Category: space.com

On Sept. 6, 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly displayed his “boarding pass” for NASA’s Mars InSight Mission Credit: Scott Kelly (via Twitter as @StationCDRKelly)

WASHINGTON – Halfway through his almost yearlong mission, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spoke via satellite to an audience gathered at the National Press Club here about the things he is looking forward to, both for the remainder of his mission and once he returns to Earth.

“I feel good overall,” Kelly told the club’s president, John Hughes, who emceed the event on on Monday (Sept. 14). “I definitely recognize that I’ve been up here a long time, and I have just as long ahead of me.”

Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko arrived at the space station on March 27, after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, with both planning to stay onboard for nearly a year. If Kelly remains until March 3, 2016, his 342-day visit will be the longest consecutive stay in orbit by a NASA astronaut. [One Year in Space: Epic Space Station Mission in Photos ]

Although four Russian or Soviet Union cosmonauts have broken the one-year mark, they did so in the 1980s and 1990s, with older equipment for studying how the long trips were affecting their bodies. In comparison, the ISS allows scientists to take ultrasounds, measure impairments in vision and study other biological changes that Kelly and Kornienko might undergo. 

“Even though the Russians have flown in Mir for longer in a couple of cases, they didn’t have the technology we have today to figure this out,” Kelly said. “The ISS is also a great experiment in sustainable energy and life support, and understanding how that works and how we can maintain ourselves for longer periods of time.”

NASA has said that a primary goal with the one-year mission is to better understand how a long journey to Mars will affect the physiology and psychology of the astronauts on board.

Six months left

During the interview on Monday, Kelly talked about several parts of the mission he is looking forward to, such as upcoming spacewalks to help prepare the station for docking with new commercial crew capsules being prepared by private companies Boeing and SpaceX.

On days off from space station duties, Kelly watches professional football, avidly following the Houston Texans, despite a disappointing start to their season.

On Sept. 14, 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly participated from the International Space Station in a discussion with astronaut Terry Virts and Kelly’s twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, at the National Press Club in Washington.
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

“Regardless of how they do, I’m a huge fan,” he said. “We’re fortunate to have football on the space station.”

But spacewalks and football pale in comparison with Kelly’s long-term goal.

“What I’m looking most forward to is just getting to the end of this with as much enthusiasm and energy as I had in the beginning,” he said.

He added his hopes to complete all of the mission objectives and science before his mission concludes.

The great outdoors

Remaining on the space station may make for good science, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about Earth that Kelly misses. He has two daughters on the planet, as well as an identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. The brothers said they speak regularly via the phone on the space station, and Mark will send his brother pictures of the food he is enjoying down on Earth, while Scott is stuck eating the limited cuisine options on the station.

Together, Mark and Scott are participating in several scientific investigations grouped under the title of “The Twins Study,” which will compare the changes that occur in both men (one in orbit, one on the ground) over the course of the mission.

Would You Sign Up for a Years-Long Space Mission?

On Sept. 14, 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly participated via video link from the International Space Station in a discussion with astronaut Terry Virts and Kelly’s twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, at the National Press Club in Washington.
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

In addition to family and friends, Scott Kelly also misses something a bit more basic—”just going outside,” he said.

He explained that the space station is a very closed environment, where smells and sounds tend to remain the same.

NASA astronaut Terry Virts, who also attended the news conference, spoke about a recent effort to help bring the great outdoors into the space station: The Russian command center sent audio clips of rain, wind and birds to their cosmonauts. According to Virts, at one point, the Russian crew played the clip of rain on every one of the 100 laptops aboard, playing the sound throughout the station for the entire weekend.

“Everywhere you went, it sounded like rain,” Virts said.

But hearing rain and feeling it are two different things, and Kelly anticipates being outdoors when the mission concludes.

“I think even prisoners can get outside once a week,” he joked.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

An innovative plan to use “optical mining” is part of the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies (Apis) concept — an ability to tap mega-amounts of water from space rocks to help establish valuable infrastructure in space. Credit: TransAstra

PASADENA, Calif. — A new way to harvest asteroid resources is being eyed as a possible game changer for space exploration.

