MARS (Eye) Candy

 

 

 

 NASA has landed another vehicle on MARS. And the crystal clear images are confirming mission success.

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Liberals Won’t Let Us Drill in ANWAR, So How About Titan?

This is an amazing story, but brings up some interesting questions, such as where oil comes from in the first place? I’m thinking Titan doesn’t have a plethora of fossils, right?

Saturn’s moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to a team of Johns Hopkins University scientists, adding to evidence that oil is not biological in origin.

The scientists at the Laurel, Md., institution were reporting this week on data collected from NASA’s Cassini probe.

“Several hundred lakes or seas have been discovered, of which dozens are estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than the entire known oil and gas reserves on Earth,” wrote lead scientist Ralph Lorenz of the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.

Lorenz also reported dark dunes running along the equator cover 20 percent of Titan’s surface, comprising a volume of hydrocarbon material several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.

“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material – it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” Lorenz wrote.

Lorenz used the term “organic chemicals” in the sense that hydrocarbons are traditionally included within the study of “organic chemistry,” not to imply any of the hydrocarbons discovered on Titan are of biological origin.

Sooo, anybody up for a really, really cold trip for oil?

Earthrise from Kaguya

Space exploration is a multi-national affair these days. These shots from Japan’s moon explorer Kaguya remind us again of just how small and beautiful our planet really is.

What the Heck Is This?

Somebody tell me what would cause a near perfect hexagon in the cloud patterns of Saturn?

Here’s NASA’s “explanation:

This nighttime view of Saturn’s north pole by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer onboard Cassini clearly shows a bizarre six-sided hexagon encircling the entire north pole, in one of the first clear images taken of the north polar region ever acquired from a unique polar perspective.

The hexagon feature was originally discovered by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in 1980, but those historic images and subsequent ground-based telescope images suffered from poor viewing perspectives. In the new infrared images, the strong brightness of the hexagon feature indicates that it is primarily a clearing in the clouds, which extends deep into the atmosphere, at least some 75 kilometers (47 miles) underneath the typical upper hazes and clouds seen in the daytime imagery by Voyager. Thick clouds border both sides of the narrow feature, as indicated by the adjacent dark lanes paralleling the bright hexagon.

Well, that was helpful, wasn’t it?

So, maybe the aliens are doing some mining?
Guess I’m listening to a little too much late night radio. Sigh.

Space Tourism: Sooner Than You Think

It’s coming, folks. Space Tourism will soon be a reality.

I know, I know. How in the world can I be talking about space tourism when so much more is going on? Easy. Space is where we are headed. The resources available on the Moon, Mars, and even the Asteroid belt will change the world economy in ways we can’t even imagine. And the hope for space travel lies with the private sector, not the bloated bureaucracies of government space programs like NASA.

A “Gouge” in the Shield

This is exactly what NASA didn’t need right now:

Add the crew of Endeavor to your prayer list. Based on past history, they will need all the help they can get to make it back home.

Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and…

…dwarf planets? Okay, I understand it makes sense scientifically, but dwarf? How about “planetarily challenged?” And has anyone considered that Pluto might have feelings on the issue? I find this quite offensive. Surely the American Civil Liar’s Union must mount a defense, don’t you think?

A Reason to Keep Hubble Flying

This takes time to download. But at full resolution, it’s a staggering, beautiful justification for space-based astronomy.

Manned Spaceflight Will Boom in the Next Decade…

…And not a bit of it will involve NASA. About time, don’t you think?