Author: jappe

A lightning storm illuminated the Arizona sky in this stunning skywatcher image of the Milky Way.

Photographer Stephen Ippolito took this image from Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona on Aug. 9. “I received a lot of help from mother nature for this image,” he told Space.com in an email. “As you can see, Bell Rock is illuminated. It is illuminated because there was a massive lightning storm many miles behind me that was illuminating the entire sky, and when the lightning struck, the entire Bell Rock area would be illuminated.”

Ippolito lit in the foreground of the image with a color corrected LED light. [See More Stunning Photos of the Milky Way]

The Milky Way galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy with roughly 400 billion stars, including our sun. The stars, along with gas and dust, appear like a band of light in the sky from Earth. The galaxy stretches between 100,000 to 120,000 light-years in diameter. At the center of our galaxy lies a gigantic black hole billions of times the size of the sun.  

To see more amazing night sky photos submitted by SPACE.com readers, visit our astrophotography archive.

Editor’s note: If you have an amazing night sky photo you’d like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+.

Aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Scott Kelly talks to journalist Katie Couric on Aug. 19, 2015. Credit: Yahoo News Video

What’s it like to live in space? It’s a question that never seems to get old, as demonstrated in a series of interviews this week with astronaut Scott Kelly, who is spending a year aboard the International Space Station.

TV interviewers Larry King, host of the show “Larry King Now,” and Katie Couric, a global news anchor for Yahoo, both spoke with Kelly this week, and both wanted to know the same thing: What’s a normal day like in space? For people on the ground, there seems to be a persistent fascination with the mundane details of space life, such as how astronauts wash their clothes (they don’t), what they do for fun (watch TV and read books), and how well they get along with the other crewmembers (very well). The full interviews can be seen in the video above.

Kelly is one of two participants in NASA’s One-Year Mission, the first instance of American astronauts spending almost an entire calendar year in orbit. The mission, which is nearing its midpoint, is meant to test the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body — information that will prove crucial if humanity ever wants to make the journey to Mars. [The Human Body in Space: 6 Weird Facts]

“What do you do all day long, Scott? Can you give us sort of the typical ‘Day in the Life’ on the International Space Station?” Couric asked Kelly when they spoke via satellite yesterday (Aug. 19).

“All the days are different, which makes it pretty interesting,” Kelly replied. Some days are entirely dedicated to science experiments, he said. During his time on the orbiting laboratory, he and his crewmates will conduct more than 400 science experiments.

“Sometimes you’re fixing things,” Kelly said. “The carbon-dioxide removal system was a piece of hardware we had worked on a few months ago that was pretty extensive. On Monday, we have a Japanese cargo ship coming, so we’ll be grabbing that.  So it’s a combination of science, maintenance and general housekeeping. And then occasionally robotics activities or a spacewalk you might get to do.”

Both Couric and King asked Kelly about how he unwinds from all that work. Kelly said he and the other five crewmembers typically get together and watch a movie on the weekends. Meanwhile, Kelly said he and NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren are re-watching the TV series “Breaking Bad,” and have introduced Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui to the show as well.

Couric also mentioned that the actress, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, tweeted at Kelly and asked if he was watching her show, “Veep,” on HBO. Kelly said he liked the show very much, but was not watching it on the station. However, the station is apparently carrying every season of “Seinfeld,” (in which Dreyfus was a main character), which Kelly said he has watched.

And what about even more mundane activities, like doing laundry?

“So, we don’t do laundry because that requires a lot of water and water’s at a premium up here. Plus, it’d be pretty complicated, I think, to make a space washer, although I guess you could do it,” Kelly replied. “So we generally throw our clothes out. I think I’ve been wearing this pair of pants for about two months. I won’t tell you how long I’ve been wearing the other things,” he joked, to which Couric laughed and replied, “Thank you.”

Astronaut Scott Kelly enjoys fresh fruit on Day 100 of his one-year trip aboard the International Space Station. This week Kelly talked with reporters about what life is like in orbit.
Credit: NASA

Kelly also told Couric that he seems to dream more while he’s in orbit. He’d been asked about space dreaming while on previous missions, and at the beginning of the current mission he started writing his dreams down, but stopped because it took too much time, he said.

“It seems like in the beginning of my flight the space dreams were rare. And now, almost 150 days into it, the Earth dreams are more of the rare ones,” he said.