The patent-pending innovation, called “optical mining,” could allow huge amounts of asteroid water to be tapped, advocates say. This water, in turn, could provide relatively cheap and accessible propellant for voyaging spacecraft, lowering the cost of spaceflight significantly.

Development of the optical-mining idea has been funded by a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellowship and grant, along with a small business contract. The concept — which is also known as the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies plan, or Apis — was detailed here during a special NIAC session held on Sept. 2 during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) Space 2015 meeting. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Asteroid-mining business model

“We’re putting together a business model … one that moves reusability into space and more commercial methods and practices into deep space,” Apis principal investigator Joel Sercel, founder and principal engineer at ICS Associates Inc. and TransAstra, told Space.com.

Sercel said that Apis can support NASA’s plans for human exploration by providing mission consumables and propellant for all missions of the agency’s Evolvable Mars Campaign, including human exploration efforts to lunar orbit, crewed missions to near-Earth asteroids in their native orbits, exploration of the moon and exploration of Mars.

Sercel formerly worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and was a lead innovator for the NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) ion propulsion system. NSTAR powers NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres.

Loads of water

Sercel said that the optical-mining approach aims to excavate carbonaceous chondrite asteroid surfaces and drive water and other volatile materials out of this excavated material and into an enclosing, inflatable bag, all without the need for complex or impractical robotics.

The Apis plan involves harvesting up to 100 metric tons of water from a near-Earth asteroid, and taking the material to lunar orbit or other depot locations, using only a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch, Sercel added.

Apis team members have already performed computer simulations and lab experiments on meteorite samples to get a better idea of how to approach the intended work in space.

Light and heat

Sercel and his colleagues are using their large solar furnace at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to shed light andheat onto the idea.

Since the late 1970s, researchers have used this furnace to simulate the sudden heat generated by a nuclear explosion. The furnace makes use of two primary sets of mirrors. One large, flat set can pivot around to seize the rays of the sun and direct them though a shutter system onto the second set of mirrors, which, in turn, focuses the light and heat onto the target.

In the September-October time frame, Sercel said, the Apis team will do proof-of-concept experiments at the White Sands facility. Hardware brought to the test site will hold cantaloupe-sized asteroid simulant targets that will be superheated by reflected and concentrated sunlight.

This solar furnace at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico uses mirrors to focus the sun onto a small point. Normally used to simulate the heat from a nuclear explosion, this high-tech blast oven is slated for use to test an in-space idea for using asteroids. The same gear has been used to test a theory that a space-based version of the furnace could be used to deflect a meteor headed for Earth.
Credit: Drew Hamilton, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

In-space spalling

The products of interest to Sercel are volatiles, especially water. Volalites can be harvested from rock by a process called spalling, in which tiny, explosive pops of expanding gas drive out particles and gas.

Sercel said that the New Mexico tests could show that highly concentrated optical energy excavates the surface of material in a controlled way, analogous to how intense lasers can ablate surfaces, constantly exposing new material and forcing water out of the spalled material.

“It actually digs holes and tunnels into the rock. The heat goes in, is absorbed in thin layers and drives out the volatiles in tiny, explosivelike pops that eject material in a controllable way,” Sercel said. “We believe that highly concentrated sunlight can drill holes, excavate, disrupt and shape an asteroid while the asteroid is enclosed in a containment bag.”

Solid ice

The Apis solar-thermal oven scheme makes use of thin-film inflatable structures stemming from work on NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). The ARM plan calls for plucking a boulder off a near-Earth asteroid using a robotic probe, then hauling this chunk of rock to lunar orbit, where it could be visited by astronauts. [NASA’s Asteroid Capture Mission in Pictures]  

But in the Apis case, the inflatable capture system is fabricated from high-temperature material and designed to fully enclose the target.

After the asteroid has been encapsulated and de-spun, an inflatable solar concentrator churns out direct solar-thermal energy to the asteroid surface. This heat is used to excavate the asteroid and force the water to outgas into the enclosing bag.

