, the liquid is water; on Titan, it's methane; but on both it affects most everything that happens."

During the eight and a half years that Cassini has been passing over Saturn and its moons, the bus-sized orbiter has mapped Titan's seas, lakes and rivers in amazing detail. The orbiter even dropped a mini-probe known as Huygens down to Titan's surface for an on-the-ground view of the terrain.

 

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Curiosity rover finds organic compounds, but are they from Mars?

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

By Alan Boyle

Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains water and more complex chemicals — including signs of an intriguing compound called perchlorate.

The first soil sample analysis from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars lab, or SAM, was the leadoff topic today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The findings were eagerly awaited because of rumors that the Curiosity team was on the verge of announcing major findings — and although NASA tamped down expectations, the scientists said they were overjoyed with the first round of analysis.

"We really consider this a terrific milestone," Paul Mahaffy, a NASA researcher who is SAM's lead scientist, said at the AGU briefing.

Mahaffy said in a statement issued by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that "we have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater."

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on Aug. 5, and since then it's been studying Martian rocks, soil and atmosphere with a suite of 10 scientific instruments. Its two-year, $2.5 billion primary mission is aimed at determining whether conditions in the crater were ever conducive for microbial life.

SAM is a key tool for that mission, because it can cook Martian samples in a mini-oven and then analyze the gases that are given off to identify the compounds contained in the sample. Other instruments — including the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, or CheMin — were used as well to study the initial soil samples, collected over the past several weeks from a drift of windblown sand and dust called Rocknest.

This Oct. 31 view from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, shows two of the trenches made by the rover's 1.6-inch-wide (4-centimeter-wide) sampling scoop. The dust and sand from a dune known as Rocknest were fed into Curiosity's onboard labs for analysis.

NASA said CheMin found that the composition of the Rocknest samples was similar to that of soil analyzed by other Mars rovers such as Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity — about half common volcanic minerals, and half non-crystalline minerals such as glass. SAM identified other ingredients in much lower concentrations, including water molecules that were apparently bound to the grains of sand and dust. Although the water wouldn't be enough to support any sort of life, the concentration was higher than expected.

SAM also identified a type of perchlorate, a compound that includes oxygen and chlorine. Perchlorate, which was also found by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008, is considered a toxic substance and used as an ingredient in rocket fuel on Earth. But scientists say the compound could conceivably serve as an energy source for hardy microbes on Mars. Mahaffy said the particular type of compound detected by Curiosity appeared to be calcium perchlorate, but "we have to study that further."

Reactions with other chemicals in SAM's oven formed chlorinated methane compounds, which geologists consider organic chemicals because they contain carbon and hydrogen. Mahaffy said it was most likely that the chlorine came from a perchlorate-like compound in the soil. However, he said it wasn't yet clear whether the tiny amount of carbon in the compounds came from the Martian soil or was actually brought to Mars from Earth by Curiosity itself.

"We have to be very careful to make sure both the carbon and the chlorine are coming from Mars," he told reporters. More >>

2023: Pioneer wants 80,000 of us to colonize Mars

By Rob Coppinger

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16. Musk was there to talk about his business plans, and to receive the society’s gold medal for his contribution to the commercialization of space.

Mars pioneers Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.

The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars’ atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment. [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]

Musk’s architecture for this human Mars exploration effort does not employ cyclers, reusable spacecraft that would travel back and forth constantly between the Red Planet and Earth — at least not at first

"Probably not a Mars cycler; the thing with the cyclers is, you need a lot of them," Musk told Space.com. "You have to have propellant to keep things aligned as (Mars and Earth’s) orbits aren’t (always) in the same plane. In the beginning you won’t have cyclers."

Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by Space.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."

Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."

Musk has been thinking about what his colonist-carrying spacecraft would need, whatever it ends up being. He reckons the oxygen concentration inside should be 30 to 40 percent, and he envisions using the spacecraft’s liquid water store as a barrier between the Mars pioneers and the sun. More >>

Genetically Altered Astronaut Poo? NASA Wants to Know

Discovery News
Has bacteria in astronaut poop left on the moon been genetically altered? Did solar wind and ultraviolet radiation destroy the flag at Tranquility Base, landing site for the first Apollo moon mission? Are the lunar rovers dented with micrometeoroid impacts?
These are among the science questions raised by a NASA team tasked to come up with guidelines to preserve lunar artifacts before contenders in a $30-million competition sponsored by Google arrive on the moon beginning in about two years.
About 28 teams are competing to send privately funded robotic spacecraft to photograph and explore the lunar surface. Winners can get bonuses if they visit lunar historic sites, a prospect that got NASA thinking about its property on the moon.
PHOTOS: Myths of the Moon Missions
Six crews landed on lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, leaving behind descent modules, communications antennas, rovers and yes, even bags with feces. The Apollo artifacts are part of a larger collection of relics that also include Soviet-era spacecraft and crashed NASA probes.
More >

Does the Multiverse Really Exist?