Astronauts have embarked on incredible adventures, like walking on the moon or repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, but even the mundane details of life in space prove captivating  to people on the ground, who can only dream about what it’s like up there.  

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

For the first time, the International Space Station (ISS) will house a Chinese experiment. The research is to be on board the ISS next year. Credit: NASA

A Chinese experiment is being readied for launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) in what could be the forerunner of a larger space-cooperation agenda between the United States and China.

NanoRacks, a Houston-based company that helps commercial companies make use of the space station, has signed a historic agreement with the Beijing Institute of Technology to fly Chinese DNA research to the orbiting outpost next year. No commercial Chinese payload has ever flown to the orbiting lab before.

Space-policy experts said they viewed the agreement as a significant step in shaping possible future joint work by the two spacefaring nations. [Latest News About China’s Space Program]

Cooperation prohibited

Over the past few years, the law has prohibited NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from cooperating with China on space activities.

That prohibition was originally signed into NASA-funding appropriations bills by Republican Congressman Frank Wolf (Virginia), who chaired the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee before retiring last year.

The final law that Wolf put in place — P.L. 113-235, the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2015, which is in effect today — states that no funds may be spent by NASA or OSTP to “develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement or execute a bilateral policy, program, order or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company unless such activities are specifically authorized by law after the date of enactment of this act.”

However, the new NanoRacks deal is a commercial arrangement, and experts consider it legal.

Obeying the rules

Jeffrey Manber, NanoRacks’ managing director, told Space.comthat he’s delighted to be working with China on getting the nation’s experiment on board the ISS.

“We’re excited to have a world-class organization that is contributing to our collective knowledge about what happens long term with the immune system during space travel,” Manber said, adding that a recent visit to the Beijing Institute of Technology’s School of Life Science left him extremely impressed.

“They are not a lab that dabbles in space. … This is a life sciences research group focused on what we can learn from microgravity,” Manber said. [‪The Human Body in Space: 6 Weird Facts]

Manber said NanoRacks worked very hard to obey the rules of the Wolf amendment.

“The White House has informed us that the agreement conforms to the Wolf amendment,” Manber said.

DNA mismatching

The Chinese experiment headed for the ISS investigates how the space environment affects DNA, which serves as the genetic material for life as we know it. (Some viruses rely on a molecule called RNA, but scientists argue about whether or not viruses are truly “alive.”)

Chinese researchers are readying a payload to be taken to the International Space Station next year. The experiment is designed to determine if space radiation and microgravity cause gene mutation.
Credit: Beijing Institute of Technology

Making use of a 7-lb. (3 kilograms) device to be housed on the ISS, the Chinese research seeks to determine if space radiation and microgravity cause mutations. The research will focus on mutations to genes encoding antibodies, parts of the immune system that identify foreign objects.

A prior experiment flew aboard China’s uncrewed Shenzhou 8 spacecraft, which launched in October 2011. Shenzhou 8 docked autonomously with China’s Tiangong 1 space module, then returned safely to Earth in mid-November 2011. [‪Gallery: Tiangong 1, China’s First Space Laboratory]

The Beijing Institute of Technology’s School of Life Science often publishes its results in Western scientific journals and interacts with the European research community and multiple U.S. universities.

Prudent discussions

“This [ISS] project underwent a succession of prudent discussions and careful deliberations before we reached the agreement,” said Deng Yulin, dean of the School of Life Science.

 “The results will answer some very important questions on life sciences,” Deng said, according to an Aug. 8 story in China’s state-run newspaper China Daily.

“There has been no official cooperation in the space field between China and the U.S. for a long time, so I hope this project enables us to explore cooperation methods between the two space powers,” Deng added.

The NanoRacks contract, valued at $200,000, includes delivery of the Chinese experiment to the U.S. side of the ISS via a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. The experiment will then be placed within the Japanese Kibo module for a planned 15 days.

Deng told China Daily that NanoRacks offered his institute “very favorable terms,” including the payment schedule.

The project is a commercial one that serves only scientific purposes, he added. “My university is an educational entity, and the project is a business activity, so I don’t think it will violate the U.S. law,” Deng said.

Rational action

The NanoRacks agreement with the Chinese spurred reactions from several space-policy experts, such as Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

“Past U.S. policy of trying to isolate Chinese space activities, toward [the goal of] influencing, or pushing, China to change its policies — in areas from human rights to the development of anti-satellite capabilities — hasn’t worked and in some cases has been overtly counterproductive to U.S. interests,” Johnson-Freese said.