From there, the outgassing water is pumped into a passively cooled bag and stored as solid ice.

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

Storage bag

Up to 120 tons of water, collected over several months, could be stored in this manner, Sercel said. The Apis system would then transport the harvested water to lunar orbit, using some of the asteroid water as fuel for its onboard solar-thermal propulsion system.

Once in orbit around the moon, the water can be converted into consumables and propellant to support a variety of enterprises, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.

“Apis is a commercially viable approach to the extraction, processing and delivery of water from asteroids to in-space assets,” Sercel concluded.

Digging in

Along with Sercel, mining experts are digging into the question of how best to extract and exploit space resources.

“After many years of dead-end investigations trying unsuccessfully to adapt terrestrial mining techniques to extract resources from asteroids in the future, we are excited to finally participate in the development of what we consider the most feasible and effective technique to recover valuable volatile elements, such as space propellants, from asteroids,” Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, told Space.com via email.

Both Abbud-Madrid and Chris Dreyer, also from the Center for Space Resources, are working with the TransAstra team on several projects exploring the optical-mining concept. 

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.

Credit: Space.com/NASA/JHPL/SWRI/Edited by @SteveSpaleta

In a new video, an enormous cluster of sunspots rotates across the sun’s face before gradually separating into several distinct groups, which also fired off a bunch of solar flares.

The massive grouping took less than a week, from Aug. 21 to Aug. 26, 2015, to travel across the face of the sun. It formed the only significant spots on the sun during that time, and they were imaged by NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory. [Watch the NASA video of the sunspot group’s break-up]

A large cluster of sunspots rotated across the face of the sun in just more than six days, gradually diverging into separate groups. This image was captured on Aug. 26, 2015.
Credit: NASA/SDO

Sunspots are the darker, cooler regions of the sun in the photosphere, the sun’s surface layer. Although they appear dark when compared to the brighter, hotter regions around them, they average around 6,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,500 degrees Celsius). They form via interactions with the sun’s magnetic field.

The intriguing region in the video produced several medium-size, or M-class, flares, ejecting material from the sun into space. The largest of these was rated as an M-5.6-class flare. The number provides information about the solar flare’s strength; higher numbers mean stronger flares. The strongest flare from the cluster erupted on Aug. 24, peaking at 3:33 a.m. EDT (0733 GMT).

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

A Russian Proton rocket launches the Express AM8 satellite from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: Roscosmos

PARIS — The successful Proton launch Sept. 14 of the Express AM8 telecommunications satellite completes the most urgent fleet-replenishment requirements and puts Russia’s satellite bandwidth supply into a favorable balance with expected demand, Russia’s two satellite fleet operators said Sept. 16.

The launch, from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was the second since Proton’s May failure. The Proton vehicle used a new version of the DM upper stage and not the Breeze-M upper stage that in recent years has replaced DM aboard Proton.

Express AM8 is owned by the Russian Satellite Communications Co. (RSCC) of Moscow, which has suffered from Proton’s error-prone record in the past six years more than any other company.

The 2,100-kilogram Express AM8 was built by ISS Reshetnev of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and carries a C-, Ku- and L-band payload provided by Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy, a longstanding Reshetnev partner. The satellite is designed to deliver 5.9 kilowatts of power to its payload at the end of its 15-year service life.

Express AM8’s 28 C-band transponders will be dedicated to two beams, one including Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and a second in Latin America with a stretch of the U.S. East Coast.

The satellite’s 20 Ku-band transponders will be devoted to three beams, over Europe and the Middle East, Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America and the eastern United States. The three L-band transponders will be used for secure government communications.

The satellite’s arrival at 14 degrees west “paves the way for RSCC to the regional market of Latin America, and provides additional opportunities to develop business in Africa, Europe and the Middle East,” RSCC Chief Executive Yuri Prokhorov said in a Sept. 15 statement.

The 2,100-kilogram Express AM8 was built by ISS Reshetnev of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and carries a C-, Ku- and L-band payload provided by Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy, a longstanding Reshetnev partner.
Credit: Thales Alenia Space

The satellite is part of the Russian government’s 2009-2015 television and radio broadcasting development program, with non-Russian beams to be commercialized by RSCC.

