Iran Reports Launch of Small Satellite into Orbit

Iran successfully launched a new small satellite into orbit early Friday, state media reported, the latest in the country's ambitious space program that has raised concerns in the West because of its possible military applications.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called in to the launch site, saying he was "hopeful this act will send a signal of more friendship among all human beings," the official IRNA news agency reported.

IRNA said the domestically-made satellite, Navid, or Gospel, was designed to collect data Relevant Products/Services on weather conditions and monitor for natural disasters.

It said the satellite weighs about 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and would orbit Earth at an altitude of up to 234 miles (375 kilometers), circling the planet 15 times a day. It's of a type known as miniaturized or microsatellites, which are cheaper to produce and allow for less costly launch vehicles.

Produced at an Iranian engineering university, Navid is the third small satellite that Iran has launched in recent years and is expected to remain in orbit for about two months. IRNA said Navid has advanced control technology, a higher resolution camera and photocells to generate power Relevant Products/Services.

The satellite was sent into orbit by a missile launch-vehicle dubbed Safir, or Ambassador in Farsi, which IRNA said has 20 percent more launch power compared to earlier versions of satellite carrier missiles.

Thanks: http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news

NASA’s New Satellite Captures Amazing Hi-Res Image of Earth

NASA’s newest Earth-watching satellite, has taken a high declaration image of Earth, one of the most good-looking such images ever created. It’s available in 8000×8000 pixel resolution, and it takes a while to download it, but it’s definitely worth it.

The satellite, named after the “father of satellite meteorology,” Verner E. Suomi, is designed to create fabulous images of Earth, monitor for natural disasters and improve weather forecasts as well as our understanding of long-term climate changes.

The image is a composite, using a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on Jan. 4, 2012. It echoes the legendary “Blue Marble” photograph, taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on Dec, 7, 1972,

The Blue Marble 2012, as NASA named the new photo, is available in high resolution .
Now, where do we sign up for a 8000×8000 pixel screen so we can use this baby as desktop background?

Thanks: http://mashable.com/2012/01/26/hi-res-image-earth/

Plasma cloud heading towards Earth: Nasa

An enormous sunspot set freed a splotch of charged plasma Thursday that space weather watchers predict will blast past the Earth.
Satellite operators and power companies are keeping a close eye on the incoming cloud, which could distort the Earth's magnetic field and disrupt radio
communications, especially at higher latitudes.

"Our simulations show potential to pack a good punch to Earth's near-space environment," said Antti Pulkkinen of the Space Weather Laboratory at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Greenbelt, Md But "we're not looking at an extreme event here."

The front edge of the burst should arrive Sunday morning, said Joseph Kunches, a spokesman for the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.
"At first glance, it was, 'Oh my God, it's at the center of the (sun's) disk, it ought to go right to the Earth,'" Kunches said.

But upon further review and "head-scratching" Thursday, NOAA's space weather team calculated that most of the plasma blob should pass harmlessly over the top of our planet.

"It's more of a glancing blow," Pulkkinen said.

Thanks : http://www.hindustantimes.com/

Space Inc: NASA to boldly go with private firm

A startup space transportation firm hired by NASA to fly cargo to the International Space Station is delaying a planned February 7 test flight to allow more time to prepare for the mission.

The launch of Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station has not yet been rescheduled.

The flight will be the second and possibly last test flight before privately owned SpaceX begins delivering cargo to the station under a $1.6 billion NASA contract.

The firm, based in Hawthorne, California, and founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, hopes to combine its two remaining test flights into one with a berthing at the space station, pending NASA's approval.

SpaceX successfully launched, orbited and landed a Dragon capsule during a test flight in December 2010


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/space-inc-nasa-to-boldly-go-with-private-firm-20120118-1q5ms.html#ixzz1jmTC4oL6

China opens 2012 with ZiYuan-3 launch via Long March 4B

China launched a new high-resolution remote sensing satellite on Monday at 03:17 UTC using the Long March 4B (Chang Zheng-4B -Y26) launch vehicle from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the ZiYuan-3 its first high-resolution geological mapping satellite, to be used for civil purposes.

The ZiYuan-3 (ZY-3) is the first of a new series of high-resolution civilian remote sensing satellites, grown from a project that was initiated in March 2008.

The new satellite carries three high-resolution panchromatic cameras and an infrared multispectral scanner (IRMSS). The cameras are positioned at the front-facing, ground-facing and rear-facing positions.

Two cameras (front-facing and rear-facing) have a spectral resolution of 3.5m and 52.3km ground swath while the ground-facing camera has a spectral resolution of 2.1m and 51.1km ground swath. The IRMSS has a spectral resolution of 6.0m and 51.0km ground swath.

At launch the satellite had a mass of 2,630 kg. The satellite is equipped with two 3 meters solar arrays for power generation and will orbit a 505.984 km sun-synchronous solar orbit with 97.421 degree inclination. This orbit will have a re-visit cycle of 5 days.