As a result, Johnson-Freese told Space.com, “changing our approach in ways that do not involve technology transfer seems a rational action.”

It is in U.S. interests to better understand how China’s decision-making process works, to have China act as a responsible player in space and to have a group within China advocate for nonaggressive policy toward the United States in space, Johnson-Freese said.

Lone holdout

“Given that the rest of the world is working with China in space, being the lone holdout has not worked in our favor in any of those areas,” Johnson-Freese said. “Hopefully, this experiment on the ISS will be a positive step forward toward all of those goals.”

She noted that her views do not necessarily represent those of the Naval War College, the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

“I see this [China/NanoRacks agreement] as a commercial arrangement that has potential scientific benefits and [that] complies with existing laws and regulations,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

“Whether it’s a precedent for future activities remains to be seen,” Pace told Space.com.

Space-cooperation dialogue

Statements by U.S. politicians show that there may be an interesting “chess playing” factor in America’s dealings with China.

Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang at the conclusion of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue/Consultation on People-to-People Exchange at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC., on June 24, 2015.
Credit: U.S. State Department

Some U.S. lawmakers have said they don’t want the Russians to have a clear, open field with the Chinese. Better to have the U.S. engaged in working space deals with China, they say — but how best to evolve and work with China within the Wolf amendment?

As for future U.S.-China space relations, the first “U.S.-China Civil Space Cooperation Dialogue” is slated to take place in China before the end of October.

Last June, the United States and China decided to establish regular bilateral, government-to-government consultations on civil space cooperation.

That agreement came out of the seventh round of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, held June 22-24 in Washington, D.C, with Secretary of State John Kerry taking active part in the discussions. The two sides held in-depth talks on major bilateral, regional and global issues.

More than 70 important outcomes resulted from the dialogue, including a number of space items.

Aside from putting in place a “Civil Space Cooperation Dialogue,” the two sides also decided to have exchanges on other space matters, including satellite-collision avoidance, weather monitoring and climate research.

The agreement signed by Kerry reflects State Department activities with China, which are not prohibited by law.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin’s 2013 book “Mission to Mars – My Vision for Space Exploration” published by National Geographic with a new updated paperback version released in May 2015. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

A new device can cloak a magnetic field so that it invisible from the outside. Here, a picture of how the wormhole would work. Credit: Jordi Prat-Camps and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space.

“This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible,” said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension.” 

The idea of a wormhole comes from Albert Einstein’s theories. In 1935, Einstein and colleague Nathan Rosen realized that the general theory of relativity allowed for the existence of bridges that could link two different points in space-time. Theoretically these Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes, could allow something to tunnel instantly between great distances (though the tunnels in this theory are extremely tiny, so ordinarily wouldn’t fit a space traveler). So far, no one has found evidence that space-time wormholes actually exist. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

The new wormhole isn’t a space-time wormhole per se, but is instead a realization of a futuristic “invisibility cloak” first proposed in 2007 in the journal Physical Review Letters. This type of wormhole would hide electromagnetic waves from view from the outside. The trouble was, to make the method work for light required materials that are extremely impractical and difficult to work with, Prat said.

Magnetic wormhole

But it turned out the materials to make a magnetic wormhole already exist and are much simpler to come by. In particular, superconductors, which can carry high levels of current, or charged particles, expel magnetic field lines from their interiors, essentially bending or distorting these lines. This essentially allows the magnetic field to do something different from its surrounding 3D environment, which is the first step in concealing the disturbance in a magnetic field.

So the team designed a three-layer object, consisting of two concentric spheres with an interior spiral-cylinder. The interior layer essentially transmitted a magnetic field from one end to the other, while the other two layers acted to conceal the field’s existence.

The inner cylinder was made of a ferromagnetic mu-metal. Ferromagnetic materials exhibit the strongest form of magnetism, while mu-metals are highly permeable and are often used for shielding electronic devices.

A thin shell made up of a high-temperature superconducting material called yttrium barium copper oxide lined the inner cylinder, bending the magnetic field that traveled through the interior.