The launch, combined with recent launches of telecommunications satellites for Gazprom Space Systems of Moscow, Russia’s second main fleet operator, has made up for the capacity shortage provoked by several Proton failures, said Dmitry Sevastiyanov, director-general of Gazprom Space Systems.

“There is now plenty of capacity over the Russian market,” Sevastiyanov said here Sept. 16. He said the problem for his company, as is true to some extent for RSCC, is how to recover satellite costs — some incurred in euros — from a market in which the Russian ruble has declined sharply against the euro and the U.S. dollar.

Raising transponder-lease rates to Russian customers is something both companies prefer to avoid in rural Russia, Sevastiyanov said.

RSCC Chief Financial Officer Dennis Pivnyuk said RSCC’s fleet was slightly less than 70 percent full before the Express AM8 launch. Pivnyuk said the Russian market is characterized by a wide variation in the prices paid for transponder capacity. In some regions it is around $1,000 per megahertz per month, while in other regions it is $3,000.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

A spectacular new image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows Pluto in an entirely new light.

The photo, which New Horizons took during its epic July 14 flyby of Pluto, captures a gorgeous sunset view. Towering ice mountains cast long shadows, and more than a dozen layers of the dwarf planet’s wispy atmosphere are clearly visible.

“This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (Sept. 17). “But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains.” [See more Pluto photos by New Horizons]

A zoomed-in view of a photo NASA’s New Horizons probe took on July 14, 2015, when it was just 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) from Pluto. The near-sunset scene, which is 230 miles (380 km) across, shows rugged ice mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high and wide, flat plains.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

New Horizons captured the panorama, which covers a stretch of land 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) across, using the probe’s wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on July 14, just 15 minutes after closest approach to Pluto.

The spacecraft turned back and looked toward the sun, snapping the photo at a distance of just 11,000 miles (18,000 km) from the dwarf planet, NASA officials said. (At closest approach, New Horizons was about 7,800 miles, or 12,550 km, from Pluto’s surface.)

The result was a new perspective on Pluto’s Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes, two ranges of ice mountains that rise up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the dwarf planet’s frigid surface. The backlit photo also reveals new details about Pluto’s nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, showing many different layers, extending from ground-bound fog to wispy tendrils more than 60 miles (100 km) up.

The setting sun illuminates fog or near-surface haze on Pluto in this small section of an image taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe on July 14, 2015, when it was 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. The image covers a stretch of land 115 miles (185 km) wide.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

“In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth,” Will Grundy, leader of New Horizons’ composition team from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said in the same statement.

The new panorama and other recently downloaded New Horizons images also shed light on how ice — likely made of nitrogen and other materials rather than water — flows into a vast, flat glacial plain known as Sputnik Planum. Some of Sputnik Planum’s ice apparently evaporates, gets deposited in a region of rough terrain to the east and then flows back down into the plain as glaciers, via a system of valleys.

These glaciers are similar to those seen in Greenland and Antarctica here on Earth, researchers said.

This New Horizons image shows how ice (probably frozen nitrogen) is flowing from Pluto’s mountains through valleys (outlined by red arrows) onto the plains known as Sputnik Planum; the “flow front” there is outlined by blue arrows in this photo, which covers an area 390 miles (630-kilometer) wide.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

“We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system,” said Alan Howard of the University of Virginia, a member of the mission’s geology, geophysics and imaging team. “Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow and returns to the seas through glacial flow.”

“Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard, and no one predicted it,” Stern added.

New Horizons beamed the new backlit panorama home to mission control on Sunday (Sept. 13), and NASA released the photo today.

The world can expect to see many more stunning new views from the Pluto flyby over the coming year or so. New Horizons relayed just 5 percent of its flyby data back in the immediate aftermath of the close encounter, keeping the vast majority on board for later transmission. That data dump began in earnest earlier this month and is expected to take about 12 months, New Horizons team members have said.