Operational period will be four years with a possible life extension to five years.

The new satellite will conduct surveys on land resources, help with natural disaster-reduction and prevention and lend assistance to farming, water conservation, urban planning and other sectors, surveying the area between 84 degrees north and 84 degrees south latitude.

Read More: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com

Earth 'being showered with mercury'

Earth is being showered with mercury from the upper atmosphere that can land anywhere and enter the food chain, a study has shown.

The poisonous metal is released as a vapour by burning fuel before falling back to Earth in a form that is easily taken up by aquatic ecosystem - the ecosystem in a body of water.

Thousands of tonnes of mercury vapour are pumped into the atmosphere each year.

Scientists discovered that over time the elemental mercury is oxidised by chemistry in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. It can then be deposited back on Earth, either in rain or snow or after being carried on air currents.

Bacteria transform the oxidised mercury into methyl mercury, which can easily enter the food chain and contaminate fish.

US scientist Dr Seth Lyman, who led the research while at the University of Washington Bothell, said: "Much of the emitted mercury is deposited far from its original sources. Mercury emitted on the other side of the globe could be deposited right at our back door, depending on where and how it is transported, chemically transformed and deposited."

Mercury from coal burning in Asia, for example, could circle the globe several times before being oxidised and carried back to the Earth's surface.

Source : http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5jOEobkWCdYsIyY-ZZvu6Qc3cHQtQ?docId=N0514961324167600156A

Lunar eclipse draws crowd at Griffith Observatory

The paparazzi staked out a spot in the Hollywood Hills before dawn. The western sky was the red carpet, the moon the day's celebrity.

That was the scene early Saturday at the Griffith Observatory, where several hundred people gathered in the dark with binoculars, cameras and telescopes to watch a total lunar eclipse — the last one until 2014.

"It's a celestial festival out here," Capm Petersen, 39, said as he set up his camera before the big event.

The crowd began gathering on the observatory's lawn shortly after 4 a.m. in anticipation of "totality" — the moment when the Earth fully blocks the sun, leaving the moon in its shadow.

"I used to play with a telescope as a kid and picked it back up again a few years ago. I usually do deep-space stuff — nebulas and galaxies," said Evan Warkentine, 33, who monitored a telescope with a camera attached to it that sent images to a laptop. "But this is too good to pass up."

The real anticipation was for what could happen once the eclipse began. Depending on the sky's clarity, sunlight skimming Earth's edge can leave an eclipsed moon a mysterious glowing red or orange.

Source:latimes.com

New 'Super-Earth' Found With Fine-Tuned Telescope Readings

A distant planet barely bigger than Earth has been discovered in our galaxy, but it might have been missed if not for the combined efforts of several observatories both on and around our home planet.

U.S. space agency astronomers say the hard-to-detect data gathered during multiple readings by the Kepler space telescope and two ground observatories revealed tiny clues they needed to make the improbable discovery of a so-called super-Earth planet that otherwise would have gone undetected.

NASA's orbiting Kepler probe initially detected the super-Earth - a distant rocky planet about the size of the Earth - in our Milky Way galaxy about 350 light years from our solar system. Overlapping readings taken by two ground-based telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona confirmed the discovery.

Discovering a relatively small, Earth-sized planet so far away is remarkable because usually only distant planets at least as big as our solar system’s monstrous gas-giant, Jupiter, can be detected - and Jupiter has nearly 320 times more mass than the Earth, with 120 times more surface area.

source:www.voanews.com

'Heartbeat' of Earth's Atmosphere Detected from Space

Lightning flashes in the skies above the Earth about 50 times every second, creating a burst of electromagnetic waves that circle around the planet's atmosphere Some of these waves combine and increase in strength, creating something akin to an atmospheric heartbeat that scientists can detect from the ground and use to better understand the makeup of the atmosphere and the weather it generates.

For the first time, scientists have detected this heartbeat — called the Schumann resonance — from space. This detection was surprising because the resonance was thought to be confined to a particular region of the atmosphere, between the ground and a layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere.

"Researchers didn't expect to observe these resonances in space," said Fernando Simoes, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But it turns out that energy is leaking out and this opens up many other possibilities to study our planet from above."

Simoes co-authored a study on the detection of this resonance made by the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.

source: http://www.ouramazingplanet.com

New Earth-like planet may have water, life

Scientists claim to have discovered a potentially habitable planet which has an environment much similar to that of the Earth and may contain water and even life The exoplanet, called Gliese 581g, is located around 123 trillion miles away from the Earth and orbits a star at a distance that places it squarely in the habitable or the Goldilocks zone, the scientists said.

The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that the planet could contain liquid water on its surface, meaning it tops the league of planets and moons rated as being most like Earth, they said “Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said lead researcher Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common,” Prof. Vogt was quoted as saying byDaily Mail The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581 using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope by a team from UC Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The team reported the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside of our own Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly-circular orbits, the team said. Gliese 581 has a mass three to four times the Earth's and orbits its star in just under 37 days.