A new device has created a magnetic wormhole, in which a magnetic field enters one end and seems to pop out of nowhere on the other side.
Credit: Jordi Prat-Camps and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The final shell was made of another mu-metal, but composed of 150 pieces cut and placed to perfectly cancel out the bending of the magnetic field by the superconducting shell. The whole device was placed in a liquid-nitrogen bath (high-temperature superconductors require the low temperatures of liquid nitrogen to work).

Normally, magnetic field lines radiate out from a certain location and decay over time, but the presence of the magnetic field should be detectable from points all around it. However, the new magnetic wormhole funnels the magnetic field from one side of the cylinder to another so that it is “invisible” while in transit, seeming to pop out of nowhere on the exit side of the tube, the researchers report today (Aug. 20) in the journal Scientific Reports.

“From a magnetic point of view, you have the magnetic field from the magnet disappearing at one end of the wormhole and appearing again at the other end of the wormhole,” Prat told Live Science.

Broader applications

There’s no way to know if similar magnetic wormholes lurk in space, but the technology could have applications on Earth, Prat said. For instance, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines use a giant magnet and require people to be in a tightly enclosed central tube for diagnostic imaging.

But if a device could funnel a magnetic field from one spot to the other, it would be possible to take pictures of the body with the strong magnet placed far away, freeing people from the claustrophobic environment of an MRI machine, Prat said.

To do that, the researchers would need to modify the shape of their magnetic wormhole device. A sphere is the simplest shape to model, but a cylindrical outer shell would be the most useful, Prat said.

“If you want to apply this to medical techniques or medical equipment, for sure you will be interested in directing toward any given direction,” Prat said. “A spherical shape is not the most practical geometry.”

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

There’s no reason to fear a devastating asteroid strike next month, NASA experts say.

For the last few months, rumors have circulated on the Internet that a big asteroid will slam into Earth near Puerto Rico between Sept. 15 and Sept. 28, wreaking widespread destruction throughout coastal regions of the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America.

Don’t believe the hype.

“There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now.”

Astronomers based at the Near-Earth Object office and other institutions around the world use a variety of telescopes to hunt for potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, and they haven’t observed anything that poses a serious threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, NASA officials said.

“Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth,” Chodas stressed. “In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century.”

Experts such as Chodas must increasingly wade into the Internet’s murky waters to debunk the myths swirling there.

In 2011, for example, rumors grew that the harmless comet Elenin was a “doomsday” object that would inflict severe damage upon the Earth. And some conspiracy theorists claimed that a cosmic impact would wipe out humanity on Dec. 21, 2012, the day that one cycle of the Mayan long-count calendar came to an end.

Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth’s lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

0 of 10 questions complete

Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth’s lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

0 of questions complete

Just this year, fears were raised about the near-Earth asteroids 2004 BL86 and 2014 YB35, which flew harmlessly past the planet in January and March, respectively — just as NASA scientists had predicted the asteroids would.

All of this is not to claim that Earth won’t get hit by a cosmic object next month. The planet is pelted by dust and chunks of space rock all the time, but almost all of this material is so small that it burns up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

An epic new trailer for the movie “The Martian” looks even more intense than the last one, and it raises some intriguing questions about the value of human life in space exploration.

Set to the howling Jimi Hendrix song “All Along the Watchtower,” the new trailer for “The Martian,” directed by Ridley Scott, features some thrilling (and stressful) clips of astronauts braving Martian storms, rocket launches and other near-death experiences. The film focuses on astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), who is mistakenly presumed dead by his fellow Mars explorers and is left behind on the Red Planet.

When NASA officials discover that Watney is alive, they must decide whether to rescue him and, in doing so, risk the lives of the other six crewmembers. At one point in the trailer, the director of NASA (played by Jeff Daniels) grapples with the decision, stating, “It’s bigger than one person,” to which another character replies, “No. It’s not.” The film raises the question: If a person willingly embraces the risks of space exploration, should he or she be rescued at all costs? [Photos from ‘The Martian’]

In an earlier trailer, Watney makes clear that he understands the risks of space exploration, saying, “It’s space. It doesn’t cooperate. I guarantee you that at some point, everything’s going to go south on you. And you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’”

In the new trailer, we hear the end of that quote, in which Watney goes on to say, “Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work.”

Stranded on Mars with only enough food and water to last 50 days, Watney must wait four years for a rescue mission to arrive. As a result, he’s forced to find a way to grow food on a lifeless planet, and produce water. Other threats to his life and his safety arise, and he proclaims at the end, “No matter what happens, tell the world, tell my family, that I never stopped fighting to make it home.”