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

Credit: Space.com / 20th Century Fox

High-school freshman Ahmed Mohamed was arrested Monday for bringing a clock he built to school after it was mistaken for a bomb. Scientists, engineers and tech organizations have responded en masse with their support. Credit: The Dallas Morning News (via YouTube)

NASA, Obama, MIT and more hailed teenaged Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested at school Monday when teachers mistook his homemade electronic clock for a bomb.

Social media quickly picked up the Texas teen’s cause with the marker #IStandWithAhmed, garnering offers to visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, MIT, Google and the White House, a scholarship to Space Camp, and even am astronaut’s NASA shirt that’s flown in space (to complement the one he was wearing during his arrest).

NASA reaffirmed their support of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculums, saying they hope to inspire kids like Ahmed.

We’re supporters of #STEM & inspiring kids like Ahmed to pursue their dreams. Get involved: http://t.co/Bye4JcO1Ho pic.twitter.com/XEHsZs21sS

— NASA (@NASA) September 16, 2015

Bobak Ferdowski, NASA’s ‘Mohawk Guy’ systems engineer at JPL who worked on landing the Curiosity Mars rover, offered his support, saying he might not have worked at NASA at all if he’d faced a similar situation.

I can’t imagine if be working @nasa today if anything like this had ever happened to me. http://t.co/OajWwPXchB #IStandWithAhmed

— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) September 16, 2015

Hey Ahmed, give me a call in a couple years. We could always use smart, curious & creative people. https://t.co/02a4feMrk5

— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) September 16, 2015

President Obama offered his encouragement, as well.

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

Those invitations were joined by a few more: visits to MIT, Facebook and Google, to name a few (and an offer from R&B singer Ne-Yo), as well as an offer for a Twitter internship. It looks like he’ll take up at least one of those invites.

@IBJIYONGI @anildash I would love to!! MIT is my dream school.

— Ahmed Mohamed (@IStandWithAhmed) September 16, 2015

(He also got an in-person invite to the school’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and Center for Theoretical Physics during an interview, saying that he is “the kind of student [they] want.”)

As a NASA fan, Mohamed has been offered a scholarship to space camp as well — from Homer Hickam, former NASA engineer and author of “Rocket Boys,” which became the movie “October Sky.” In 2013, Hickam offered such a scholarship to Kiera Wilmot, a high school student arrested after a science experiment done on school grounds exploded.

@SpaceCampUSA My co-creators at http://t.co/VAytd0lYUx have offered Ahmed a scholarship at Space Camp just as we did for Keira Wilmot.

— Homer Hickam (@HomerHickam) September 16, 2015

Canadian astronaut and space popularizer Chris Hadfield, known for his videos filmed in space, sent along an invitation to his science show in Toronto.

Hi @IStandWithAhmed ! I’d love you to join us for our science show Generator in Toronto on 28 Oct. There’s a ticket waiting for you.

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) September 16, 2015

And in case he needs an upgrade to his now iconic NASA shirt, Mohamed has at least one space-faring alternative, from astronaut Dan Tani:

Looks like Ahmed might need a new NASA shirt. I can give him one of mine – that flew in space! #IStandWithAhmed pic.twitter.com/I5aluiw24C

— Daniel Tani (@Astro_Tani) September 16, 2015

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Astrophotographer Maxwell Palau captured this view of a total lunar eclipse from San Diego, California, on Oct. 8, 2014. Credit: Maxwell Palau/StarDude Astronomy

This month’s highly anticipated “supermoon eclipse” may be a magical treat for skywatchers, but there’s nothing supernatural about the event.

On Sept. 27, skywatchers throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, western Asia and the eastern Pacific Ocean region will witness a total eclipse that happens to occur when the moon looks abnormally large and bright in Earth’s sky. It will be the first supermoon eclipse since 1982, and the last until 2033.

This rare celestial phenomenon has its roots in the moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth. [Supermoon Lunar Eclipse: Complete Blood Moon Coverage]

“When the moon is farthest away, it’s known as apogee, and when it’s closest, it’s known as perigee,” Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “On Sept. 27, we’re going to have a perigee full moon — the closest full moon of the year.”