By George F. R. Ellis
In the past decade an extraordinary claim has captivated cosmologists: that the expanding universe we see around us is not the only one; that billions of other universes are out there, too. There is not one universe—there is a multiverse. In Scientific American articles and books such as Brian Greene’s latest, The Hidden Reality, leading scientists have spoken of a super-Copernican revolution. In this view, not only is our planet one among many, but even our entire universe is insignificant on the cosmic scale of things. It is just one of countless universes, each doing its own thing.
The word “multiverse” has different meanings. Astronomers are able to see out to a distance of about 42 billion light-years, our cosmic visual horizon. We have no reason to suspect the universe stops there. Beyond it could be many—even infinitely many—domains much like the one we see. Each has a different initial distribution of matter, but the same laws of physics operate in all. Nearly all cosmologists today (including me) accept this type of multiverse, which Max Tegmark calls “level 1.”
Read more... 

New solar cycle prediction - #NASA

An international panel of experts, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, in English) and sponsored by NASA, has issued a new forecast for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will its maximum, say, in May 2013 with a sunspot number below average.

"If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a maximum of 90 spots, the lowest number of all cycles counted since 1928, when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 70 spots," says the head of the panel, Doug Biesecker of the Center for Space Weather Forecasts (Space Weather Prediction Center, in English) from NOAA.

It is tempting to describe a cycle of these characteristics as "weak" or "soft", but that might give the wrong impression.

"We still remain below average, any solar cycle is capable of producing severe space weather," notes Biesecker. "The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, took place during a solar cycle of the same size as we're predicting for 2013."

The storm that occurred in 1859, known as the "Carrington Event" in honor of the astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed this tremendous solar flare electrified transmission lines, caused fires in telegraph offices and produced Northern Lights so bright you could read the newspaper in its light reddish-green.

A recent report provided by the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that if a similar storm occurred today could cause between 1 and 2 billion dollars in damage to the infrastructure of our highly technological society, and lead to four to ten years to achieve full recovery. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina caused damage "only" 80 to 125 billion dollars.

Above: This chart represents the number of sunspots shows the maximum intensity measured in the last cycle, in blue, and the maximum intensity predicted for the next cycle in red. Credit: Center for Space Weather Prediction / NOAA. [More]

The latest forecast is based on a review of an earlier prediction, made ​​in 2007. That year, a panel of experts, divided into two positions, believed that solar minimum would occur in March 2008, followed by a strong solar maximum in 2011 or a weak peak in 2012. Competing models gave different answers and researchers were eager to know which is nearer the Sun

"It happened that neither of the two models was quite correct," says Dean Pesnell of Goddard Space Flight Center, who was the NASA representative in that panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting."

Researchers have known of the solar cycle from mid-1800. The graphs represent the number of sunspots counted since those days are like a roller coaster, up and down with a period of approximately 11 years.

At first glance, seems to be a regular pattern, but predicting the peaks and valleys has proved problematic. Cycles vary in length between approximately 9 and 14. Some peaks are high, others low. The valleys are usually short, lasting only a couple of years, but sometimes spread and become much longer. In the 17th century, the sun sank into a period of 70 years with no stains, which is known today as the Maunder Minimum, and still baffles scientists.

Above: The average number of sunspots per year between 1610 and 2008. Researchers believe that the newly launched Solar Cycle 24 will be similar to the cycle that peaked in intensity in 1928, indicated with a red arrow on the graph. Credit: NASA / MSFC

Right now, the solar cycle is in a valley - the deepest in the last century. In 2008 and 2009, the sun has broken records of the Space Age for the lowest amount of spots, weak solar wind and the low solar irradiance. It has been more than two years that the Sun emits a solar flare of significant size.

"In our careers, we had never seen anything like it," says Pesnell. "Solar minimum has lasted much longer than the date predicted in 2007."

In recent months, however, the sun has begun to show signs of life, but very timid. Small spots and "proto-spots" sun begin to appear more frequently. Huge plasma flows on the solar surface (known as " flow zone ") begin to increase in intensity and move slowly toward the solar Ecuador. Radio astronomers have detected a small but significant increase in solar emissions in radio waves. All these things are the precursors of an awakening of Solar Cycle 24 and form the basis of new and nearly unanimous forecast provided by the panel of scientists.

According to the forecast, the sun should remain calm for at least another year. From the standpoint of research, that's good news because solar minimum has proved more interesting than anyone had imagined.

The low solar activity has a profound effect on the Earth's atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract. The debris accumulates in orbit around the Earth because there is less aerodynamic drag. The quiet storm produces less solar wind around the magnetic poles of Earth. Cosmic rays are usually bounced by the solar wind, slip instead into the near-Earth environment. There are other side effects, too, that can only be studied under the sun remains quiet.

Meanwhile, the Sun cares little human committees. There could be more surprises, the panelists agree, and thus more forecast revisions.

"Go ahead and mark your calendar for May 2013," says Pesnell. "But mark it in pencil."

Source: Science & NASA

Aliens exist, and we have proof

Aliens exist, and we have proof.
That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.