Meanwhile, NASA and Watney’s crewmates must decide whether to rescue “the Martian.” By sending the crew back to the Red Planet, the agency would be risking six lives to save one, and thus rejects the proposal. The crewmembers must then decide whether they will not only risk their lives, but declare mutiny by going against NASA’s orders.

In the new movie “The Martian,” a group of astronauts must decide if they should rescue their stranded crewmate from the surface of Mars.
Credit: 20th Century Fox/The Martian

The plot of the film is a thought experiment: If a person understands the risks of space exploration, should the rest of humanity make every possible effort to save that person if (or when) things go wrong? Is NASA’s responsibility different from the individual responsibilities of its astronauts? 

These are questions that humanity will have to seriously consider if a program like Mars One gets off the ground: If a private company sends people to space and something goes wrong, how much money and effort should the rest of the world spend to save them? Is it directly comparable to instances where hikers become lost or stranded, setting off costly and risky rescue missions? What do we lose if we reduce the value of one human life compared to multiple lives, and what do we lose if we don’t? 

We’re excited to see how the movie tackles this question, and how closely it will follow the book by Andy Weir on which the movie is based. The film is set to be released Oct. 2 and, in addition to Damon and Daniels, stars Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Donald Glover.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the record-holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, joined on as a cast member in the fan project “Star Trek: Axanar.” In April, she tweeted this photo posing in the International Space Station in a “Star Trek: Voyager”-style uniform. Credit: ESA/NASA

After spending 199 days on the International Space Station, a European astronaut is readying for her next big mission: joining an independent “Star Trek” production.

Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut for the European Space Agency, will join the fan-produced film “Star Trek: Axanar” in an as-yet-undisclosed role, film officials said in a blog post. Cristoforetti was the first Italian woman in space during the space station’s Expeditions 42 and 43, which wrapped up in June.

The news comes as the production wrapped up a crowdfunding campaign  that raised $487,076, nearly double the original goal of $250,000. Filming will begin in early 2016.

“Star Trek: Axanar” follows the story of Garth of Izar, a character who was introduced in the “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode “Whom Gods Destroy.” Garth’s story takes place about 21 years before the events of the first “Star Trek” episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The new, full-length film will follow from a 20-minute crowdfunded prelude that was released last year. Stars in the feature-length film include Richard Hatch, Kate Vernon (both of “Battlestar: Galactica”), Gary Graham (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) and Tony Todd (“Candyman”, “Chuck”, “24”). It is led by Executive Producer Alec Peters.

After a crowdfunding campaign last year on Kickstarter that raised more than $600,000, the filmmakers have decided to break the feature-length film into four episodes costing at least $250,000 each.

The base goal for the work is $1 million, but the filmmakers need at least $1.32 million in total to cover costs from using the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, which takes a cut of projects funded on its site, as well as “ongoing studio costs” and “payment processing,” according to the Indiegogo page.

Cristoforetti wouldn’t be the first astronaut to appear on Star Trek. In 1993, NASA astronaut Mae Jemison played a small role on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Credit: JAXA/NASA

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained this view of Pluto at a distance of about 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA

NEW YORK — The first-ever flyby of Pluto left scientists and the public wide-eyed, and the surprises will likely keep on coming.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed through the Pluto system on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the dwarf planet’s surface. Images captured by the probe have revealed a world with its own cryogenic geology, situated in a diverse array of moons.

At the American Museum of Natural History here, Emily Rice, an astrophysicist at the College of Staten Island, and Jackie Faherty, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institute, took an audience on a journey with New Horizons last week to highlight the science. [New Horizons’ Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]

The Aug. 11 presentation was in the museum’s Hayden Planetarium and used its skylike dome to immerse people in the vastness of space. The show, called “Visiting Pluto and Friends in the 21st Century,” was part of the museum’s “Astronomy Live” series.

Using new visualization technologies, Rice and Faherty offered views of Pluto and its five moons as New Horizons might have seen them and placed the dwarf planet system in relation to the sun and Earth.

Carter Emmart, who directs Astrovisualization at the museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space, Skyped in from Singapore to show off some of the technology, and to talk about how New Horizons made its way through the Pluto system.

“I’m calling from the future,” he quipped, noting the time difference. (Singapore lies on the other side of the International Date Line.)