The moon is about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) closer to Earth at perigee than it is at apogee. As a result, perigee full moons, also known as supermoons, appear about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter in the sky than do apogee full moons (which are also called minimoons).

“There’s no physical difference in the moon,” Petro said. “It just appears slightly bigger in the sky. It’s not dramatic, but it does look larger.”

“Normal” total lunar eclipses — which occur when the Earth, moon and sun align, and the moon passes completely into Earth’s shadow — aren’t terribly uncommon: On average, a skywatcher in a given location on Earth can expect to see one of these events every 2.5 years or so. 

But it is uncommon for a total lunar eclipse to coincide with a supermoon. There have been just five such events since 1900 (in 1910, 1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982), NASA officials have said. 

Rarity does not imply anything inexplicable, however.

“It’s just planetary dynamics. The orbit of the moon around Earth is inclined to the axis of Earth, and the orbital plane of all these things just falls into place every once in a while,” Petro said. “When the rhythms line up, you might get three to four eclipses in a row, or a supermoon and an eclipse happening.”

The supermoon will begin to dim slightly at 8:11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 27 (0011 GMT on Sept. 28), NASA officials said. The total eclipse will start at 10:11 p.m. EDT (0211 GMT), and it will last 72 minutes.

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing view of the supermoon lunar eclipse or any other night sky view that you would like to share with Space.com for a possible story or gallery, send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com.

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

This SpaceX conceptual illustration depicts how the private spacecraft company plans to send their Dragon capsule to Mars. Image released Sept. 14, 2015. Credit: SpaceX (via Flickr as SpaceX Photos)

A gallery of gorgeous new images shows a cone-shaped space capsule shooting like a meteor through the atmosphere of Mars, and descending quickly toward the surface before its thrusters set it down gently in the middle of a rocky, uninhabited landscape. The human crew prepares to set food on the Red Planet.

The images are only artist’s renderings, of course — humans have not yet made it to Mars. The gorgeous gallery was released on the Flickr page of the private Spaceflight company SpaceX, and shows what it might look like if and when the company’s Dragon crew capsule makes a trip to the Red Planet. You can see all of the new images in our full Crew Dragon photo gallery.

From early in its creation, SpaceX has made clear that one of its central goals is to set up human colonies on Mars. Test flights have already begun on the Dragon capsule, so it’s possible that the gorgeous scenes captured in this stunning and incredibly realistic image series could already be on the horizon.

The new SpaceX images on Flickr show the dry, rocky Martian landscape as it often looks in images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover and other robots on the surface of the Red Planet.

NASA scientists have studied the possibility of using a robotic version of its Dragon capsule in a mission to bring samples of Martian soil and rock back to Earth. The “Red Dragon” project, which is only in the concept stage, would pick up samples collected by NASA’s 2020 Mars rover. This could help tremendously in the search for ancient life on Mars. Finding signs of ancient organisms in the Martian soil will likely be an extremely delicate task and will require that the samples be analyzed in advanced laboratories on Earth.

Part of SpaceX’s plan for human spaceflight involves making its powerful Falcon 9 rockets reusable. In theory, the rocket’s first-stage boosters would shoot the payload into space and then land safely on a ship, rather than falling into the ocean and being discarded. The company has attempted to land the reusable stage of the Falcon rocket on two occasions, without success.

NASA, meanwhile, has also discussed a human mission to Mars but has not made any solid mission plans. However, the space agency has said that the primary goal of the one-year mission aboard the International Space Station is to learn about how long-duration spaceflight affects the human body. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, are halfway through their nearly yearlong stay aboard the station. Using current technology, experts estimate that a trip to Mars would require more than a year in travel each way..

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

An artist’s impression of the completed Square Kilometer Array, which will be constructed in South Africa and Western Australia. Credit: SKA Organisation

A huge telescope array will allow scientists to conduct the most sensitive and exhaustive search for signs of alien civilizations to date when it comes online, the project’s backers say.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), currently planned to begin construction in 2018, could enable the search for intelligent alien life to piggy-back on other scientific observations, scouring the galaxy with unprecedented precision.

“A unique aspect for the search of life in the universe is the question of whether advanced lifeevolves intelligence,” Andrew Siemion said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

Siemion, who holds joint appointments with the University of California, Berkeley, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Radbound University in the Netherlands, hunts for signs of alien technology in the universe.

“The only way to answer that in the foreseeable future is to look directly for evidence” of intelligence, Siemion said. “For that, you need a large telescope.”

Piggy-backing the search

Do you believe alien life exists elsewhere in the universe?

The Square Kilometer Array is an enormous radio telescope that will be built in South Africa and Australia. Funded by a consortium of different countries, the SKA will combine thousands of small antennaeacross the globe instead of a single large dish, allowing unprecedented sensitivity in radio astronomy.

Using such a costly instrument for a single scientific study, especially one as speculative as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is unheard of in astronomy. But SETI scientists figured out a way to obtain significant telescope time nearly 30 years ago, when they began to piggy-back on other users’ observations at the enormous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, duplicating their observations with very little loss of sensitivity. Today, SETI researchers are able to obtain thousands of hours of observations annually, which they diligently scrutinize for radio signals from beyond Earth.

According to Siemion, data from the SKA could be similarly piggy-backed. But while Arecibo utilizes a single large dish, the SKA will be much larger than the biggest radio telescope operating today, allowing scientists to search for fainter signals.

Construction on the SKA should begin in 2018. The first phase, planned for completion by 2020, would allow for about 10 percent of the collecting area of the full instrument at low and mid-range frequencies.

According to a paper Siemion authored last fall, a five-year campaign by the first phase of the SKA could allow scientists to survey more than 10,000 stars. When completed, the SKA could detect signals as faint as those emitted by aircraft radars on Earth from every star within almost 200 light-years.

Eavesdropping on E.T.

Earth began leaving its mark in the galaxy when humanity started transmitting signals by radio. These signals radiate outward from the planet, and could theoretically be detected by other civilizations. Given the enormous size of the spectrum that radio waves cover, scientists have suggested a number of preferred frequencies to hunt for extraterrestrial communication. [The Serious Search for Intelligent Life: 4 Key Questions (Video)]

As technology has improved on Earth, however, humanity has begun to reduce the radio-wave leakage into space. This could suggest that the window for observing accidentally broadcast signals is brief — perhaps only a century or so. While scientists still hope to detect such signals, they also aim to find deliberately transmitted radio waves, which have been designed to travel through space.

The SKA concentrates on a frequency region known as the “terrestrial microwave window,” the spectral region of low natural noise between the galactic background and the emission and absorption of water and oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. These frequencies can travel through the space between stars and through the water-laden atmosphere of Earth or any other planet with ease, leading scientists to suspect that distant civilizations might use them to communicate.

SETI scientists aren’t just searching for signals broadcast at random. They also hope to eavesdrop on interplanetary communications.

If alien technology spreads to multiple planets within a single system, it is feasible to expect these various outposts to communicate with one another. If those planets lie along Earth’s line of sight, and observations are made when the planets are communicating with each other, it is possible that the SKA could pick up those broadcasts, researchers said.

In addition to the recent spate of planets unearthed by NASA’s Keplermission, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecrat and future missions such as NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite(TESS) could produce a catalog of properly aligned planetary systems to watch. Life-hunting researchers have already begun eavesdropping on some of Kepler’s discoveries, for example.

“We’re going to have all kinds of data to figure out how to build these databases in coming years,” Siemion said.

Although the terrestrial microwave window will be the primary focus of the SETI search with the SKA, Siemion cautions that it is not the only potential signal for communication.

“We don’t know  exactly what E.T. is going to do,” he said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR, Stefano Mottola/Jakub Knapik, Platige Image/Sarah Poletti and Marc Thiebaut (ATG/medialab for ESA)/Music: “Saline” (instrumental version), from “Experiments in Mass Appeal”, Frost*/Jem Godfrey