The 3D view showed the shadows of Pluto and gave a feel for how the spacecraft was oriented, and how the craft had to move in space to get the pictures that NASA sent around the world.

Rice said the accuracy of the flyby was quite good; the probe arrived within 90 seconds of its targeted time.

“It’s like hitting a hole in one on a golf course in Los Angeles from New York,” she said.

New Horizons also had to navigate among Pluto’s five moons — Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. Styx and Kerberos weren’t discovered until 2011 and 2012, when New Horizons was well on its way to Pluto. (The $720 million mission launched in January 2006.)

Later in the show, Rice called up an old artist’s rendering of Pluto, which had been created long before New Horizons’ historic flyby. [‪Flying Over Pluto: Ice Mountains and ‘Young’ Plains (Video)]

“We were so wrong,” she said. The old picture doesn’t show ice mountains, or even a surface that bears much resemblance to the one New Horizons showed.

Faherty and Rice also demonstrated how New Horizons studied Pluto’s thin atmosphere, using a picture of Pluto “eclipsing” the sun. A hazy ring marked the edge of the dwarf planet, showing that there was some gas diffusing the light. The atmosphere contains methane-based chemicals called tholins.

“The tholins probably rain out,” Faherty said, adding that they are what give Pluto its reddish-brown color.

The big highlight of the mission, though, was finding that Pluto’s surface has been reworked in the recent past — it’s smooth in places, and cratered lightly or not at all. This suggests that some sort of internal heat source remained active until relatively recently, and may still be active today, mission scientists have said. 

“But we don’t know what it is,” Faherty said.

Many more pictures are coming from New Horizons; they’ll just take a long time to transmit. Mission team members have said the complete flyby data set probably won’t come down to Earth until late 2016. Emmart said the data-transmission rate is akin to that of a dial-up connection, and New Horizons is a good 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) from Earth..

Pluto wasn’t the only object that got attention during the planetarium show; Charon did as well. Faherty noted that Charon is “Pluto’s opposite” in that it’s made mostly of water ice rather than mostly rock, methane and nitrogen. She pointed out the tantalizing features that New Horizons saw, such as a large, miles-deep canyon and the dark spot near the moon’s north pole, which has been dubbed Mordor.

The two scientists also mentioned the dwarf planet Ceres, which is currently being studied by NASA’s orbiting Dawn spacecraft. Dawn has spotted intriguing bright spots on Ceres’ surface that could be ice or salts of some sort; Dawn is moving down to a lower orbit to map the surface and get a better look.

Then there is the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, which began orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in August 2014 and dropped a lander named Philae onto the icy object’s surface three months later.

Comet 67P harbored its own surprises. “When they [Rosetta scientists] saw it, they said, ‘Oh damn, it looks like a rubber duck,’” Rice said.

Philae didn’t manage to land in quite the way the mission planners hoped; it actually bounced off the comet twice and came to rest in a place where it couldn’t get as much sunlight as it needed to run its instruments continually.

But Philae did gather data for more than two days on the comet’s surface, and the Rosetta mothership continues to study the object from orbit. Rice showed one photo taken by Philae during its November 2014 descent, at a distance of just 30 feet (9 meters) from 67P’s surface. It showed the place where scientists think the lander initially hit the surface. [Surprising Comet Discoveries by Rosetta and Philae (Infographic)]

Rosetta’s mission will end when the lander is sent into the comet in September 2016. “I would call it crashing; Jackie would call it landing,” Rice said.

Even Mercury got a place in the sun (no pun intended). NASA’s MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) mission, which ended in April of this year, gathered a wealth of new data about the small planet, which is smaller than the Jupiter moon Ganymede, the solar system’s largest satellite.

Rice brought up an emotional moment with one of the mission specialists on MESSENGER. “I asked if he was sad that the mission was over,” she said. “He said he woke up one morning and wanted to look for new images from MESSENGER, and there weren’t any.”

Its fuel tank empty, MESSENGER was deliberately crashed into the planet’s surface on April 30.

The show ended with a journey to the Oort Cloud, a huge comet repository that lies perhaps 2 light-years from the sun. None of the objects that inhabit this distant realm have been imaged yet.

After the presentation, audience members got a chance to ask questions, some about the future of New Horizons. One person asked how long New Horizons would last. Rice noted that the probe’s plutonium power source could keep it going for years yet — perhaps another decade or two. But keeping New Horizons going has less to do with science and engineering than with Earthly politics.

“It’s all dependent on the funding,” Rice said.

Another question was whether New Horizons has solar panels in case it might pass another star. “It would take about 100,000 years for it to get to another star,” Rice said. “And it’s going in the wrong direction.” So the probe wasn’t designed with solar panels.

New Horizons will fly by another object in the Kuiper Belt — the ring of icy bodies beyond Pluto — in 2019 if NASA approves and funds a proposed extended misison.

“Maybe other Kuiper Belt objects won’t be as sexy as Pluto, but who knows?” Rice said.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Diagram of the Lagrange points associated with the sun-Earth system.  Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team

A Lagrange point is a location in space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the sun or Earth and the moon, equal the centrifugal force felt by a much smaller third body. The interaction of the forces creates a point of equilibrium where a spacecraft may be “parked” to make observations.

These points are named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an 18th-century mathematician who wrote about them in a 1772 paper concerning what he called the “three-body problem.” They are also called Lagrangian points and libration points.   

Structure of Lagrange points

There are five Lagrange points around major bodies such as a planet or a star. Three of them lie along the line connecting the two large bodies. In the Earth-sun system, for example, the first point, L1, lies between Earth and the sun at about 1 million miles from Earth. L1 gets an uninterrupted view of the sun, and is currently occupied by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Deep Space Climate Observatory. 

L2 also lies a million miles from Earth, but in the opposite direction of the sun. At this point, with the Earth, moon and sun behind it, a spacecraft can get a clear view of deep space. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is currently at this spot measuring the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope will move into this region in 2018.

The third Lagrange point, L3, lies behind the sun, opposite Earth’s orbit. For now, science has not found a use for this spot, although science fiction has.

“NASA is unlikely to find any use for the L3 point since it remains hidden behind the sun at all times,” NASA wrote on a web page about Lagrange points. “The idea of a hidden ‘Planet-X’ at the L3 point has been a popular topic in science fiction writing. The instability of Planet X’s orbit (on a time scale of 150 years) didn’t stop Hollywood from turning out classics like ‘The Man from Planet X.’”

L1, L2 and L3 are all unstable points with precarious equilibrium. If a spacecraft at L3 drifted toward or away from Earth, it would fall irreversibly toward the sun or Earth, “like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill,” according to astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Spacecraft must make slight adjustments to maintain their orbits.

Points L4 and L5, however, are stable, “like a ball in a large bowl,” according to the European Space Agency. These points lie along Earth’s orbit at 60 degrees ahead of and behind Earth, forming the apex of two equilateral triangles that have the large masses (Earth and the sun, for example) as their vertices.

Because of the stability of these points, dust and asteroids tend to accumulate in these regions. Asteroids that surround the L4 and L5 points are called Trojans in honor of the asteroids Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector (all characters in the story of the siege of Troy) that are between Jupiter and the Sun. NASA states that there have been thousands of these types of asteroids found in our solar system, including Earth’s only known Trojan asteroid, 2010 TK7.

L4 and L5 are also possible points for a space colony due to their relative proximity to Earth, at least according to the writings of Gerard O’Neill and related thinkers. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group called the L5 Society promoted this idea among its members. In the late 1980s, it merged into a group that is now known as the National Space Society, an advocacy organization that promotes the idea of forming civilizations beyond Earth.

Benefits of Lagrange points

If a spacecraft uses a Lagrange point close to Earth, there are many benefits to the location, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Amy Mainzer told Space.com. 

Mainzer is principal investigator of NEOWISE, a mission that searches for near-Earth asteroids using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft that orbits close to our planet. While WISE is doing well with its current three-year mission that concludes in 2016, Mainzer said, a spacecraft placed at a Lagrange point would be able to do more.

Far from the interfering heat and light of the sun, an asteroid-hunting spacecraft at a Lagrange point would be more sensitive to the tiny infrared signals from asteroids. It could point over a wide range of directions, except very close to the sun. And it wouldn’t need coolant to stay cool, as WISE required for the first phase of its mission between 2009 and 2011 — the location itself would allow for natural cooling. The James Webb Space Telescope will take advantage of the thermal environment at the sun-Earth L2 point to help keep cool.

L1 and L2 also “allow you to have enormous bandwidth” because over conventional Ka-band radio, the communication speeds are very high, Mainzer said. “Otherwise, the data rates just become very slow,” she said, since a spacecraft in orbit around the sun (known as heliocentric orbit) would eventually drift far from Earth.

Additional resources

An illustration depicts NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames/Dana Berry

The moon doesn’t have any gaudy casinos or buzzing diner signs, but it does have neon.

NASA’s LADEE spacecraft has made the first-ever detection of neon in the wispy lunar atmosphere, which is properly known as an “exosphere” because it’s so thin — about 100 trillion times less dense than that of Earth at sea level.

“The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made,” study lead author Mehdi Benna, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in a statement. “We were very pleased to not only finally confirm its presence, but to show that it is relatively abundant.” [The Moon: 10 Surprising Lunar Facts]

But the gas is not abundant enough on the moon to generate the famous neon glow, NASA officials said.

LADEE — which is short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer — studied the moon’s exosphere from orbit for seven months, from September 2013 through the end of its mission in April 2014.

The spacecraft’s Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS) instrument determined that the moon’s atmosphere is composed mainly of helium, argon and neon. Most of this material comes from the solar wind, a diverse stream of particles flowing from the sun at about 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h). (Other elements in the solar wind tend to stick to the lunar surface, because they’re more volatile than helium, argon and neon, NASA officials said.)

But the NMS data showed that some of the exospheric gases come from moon rocks, via the process of radioactive decay. About 20 percent of the helium probably came from the decay of uranium and thorium, and some of the argon from the decay of potassium-40 into argon-40, researchers said.

“We were also surprised to find that argon-40 creates a local bulge above an unusual part of the moon’s surface, the region containing [the dark volcanic plains] Mare Imbrium and Oceanus Procellarum,” Benna said. “One could not help [but] notice that this region happens to be the place where potassium-40 is most abundant on the surface. So there may be a connection between the atmospheric argon, the surface potassium and deep interior sources.”

LADEE’s measurements also revealed that argon abundance changed by about 25 percent over the course of the spacecraft’s mission, possibly as a result of outgassing caused by the Earth’s strong gravitational tug, researchers said.

The new results, which were published May 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, should give scientists a better understanding of exospheres in general, and that of the moon in particular, researchers said.

“It’s critical to learn about the lunar exosphere before sustained human exploration substantially alters it,” Benna said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

If the fictional USS Enterprise raced the ship from “Battlestar Galactica” to the nearest star system, which would get there first?

A new graphic from Travelmath.com seeks to answer that question, which sounds like a typical opening argument over beers. The graphic shows fictional travel times across the universe for spaceships from several sci-fi franchises as well as comic-book characters such as Iron Man and Superman.

When leaving Earth on a voyage to Alpha Centauri, it turns out, Galactica would get there in just 29 minutes, traveling at an average speed of 53.4 trillion miles per hour (85.9 trillion kilometers per hour). The USS Enterprise from “Star Trek” would take more than 161 days, at a speed of “just” 6.6 billion mph (10.6 km/h). [The 10 Greatest Sci-Fi Spaceships of All Time]

This fun graphic from Travelmath.com pits fictional spaceships and characters against each other in races across the universe.
Credit: Travelmath

To calculate the blazing-fast speeds for the various characters and spaceships portrayed, Travelmath.com consulted online fan encyclopedias from different franchises. You can actually race the sci-fi spaceships and fliers on Travelmath.com to see who wins, with each race accompanied by its own animation.

From the Milky Way to Andromeda, the graphic pits three famous ships from the Star Wars universe: the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon and the X-Wing. It turns out to be not much of a contest, with the Millennium Falcon getting there in 100 days, two times faster than the X-Wing and eight times faster than the Death Star.

Regardless, the superhero Dr. Manhattan from the comic miniseries “Watchmen” could beat all three of them, according to the graphic, because his travel is instantaneous.

The graphic also claims that Superman would beat “Firefly’s” Serenity ship in a race from Earth to Neptune (4 hours as opposed to 42 days), and Iron Man could get around the world in 3 hours — 10 times faster than a TIE fighter from “Star Wars.”

Travelmath is a service that offers information on travel distance, travel time and travel cost between Earth destinations, including flight and driving times. For real-life fliers, such as F-16 jets and passenger planes, the site uses information from aircraft manufacturers’ websites.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.